[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I'm here with Flynn Zager. Why don't you give yourself a quick introduction and focus on the credentials or experience that people should trust. [00:00:13] Speaker B: Yeah, it's great to be with you, Jeremy. My name is Flynn Zager. I run an agency called Online Optimism. I started it 13 years ago, which seems like a pretty long time at this point in the SEO world, it's just myself with a laptop. I figured I would try it out for a bit doing digital marketing until I got a real job. And 13 years later, thankfully it hasn't happened yet. So we have 20 employees. We're still headquartered in New Orleans where I started it, but I'm based in New York City. We've just been able to grow through doing good work, having consistent SEO marketing campaigns, and really a lot of word of mouth and referrals from people who know and trust our work and want to see us succeed. [00:00:51] Speaker A: Fantastic. So in that time, has there been a particular dominant niche that you've focused in on? For example, I worked at one agency where he was a big outdoors guy, so everything was optimizing dead deer pictures and hunting and bows and arrows. And then another agency, the guy was a big surfer, so everything was beach related, travel related. So what niches Is there a main niche that you have fallen into in terms of type of business, or has it just been scattershot? [00:01:26] Speaker B: Yeah, nothing as exciting as Dead Deal. We did once do a remediation service, which is crime scene cleanup, and we'd always bring our staff to networking events and I like pop in to see how they're doing and they're like, do you know how to get blood out of carpets? Because we do it. I was like, this is terrible networking. So we don't have. We are two niches that we kind of fell into. We do a lot of healthcare clients and then we also have some higher ed clients. Those are both pretty competitive and so we've been able to build those again through word of mouth. People just kind of sharing our work with their colleagues. But I try not to do a niche. I feel like a lot of people go into a niche because it makes your agency easier to sell, honestly. But I think there's a lot to learn from when you have a variety of clients. I think we see this in business and entrepreneurship is that you can somewhat learn from other SEO agencies, but I learned the most from talking to borrowers and manufacturers and people really outside your world. And I feel that SEO and content's kind of the same thing in that if you stay in a niche and you only know health care, there's probably fascinating things happening in B2B and you're too far removed from that. So we have some small niches, some collections of clients that are similar, but we purposefully try not to do that and try to get a variety so that we stay really on the leading edge of everything possible. [00:02:48] Speaker A: I definitely get that. I mean I've been in weird niches too. I mean vanilla stuff like commercial real estate, but also, you know, a stair handrail site or a poop scooper in the tri state area. [00:03:02] Speaker B: I actually gotta get that regional poop scooper market you don't want to get domestic. [00:03:08] Speaker A: I did their, their conference pause which was a collect like I was speaking to a whole host of owners of poop scoopers actually leading the charge and introducing SEO to dozens of poop scooper businesses. So I think there is something to that cross channel because each niche does come with its own particular unique challenges. And you know, I have gone broad myself obviously breaking into different niches again and again. Basically almost every other client seems to be something new and I haven't done before. Which brings me to my question. What are the through lines that you've seen over the years that the core pillars that you always set up. Let's talk about those core pillars and then the follow up question obviously is going to be let's go into some rabbit holes of some weird stuff. Stuff that you've seen. [00:04:12] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I think and I will say to the point of like you being in varieties and doing new clients, I think that's pretty essential anyway to be a successful agency because it is rare that your niche that you pick will have a up into the right like career. And I know that just from watching agencies that like work in hospitality get crushed in 2020 and like there's no way to predict what the next industry is going to break. So I do feel that the variety of clients also lends to a more stable agency kind of consistency and just distributing, diversifying your revenues. I will say what's mostly worked for us over the years is I think a lot of things that many SEOs forget is that at the end of the day you need a human to make a decision. And I'm aware, I'm sure you've had agents and a lot of AI that wants to take, take the humans out. But it's 2025, there's still humans clicking by for the most part at the moment. So I think one of the things that we start off with in SEO is even if we're going to eventually deal with algorithms and all that is look at our client's