From Demolition to Digital: Kent Sheridan

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted SEO podcast host. I'm here with Kent, who's going to introduce himself, but with a specific angle of why we should trust him on his topics of local SEO and more, more than a chat GPT output. [00:00:22] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks Jeremy, I appreciate it. So yeah, I'm Kentucky and I do SEO, local SEO and I also have a demolition company that I run. So I'm transitioning like, you know, in what do I do? I'm transitioning from my primary thing being running a demolition company between two different states to more and more doing local SEO as my full time gig. So I'm sure we'll get into all of that. But yeah, I kind of have a foot in both worlds and have really fallen in love with learning about SEO, performing it for my businesses and now, you know, some other clients that we've just seen some good success for. But I'm still early in my process and I just love learning and love talking about it. So I look forward to getting into all of that. [00:01:13] Speaker A: That's awesome. I think the real answer there is you have, you know, the hands on experience and, and I'd love to learn a little bit more about that journey starting in demolition. Is it industrial demolition? Is it pulling down industrial work sites or is it demolition of houses? Like what's that niche look like? [00:01:35] Speaker B: Yeah, it's actually really, really small and specific. So it's technically you would call it dismantlement or selective demolition. And and I got into this because for many years I was in the coffee industry. I like coffee stuff behind me here and I had a instant coffee manufacturing company that I started Bootstrapped, did some fundraising for and that was kind of my career path. And that business was really complex and very difficult to run. But we had an amazing product. We ended up making the highest scoring instant coffee ever made. So you know, an instant product that would score better than most regular coffees, but as instant. And so I did that, worked through all the supply chain, working with the fda, working with, you know, white labeling for clients. So I learned a lot about how to run a very complex business. I kind of got my like bootstrap mba, you know, in a way and I had to close down that business. You know, super capital intensive. We had some partners and things didn't work out close that business and I didn't know what I was going to do. And my in laws came to me and they work in construction, have a remodel firm. They said you should really look into demolition, like demo. It's been a long time since I've, you know, helped you guys on some projects. I'm not sure about, you know, coming from this cool coffee career to doing demo. Well, just look into it. And I did. And sure enough is a really clean and simple business. I got to just work with my hands, you know, all of my work in demo or construction. Your work's kind of just like right in front of you. It's not so all over the map and dealing with regulations. I mean, you have some regulations, but you know, not supply chain management and co packing all this crazy stuff. And so I gave it a shot and we ended up building a really fantastic demolition company in Oregon. First it just blew up and is pretty much the number one demo company in that area. We work on both residential and commercial projects, but I really started in residential, started super small kitchens and bathrooms, getting prepped for remodels. And so it's been primarily a B2B business. [00:04:03] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:04:04] Speaker B: So getting into it, I always ignored SEO in the beginning because I was like, oh, I'm just gonna walk in places and knock on doors. But as the company has grown and now I'm launching, you know, a year ago I launched, I relocated back to my home state of Georgia, Atlanta, Georgia. So I still have the operation in Oregon and now I have one in Georgia. So getting into a new market, I was really like, we need to take SEO seriously because there's so many people, people do search. Even in a B2B business, people search for new, you know, new contractors to work with. So it's not. I know SEO is so important for home service businesses. So heavy. It's their main, you know, lead flow. But it's also equally as important for B2B because even though the traffic and the amount of people searching for a B2B contractor might be lower, the ROI on that can be massive because if you get one new client that you work with for the next five years on every single one of their projects, that could be hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars depending on what type of contractor you are. So somewhere along this process I've learned to really love SEO and appreciate it. And at some point came, you know, was learning about it myself and approach my, my brother in law who has worked with me through coffee, through a lot of businesses and is really just a talented smart guy. And he said, look, I have this need, would you be interested in spinning up, you know, a little freelance SEO agency type of thing with me and I can, I can help, help you get along. And so that's what we did and that's how we started localize and now that started to grow and get good results. And so yeah, I'm a year into the Atlanta demolition business and now I would say a year and a half into the SEO as well. [00:06:07] Speaker A: Let's talk a little bit more about that B2B play because you know, like I've, I've got a big subcategory because I subcontract with different agencies and I've consulted over the years with every style of business