Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. Chris, why don't you give yourself an introduction to everybody and let us know why we should trust you.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: Hey, Jeremy, thanks for having me. Yeah, so my name is Chris. I'm the founder here at Catalyst Marketing. But my journey into SEO kind of started about 13 years ago next month.
I started as just an apprentice working on SEO with some pretty small accounts to begin with, just in small agency work. But then from there I've just. I feel like I've kind of been everywhere in terms of industry, the size of accounts I've worked on, and, you know, going that far back as well. It feels like looking back on what we've got now with SEO and how it's changed is just massive.
And I really didn't think it had changed for a long time, but the last three to five years has just accelerated hugely. But yes, starting years ago at small agencies, and I've worked my way up through working on some pretty large global accounts, working in house with some really big insurance firms as well.
And yeah, some my freelancing career kind of took me as to some interesting parts as well. But over the last four or five years or so, since about 2021, I've been mainly focused on Catalyst, working with local service businesses, and that's kind of been where I've honed in on a lot of local SEO over the last four or five years.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: I've had a similar path.
You know, started with real estate agents, commercial real estate, as a website hosting person, just answering questions, led to, you know, doing my reading the SEO book by Aaron Wall, you know, listening to the early founders of SEO hold court on Twitter and just kind of experimenting with everything.
But I've seen a lot change too. It's interesting because I also have ended up with like a really big focus on home service businesses. SEO and local SEO just, it is a different game. It's funny, I think the local SEO game has stayed the most the same while changing. I feel like some of the bigger, you know, big content publisher SEO has changed. There are, you know, literally SEO niches that no longer exist because Google's pretty much consumed them. Like, when I started, you know, the hotel industry niche was separate and distinct, but now Google has its, its hands firmly around the throat of that. And it seems like the more we turn around, the more Google. You know, Google even replaced what emoji directory recently, where you can now type in an emoji and just copy it and instead of going to the emojipedia how do you view the search evolution from being what it was when you started?
I think it went super insanely Google monopolistic for a minute. And everything SEOs did was 100% obsessed with only Google. But now it looks like we're widening that funnel out. How do things change as they go back to how they were?
[00:03:23] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. And you know what, think about the early days as well. And you were just mentioning some of the people that you read and listened to. I don't know if, if you watched, but it was quite big back when I was first learning SEO was obviously Rand at Moz with these Whiteboard Fridays and he's just always been a huge authority figure. You know, obviously, you know, has kind of founded Moz and made a big impact on like the SEO industry as a whole. But I still follow him now on LinkedIn and I see everything he's posting and the work that he's doing with SparkToro and everything at the moment and I find that really interesting. Everything that he's talking about like the zero click marketing and how prevalent brand is becoming.
Have you watched much Defhint before?
[00:04:05] Speaker A: Absolutely. I mean, Moz was the counterpoint. I actually ended up working with Raven Tools, which was kind of the opposite side. We kind of saw ourselves as competition for Moz when it comes to the SEO SaaS service game. Even before Ahrefs was a thing, Semrush was a very niche tool when Moz and Raven Tools were fighting things out in the SAS SEO world.
So yeah, definitely paid a lot of attention to a lot of the things he said and a lot of things that his agency model actually did.
I think he has been kind of the Nostradamus of the future of, of search.
Seeing the trend of, okay, well, you know, we had 10 blue links and now we went universal. And once it went universal, you know, showing all of these different types of results, you know, it was that next step when featured snippets kind of became a thing. And that really was the, I think the biggest change in direction for Google as far as what it was trying to be to the public. And it became much less about, you know, being a trusted, you know, quality moderator in that process to actually owning and displaying and being the arbitrator and being the source of truth. You know, their tagline to begin with was, you know, we organize the world's data.
And now it seems like we are the world's data they want to be. You know, there's all of these situations you get into now of like the as A.J. cohn, my favorite author, you know, blind five year old.com he says, you know, is it goog enough like can you get these results and they're just acceptable enough to like pass the bar? You know there's, there's the, the meme now of inshinification of search results of you know, it's, it's, it's culturally like there's all these things where these tech companies come in and they take control and monopolize it and it's just somehow just worse for having such like a heavy handed control of it. And that, that is, that is so true. When you can Google and ask for kitchen recipes and get ones that include gasoline.