website, look at the conversion and make sure that that is a good process. That's a key step that I feel like a lot of SEOs forget is end of the day your client is rarely going to measure you just on organic search traffic. They are going to measure you on are you helping to grow the business. And so that's important. Whether or not the client wants us to look at that, we do need to look at that. Beyond that, good engaging content was kind of the through line, I would say probably from 2012 to, through 2023, 2024, it's not that good engaging content isn't useful anymore. It is that every AI tool has pilfered all of your good engaging content and it is much harder to see quantifiable benefits from it. I think that number one ranking that you used to fight so heavily for has become more of a vanity metric than ever if it's not directly tied to search traffic or more importantly, whatever the conversion is for the client. So user experience is still our main. Is this going to look good in the end? Then you do some on site technical elements and engaging content and of course there's link building and other ways to move yourself up. But we've always really focused on creating engaging content. We do all of our content marketing, like in house. We've been adding on more multimedia over the years, so like video. But I think it comes back to getting more people onto the site and then making sure that they actually are well positioned to do what you want them to do once they get there. [00:06:48] Speaker A: Yeah, I've had that conversation with Matt Brooks of seoteric, another agency owner of the value behind really conversion optimization being first and foremost of looking at the ROI of what you're doing. And you know, I think we often like look at that funnel picture and we get so mad that AI is eating our lunch up here while we still haven't looked at the bottom. Like, have you actually done blind shopping? Calls yourself to see what the experience is? Because I, I was shocked. There's a stat that something like 50% of forms on sites for local services are never replied to. And it's like, and I think it was 4 or 5% that got an answer the same day. And so like, it's insane. The amount of meat left on the bone, the amount of process there of looking at the workflow as an agency of the Deliverable, really, at the end of the day, is either a lead as qualified as possible, because then it's not in your hands anymore. That's as far as most SEO or digital marketing agencies will go. They usually don't offer, you know, a salesman structure to go along with that, to, like, finish the process off. We're usually tapping into an existing business process, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be ignorant of what comes after. Because, like, for, you know, I worked with an asphalt guy, and, you know, I was, like, super excited to send him over a lead to see a lead come in. And it's like, how'd that go? You're like, oh, well, you know, they're. They're in the wrong city. I'm like, what do you mean, the wrong city? I'm like, oh, they're in. They're in Sparta, and I'm only doing Cookeville. What? No, you. You. Why do we have a Sparta page on your site? Like, these are some of the fundamental things of, like, you know, because he said, I do everywhere. [00:09:06] Speaker B: My audience is everyone. [00:09:08] Speaker A: My audience is everyone. Anyone that will hand me money. No. At the end of the day, no. If somebody is in Alaska, you cannot be a plumber in Tacoma and fix their plumbing. Right? [00:09:23] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that's, like, when we do the onboarding process now, we have a lot more questions about the sales process. And a lot of times when people come from other SEO vendors, they're like, honestly annoyed because they're like, my last guy just asked for the logins. Like, why are you asking me about my CRM and asking for demos of sales calls? I'm like, well, this is part of SEO is they're going to end up in there, and we need to have that sort of understanding of the business. It's definitely a much slower process. And for a lot of clients, it's like, a fundamental difference in how they see their SEO agency. But I think it's really essential to growth and to a good partnership between you and your SEO team. [00:10:03] Speaker A: I agree. And I think it's also like, a better alignment of keyword research if it comes after a client conversation where you're kind of connecting the dots of who. Like, because you can do it on the outside, you can, like, you can guesstimate, like, what type of frictions or challenge challenges might be Googled to be solved, but you might not have as clear a picture as to what the frictions are that are keeping people from buying that product or service. What the frictions are from People, you know, scheduling for them to show up. Maybe they need to be assured that the product is going to be shipped within particular time or the type of packaging that it's shipped in or you know, if it's an E commerce and you're sending, you know, CBD through the mail, do they know if that's, are they going to be afraid that that's illegal? Are they going to be