and I found B2B in SEO is a challenging niche. Like if you're like getting it right because it's a lot like you don't have. It's not a Cabo luxury vacation that's easy to sell. Like, oh yeah, you're going to be on a beach. Like I want to put up pretty pictures and this is your experience. Instead you're, you know, you're manufacturing, you know, vape cart carts to sell to these guys that are going then resell it. You know, if you're, you know, they're super niche things. So what is it about that long term play? What is the, the type of content that you need to be focused on building for B2B because you're not going to see the volume, right? Like we can all put out, can put out of our mind that you're going to have a really clear picture from Google search volume of exactly what's going on because B2B is necessarily niche and so you probably are lucky to have even half or a quarter of your keywords even show up in most tools like a traps Semrush, you know, like it's super esoteric type stuff like so when you're doing that B2B stuff, what's the mentality you have when it comes to creating content? [00:07:40] Speaker B: Yeah, well that's a super good question because like you said, you know, there's almost no data behind some of these terms that you're trying to rank for. And so it's kind of putting yourself in at least for demolition. That's a, that's what I can, you know, use as a. Yeah, use that example. [00:07:57] Speaker A: Let's explore that and then mirror it out to everything else. Extrapolate, but use your experience. [00:08:02] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. So you know, when I first started, you know, creating my website and creating, you know, what is, what am I going to tell the world about Swift Demo? What do we do? It's common to think about like, oh, here's all my advantages, here's my Differentiators, you know, this is what I do. But I've learned more and more through the process is on the B2B side of things. People, like bigger firms want to know the problems you're solving for them. So it's more of like, mitigating, like what you're. What you're mitigate. What problems are you mitigating? So for demolition, that's safety. And so having things that talk about safety, like your content is focused around. Here's what we put in place to where we don't have workplace injuries. It's like a totally different mindset. It's not like, okay, we're the fastest, we're the cleanest, we're the best. It's about like, here's all the common problems that you see for other, you know, other demolition companies. And you can start to like, picture other B2B businesses. Like, here's what you're used to dealing with and what your headaches are used to being. And here's why we're cognizant of that and what we've put in place to solve that for you. So it's like all the headaches about agencies, you know, that you deal with, here's what we do to mitigate those problems and like, why we're different. So it's less. It's more of like a reactive positioning in a sense, you know, And I found that to work really well. And what I see with really big subcontracting firms, whether they're electricians or, you know, they're doing structural engineering, it's like their positioning so much across the board is like, here's how we keep up on regulations on safety. Here's how we're staying ahead of, you know, new developments that are coming into the region. And it's, it's a. Just a slight different angle on what content they're putting out there. Yeah, it seems to work really well, especially in construction, for sure. [00:10:14] Speaker A: No, I think that makes sense because if, like your Meissner commercial real estate, like, you're going to be talking to a type personality business folk who want to make a transaction. So their concerns are going to be, you know, clarity of paperwork. They need to know, like, your workflow and cash flow, you know, situation, like, how are you going to communicate the. That these documents are done, like. And a huge part of it is just being proactive on the front end of having created some of this material. So when you're in that sales position, when you're having that conversation of what you do well, we solve headaches and we know about these headaches. Check out this blog, check out this podcast, check out this episode, check out this video. If you want an extra resource that solves this main concern you have, then you're coming with a gun instead of like trying to scramble. Oh yeah, sure, we, we've heard of a reticulating gluggingator before and we could, sure, we'll look into that. You know, instead you're like, oh yeah, the Glocinator 5000. Oh yeah, I got an article on that versus the Glocinator 2000, you know, and how it might not be appropriate for these scenarios. So it's almost like much more of an establishment of authority play when it comes to SEO, which is great because you also get the double dip of those people who aren't currently in your funnel are likely to be typing in those very niche long term queries to discover that material. Right? [00:11:55] Speaker B: Yeah. And it allows you to demonstrate your industry expertise and your depth of knowledge within that industry. You're not just talking about, you know, regular consumer problems. You're talking about what problems enterprise level businesses are facing at year five or year 10 or when they try to cross into the 10 million mark are going for 100 million mark. So you're talking about nuanced problems. And so, yeah, I think exactly what you said, those probably are the right terms to be positioning yourself for and ranking for as well, because those are real problems and they're worth a lot of