Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I'm here with Charlie Burch, who's going to introduce her company, and as she does, I want her to focus on her experience in life.
That makes her a trusted expert in her niche.
[00:00:17] Speaker B: Okay. All right. So, hi, everyone. Jeremy, thank you for having me on the show. I'm super excited to be here. I am the founder and creative director of Humanized Collective and my life and how that makes me uniquely qualified to be trustworthy in my role.
So, actually, my background is not in marketing or design or any of the things that a lot of other brand strategists and experts may come from that world. My background is actually in performance and psychology, and as I kind of moved through the world, tried on this entrepreneurial founder hat thing that kept, like, smacking me in the face.
It just kind of came around to, oh, brand is something I'm really passionate about. It's something I'm uniquely qualified, I think. Not that there aren't tons of people who are qualified, but my background actually puts me in a really interesting position to do that work. So in my previous chapters, when I was going to be a psychologist, I worked in a psychiatric day school in a crisis intervention. So I'm really interested in, like, what goes wrong with brand and what's human impact of that and how can we prevent those crises from, like, taking down the ship. Um, and so I actually do have some real life experience with real cris. Real big crisis. I also, like I said, my background is in. In performance, and I think I talk about this a lot. Like, brand is.
I would never encourage someone to go, like, the inauthenticity route, but at the end of the day, like, there is an inherently performative nature to brand. Like, we're projecting out into what we want permission to do with other people's time, money, resources. Right. And so there is an inherent part of it that requires you to be able to captivate the attention of an audience, maintain that attention, resonate with them, pull their heartstrings in the right kind of ways, and to do that in a way that's not going to, like, spiral into a crisis. You know what I mean?
So it's just this year has been A really, well, 2025, I guess I has been a really interesting year of, like, reflecting on the full circle of my life trajectory, because I really am feeling for the first time like the trans. I've always felt I have a lot of transferable skills from my previous life in the work. I was Doing which was previously like website design first and brand second.
But now that I'm doing this really like deep identity development work with our clients and the transfer of that identity to other people in their organization, I really feel a lot like when I tell people I have transferable skills and I explain what they are like, people can see what I'm talking about and they're not just kind of taking, taking my word for it. So I hope that answers your question.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: I love that question.
[00:03:26] Speaker B: Like tell me through your lived experience. That's, that's a new one for me. So I hope I did it service.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: I would say off the cuff, having crisis management and you line is definitely an, a great additional life skill to handle what's been happening in SEO.
Many of my fellow SEOs have expressed kind of dismay at, you know, this factor, that factor. But I love what you're talking about, about brand and I want to dig into that concept and how you understand it and how you're seeing the concept of brand through the lens of Google's hard realities and reflected in the algorithm choices, reflected in what pieces of information that they pick up in process and then extrapolate into results. Because there's kind of two sides, right? There's the brand in terms of your choice as a company of how to front, so to speak. And then there's how you create a stack of marketing resources that are supposed to align with that and then how that's consumed by the information ecosystems which then is surfaced to the end user.
You know, my friend Chris Tweeten at Spacefar Collective said, you know, publishing more won't fix a weak SEO game. It's about leverage. It's not a volume game. You know, you have to leverage the right people at the right time with the right personal identity. The brand identity matters as much and your positioning.
So what, what is it in that stack of, you know, output that you're putting out there that's having the largest impact on that information space that's getting consumed right now?