comfortable with tinctures? You know, is this going to break? Is that some, you know, there are all these little minutiae that you know, there's no keyword volume for. Will my CBD tincture break in the mail? You know, there's no volume to that. That is a concern and that is a friction that would prevent somebody from making that purchase. But it's not something that's going to be, that's going to be like have a search volume behind it that you would traditionally associate with that keyword research process. [00:11:43] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think the, like that zero search volume is really important particularly since Google seems to not want to give us any data like the AI overviews is putting more of the sales information, these FAQs on your website. Like it is absolutely like a leap of faith that that is getting picked up by these LLMs. But I would imagine it is and if not they're going to hallucinate an answer to that question. So like you might as well give it some, something I try to think. [00:12:11] Speaker A: About give it some meat so that when it gets it wrong, at least you tried. You know, it's kind of like if it's going to get. I just saw something on, on Lily Ray. Like it said the question was is it 2025? And said no it's not 2025. The year is 2025. In the same answer. It's like. But you're right. I was talking to Michael Buckbee on his interview and he does kind of his tools, Noa Toa and they do like brand sentiment analysis on AI tools. And he said this thing which stood out which was that AI overviews and LLMs, they're your least trained customer support representative. [00:13:03] Speaker B: I like saying that they're drunk personally but that's, I feel like even a least trained person would like remember what they said for awards and I, I just, I feel like you need like the shepherding, you need to be guiding them by the shoulder and like when they, they turn around to go back to the bar, you gotta like pull them back. But that's again we're a New Orleans company so that Might be the source of the metaphor. [00:13:28] Speaker A: I love it. No, it's, it's definitely true. There's very much a need for a guiding hand. Which I guess is the answer to that, that question that's on different agencies minds, that's on SEO's minds of like, well what now? You know, like I can't you know, sell you know, a content marketing campaign at any, anything like the price that would sustain itself. I mean if you paid for humans to create the same volume of content for everything, it's prohibitively expensive now compared to how much volume output goes out. But I think the answer is that we need to come down the funnel and we need to connect ourselves more strongly to the business and understand the revenue model better, understand the frictions that are preventing purchasing. As much as we were concerned before about that, about creating the same top of funnel content that now LLMs can create or steal and combine and drunkenly regurgitate. [00:14:50] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a challenge for sure. Like for agency owners. It's just you are pushed price downwards so heavily recently and for good reason. Like I understand. And that's why we're like trying to diversify for more high end SEO for like on video, which might honestly only give us a year or two Runway until the video generators are able to do that at a production quality that's acceptable and able to create clips that are longer than six seconds. But I do think that it's very much a challenge and that's, I mean going back to that niche thing, you need to be diversifying your knowledge and you need to be talking to as many people as possible. Because I think if you told me in 2022 that most agencies would still be kind of fluttering around and trying to throw things at the wall, I would think you would be like, we figured out Google, you figured out search engines in 95, 96 so quickly. And it does feel like a lot of, I think a lot of people are getting better at programmatic, they're trying new things. But it definitely is way less of a roadmap that people are following for AI, which is exciting, it makes the game more exciting. But it's definitely a challenge for challenge. [00:16:10] Speaker A: But I think it's also nice, it's a good challenge for us to have as an industry because for a minute we weren't SEOs, we were just Google optimizers. Yeah, let's be honest, there was a day when like SEOs never thought of any other search tool because Bing, what a joke. Yahoo. That's a joke. Like any Other like that's where the meat and potatoes was, but it was also part of the devil's bargain. Right. You know, Google was awarding traffic that to sites that created tons of content. And we had, you know, a renaissance of food bloggers and travel bloggers and content creators of all stripes and varieties. Coming down to earth. Icarus flew too high and, but we didn't realize what a hungry God Apollo was. He, he singed Icarus's wings out of jealousy for his flights. Uh, it just feels like every turn, you know, the farther we go from Google's original maxim of don't be evil. [00:17:17] Speaker B: Yeah, well, they don't