Like the it feels, I think I said this in a prior interview last week that's coming out of it feels like we have been demoted to beta testers as the public. And it used to be that the outcry, the outrage would shut down a company if they launched a product prematurely that had even 100th of the error rate that we're seeing with these LLM tools with AI overviews like it. I remember distinctly some search results that came up in 2014 that were so scandalous that they got them so wrong that there was practically a public apology from the search engineers for having released that update that would display search results that way. That was so egregious. And now we have just run into this age of lawlessness. It seems like with corporations are so large that they can just push this out and say Google.
[00:07:52] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, you're 100% right. And I was watching a video only yesterday actually and somebody was talking about how the corporations, what they get away with now compared to what they were allowed to get away with like back in the early 90s. And I used an example that wasn't too familiar with. I think it was something about when Microsoft kind of forced you to have a browser as part of the operating system. And there was a big fuss about that. I wasn't too sure, I wasn't too aware of it. But he was comparing it to what's happening today, which as you say is essentially these corporations sort of crowdsourcing crowd testing just as it goes, just like basing it live rollouts. If it works, it works if it doesn't. And they, you know, they try and change and everything, but it really does feel like they're just kind of testing and making it up as we go. And yeah, you're right, we, we do put up with a lot and I think it's Even more difficult when you've got clients as well, that they see stuff happening, they see changes. And you're thinking, I'm not even seeing the same sort of search results or I'm not even, I haven't heard about this. Not an update. And then in six months later you hear about what they've rolled out and now what the final version is and.
[00:08:54] Speaker A: You know, with the removal of the search liaison processes position, you know, is kind of just the final peg of you know what. We care so little now about your feedback.
We will tell you what your feedback is by holding a conference. After our disastrous HCU decimates, you know, food bloggers decimates travel bloggers, decimates publishers, we're going to have a few people and we're going to tell you what your objective experience actually is while not changing anything in the algorithm to actually restore what is obviously a devastating modification or process like the lack of ability to recover from these hcu, the HCU penalties for so long, only in the last one or two algorithm updates have we seen anyone come back.
And for that to be the state of the nature of the industry for two plus years since HCU came out, it's hard to, it's like, oh, that happened two years ago. But it's been that way for this long. That it is. Okay, well, I guess we'll die. You know, like I literally had, had, we had a subcontract, we tried everything, we threw spaghetti at the wall and we're like, sorry, you have to start a whole new site. You know, we're grab a new domain basically kind of restarted the business under a slightly different, different name with a quarter of the content and the, that strategy worked.
It was the stupidest thing that I've ever seen, you know, and what was, you know what, what, what we cut out was what actually Google had rewarded in the previous algorithm, shot them up and then shot them in the face for the same thing. So it's like, you know, we're, we're kind of used to this poor behavior now, I guess.
So in my, and part of my heart says, oh now, now you have some competition. Now you have chat GPT perplexity and these secondary models coming in and starting to, you know, take some of the market share. You know, Bing's coming in and playing a genuine player at least in terms of serving up index.
Yes, thank you. Let's have some competition with this monopolistic Google that is determined to go further and further of destroying this, you know, exchange of. We'll Create the content and you'll drive people to it. It's like part of that social contract is broken down and I'm okay with a competition that. Okay, well, I, I can't. I know that like there's a lot of research, a lot of people are trying to determine does GPT search, is it secondary to, is it replacement of search behavior or is it a different model?
I think there's, it's a mixed bag. I think for the most part how you interact with a ChatGPT tool, there's a fraction of it that mirrors some of the things that you were trying to do with search, but it is, it ultimately is, is like an augmentary process. I think we do have to go back and go deeper, you know, outside of the answers within LLM tools to find these, these answers. And some of that goes back to, you know, true search.
And I'd love for this aspect of competition to, to help change the trajectory at Google. I don't hold out much hope that it's going to, but I can hope that competition might be a positive change factor.