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I have been witness to and participant in many power struggles between copywriter, you know, brand oriented copywriters, SEO copywriters, brand oriented website designers, SEO oriented website designers. I've been up to my eyeballs in that for years and I think, you know, the pendulum swings back and forth and there's been times when, you know, I could confidently make the argument that the experience of the people who land on your website is going to have a bigger impact on your ranking than the amount of pages that rank has on your ranking, right? Like there's. And it's kind of, like it's kind of swinging. And I actually just recently participated. One of our long standing clients who historically had a very small website, she had a five page informational site. And we designed it to be like super low friction. Like people are going to come to the website, they're going to land on one of the five pages and all roads lead to Rome. Like every click is going to take them to a book, an intake book. An intake book, an intake because it's a psychotherapy practice, social work practice, and the people are in crisis and they don't want to have to wade through like a bunch of dense information. And she hired recently an SEO team and they're really looking at like doing like a volume and density of keyword play on the website. And there's all these pages, all these pages. And it was really like, okay, if your assumption is that, you know, Jane Doe over here is going to find the website from this page and she's going to be the right person to find the website from this page, and you want her to then like click through and convert through that page, then we have to make the assumption that like, the impact of the design, the brand coming through is just as important as her. The page's ability to capture is just as important as the page's ability to resonate and convert.
And I know that, like, I just don't see any point in which that's gonna be untrue. And I think the biggest challenge, the biggest crisis I see is like the ability for experts in all those lanes to marry their strategies. Like, and I see this all over the place, right? Like, yes, you have a strategy that your agency deploys that works like for your clients in the very narrow lane in which you're measuring the success of your clients.
But what about everything else? Like, what about all the periphery? Right? And so I think, and that's a big reason why I started Humanize in the first place, was I felt like as somebody who was working kind of in the freelancer space, and I was, you know, over here doing this project and my other freelance colleagues are over here on the other side of the business doing this and like all these siloed things. And we all want, especially as freelancers or as agencies, we all want to think that like our offer is the thing that's going to move the needle for our clients, but the truth is, like the cohesion of the business is what's going to move the needle for the business. Right. And so like, yeah, how do we kind of step back and not be so territorial
[00:08:59] Speaker A: again?
[00:08:59] Speaker B: I don't know if that exactly answers your question, but I think, I think there's really an important, I think it's really important, especially as like AI is entering into this conversation, to remember that when it was more simplistic tech that was running SEO, like, yes, these, these like technical, logical left brain experiments like with keyword density worked until they didn't. They worked until the systems caught up and then they had to revert back to human friendliness and like, can we just like shorten the arc of that eventuality and get to the point where we like still put humans first? I don't know.
[00:09:43] Speaker A: I think it was, I think I was talking to Matt Brooks of SEO Tarek about the concept of brand, because I was part of a big brand and SEO called Raven Tools. And joining their team, it was very much like jumping on the back of an elephant with all of its inertia. And then you have five other people that also want the elephant to go somewhere. And if you're all shouting and you know, bopping on different sides, it's going to, has kind of a momentum, a direction. It's already plotting.
[00:10:16] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:10:17] Speaker A: So you can't take full control away from those five other people, but you can convince them, you know, the majority of them, or show the value of, hey, if we all lean this way, we can avoid the cliff over there.
And they're like, well, what about the thorns? And you're like, okay, there's some pain. Going to be some pain involved. So like, those collaborative decisions are key in a proper, fully developed SEO campaign. Like the days of, you know, just cracking open your ahrefs, your semrush, your keyword volume tool from your API and just making decisions about the website in the dark. Or disconnected from a sales team, disconnected from the email team, disconnected from the CEO and his vision, disconnected from the product manager who's queued up from his launch. That doesn't work anymore because you know that that search volume story, that narrative of, hey, we just, if we just do these things and we'll be rewarded with Google because this is how much volume is there attract it. Here's the math. We can kind of map it out that it doesn't quite work as well anymore because you have so many countervailing interests. And the reality is that any search volume number is just, should be seen as just a starting point, you know, because you can pump that number up through influencer campaigns. You can increase that search volume number through advertising campaigns. You can augment that by audience capture because frankly, the search volume amounts that are being allowed to come to organic are shrinking. You know, even the click to call element on the Google Local pack, well, that's just been moved over to paid only, you know, and there's more, you know, organic is getting sandwiched after, you know, paid ad.