have that anymore anyway, so. [00:17:20] Speaker A: No, yeah, they, they got rid of it purposefully and now we can see behind the veneer that they don't care and they're going to maximize their profit and they feel, obviously feel confident enough that they've stolen enough content to become the answer engine. [00:17:43] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I, I, their confidence is, is wild to me. I think it's somewhat confidence, but it really feels to me like Sears, which is, I know is like such a weird metaphor but like they are so like when Amazon came around in the 90s, like Sears could have used its dominance. It could have been that company, like it had been that company in America for like 80 years or whatever. And I do like what it's a struggle to me to think of like what innovation in this new like AI or even like with TikTok, right. Like tick, you hear less about TikTok as a search engine now than we do because I think AI has like, is a much sexier thing to talk about and it's, but like Google never really solved that and you have Gen Z and Alpha like, or still using TikTok as search. And Google was just like, okay, so we were at 92%, now we'll be at 90% search share. Like we're just going to keep going. We're not trying Google circles again. And I feel that way about AI. They are just chasing the leaders as opposed to leading. And that's definitely going to work. I mean it's going to take a long time to drop from 90% search share. But if search share doesn't matter anymore, I don't think it will be a problem for them for five years or 10 years. But 15 years down the line, it's interesting to think of if an optimizing for Google thing will even be a part of our strategy. [00:19:13] Speaker A: I think eventually it's getting a little bit less priority and that'll only Ramp up talking to Melissa, pop at rickety roof. You know, she's pointing out, hey, you need to be more cross channel and understand the different ways that people are discovering your client and finding ways to optimize for it. Whether that's AI, whether that's, you know, thinking of. How does your optimization on your site impact email capture? How does your email campaign impact your SEO? How does your video influencer outreach impact your branded quick click query ratio? Because it used to be in, you know, 20, 2010. We don't use clicks. No. We don't use on, on site behavior. No, we don't do that. And then lawsuit reveals the man behind the mask. Yes, we absolutely do. It's one, it's the C, you know, abc, you know, links content and behavior. So they lied again. [00:20:22] Speaker B: So I always feel bad because I had a friend's mom who bragged that every time she would think of me, she would search my company name and click. And I was like, what are you doing? That's an insane waste of your time. And then she was helping us for years. [00:20:35] Speaker A: She was helping you? [00:20:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I yelled at the gift horse, apparently. [00:20:39] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I tell my kids, don't look a gift dragon in the snout because you might get burned. So let's talk about link building in this age, I think, and I was talking this through a lot of permutations with Michael McDougald of Right Thing Agency on how we should be viewing link building. Now, I think that is becoming more important, but I think that we've overcomplicated it as SEOs, I think there's a couple of fundamental things that we should take into account, which is anchor text I think has been way more important. But also embeddings of what's the text before and after the link and are they relevant, as well as the concept of trust and seeds. And I think we haven't had a good discussion in SEO about the concept of distance from authority sites. You know, there, whether it's the White House or whether it's an industry site that's seen or perceived as an authority. I'm sure that you probably came across this in your edu work and the educational field. There are entities that are freaking SEO bulletproof. You know, they literally like, what was it the Vatican had? It had an injection where they had a page selling CBD gummies and it popped to the top like the day that they did it. And I'm sure they sold a ton of very confused Catholics, a lot of really good gummies. But that was a Reflection in my mind of hey, even in 2025, authority is paramount. [00:22:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I think people that talk about like the death of link building and death of SEO are hopeful or they just, they just find it too hard. It does feel like it's still part of the algorithm as like somewhat easily gamified or you know, you could just hack the Vatican, which I'm not recommending. Like, I think that is, I think what still works for the most part, I will say what still works long term I think is the unscalable strategy. So we think of it a lot like more like digital pr. We think of it as trying to work more in your niche now. I mean long. When I first started like we were just, you know, any link anywhere would be great. And now we really. And this is somewhat from SEO, but somewhat