The SEO Agency Rollercoaster with Olivia Tapper and Thomas Phillips of DTC SEO Agency

Andrew:

Welcome to the SEO Agency Rollercoaster Podcast. Here we sit down with agency leaders to fuel the ambitions of up-and-coming SEO entrepreneurs, equipping them with the insights they need to start, grow, and scale up an SEO agency. Think of it as a roadmap to success packed with lessons from industry leaders who have been there and done that. 

My name is Andrew Zeruny from Mr. Ranking, and as always, I am joined by my co-host, agency coach Chris Simmance of the OMG Center and of the Worshipful Company of Entrepreneurs. Today, we’re thrilled to have Olivia Tapper and Thomas Phillips of the DTC SEO Agency and PetPortraits.com on the show. 

We’re excited to uncover the highs, lows, and game-changing moments of running a digital agency. So if you’re ready to take control of your future in SEO, buckle up for a thrilling and insightful ride. Welcome, everybody!

Chris:

Nice to meet you both. Before we started, for the audience’s benefit, if you’re not watching this, you should try and watch it and have a look at Thomas’s Formula One merch in the background there. I’m sure he bought them from a reputable DTC company. 

Both of you, because there’s two of you, we don’t often have two founders on a recording. So I’m going to put the first part of this question over to you, Thomas. So if you could just tell us a little bit about, you know, your journeys in digital marketing and how you got into this and then kind of where you combine forces or how that works, that’d be great.

Thomas:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I started my first online, well, proper online company when I was 13. Um, I was building little miniature finger skateboards, like little tech decks, uh, in my dad’s garage, sold to 39 different countries in the first year. And yeah, it just kind of took off from there. I just quickly realized like, oh, wow, okay, you know, I could build a website, I can market it through SEO at the time and forums. And then I just quickly realized like, okay, sky’s the limit, like we could build anything around this. And then, I had like one job for nine months and I was like, this is not for me. Um, full-time job. 

And then, yeah, we just went through and had a bunch of different joint ventures. We’ve built massive content, affiliate websites, scaled, and exited 16 different brands at this point. Yeah. And then we’re at the point with the agency now where basically just so many people in my network were asking us to do SEO for them. And I never wanted to do it. And I never wanted to feel like we had a, or I had a boss, you know, like so to speak, but it’s been extremely rewarding, which has been a total 180 compared to what I thought it would be, which is fantastic. So yeah, we’re now at this point and scaling other DDC brands, which is super fun.

Chris:

And Olivia, tell us the story of how you two joined forces. Where did that come in?

Olivia:

Yeah. So I think Thomas has the entrepreneurial background, obviously, starting out when he was 13. I have more of the business and corporate background. So I have an engineer degree, I worked in tech companies for the management and worked with leadership teams. I think he saw that he needed me in order to scale a business and set up the structure around it. So he has fantastic ideas. He has so much knowledge in his head, but I am the one that extracts that and put that into the operational processes. So yeah. We make a great team.

Chris:

The perfect yin and yang of visionary and implementer, the ideal combination for two leaders in an agency. That’s perfect. 

What was it that kind of inspired you to start DTC SEO Agency then? What was the, was it literally Thomas, just people saying, I want to buy stuff from you, or, you know, was there, was there something else there that kind of was that, you know, sign up on the government website to start up a business. What was the real kind of push?

Thomas:

It was literally just the number of people just saying, hey, can you do SEO for us? Over the last 18 years, I’ve just been like, no, I’m not interested. We only do, we only work on our own brands. And then, yeah, it just got to the point where we’re like, this actually makes total sense. Yeah. We relocated over to Austin. So everything’s now based in Austin, Texas. Yeah. And it just made total sense to do. So we use our existing team that we also use to rank our own websites. And we’re now just scaling up on that front. So it’s been great.

Olivia:

And to add to that, I think it’s also the mindset shift from Thomas thinking that he has like a boss, which would be a client instead of moving from that to like, he can help other agencies or other teams to grow. So helping out websites to grow online I think that’s really the core of it.

Chris:

It’s telling with good agency leaders their level of employability elsewhere. The chances of you being employed somewhere else is quite low, not just because you don’t want to, but you know, the chances of you being able to say ‘yes’ to a boss all the time, and like Olivia just said, you kind of have to change that mindset to they’re not a, well, they are a client, but they’re not your boss, you’re working with them, not for them. And that’s a mindset shift in there as well. But yeah, all credit to you both.

Andrew:

Besides your partnership that resulted in the DTC SEO Agency, you have another business as well. I just wanted to find out how did this idea for PetPortraits.com come about and what was the motivation to venture into a whole different market with the custom pet art.