money. And if you're demonstrating that you've thought about that as well as a subcontractor, whether it's SEO or demolition, if you've thought about those problems that your clients are experiencing, they're way more likely to trust you. [00:12:53] Speaker A: That makes a lot of sense. Let's shift a little bit into the local SEO. I want to understand some of your game plan there. Your major world. You're a car dealership in Queens. What are you doing differently or is it the same? Is there a differentiate. What's your top three items in your local SEO playbook? How does, how does this car dealership rank better locally in Queens? Where's your head? [00:13:21] Speaker B: Yeah, well, we can talk about like what, you know, what my playbook is or lack thereof really, because we're, we're just so new, so I'll kind of color and give some context because we are green and we're just figuring stuff out. But it's exciting. And where we started in our journey was like really just helping remodel businesses subcontractors kind of looking at the problems that I'm facing, solving those first and really just being open ended in our first year of performing SEO to not having a niche right out of the gate and kind of figuring things out. And so Zane is my business partner and we, we tested a lot of things. We worked with a restaurant and that wasn't really a fit for us. You know, it didn't feel like we could provide enough value for them. Okay. And then we worked for a photographer who was not very invested in their business and you know, didn't enjoy the process of trying to go out and rank higher on Google and change his very creative verbiage that ranked for nothing. Okay, now we're kind of learning about which clients. These are very low level local SEO problems for sure. But we knew, hey, we're green, we're getting into this, we're just going to figure this out and, and will eventually land in a niche. And so at some point I talked to some of my good friends in the coffee industry and they have a podcast that's really fantastic and they, they're very influential in coffee. And I just said hey look, we'd love to sponsor your podcast. I don't really know how, how it's going to fit in to help your clientele but you know, cafes, I don't know, maybe we just do some web work on the fine if on the side if they're a cafe client but they're a big avatar that they serve on their podcast are people with coffee carts that do catering events. Yeah, usually like slightly higher ticket things. People without a brick and mortar and very search based. So we started positioning ourselves for those people, got one or two clients and immediately the results like hit within, within a few weeks. There's just no competition especially in these smaller towns. You know, a few, a few tweaks on the Google business profile, few tweaks to H1s and meta titles and it's like they were number one in their town. And so we were looking at that and going wow, we really like being connected with coffee again. And here's a very interesting niche and avatar that we could over deliver on. Almost like it was so simple. We could follow such a simple playbook and really have a strong ROI for them. And so that's what we've started to pursue the last, I'd say five months. And most of our clients are now like coffee caterers or event caterers. And so we've kind of fallen into that niche, really kind of adjusted our price point for that Avatar to just be super affordable. You know, usually there's like first time business owners haven't done SEO before but it's fun because yeah, there's nobody in their world for. There's a lot of carts out there, but none of them know about SEO. And so when somebody steps in and just makes a few tweaks, you know, send some good links their way, it's like, boom, they're number one in the city, then the state and so on. [00:16:56] Speaker A: That's totally legit. And I see that phenomenon too of, you know, like asphalt contractors are so busy and they're old timey and they're working with their hands in there, out there and they're terrible. Like three, four of them don't even have a website. You know, they might have an outdated Facebook page at most and you're like, this is like taking candy from a really old baby. But you know, so that, so you're looking at, you know, some of the fundamentals. Like I think Google Business Profile optimization is high up there. I've had several really good conversations like with Marilyn Jenkins, she did legal, but she's like, you, you need to think of Google Business Profile as your better communicator than gsc. Like there are, you know, some levers that you can pull on the indexation side of things, but you actually can communicate what it is that you do by adding specific pictures. You can fill out the Q and A section, you can go in and make sure all your categories are actually correct for once and then make live posts that push to different parts of your business. And it's cash on the table left by so many organizations. And so I love the concept in local SEO of being able to find those niches. And I certainly forgot for anybody that's listening that's an SEO professional or wanting to be, or wanting to be a freelancer, there is a learning journey that SEO is SEO, but it ain't the same niche to niche. Like every industry is going to have its weirdness, it's going to have its foibles, it's going to have its challenges, but also often opportunities like it's not the same to do a rehab SEO like that. You know, you want to push certain things on that side and the level of competition is also going to be a huge factor because people are going, they know that the, the return on investment on SEO is well