[00:12:43] Speaker B: Yeah, no, definitely no. I agree with you. I kind of didn't really see it as like competition like that in the sense of, well, I suppose that's where I'm lucky to be working with a lot of local service businesses because that's where there hasn't been as much change as you said, in terms of how people are searching. And obviously you've kind of got the high intent keywords which are like the company, the near me local, any of these local based terms when people are actually searching. I feel like the majority of what worked in SEO five years ago is still working now to get people ranking for those high intent terms. There's been some changes, but I think a lot of it really is like you're saying about these other competitors and these LLMs. It's, there's just more top of funnel and middle funnel sort of research going on there and it's trying to create that content, optimize for that and then also think about, well, if that doesn't turn into a click, how does that affect the rest of my marketing or how do they end up actually getting to my client's website and actually converting and becoming a customer of those high intent keywords.
[00:13:45] Speaker A: I think that is the question, you know, like thinking about, you know, an Atlanta law office, you know, what is it that they are going to do differently for local search that you wouldn't have recommended in 2008 or 2015? Like I look at these.
And I think a lot of it stays the same.
ChatGPT now has a map feature for local.
But how'd you get in it? Well, you got to be a verified Bing business.
You need to be in the Bing index period, which is helpful. If you have index now. Like, if you don't have index now on your site and you're on WordPress, you're an idiot.
It's such an easy win.
And then you have Google Reviews who, like, if you combine those three factors, it's like, okay, well, like I would have told them in, you know, 2008, let's get you verified on Google Places or Google My Business or Google Profile, whatever the name du jour of that thing was. I think it was Google Places in 2008. And then, you know, let's get you in MSN and then we'll get you your citations.
You know, are these kind of verifying factors as these basic directories gets you some local links and then actually do something in the community so that you show up, like, let's do a trash cleanup. You know, let's.
Let's be part of a charity drive. You know, I know ziplocal has a free tool to find sponsorships in communities of organizations that are looking for funding for their fun run or funding for their duck boat charity race or whatever it might be. Like, those are things and actions in the community that I would have recommended then and recommending them now. Like, it's what I like local SEO, because there is kind of, you know, hey, you've got a CPR class in a particular city. You need to, you know, have the bottom of the funnel stuff to say, differentiate yourself. What would you say you do here and then show up in the community? And what does that showing up look like? It's, you know, directories that's getting listed in the city hall, you know, participating in the community.
So it really, the more it's changed, the more that local, I think, has stayed the same. Which what has for you changed in your process or is something that you think about now that you didn't before when it comes to local SEO?
[00:16:39] Speaker B: That's a good question. I feel like, like you're saying a lot that is still the same reviews. Local schema has definitely become. I think it's always been important, but obviously I think these are just something that used to carry less weight, now seems to carry a little bit more weight. I'm seeing. I mean, for example, we've kind of totally paused on a lot of any backlinks we were doing, obviously we're doing a lot of the citations and everything like that, but when we get a big link, we see it not boosting as much as we used to. There used to be clients that would rank nationwide for, you know, quite a long tail keyword, for example. Then obviously that got eaten up by the snippets and the AI overview and they still get featured a little bit for some of it.
[00:17:19] Speaker A: So.
[00:17:19] Speaker B: But it used to be a really big traffic driver for some people and even though it's locally based, you'd still get some people. So if you're selling expensive kitchens, for example, they're 100, 150 miles away and obviously I'm in the UK, that's a lot. And it's about half the country's length. It's not the furthest, you know, so they would still could be interest, they could turn into customers, but at the end of the day still was, it was, still was driving some good high intent traffic nonetheless. But that's what it seems the backlink seemed to impact more. Like you said, if you don't have your basics in place, like being listed in Bing Maps, Google Maps or having the reviews, I mean, reviews a huge part of it as well. That's kind of a bit of a make and break when it comes to a lot.
Well, especially with the LLMs, because it seems to go massively on reviews. I think I've done a lot of test searches to see what it or to try and figure out what its algorithm is.
What's it suggesting? This is the best sort of company to go for and a lot of it is always just reviews.