Thomas:

Yeah, great question. So it was really around, we had another website that was in a similar space doing just custom print products, essentially. And we were testing out a bunch of different products and custom pet portraits just kind of took off and we were like, huh, this is interesting. 

So we very quickly built a website in 24 hours, PrintedPetMemories.com at the time that started to take off. And then we were like, right, we need to solidify this brand. Yeah. Like we need to make it official. You know, make it proper. 

And we were having a discussion quite yesterday on this and Olivia brought up that we actually did a quite a big poll around the name of it and what the general public thought of the name. And it was actually that it came up that they thought it was a memorial, like all it was memorial because of the memories name, presumably. So we basically went through, ended up acquiring PetPortraits.com. Yeah. And then built and scaled that out. So it was kind of an accidental thing falling onto it. And then, yeah, just snowballed into a much bigger brand.

Chris:

It’s a great website now, it’s pretty cool. I might have to get one.

Andrew:

When you started off both ventures, both companies, what were the initial setbacks or maybe challenges that you experienced and how did you overcome them? The initial ones. Olivia if you could. 

Olivia:
Yeah. So I’d say the first thing was just extracting everything that Thomas had in his head. So he has done SEO for so many years. It’s like, and we still work on it, right? It’s a continuous work in progress, things pop up. He’s the one that kind of goes out there, identifying new trends, all that thing. And then I am the one that has to operationalize it, ensure that we roll it out to our clients and always continue to work with excellence. So that was one of the initial challenges. Thomas, do you have any more?

Thomas:

I think from a PetPortraits.com side of things was venturing into paid ads. And it’s a little bit outside of the agency side of things, but like we’d have basically zero experience with paid traffic. It has just always been SEO. So that was an interesting rollercoaster of things. 

I feel the pain of a lot of DTC brands who are heavily reliant on the paid side of things is real ups and downs. You know, you make a bunch of profit one day and then everything gets sucked up the next day. So, you’re back to square one. Yeah, I’m happy to be back in SEO.

Andrew:

You mentioned that it was called PrintedPetMemories and the reason was people associated with a different thing and that’s why the rebranding came about. Do you have any similar issues with the agency, with the DTC SEO Agency? Are there any thoughts about rebranding? Because I’m not suggesting anything. I’m just thinking this because SE Ranking had a rebranding and we had our reasons for it and we just thought I would just sort of revitalize our efforts. And I’m just asking if you are considering anything to sort of change the way people perceive your brand?

Thomas:

Yeah, I think, I think it’s a great question because we get people come into us who are B2B and we’re like, we also do B2B by the way. It’s just the name. But we also get a lot of people coming to us who are, you know, DTC brands, which is fantastic. 

So we’ve kind of thought about it, but at the same time, it hasn’t, I feel like it hasn’t held us back yet. So we’ll probably just leave it as it is for now. We also rank very well for a DTC SEO. 

Chris:

Yeah, there you go. There it is! And just on part of Andrew’s question there about running PetPortraits and DTC Agency is notoriously stressful. Lots of things go on all the time. How are you handling the two running concurrently? Naturally, a client of DTC is probably PetPortraits from that perspective. But how are you managing the balance? I’m guessing Olivia, there’s quite a lot of operational things under the hood there to keep Thomas out of the way.

Olivia:

So we started with PetPortraits.com a little bit before we started with the agency. So we had time to set up all the processes. We built our spoke systems so that all the artists and the interaction between them and the customers are happening seamlessly. So there’s not a lot of things that we need to step in on and manage within PetPortraits, which has given us the opportunity to really focus and prioritize DTC SEO Agency. And that’s really where the effort lies right now.

Chris:

Hands up, I rarely practice SEO these days. But I can smell a bad one a mile off, should we say. So I don’t know the answer to this anymore, but how are you tailoring some of your strategies to sort of focus more on D2C versus B2B? Because quite a lot of B2B is lead gen focused and things like that, whereas D2C is I want it and I want it now. So the types of queries are always different. Is it strategically different these days? What’s the approach?

Thomas:

Yeah, I think it’s a great question. Yeah. I mean, a lot of it comes back around to the attribution side of things. So like for B2B and lead gen, you know, it’s more like, okay, how do we link into their GoHighLevel account, as an example, which is obviously a totally different ball game to how do we link into their Triplewell, you know, which is obviously a lot easier. So the kind of queries are, I guess, similar in that sense. 

SEO is similar across the board. But the way that we do things is we build out a 365 day plan before we onboard a client to basically show them like, this is exactly what we’re going to do. These are the exact keywords we’re going to go after the collection pages, products, here’s our reasoning, here’s how many links we’re going to build, here’s the kind of level of digital PR, everything around that. So, we build everything out, present that to them and everything is based off of what is actually required. That makes sense? So, it’s not just pulling numbers out of nowhere. What is it going to take for that exact client with their particular website in their exact position right now to, you know, rank top three for all the different keywords they want to go after.