known in rehab because those admits are very expensive and they know that it's very much predicated but it's also a very cutthroat Game not as cutthroat as, you know, locksmiths or steel door manufacturing. That's super cutthroat, surprisingly. But you'll find these niches have different levels and you gotta adjust your gameplay to it. So kudos on finding your, your coffee event niche. I'm curious because I, I have a couple of gameplays where I look at event marketing as a channel to build links. Have you explored like the value of these event syndicators in the event markup on site to get extra SERPs? [00:19:51] Speaker B: I think, I think we're starting to now because so many people in the larger markets are like coordinating with you know, these syndicators or you know, brokers for, for bigger events or even like associations that put together, you know, quarterly things and trying to start to put together a game plan to talk about, you know, getting some links, you know, sent, sent to those, those accounts because man, some of them just get so much traffic. Like you look at the knot, you know, it's like how something as simple as getting a link sent from the not.com to a small catering, you know, page can just have a massive impact. Yeah, that's an interesting, interesting play to start looking at more. I, I'm like, I'm just loving cataloging all of these things that we've started learning and, and I'll admit like I, I'm way more the higher level strategy, the business strategy and Zane is way more technical than I am. So like I'm, I'm secondarily learning the technical components. I'm like oh yeah, what are, what are, what are all these terms again? And so like, you know, it's, it's a great partnership between the two of us because I'm super client facing, super industry facing as well. Coming on podcast or, or, or you know, talking, being on the calendly meetings. But then once it's comes to all of the technical, he's like very in the trenches learning. And what's interesting is Jeremy, I mean you, you reached out on X and like X is just this gold mined for so many things of like, you know, the stream of consciousness of all these SEOs on X is just so great for somebody like myself coming in and being like where's everybody at? Look, looking at different SEO niches even. Yeah, like what's working for this niche versus that niche? You know, how, how technical are people getting versus like how often do people just go back to basics like what's working, what's not, what are these trends? And X has just been such a great platform for me. My, my bookmarks are like going crazy on X. [00:22:05] Speaker A: It's definitely true. There's still a core community. I pine for the days where it was. It was 10x or 10 times as many SEOs on Twitter before it got toxified. I call or musk ified. Yeah, there was 10 times as many people excitingly sharing this or we'd throw that out. There's some salty old bodies like me who've been there since 2007. You'll run Darth Na holding court and Linden, you know, the avatar of Darth Vader talking to you about SEO. He has a surprisingly British voice in person. It's hilarious. But I think it's interesting because there's actually a fraction of fractalization of SEO communities. So there's about five to 10 major Slack communities that have that, that started with big SEO from Reddit and then there are some semi active subreddits where you can kind of get some good information. But really, you know, there are people talking about it on Blue sky that everybody, there's, there's a portion of the X crowd or the, the Twitter crowd that migrated over to Blue sky and there's a new hub of SEOs holding court over over there and discussing things. So it's kind of like it used to all be on Twitter and now it's fractioned out. But there are, there is, you know, if you're learning SEO, certainly, you know, I recommend kind of looking across multiple channels and I guess I'll put into the show notes the, the links to the, the Slack communities that I'm aware of. There's you know, the tech SEO Slack Slack. I'll click on a couple of things here live on the show. There's the, the, of course the, the biggest one is the, the big SEO subreddit Slack channel. There's an off page SEO Slack channel. And then Noah Learners SEO community. That one's really active. He does a lot of work there managing and keeping communication pretty good. It's hit and miss. It isn't as much. People on X tend to like kind of throw big ideas out and some of it can just be like rage bait and yeah, for sure. But there's still those who, you know, genuinely like putting stuff out and having real conversations because I think iron sharpens iron when it comes to SEO and you know, challenging, you know, the status quo of someone saying, oh well, Danny Sullivan said that, you know, eat doesn't isn't used. And half of the people like, well yeah, I mean anybody that Says eat at any point is a huckster now. And then you're like, wait, let's go back to, you know, yes, anytime a Googler says something you want to parse that down like, okay, does he mean that it's not used as a ranking factor or it's not in their ranking system? And then he can say that and it is accurate. But you know, me and Darth Na went back on this like Linda and we talked about how, you know, if it's expertise, authority, trustworthiness and experience. You know, those are all of the things that differentiate you from chatgpt as a human. So no there isn't. Like adding an author profile to your blog isn't going to rocket you to number one. No, but those small things are rec or potential signals of somebody that's paying attention to trying to create authentic, truly