But I think like you're saying, getting into the local community and how that's kind of grown into digital primary. I think digital PR's become quite a hot topic in SEO over the last year or so, maybe a little bit longer, but I think that that's really important. And it does come back to what you said. You suggest basically almost, you know, 15, 16 years ago, which is kind of getting out there, doing local sponsorship events, local brand ones. So we're trying to think of ways of how can we get more creative with our digital pr, what can we actually suggest clients do? And I think the interesting thing about how SEO is changing and obviously with AI and everything, I'm getting a lot of clients ask me questions and essentially I'm saying, well, a lot has stayed the same, so you don't have to worry too much when it comes to local SEO. But what is that? What is actually doing. I think it's dragging a lot of people that just focused onto SEO into the wider sort of marketing sphere. So actually looking at things perhaps they wouldn't have before, which is impacting search now. So obviously a lot of brand mentions, brand is becoming really big and I do like that. Search everywhere optimization, a phrase. I know there's loads of different acronyms going around for at the moment, but it does seem that, you know, if you're ranking or if you've got mentions on Reddit and you've got mentions on a blog or a forum, a local magazine or newspaper, LLMs are really picking up, notice that. And that's all about brand marketing and it's just, it's overlapping even more so into SEO. And I think it's getting there for local SEO as well. Especially as people start to get a bit more conversational with the way they talk to these LLMs and the saying things like, well, what's the best one? Who can I go to that provides this or you know, anything like that rather than just the high intent keywords that we've always focused on.
[00:19:58] Speaker A: I agree. I think it's as much about now I was talking to Matt Brooks of seoteric of how, you know, reputation is now echoed in a different way on social media and there's kind of a broadening and a narrowing because that used to be like forums were its own unique separate thing and then you had, you know, social media sites but now like you've got these Stradlers of like, you know, voice AI, you've got Reddit subreddits, you've got LinkedIn Pulse, you have kind of these UGC sources that both LLMs and Google are both turning to for answers because they are, you know, they're answers from people, you know, and we kind of, we kind of oversat. I think we, we saw the opportunity in the field of like going after these keyword research, these keyword research phrases.
But we kind of ran into a problem on the local server side, didn't we? Of course. How many?
Every single plumber answering the question of how to spot a leaky faucet.
Google then has 1 trillion triplicate articles which it incentivized the creation of. They created this problem, but now they have this massive problem of all of these marketing agencies putting out a perfectly good answer to the point of where it's just so duplicate that there's nothing unique about it. So then we see the folding in of these social media results. So if you are trying to sell your stair handrail system, you know, so like it doesn't matter if you there's articles about it. It's does did somebody on Reddit, you know, their uncle installed that stair handrail system and it pulled out of the wall and they died. You know, like there's this Yuji or it or it really, you know, worked really well and, and somebody on Reddit actually mentioned it. Like it's kind of like they're outsourcing the social proof with these hybrid platforms. Because I don't like, Reddit isn't exactly a forum, it's not exactly social media, it's not exactly a content site. It is an abomination before the Lord. But it is, you know, it's also in some ways, you know, like somewhat genuine conversations. And there's this weird like I've been on Reddit since the narwhal bacon. It's like you know, 18 plus years.
So there is kind of this self policing, like don't market to me bro. But on the flip coin of that, like, oh, I'm totally marketing to you, like, yeah, you made a bacon underwear. Woo.
Yeah, this weird culture about it. But I think what I'm pointing out is that I think it's a new opportunity, but it's the same old opportunity at the same time. Hey, in 2009 I was recommending go genuinely participate in forums and I think it has become, you know, reviews and like human verification that this event happened or that thing exists in like that UGC aspect is more important now.
[00:23:24] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. I do think it is more important and I think at the same time one of my first tasks, I remember when I joined an agency as an Apprentice, you know, 16 or 17, and it was to basically go on behalf of their clients at the time and just go on to different forums and start commenting on the forums. It was just to get backlinks from forums, but I think I was, it was always done from the point or the perspective of okay, this is a really. Yeah, it's a backlink. This is an old forum. I don't know how many people gonna find it if they're gonna search for it, you know, is it how many people actually gonna read this thing come to my company is more about the backlink side of things. And like I said, now I don't think people are doing it for that anymore. They're doing it for the LLMs or they're doing it for the brand mention because you know, it was always the thing that social mentions are good for SEO, you know, maybe 1015 years ago they were good for SEO, but they carried no weight ultimately and they didn impact your actual SERP ranking position.
So that's is interesting how it's changed. People seen it as well. Oh, it's still a mention. People still going to read it. But maybe that is just the power of social media and the fact that things are, you know, they, they do stay ranked for a long time and a lot of people are seeing them.
[00:24:35] Speaker A: I think the difference too is the, the eradication of walled gardens. Well, everything is in a walled garden. And so think about it like Facebook evolved from. You had to be logged in to see the content and that's where you participated to.