just we're thinking about this in terms of how LLMs are likely scraping the web is identifying, you know, making sure that similar sites and topics and pillar content on our site, but also on the sites linking to us is relevant to our brands and our companies. I don't have an exact science for that, but we do think about these things and try to work toward do we want to be a leader in this region, in this industry, in this topic, making significant content from us and on other sites is what we work toward. I will say we're also diversifying our link building efforts to where we used to do it, mostly on more general sites, but now we're working more towards forums, Reddit as well and trying to think about how those links as the pages themselves are getting higher ranking on Google and being more trusted. How do we build our authority links and kind of awareness on those forum sites, which isn't something we used to do and have really started doing it a lot more in the last two years. [00:24:23] Speaker A: No, I think it makes sense because you've got Lily Ray pointing out there are LinkedIn Pulse Pages ranking for high value keyword. You know that like over sites and domains that have and like have worked really hard to be there. Instead there's a LinkedIn pulse or a substack or a medium post or you know that forum pop it pop up for, for Reddit. So I agree that there's definitely like, I think it's those two layers. One is looking at link building as a horizontal effort of creating more places where you can magnify your brand reach. So that's creating and populating content into a substack where you're accumulating readers but also publishing which have links to Your other stuff. So kind of barnacle, I think they, that was the term from the, from 2010 was, you know, you create these entities on smaller other sites, you know, so that you kind of amass that value. But I think there's, there's value in that distribution of brand signal of like, hey, we are here, this exists here. You know, thinking about, you know, in the Ross Simmons kind of way, create once and distribute forever. But distribute not primary channel to your site. Now the primary thought of, oh, we're going to make content for, for your business. We're not making blogs. Yeah, we're making a LinkedIn post. We're posting to, you know, substack. We've got a medium page. We turned it into a slide deck which went on slideshare. You know, we turned that, you know, used AI to make, to take that statement and make a little video. And that went up on these video platform sites. So it's much more distributed. Right? [00:26:21] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think it's hard for anyone who's only an SEO agency. Right. Because now to do this strategy successfully you need, you need access to everything. I do think for in house teams, like I say this as an agency person so jealous of in house teams because you just have that access and ability. And I think a lot of agencies even including, including us, there were so many things we could do, but oopsies, the client doesn't want to pay for it. It's not in their scope or service. And so our scope of service at our agency used to be so much more defined, I feel and now our proposals are forced to be blurrier. That's not so that clients don't know what to expect. But it's like what will work for you is it could be a thousand things as opposed to just we're going to get you some links, we're going to make some content, we're going to make sure the on site SEO foundation is built. There's like three things done. Great. That will be your contract. And now it's like we are just going to give you hours because our time could be used to. We could be doing programmatic SEO. We could be kind of updating some of the on site stuff. We could be building links, we could be posting on forums, we could be making new profiles. So there's just so much more you can do. And I think you have to think if you're an agency person, like how do I write a scope of service? How do I report back on all of this work and make sure that a client Appreciates it and sees the value of it, which is a really tricky thing to do. [00:27:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean like I did this for a brand save fry oil. Like they're in the commercial kitchen space and technically they were writing a lot of content, but it was like how to change your dirty fry oil type articles. It's like, let's make a podcast and we'll find a restaurant host and they'll talk to other restaurant owners about the challenges of keeping a cost effective kitchen. Because they're selling, that's what they're selling. They're selling a device that saves 50% on fry oil. You know that cost saving devices in the kitchen as is their jam. But they were talking about, you know, like top five ways things to do with your dirty fry oil. It's like, like, okay, that could have worked five years ago, but now we need to talk to people, we need to deliver some sort of unique value and we get to tap into other people's audiences. Which I think is the undervalued part of link building is looking at these systems, these places dryly for, oh, Is it a doctor 75? Is