trustworthy, good content. And that's really what the Google quality raters guideline was trying to establish as a feedback point. Because that's what it is. Like the engineers are over here pulling widget A and changing this weight and value here, then saying, looking at the results from these QRGC and then making adjustments to the algorithm and those might come back directly as LLM training data sets or it could be scores. So they're using it to fine tune and understand this is garbage and this is good. So if you know that there's a process by determinant that uses those elements to determine garbage or good, of course that's going to impact ultimately the algorithm. Algorithm, algorithmic output. But it's not. You can't just like, oh, I did my eat, you know, I'm done. It's a whole like, you know, it's about what you were talking about in the beginning of looking at the problems that these businesses are having and creating unique authoritative content that addresses those, those, those pain areas, right. Instead of just like oh, what are the problem GPT? What are the five major problems that demolition companies have? And then copying and pasting that, right? There's a total difference from that having versus having worked in the business. You know that you need this size hammer or you need this size truck to carry this stuff out and if it's over this size, then where do you dispose of it? Is there anything about tox like there's all of those little things you've learned in the trenches. So it's a reflection of the real world expertise. [00:27:42] Speaker B: Yeah, that's super interesting. First of all, I love being turned on to these slack groups because I never even thought about that before of like learning from those groups. So I'll have to get those links from you. But second of all, it's interesting to just like hear you walk through that, you know, the thought process of, you know, what you just shared. Because I think it's so funny now looking back, which wasn't that long ago, but when we, when we first started and we were like, okay, we don't know what we're doing. We know basics, we can, there's so much like self educating you can do when you first start SEO. But it's like once you crack into that second level, like, okay, now you're really getting so many different schools of thought, like, which one's right? And funnily enough, we hired, we paid for a few consulting sessions with a few different people just to see where some SEO's head's at a few rungs above us. The first one we talked to looked super credible and probably totally is. But they got on the meeting with us and we're looking, we have just my business and you know, and then a friend's business at this point that we're working for, like really not real clients. And we're like, okay, here's where we're at, what should we do? And the whole meeting was just like, no technical SEO at all. Everything was just like, just use common sense. It was like very just in the air, esoteric, like just common sense. Like if you wouldn't read it, don't put it out there. Like, okay, how does this help us? Because common sense for me might not be common sense for you. My perspective and the way I view it as a consumer could be totally different. And I get where that person was coming from because it has a little bit of truth of what you were saying about the author page. There is something there in having common sense because of the process to which everything comes about in ranking factors and all of that. And then the second person we had an hour with or whatever, they were doing SEO for like an online gambling site. So everything was all just like hacking, sending as many links as possible, just like really gray hat type of stuff. And just like, we'll do this until it stops working and then we'll pivot and find something else. And it was just, you know, blow and go type of strategy. And we're like, okay, there's something in between all of this. [00:30:17] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a to it that's amazing to get a consult with. Like you consulted with the Jedi Order at the end of the Republic and then with a Sith Lord. [00:30:28] Speaker B: Yeah, we really did. And it's so funny now, like, having a little bit more context of, like, so interesting that that was our first two, you know, introductions to, like, this deeper level. And, like, no wonder we were so confused at first. But, yeah, I mean, I think our approach has been simple. It's like we're not trying to. We're not trying to pretend we're at a level we're not. And each step along the way, we're going to deliver the results for the client in kind of, like, the niche that we're at. And then now we're being asked to, you know, take a step up to more, like, E Com SEOs. Like, okay, so who, you know, what do we need to learn before we get into that, before we commit at that level and just, like, work our way up the ladder as it would. And I just find it really fun and really interesting because it helps so many aspects of my business and learning just thought processes of, like, I'm not gonna teach Google anything. You know, like, how do I think through solving and figuring out what is working? And, like, what test do I put in place? Like, that applies to SEO, to demolition, to everything else. It's been a fun exercise to go through to figure out these processes, figure out how I'm looking off to the horizon and what's coming down the line in terms of changes and new updates and things like that. And then, of course, yeah, trying to not listen to the doomsdayers of, like, SEO's dead every two weeks. [00:32:06] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:32:07] Speaker