Then it was indexed and Facebook pages were promoted for their organic reach and value. And then meta squeezed the life juice out of that and now it's pay to play. But that kind of squeezed traffic. The genuine participation of businesses to create unique content for meta is no longer there. If you're there, you're paying and creating content and trying to interact with people on Instagram on threads.
But we couldn't index it. And now Google's now indexing Instagram videos. TikTok videos are indexed and showing up in SERPs and LinkedIn Pulse. Like I saw Lily Ray take the same article that wasn't ranking on her site, put it on her LinkedIn pulse as an article pop.
It's now up there. And so what again, what is old barnacle SEO? You know, we used to talk about, hey get, you know, create barnacles and they create on these little subsites and we're like okay, I guess but those aren't really good links. But I'll do it. And then like oh hey, that works. It's like the particles got bigger and the, the particles have a life of their own now. You know, so it's. The term isn't quite quite right to call them barnacle but it's more like distributive.
It's like market share owning like having more.
[00:26:19] Speaker B: You talk about parasite SEO, is that using barnacle and parasite. Okay, cool.
[00:26:23] Speaker A: Yeah, Parasite SEO, Barnacle SEO.
But it, but they're not parasite, they're more. It's more like arms of an octopus now.
You know, like show like if you think of your, like I think I'm going to float this. Tell me if you think this is true. It used to be that the, the website was the absolutely true dead center of your marketing universe. And when it came to SEO and everything and you had kind of, you know, SEO or social media could Be kind of separate.
And you were building links, but you're building links to get your website ranked higher 99 times out of 10. Like maybe 1 in 100 links that you got was actually like a partnership that actually sent traffic. Now it feels like you must have tentacles going out that draw people back, but the arms in and of themselves have their own value and you could have like a very valuable referral relationship. And, and we need to as SEOs, consider the multi channel approach and not think of ourselves just as SEOs. We need to be better positioned in the ecosystem to take advantage of those marketing emails. As much as, you know, placement of a citation, doing a press release and, you know, putting, getting something on Reddit, getting a huge upvoted post on Reddit now carries as much weight and value as getting a huge backlink did in 2015, right?
[00:28:00] Speaker B: 100%. 100%, yeah. I actually started writing a blog just the other week and it was mainly to kind of get my thoughts out. Something I wanted to use as promotional piece, but to send to clients and speak about in terms of saying, this is where SEO has been, this is what's happening at the moment and this is where I think it's going.
And I got stuck toward the end where I was thinking about where it's going because obviously the AI search mode for Google just got released in uk, I think last week or two weeks ago, whenever it was, and I've been doing some tests, I've had a few clients in a screenshot saying, oh good, we're showing up. And it's a bit of a black box. And when I started writing the end of this blog saying where the future of search is going, that's where I started to get a bit stuck. And I was thinking, well, what does Google want? Does Google want this sort of platform where it's going to eventually 5, 10 years time, AI keeps going, got this AI assistant, but it knows your preferences really well, knows you as a person really well. And when you're searching for something, it's taking all of that into consideration. Do they really want. Obviously everyone used to Visit, you know, 20, 30, 40 sites. And then a few years ago it came about. Everyone just goes to five sites. You know that people just go to Google, YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, whatever it might be. Is it, is that what face Google wants to basically, you know, grow into just to become this, this search assistant that has all these different, has all this data as you were talking about and it just lists it all. You don't need to go to Facebook anymore. You don't need to go to TikTok. We've got it all indexed. I'll show you your favorite restaurants top TikTok. I'll take something from the Reddit post about it that mentions it and it kind of gives it to you in this AI overview. Is that where we're heading in terms of search? And that's where it got me thinking about the website. I was like, what role does a website play in terms of authority? And like you saying, being that absolute central hub of SEO and we can already see it's kind of, you know, drifting away from that and is there a post website world? What does that look like? I mean these are all, I suppose, big almost existential questions when it comes to search and things like that, and nobody can predict. But it's definitely been playing on my mind thinking, you know, when, how relevant or how long does a website stay relevant and how much is needed in this LLM future.