Olivia:

Yeah, and I think as well to tap into that SEO is so much about user experience and understanding the customer and the client. So regardless if it’s B2B or B2C, it all starts with really understanding the client and their customers. That’s what it all comes back around to.

Chris:

And in the last couple of years, there’s been a big old shakeup with the elephant in the room, AI, that lots of people are using it for everything. Some people are using still for nothing. In some cases, people are developing it into automation in the business rather than from an ops point of view and things like that. How are you making use of AI and growing the agency? And also sort of as an aside to that, how are you making sure that the outcomes that you’re using this for are consistent?

Olivia:

I have a little bit more conservative view when it comes to AI. I think it’s fantastic and you can apply it in a lot of different processes and speed up things. But when it comes to SEO and when it comes to building out the client strategy, really mapping out the keywords, building out the whole structure of it, you need to apply the human skills. You need to really analyze the data, go into it.

And there are SEO tools that you can just plug into your Shopify store and it will automatically update everything for you. That is too good to be true. It doesn’t work that way. So we are very conservative when it comes to AI and we rely on skilled editors. We rely on like really, really in-depth knowledge about things because it’s usually not accurate or reliable.

Chris:

Where are you using it on the ground, Thomas?

Thomas:

Improve my emails. Research has been a big thing. We really don’t use it in the agency, like almost at all. I feel like the output that I’m getting out of things after using ChatGPT for a good year or so still is just like, it’s not quite where I want to go with things. And I don’t know, maybe that’s not a prompt engineer at this point, you know, to get the best output for, I still just cannot rely on it. You know, like even if nine times out of 10, it’s accurate. We can’t rely on nine times out of 10. Like it has to be 10 out of 10. 

Yeah, we’re still old school with it. I also don’t trust any AI content on the website. Like big red flag. We have a stern talk with clients if they admit to us that they’ve just output ChatGPT content straight onto the website. We just can’t take the risk. Like it’s just not worth it at all.

Olivia:

We even have that in our contracts as well, that if they do like roll the blog articles with AI, et cetera, we cannot be accountable for how their website will react. So we really avoid AI in our contents and in our processes as much as possible to show quality. Cause that’s at the end of the day, it’s about user experience and quality. And a skilled editor is way better at writing and connecting with a user than AI and strategy would be.

Andrew:

Wanted to make a short transition to talk about the team, the composition of your team. How it was when you started, what it is now. Do you have like a team of freelancers who you trust? Do you have a lot of in-house people? Just, it’ll be really helpful for our listeners just to find out how exactly your agency functions because a lot of them, it’s like a balance, like a hybrid where you have in-house freelancers. So, I’m just really curious to hear about the DTC SEO Agency.

Olivia:

Of course, we started off with freelancers and were heavily reliant on that. And now we’re transitioning a bit more to hiring here in the US, especially building out the team in Austin. It depends on the role and the functionality of the role. Our link build team are still remote, but when it comes to client-facing team, so we have a roll call client strategy owner, who is in direct communication with the client, building out the strategy, understanding full SEO. So it’s a very tight operation to the client.

So we want to try to avoid as many layers as possible and rather have experts in every single position. So moving from freelancer to more regular employees.

Andrew:

Is there anything that you do to keep your team updated on the latest trends, maybe personal growth, maybe you send them on different courses just to make sure that they are up to date? Because once you just start working, you sometimes forget about just looking outside and keeping your finger on the pulse of the market just to make sure that everything’s happening. It’s sort of a question of team management. How much do you dive into their activities? How much do you suggest what they need to do? Or is it just a matter of hiring the right people who you can trust?

So I’m already sort of putting words in your mouth. I would just love to hear how you do that at DTC SEO Agency.

Olivia:

Yeah, so we have definitely team members that we task with doing research and we do that on a regular basis so that they are staying up to trends within their work space, work environment that they’re working in. So it’s definitely something that’s super important. I also see that Thomas, one of his biggest roles is to just be on top of trends. You want to step in, you network, you ensure that you’re out there, know what’s happening in the space and especially around like SearchGPT is something that you’re on top of right now.

Thomas:

Yeah, just keeping up to date with what is going on. I think Olivia mentors the team an awful lot, especially around the managers in the team. I think that’s a very, very big area is coming from the corporate background of things, structuring everything in the correct way. So the whole company structure is set up. We have the managers and then we have everyone working underneath. So that whole setup is very, very good. And I think Olivia is very good at mentoring certain people into the role that they want to go into as well as, which is great. So I feel like you brushed over that pretty quick there. 