The number one organic AI overview and then three blue links, you know, as we call them, it used to be 10 blue links. The pool is shocking shrinking in terms of like these top positions for any organic keyword.
So you can't rely solely on the proposition of oh, highest search volume.
I just need to optimize for that. It's gotta be more. You have to be thinking about long term audience acquisition. You have to think about how are we satisfying the need and intent of our returning visitors and not just trading our search volume as this unending, you know, potential blue ocean. But how can we make our own kiddie pool? How can we create our own pools that we can fish in consistently instead of relying on wild caught salmon?
[00:13:18] Speaker B: Well, you know, I think that's exactly right. I think there I was talking to a colleague of mine who's in the SEO space and you know, she talks a lot about high intent keywords, right? Like it's one thing to go viral, it's another thing to capture that virality and like convert it into long term loyalty, right?
And I think that that's, you know, that's the intersection of the tactics and the brand. Like, do you know who you want to attract and do you actually know like what the volume of that audience is is?
And is, is your objective to really just get the biggest volume number or is your objective to get the accurate volume number? And like, if you don't know the trickle down of all of that, like how many leads do you need to convert in order to hit your numbers, right? Like, and so there I what I see a lot of times in, and I'll back up what I see as like the role of brand in all things business really is often flattened to attracting, right? And I think SEO probably has a similar, like, despite the fact that sometimes they feel at odds, like the flattened down objective of SEO is attraction, but really like it's about attraction is about setting an expectation, meeting an expectation and then exceeding the expectation is where like that loyalty piece comes in. And again, back to our previous little tangent. If you know, if the SEO research is done well and the keyword research is done well, then you're going to have pages that are setting the right expectation. But then if the content built around those things is not up to snuff, then you're not going to meet the expectation.
Right? And it's not going to create the result that you ultimately want, because the result that you ultimately want is not search volume, it's conversion and retention. Right? And so like we can, it's. You can always find a big number to point at, you know, out of context or in a sliver and be like, yay, big numbers. But like, big numbers of what, you know, I think is a really important part to keep in mind. And admittedly I am like way too right brain to like to run anything SEO. Like, even when I was doing website stuff, I'd be like, I just want to be like, really clear, like, I'm an experienced designer.
You're going to have to activate this website or like bring somebody else in like that. And anything where I have to really keep up on the research instead of kind of trust the wisdom of the ages is going to be out of my lane of things I want to be responsible for. So very grateful that there's people like you out in the world doing the complimentary other side of the coin work.
[00:16:22] Speaker A: I think that's the fascinating part about, you know, it really comes down to human, human behavior and analysis is really the foundation of all marketing.
And you know, you can approach it from, you know, a survey perspective, you know, type of.
Here's the data that says that people react to these colors, you know, more on CTA elements. And that data is technically true. But if it's done in a vacuum, you can always cherry pick data to support hypothesis, but without the other side of it, of the creative aspect of. Okay, yes, if the button isn't an opposite tone, it draws more attention. But if that's done in a way that's clashing with your overall brand aesthetic and it's the call to action is super ham fisted. It's not lined up with what your sales team is actually trained to close on.
You can drive. And I've been in this scenario where like SEO comes to the table. You know, they're like, hey, we saw these numbers, we created all of these leads and we killed it. And then sales comes back and this is the worst quarter that we've had ever.
And we're like, I don't under how I got you like three times as many leads. We got the conversion, like, yeah, but none of them convert. They, they're converting at a third because they're not the right person, they're not within the organ, they're not the decision maker or this fraction or friction. And that's, you know, that's as much, you know, human psychology, understanding the business process as anything else.
[00:18:23] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:18:24] Speaker A: What are some of the, you know, the biggest misses that you've witnessed in terms of a campaign kicking off, seeming successful, but not quite catching the goal?