[00:30:15] Speaker A: It's a challenge because, you know, you're right like it, it picks up on the brand entity, but that's spread out over multiple, you know, TikToks, Instagrams, you know, Reddit posts, all of these differing signals. It's like Google, Google wants to make it harder for itself, I guess, like and distributing it out. But that's kind of the outcome of it. But it becomes very problematic very quickly of, you know, what is the incentive of these businesses to invest in the marketing that they're, that Google is, is leeching off of.
You know, like they're, they're like, how incentivized are we to create, you know, they want us to create content for humans, but they, they're sending their robot to consume that content.
So create content for humans for our, our bot to consume, but don't create it for robots. You know, don't you dare create stuff that just is going to rank because that's, that's bad. But also create a ton of content for us to consume so that we can give it to our users. It's contradictory and I don't see a clear solution either from, you know, perplexity or chatgpt. The problem there is the same because, you know, there is no pure content anymore for LLMs to consume because we're all using LLM tools to generate content.
It, it, you know, I think it's what 2014 was the last like the oldest date before or 2012 before LLMs started generating any content on the Internet. So everything predating that is pure to train on and everything after that is tainted to a particular degree and more. And it's, that's going to accelerate more and more and more. So there's definitely a information gain issue.
I think part of it is solved in things like what we're doing now. You know, two experts discussing it, recording content. And there's a, there's a hell of a lot of podcasters, you know, maybe that's, you know, their plan is to, you know, extract and harvest from human to human conversation to generate new content going forward as their pure signal. You know, at some point what we know is going to be infected by what LLMs said, right?
[00:32:50] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. It's kind of like, you know, does art influence life or does life influence art? And then it starts going round and round. You think, yeah, where does it start and end? But I mean, I suppose it kind of brings me on to like you say people, you know, if, if it's going to, you know, you can trust content that's created on a podcast. You can see it's two people talking. Is our LLM is going to be fed off of that. But when it comes to doing that for your client as well and actually providing that service for your clients, how are you tackling that in terms of, okay, we know that this is, you know, this basically an octopus that we need to kind of service now in terms of SEO and we need to be here, here and here. And actually there's so many new skills. Is it all search? How, when, where does the line draw between what is SEO and what should your social media person be doing?
[00:33:37] Speaker A: That.
That, that is something currently asking myself. I mean, I, I converted my keyword research SaaS to just basically be a white label podcasting, content marketing dynamic engine.
You know, so like I find hosts and I find guests, turn that into content and turn that into links as a white label service for agencies to solve that particular problem.
But that I also, in that process, I'm creating like, hey, here's your, from this interview, here's what you should be posting on these five social media channels. Here's your LinkedIn pulse. Here's a post for Medium. Here's a post for your subreddit. Like, so do I as the SEO, then like go post to these social media channels or do I hand that off to a social media person? And now is that social media person also, you know, posting to these owned distribution network sites? You know, because they're. That more of those are coming.
Was it, I think voice AI, like they allow you to monetize your content but they allow followed links. So there's much reason to publish there as medium as subreddits, you know, showing up.
So those are going to crop up more and more. So is that social media? Is that, you know, so that's why I think of myself more as a, you know, SEO is a factor.
How, how what we do is going to be more integrated with what used to be separate channels.
And I'm very much more of a business consultant. Consultant, digital marketing, business consulting in my freelance work, talking about, okay, well, you know, how are we going to show up as a brand across the board?
Do you have your drip email campaign set up to capture soft leads? What are you creating for people to come back to? Creating your own platform and brand and value separate from search, you know, because you, you got to grow your audience and Google is only going to continue to choke that audience volume. And so, yes, it's more distilled so that it means more what actions those people when they come to your site. You can't afford to have a site that has a 0.5% conversion rate anymore because you're getting 1, 1 or you're getting 50% of the visitors you were before. You need to bump that, you need to pump that up.
So it does change what we do.
Maybe that's a good thing.
I don't, I, I think it is ultimately a good thing, but it is hybridization of our skills and not being stuck to these labels or concepts of like, oh, there's a social media manager.
Maybe that's more of like our distribution, content and audience acquisition manager.