B: How many rounds have you gone through of that? [00:32:10] Speaker A: Oh, my God. It. It's not even rounds. It's kind of just a constant drumbeat from. From when I started. It has been just a joke trope. And I don't understand how this joke trope keeps reiterating and mutating and, like, ever. It's like, oh, you know, now Google's rewriting their meta titles on your site for you. SEO's dead. Like, it's as if the immediate reaction to literally any algorithm changes. Oh, it said HCU is here. SEO is dead. Like, so it's just kind of okay, I guess. I'm a zombie. I will eternally be a zombie and just keep plodding forward because, you know, it's dead. But no, it's really just alive in this different way. So, you know, it's all about adaptation and it's evolution. You know, like, if you look at the survival of species over time, it's not that these creatures from the Jurassic period Live today, they died. It's just the, the newer version of the next iter, the next generation did something slightly different and it happened to work. And you know, that's why we've got pinkies, because pinkies at some point help. You know, the, the folk that survived had pinkies. Maybe that was really useful. Maybe it's coincidental. And that's where we're at in SEO is like we're surviving. And the traits that we have now aren't necessarily all good, like how we approach and understand optimization when it comes to link building, optimization when it comes to content creation, optimization when it comes to technical things like we just happen to have survived. And so I think, you know, we face these extinction level events with kind of a pessimistic view of like, oh well, I guess we're dead again. And then yes, there is going to be a die off of folk who don't adapt to the fact that now Bing is once again a player in this. Because Perplexity and ChatGPT use the index based off of Bing Brave browser. And I didn't even know that Brave browser had its own Internet index, but it does and it feeds Claude, not Google. I didn't know that about Brave little tidbit there. But it means that there's a change in the market and understanding that and the opportunity and cost of every new thing that comes in. Like, okay, well suddenly LLM based search. Oh, all SEO is dead. Well, no, but there is a definite shift in behavior and we can argue whether it's additive to the search thing or we can take the anecdotes of, you know, the past. You know, four out of four out of seven people I talked to and on interviews have said specifically, I don't use Google directly anymore. I actually use, you know, if I have a search question, I'm typing it into Claude, I'm typing it into Perplexity, I'm typing it into GPT or whatever the flavor du jour of LLM. So there's definitely a, you know, definitely some sandwich eating going on. Like for people that were whose content strategy was like, I'm going to create all of the stupid little pieces of content. And like, well, the question is how much of that upper funnel content stuff is going to get regurgitated into this new user output versus like there are they competitors to each other or do you need a Lexus and core corpus of content out there in order to feed and train the LLMs? Do you want to do that selectively and you know, kind of niche down or is your better play to create more bottom of the funnel, bofu type stuff of differentiators between brands, differentiator between you and your competitors, your specific value offering. And it's kind of nice because there's a layer of content that I think just got ignored in the days of oh, you do SEO. How many blogs can you produce for me a month? And that was SEO. It's like we're going to create a bunch of blogs. Well now it is way easier to create blogs at scale, but if you're not creating something with a unique voice, angle, aspect or value and perhaps even attaching it to some sort of branding entity or play, then you're more likely, even more likely than ever to get ignored or have a hard time proving that out. You're not going to make your retainer with your client by telling them you're going to blog four times a month anymore. Not going to. That model is dying. So you need to adjust your agency model to roll with that punch and you know, do things more at scale, at speed, but also like reinvest that same level of energy into, you know, getting a true subject matter expert, you know, or having a real conversation in a podcast interview as the hub of that value that you're creating. [00:38:02] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So on like where things are headed, what, how tapped into, kind of where the local and specifically like, you know, I'm personally interested in where someone like myself as a contractor, maybe B2B, maybe direct to consumer home service type of businesses. Where do you see the future of like the local SEO serving that type of client, going with in terms of like what, what people are changing that agency model to? [00:38:41] Speaker A: I think it, it needs to be actually more hands on and more in the community. Like you can do, you know, man on the street type stuff and like think about, you know, zipsprout's got a great tool where you can find local sponsorships of, you know, entities and businesses here in the community that need help. So tapping into, you know, your local entrepreneur center and seeing if there's, you know, local meetups, you can collaborate with other potential allies and businesses who want to serve the same audience but are not direct competitors. So a realtor would look to, a home inspector would look to a painter, a landscaper, an interior designer and look for co marketing opportunities as much