[00:18:40] Speaker B: Well, to be, you know, full transparency. I don't do a lot of campaign management because we do more vers. We're, we're more of the like, identity design on the front end. And that's actually something I've been really trying to figure out in our business is like, how do we kind of keep our finger on the pulse better of the activation campaigns that come after us?
But what I will say is that, you know, I think it's, it's really important when you're developing any kind of campaign because I think, you know, there's, there's like the growth marketing lane which you're talking about, is the one that is going to come across like, really it's gonna, it's expensive to, to really do it well. But like, I experience that growth marketers versus brand marketers are a lot more confident in their ability to promise return on investment. Right. Because you're working with numbers, because you're going after sales, like you're going after that, that fiscal result in a different way.
And so I see that tension. And what I've really, what I encourage my clients to do after they leave me when they're evaluating a campaign from the beginning is to really think, like to your point, what you just said, who is your ideal audience for this? Right.
Where do they need to land? Where do they need to like, what are the sequences of events that they need to go to? But I think, you know, it's really easy when you're dealing with something that's kind of like heady like SEO, to get overwhelmed as a business owner or a decision maker inside of a business and just be like, okay, you know what you're talking about, do it for me. And to not to start to like, kind of not evaluate the underlying strategies that are there and just say, okay, if it works, do it. But it's like not every strategy.
There's tons of valid sound strategies that get successful activation all the time. But it's not necessarily just a successful strategy. Doesn't mean it's the right strategy for your business. And I think more business owners need tools to evaluate the fit of strategy for their Business, Right. Like, I'll give you an example that I just recently, internally, we hired a sales, like an outsourced lead generation team, and they're like, we get all these results for our clients. We help, you know, 500 businesses a year, yada, yada, yada. And then they sent me these scripts that they're going to send out on our behalf. And it's like, these are working for all the other brand agencies in our client pool. Well, like, I don't want to use the same strategy as every other brand, every. All of my competitors that are in your client pool. You know what I mean? Like, that's not what I want.
And what it's promising is what they think will get results. Right? So it's like in the SEO terms, it's like, yeah, I might have success running that keyword campaign, but is it going to differentiate me from my client, it from my competitors, or is it going to just keep me neck and neck with them?
Is it going to actually attract the people that I want?
Or is it like a click and switch, you know, a bait and switch kind of thing? Because these scripts that they're sending me are like, they're promising things that we immediately can't deliver because that's not how our business is structured. You know what I mean? So I think before, it's like, looking at what makes a campaign having been a success is a very important thing to offer. But I think for my clients, like, a lot of them are making decisions around what campaigns to invest in in the first place and, like, being able to step back and have a way of, like, putting on, like, what would the brand do? And saying, like, this is the wrong date for me to go on, like, this is this, this is the, this is the wrong campaign. It might be valid and it might have had traction in seven other businesses, but I can tell you right now that this is not the right strategy for us. And I think too few business owners have the ability to do that with confidence and choose the right campaigns from the jump.
[00:23:08] Speaker A: It reminds me, we built a content gap analysis tool and I had to develop an extra warning on it that I put into it of if you're looking at your competitors and looking at what you're not doing, that they are only, you are in too much, you are just duplicating their business and making yourself more like them.
A counter function after you get that data is to then say, what is the gap that none of my competitors are addressing? And how can, how can I fit into that niche? Because that's, that's the competitor fallacy, you know, like, oh hey, I want to do competitive analysis, see what's successful, see what's working. If you only duplicate what's working for other people, then you're only going to get a smaller and smaller piece of the pie because you're aligning yourself more and more with where somebody else is already succeeding.
[00:24:10] Speaker B: Right.
[00:24:11] Speaker A: So there has to be that, you know, that value option. It came up in a conversation with a client. You know, we're analyzing them for, you know, delivering precast concrete walls and like, you know, the competitor is promising this, this delivery angle and that delivery angle. I'm like, we need to interview the actual person who does the installation.