[00:36:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And you know what I think. So I started freelance in about 20, 2016, 2017, so about eight years ago or so. And I think it's quite straightforward then in terms of saying, okay, I do SEO and ppc. That's what I do. This is how I can help. This is how it works. And I've kind of gone through that phase of, oh, I want as much work on as I can get to begin with. Especially when you start a new thinking, okay, I need to get clients on. So you start saying yes to everything. And I do feel that, well, I'll go back to where I was so going from the freelancer through to trying to transition into an agency. And now we've gone into quite a niche agency. And the reason for that is I noticed that and I think, I'm sure you saw it as well that as you try to get into a bit more consultancy, there seems to be this trend of like fractional CMOS or the term fractional has popped up massively over two years. And I think that's probably because as I felt as a freelancer, as, you know, search expanded, people were asking me, well, can you do this? Can you do that? And I was like, oh, I suppose it is kind of SEO and I'm taking it all on. And then, you know, four years of doing it and I had a bit of the refresh over Covid actually it gave me a good break to think I need to drift away from this, I want to start an agency. So I had that break to do it in.
But yeah, I was asked to do so much more and I was thinking, I don't even know if I can do half this stuff. I don't know what's my role with it and everything like that. I can see why somebody would then be birthed to be a fractional cmo because then it's like, okay, well nobody can be an expert in executing all of these tasks. Like it has to be this sort of single person that can kind of coordinate it all and have an idea of where to take it. And obviously they are just, it's just consultancy at the end, but you know, it's kind of got, they've added this extra layer onto it but, you know, and it's kind of meant to be the leader of the strategy and everything. And I kind of noticed the same sort of thing was happening when I first started the agency. We started taking more and more on and that's when we kind of went into, okay, we're just doing performance marketing for local service businesses. And that's because I know what it involves, I know how to service it and I know what we don't do as well.
Well, of course, until organic search has become, you know, eight different things now. So that's something to think about. But yeah, it is interesting to kind of see this growth happen over the last eight years or so into just, you have to now know thousands of things to just be considered like a consultant in marketing or a cmo.
[00:39:16] Speaker A: I absolutely agree. I've talked to a dozen now different fractional CMOs and basically it boils down to, yeah, I may.
They can't afford. They don't want to Pay, you know, $200,000 for a C level position, but they want somebody in a semi circle C level position who can orchestrate all of this insane stuff. Because finding a talent that they can forever adopt into that position seems too hard or there's so many hoops to jump through. So it's kind of the flexibility of being able to fire an agency but also bringing somebody into the structure of the company itself.
Whereas, you know, with an agency you still have to have that, you have to have buy in, but you also have to have a key position that you're interacting with.
And so like their job becomes to manage the agency, you know, so some people like, well, you know, I'll just hire somebody who can then interact with our, all of our agencies, you know, whether they're just SEO or email or whatever. So I kind of get the, get the evolution of it. It's, it's fascinating because you're right, fractional did not exist as a concept. What six.
I think it's new within this last six to eight years period.
And what it means for our industry is certainly different.
It's fascinating. I love it.
Tell me a little bit more about Catalyst.
Are you on a particular social media platform? What's coming up for you guys if people want to get connected with you as we kind of wind down the interview?
[00:40:59] Speaker B: Yeah. So Catalyst, like I said, we're very focused on just being performance marketing for local service businesses at the moment and I'm really focused on that. So I've recently created a school community around just kind of help local service business owners kind of find information not just about marketing, but all sorts of things. You know, local politics, you know, accounting, advice, growth, whatever it might be. Because you know that's, that's a battle itself. And I think trying to understand marketing is a layer on top of it. So I've recently created that school community so people kind of come together and discuss that. I find them useful for I'm in a few agency owner ones so I find those really useful. Thought I'd do the same.
And yeah, that's probably the biggest and newest thing that kind of started recently.
[00:41:45] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, are you on more on LinkedIn, Twitter, Slack.
If people want to hang out and chat with you, shoot the brius. Where can they find you socially?
[00:41:56] Speaker B: LinkedIn. Yeah, LinkedIn's the best. I am quite active on there. I've got a newsletter on there just about how small business owners can kind of start fixing their marketing mainly around performance marketing based things. SEO, pay per click, email, content, all that sort of stuff.
Not too big on Instagram. I'm not charismatic enough for that. I don't think so. Yeah, mainly, yeah, shoot me a DM on LinkedIn if anybody wants to connect or anything like that. It's probably the best place.
[00:42:23] Speaker A: Thanks for your time. Chris Turnbull.
Fantastic to chat. See you around.
[00:42:27] Speaker B: Cheers, Remy.