as they're looking for, okay, can I hold like a trash cleanup event and build a bunch of links that way or can I, you know, like with your coffee carts, like if they're going to do an event that's publicly listed, then taking part of the extra business model to go and submit those events themselves to say, oh hey, like this event's happening, go grab it, you know, go check it out. You know, I'm going to be there and you get a link to your coffee cart and you kind of do co marketing and push the value of the event. That's something that, that they might, the event managers probably aren't going to take the time to invest and list it in every single event site. You know, Cookeville here in Tennessee, we have HIP Cookeville is a specific city, specific niche directory that lists events happening here. But you got to submit manually and it's not connected to any other aggregator, but you do it here. And there's actually also a Facebook group group that's connected to it. And so taking the time to look at where are the people actually, you know, aggregating what are, where is your audience where you can build that demand where it might not exist. You know, like there are other ways to generate demand for SEO where it doesn't exist currently. Because that's the lazy laurel problem, right, of like passively looking for, oh, I'm only going to, you know, target keywords that have high search volume. You know, this coming from the B2B world is suicidal because the visibility is not there. But there's ways that you can, you know, get ahead of that volume generation and do things that are generative of search volume and don't ignore those possibilities because those things that are generative of search volume are also the things that LLM based tools seem to love. You know, articles about upcoming events, reviews of restaurants, you know, like articles listing things to do. Like those are all traditionally PR type things. Well, we need to reconnect with our, our other marketing channels. We need to look at, you know, oh, hey, how, how can I maybe tap into the influencer side of things and look at, you know, they have audience and if they make a mention of art of pink pants in general, then the whole bunch more people are going to search for pink pants. If I rank for pink pants and then push the influencers to create more demand in that, then that's a great use of budget so far. On a local level, you know, looking for where are the local people interacting? You know, is it Reddit, is it Facebook groups or you know, are there church communities? You know, there's all sorts of groupings of people where that you can reach them and do things that have import and you know, make a difference and show up and on that, you know, through the looking glass version of your business, how is it reflected online? [00:42:44] Speaker B: Wow, that's super interesting. So you're saying like what I'm taking away from that is like, it's way more real world, way more connected between all of these channels, like more of a holistic view of approaching this and even on the business side of it, like myself at Swift, looking at what, almost, almost taking my SEO glasses off for a second and be like, what would I do just as a local business owner and then, then reassess that through the lens of SEO and like, how could, how can those two incorporate and merging those two together a lot more like in the dirt. Like hard, hard to, hard to just check off, you know, through, you know, online and more tangible, local, in the dirt, grassroots type of, type of campaigns and then just feeding that through a greater strategy on SEO. That, that's all really interesting and super, super exciting. I think for me as like a local, truly a local business owner, you know, in Atlanta, much bigger market, but in Oregon, we're in more of a resort town. Like everybody knows everybody. We're, we are the, the local demo company. Right. So I think that's encouraging for somebody like me to be like, these are working more and more and these can be assets to, you know, to grow in that community and to even, even I'm seeing, you know, just tenfold of like, okay, I'm gonna put the same amount, I could be putting the same amount of effort into, you know, truly strictly SEO campaign. And like, okay, here's my topical Mac. Here's what I'm gonna write about. Or I can be putting that same amount of effort into a local community based campaign that not only helps SEO and helps my rankings and helps, you know, the strategy of my business, but also connects me to the other business owners in real life and could have that tenfold effect on what I'm doing. I think that's, that's really interesting. Jeremy. [00:44:58] Speaker A: I think we flipped around the interview here. At some point you started asking questions of me. [00:45:02] Speaker B: Well, I'm just so curious, you know, I mean, you know, no, I just have so much to learn and so much to glean. And so I just, I like that I have a foot in both worlds, but you know, I'm far, far from an expert. So I just, I'm just so curious. I just get really excited about hearing where people's heads are at around all of this stuff. [00:45:25] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's maintaining the curiosity and SEOs like me, we can get styfined we can get stuck in our ivory towers, we can get stuck in our ahrefs and our workflow and our asana. And we have this, you know, our set, our set workflow that we created 10 years ago and we hand that off to, you know, a subcontractor who gives it a subcontractor and then puts together these little bits. And then, you know, you spend a quarter of your time building the monthly report instead