it a doctor minus 50? A doctor minus minus 32? No, it's not a doctor. I don't care what the number is on the site. Like, is it useful? Is there an audience there? Like, there's kind of like, is it spam? If it's not spam, okay, great. Even better. Does it have some sort of audience mechanism attached? Like if I get, you know, do outreach and you know, reverse haro style and get somebody to post my article onto their social. Because I included a quote, quote from them. I just tapped into their entire social media audience, which could be follows. It could be likes, it could be. Maybe there's a blogger that knows it and links to my resource because I did that legwork to make that resource happen. [00:29:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I think people feel that like SEO is just a bunch of tricks and if you want to be someone who is like always on the leading edge and you're in discord is talking and chatting and changing strategies every week or two, those tricks could work. But in the end, the thing that has worked for a long, long time and will likely still work is the engaging content and building that with others. Five tips. I mean, we obviously do a ton of those. We've done a ton of those. That was what you did for many years. But also if we just didn't do that, we just made interesting content with restaurant owners or whoever has fry oil. I assume it's only restaurant yeah, it's restaurant oils. We could, I think if we had done that for like the last five years, you would be able to like work much better in this new world where those sorts of listicles are no longer as effective or where all of our short content is just taken by the AI overviews. Like if we had made more engaging pieces that answered questions that couldn't be answered in a two paragraph summary like that would have paid off in the long run. It's really hard to get clients and even yourself to like invest in those like to put so much money and resources into content production. But long term it does seem like a good investment and like something that has proven itself time and time again to pay off if you could just be patient enough for it to do so. [00:31:13] Speaker A: Let's kind of wrap up here. What would be your number one actionable piece of advice and in today's economy. [00:31:26] Speaker B: Today'S economy, Diversify your stocks is what I if not the economy in the SEO world. I actually think you brand should have a presence on Reddit and I say that most brands don't. Ours is one of the few that do. I think a lot of brands are scared of it. I think it makes sense from it is a diversification bet, right? Like the reason that Reddit's talked about so much in 2024, 2025 for SEO is that Google's rewarded it and Google could flip that switch and turn it off and all that investment will be for naught. But like I think we've seen like we just talked about it, the power of SEO comes from like building on other communities. And I think you can build a pretty sizable community on Reddit and at least at the moment it has. They've not taken that audience away like other social channels have. And so I think I was going to say what is the one thing I think most of your listeners haven't done that they could easily do? They just don't see the purpose of it at the moment. Make an account for your brand, make a subreddit for your brand, which seems even sillier, but claim all those profiles and post and engage. It will not be a short term win. The new threads are barely ranking. It usually takes a couple months for threads to rank on Google, but that's my safest long term bet really is is invest in that platform and see how it works for you. That's what we're doing and I think it's a good strategy for 2025 and 2026 at least. [00:32:52] Speaker A: You heard it here folks. Flynn Zeiger says the Narwhal Bacons at midnight. [00:32:58] Speaker B: I would like to go on record and say that I did not say that. If you check the transcript, we are normal people, but I do get the reference. But I would never say that out loud and on the transcript in the minutes that I did not. But I appreciate you taking a bullet for me, Jeremy, and saying it yourself. [00:33:16] Speaker A: Thanks so much for your time. Shout out to the people what social channel aside from Reddit or on Reddit if you're brave enough. Because that was my problem with Reddit. I have a handle there and another handle. There's one that I use where I do everything and the other where I post stuff that I know want to be associated with my entity. [00:33:39] Speaker B: Online. [00:33:40] Speaker A: So if you have a public Reddit handle, if you want to be brave enough to dox yourself there. [00:33:47] Speaker B: Yeah, you can find us at Online Optimism. It is absolutely Reddit's terms of service. You can have multiple Reddit accounts. You're not breaking any rules, so by all means make a few. Make one that you share on podcasts like this and make one that you wouldn't want your best friend to see. [00:34:01] Speaker A: Make a sock puppet. [00:34:04] Speaker B: Not too. [00:34:06] Speaker A: Thanks so much for your time. I'll see you around. [00:34:09] Speaker B: Thank you, Jeremy.