And we did. In that conversation it came up frequently, oh hey, they always ask for the, you know, can we put something under the ground for anti dig? And I'm like, anti dig? Like there's no volume for that. Like it only comes up with dogs. And like, I swear to you, every single time we install these walls, they ask if it can be put in deeper so that people can't just dig under these expensive walls and just invalidate their existence. Like, oh well that makes sense. And you know, that's, that's a competitive angle that wouldn't have been surfaced any other way.
[00:25:10] Speaker B: Right.
[00:25:12] Speaker A: So is it that goes back again to just the human element.
Right. Of what do you have in your stack of processes to have those conversations to better the USPs that you're working with at the outset?
[00:25:29] Speaker B: Yeah. So I'll point you toward or the audience towards our brand IDQ framework. So that's our signature framework that I've developed and we used to, you know, carry it out one on one interviews over extensive periods of time. And it was like really indulgent and wonderful. But like, let's be honest, the world is moving faster than that. So over this past year I've been working really diligently to build our own tech stack around this exact question. Like, how do I tease apart the identity of the founder? And you know, we work with founder led brands specifically in the service driven space who. Where the human experience is really central to the success over time. So, so we look at like how do I tease the founder identity apart from the brand identity so that it can be articulated, codified and transferred to the whole team so that it's not just the marketing team that's creating the visuals and the core messaging that. But we can give this to the sales team, we can give this to the SEO team, we can give this to the finance team, we can give this to operations. And everybody has that same lens of glasses that they can put on that essentially they can ask the brand what needs to happen here?
Like what needs to happen here? And it's before mood board, before positioning, before icp. It's the logic set that the founder has historically tapped into instinctively and through intuition, we can start to tease that out so that all people in the organization can make those same kind of sequential decisions. And we have something that we call the brand integrity statement, which very clearly lays out like it's recommended that the brand make decisions in this way.
These are the things you want to be mindful of, because if you are making decisions in this way, you might also fall victim to like the shortcomings of that way of making decisions. So like, watch out for that because that could undercut what you're trying to accomplish. You know, people around you need to be expressing certain things. Those are, those are the signals that you're on the right track. Right? These are the needs that need to be fulfilled. These are the habits that you should adopt. Here are the relational strategies that you want to deploy. And the relational strategies is, you know, a really interesting part for the SEO conversation because it, it will tell you like, are you wanting, it'll, it'll help you figure out like what kind of keyword information where all these things are coming together. So for example, if you have a brand that's really oriented, oriented around care for the client, like everyone wants to think that that's their prerogative, but it's not and that's totally fine. Like some prerogative is, you know, to model new behavior and some is to care and nurture the customer. And that's going to affect like when you're going through a list and you're thinking, okay, how do I run a, run this campaign?
You know, yes, these ones over here might, you know, be the low hanging fruit for your campaigns and ranking, but they might be not as aligned and therefore they might produce the most volume upfront, but they're not necessarily going to promote the most conversion and the most retention of business over time. And so I would definitely recommend for anybody who's listening, if you're feeling like that sounds great, Charlie, but how do I do that?
So that tool is available on our website. We have what we call the integrity snapshot, which will give you, it's designed to extract that intuition and instinct very quickly and articulate back for you those core pieces that you can start to kind of filter all of your thinking through so that again you're making decisions as the brand instead of as yourself because especially for founders like sometimes we're so close to it and our survival is and our egos are all so interwoven with the success of something that we can make decisions in our best interest and sometimes that means keeping ourselves comfortable or you know avoiding something that we probably should do. When you can kind of tease that apart a little bit more it's much easier to be objective about like what is really the best decision for the brand in this moment, in this conversation, in this arena.
[00:30:01] Speaker A: Absolutely love that. If people want to have more conversation with you connect I'll make sure that that those resources get linked in the show notes of course. But where can people find you? Are you doing any conferences or are you active on a particular social channel where people can.
Love it? Thank you.
Thank you for so much for sharing your expertise.