of, you know what, here's gia, here's SEO gets. And look at that. If you want to know what we're doing organically. And here's a, here's the, you know, the asana, the Trello board. We're going to be moving cards into there as we, you know, reach out to people and connect and we're going try to hold this, you know, real world event. We're going to submit to these directories as a course, but we also want to, you know, promote this in Google business profile. We want to interview, you know, other local businesses like be. Yeah, like the, the, the play is much more irl. Like I just did a SEO charity live stream talking about all the way of like, you know, go touch grass folks. Like as an SEO, let's get real, we got to bring it back and because otherwise these machines are going to steal our jobs and we don't have enough hammers, hard drives. So we gotta do something in the real world to match this highly scaled output of dross, you know, and we can direct the fire hose of that value by multiplying it. You know, like this conversation we're going to have, I'm going to turn it into a blog post. I'm going to give it to you and that's going to be mostly through Claude. And so that would have taken me an hour and it's going to take me 10, 15 minutes to, to bang it out. But it's going to provide long term value for this conversation that otherwise might go into the either and that's also for like social media channels of like hey, if you're writing about SEO and you want to put blog posts out like check, check some of the conversations you had and copy and paste and move that conversation into a different, more stable long term medium. Because the conversations on Twitter, they're gone and they have no search value long term, they might have some long term business input. That's like something I posted two weeks ago. I just got DM'd about today of somebody following up on something that I talked about and they might become a client. So it's definitely an interesting, you know, channel to put your thoughts out there and kind of, it, it does sometimes pay off. But you can also be shouting into the void, you know, like, so you gotta like be aware of, you know, digital marketing voids where you're just, you know, standing on your. Shout your, your soapbox and shouting when you should be slipping into everybody's DMs. Like, you know, slip into a DM and say, hey, I'm writing an article on this. What's your take on it? You give them value by giving them the link and you establish a relationship with a vendor in a different channel. Like there's, there's all kinds of plays like that that you can, you know, not just in the SEO space, but like if you're running a service area business, like that's how you should be, you know, you know, using social to find other people threads. I'm going to give away my, my secret weapon here. Threads on Instagram. There's people literally putting out there, hey, I want to be interviewed or hey, I want to interview people for my podcast. Okay, do that all day, like in its real connection. But there's also like, hey, I'm, I, I want to connect with other business owners in Nashville. Like what is this social media channel? Go to threads. Like I'm on there checking things out. Like there's so many like one to one options to connect with people and find co marketing opportunities. So that's my, my, I will wrap up this episode by saying, look for the co marketing opportunities in channels as opposed to buying into the need to pay for more advertising. [00:49:51] Speaker B: Yeah. Wow, that's all super interesting. It's like a way more creative approach to SEO. It's like having this new tool in your tool belt which is like, what are these creative and innovative ways to reach out to people and to connect and then have that hopefully create a flywheel of real content that can be out there and work for your business. End result. That's great. I mean, so many things went through my head when you're talking about that. I mean, I know I'm kind of at this office space and I see people having really fantastic brainstorming meetings all the time and they record it and then send it to, you know, GPT to transcribe it. It's like, what if that, that became something on your site that was more exclusive, you know, to your B2B customers? It's like, here's, here's our latest thoughts on this topic that everyone's dealing with, you know, join in that conversation. So not only are you, you know, creating content from something you had to do anyway, but then you're repurposing that and then you're inviting more people in to comment, weigh in, you know, and you're just creating that flywheel for it. So, Jeremy, I feel like you're just really blowing my mind with all new ways to look at it and to really kind of step back from just process processing everything. Like, these are my processes. Send that. You train a new VA on this and just. Yeah, really? I don't know. I think that's super healthy for somebody who's kind of early in their SEO journey, like myself, to not lose myself in, you know, in the dark matter of just over processing everything and then losing touch with reality, you know. [00:51:52] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, thanks for all the excellent questions. As the new host of the unscripted SEO podcast, watch out for canon on localized growth. And if you need demolition needs in Oregon or Atlanta, connect them up. I'm going to put you all, put all of your stuff into the show notes. If anyone's curious about anything we talked about, drop me a dm. Happy to talk through any of the crazy stuff we've talked about. Thanks so much for your time, Ken. [00:52:25] Speaker B: Thanks, Jeremy.