In terms of, what we’re looking at. mean, SearchGPT obviously is, the elephant in the room. you know, AI search and everything like that, keeping up to date on the trends. Every Friday, I think, the team has like one to two hours where they basically go do their own research. And if there’s anything that I’m spotting that I see on Twitter or whatever it might be, you know, I send to like our link-building manager, hey, this is a new thing that’s coming up. Please look into. It may be something, it may be nothing. It may help improve processes and then she’ll then go improve all the processes from there, work with Olivia on that and then keep things up to date. So we’re just constantly on top of, of what is going on essentially.

Olivia:

And connecting back to that, it’s always about managing the workload and ensuring there’s time for that kind of inspiration where they can actually dive into something. So that’s where I keep staying connected with the team to allocate time into what gives the most value. So sometimes that’s going to be two hours of research.

Chris:

The one of the hardest things, and this is, this is a curve ball because it’s not on the set of questions that we’ve worked on. 

So one of the hardest things I think in agencies is going away from deliverables equal time or selling of time. But ultimately people have time to do stuff and you’re paying people for their time. So there’s always that kind of working out the balance and you touched on it just there, Olivia, like working out where the value of that time comes in. 

What is it that you guys do when you’ve got two sites on paper, they’re the same, but they need different work? How are you working out this five hours here is more valuable than that three hours there or something like that? Is there something that you do to manage that or run that?

Olivia:

I think it’s about priority. So when it comes down to it, the client comes first. So if it’s client work that needs to be completed within a timeframe, that comes first. And then of course, it’s about being part of a team. So have enough resources to allocate that padding time. So I always try to have that kind of gap for the team where they can be creative, where they can do things. And when I see that, okay, you’re starting to fill all your hours just with regular work, we need to hire someone else as well. So it’s about continuously monitoring and also ensuring that they have the created time, whether that is weekly or monthly, and it also depends on the role. Did I answer your question?

Chris:

Yeah, from an ops point of view, did. So Thomas, from a how long is a piece of string when it comes to value of time for title tags versus robots files or whatever it might be, how are you kind of doing that mental gymnastics around that area?

Thomas:

So we work off of a credit system in the agency. So let’s say, you know, it’s 20 credits per month, that is essentially like a time allocation to link building content and digital PR. And then if there’s any kind of technical SEO or anything else that’s kind of required in that, that’s just bundled in. We could probably do a little bit of a better job in terms of, you know, not bleeding over for one client. You know, I’m sure that comes in, but at the end of the day, I don’t care. I just don’t care if it takes the team more time. Because we only take on a certain number of new clients per month, and we have an exclusivity agreement. We only take on one client in that specific niche. In a combination of that, we’re a low number agency, if you’d call it that. We make sure we have the buffer of time that the client needs all of the work from the team. So yeah, I hope that answers the question a little bit.

Olivia:

And I think that’s also—sorry—to tie into that in the beginning, we started off by doing just like full blown side SEO straight off the bat, but we saw that we got scope creep. So that’s when we went into the kind of credit system where we learned like, well, we can’t do everything quality unless we say, hey, this is so much credits, it might take one hour or two hours, you know, it then has that wiggle room where it can take a bit more time if needs be.

Chris:

And that’s the balance, right? So you’ve worked out based on credits. Some people do totally different methodologies to ultimately try and come out with this is the time that they’ve got, or this is the outcome that they need. Here you go. Thomas, your answer sounds very similar to my old thing that I probably battered everyone in the agencies with, which is I care about the outcome, not the input. If it takes you five minutes to do a job that makes someone lots and lots of money or lots and lots of clients, that’s better than spending five hours doing a job, which arguably is kind of worthless and no one feels good about. 

Looking to the future, though, not just with the agency, but also with your own DTC brand that you’ve got, what are the challenges that you think are going to sort of shape the future of the agency and maybe even the sector?

Thomas:

Yeah, I think search AI I think is just such a big one. I definitely don’t think SEO is going anywhere because, at the end of the day, people are still searching for something. I think just the website that they search on may start to change, you know, which it is especially in the marketing space. But if I speak to my parents, for example, they’re like, why would I use ChatGPT? Like what the hell is that? 

So I think the adoption is a lot slower than I certainly thought, like last year, which is super interesting, but leaning in massively on SearchGPT and the different AI search engines to work out, okay, how can we rank first? And that’s really what we’re starting to uncover from a SearchGPT side of things like how we can come up first for curated lists. And that’s been very, very interesting. So we are implementing that across all of our clients at the moment to the point where we’ve also added AI search, like referrals, onto our dashboard. And we’re also tracking the revenue that’s coming from that as well as not. And some of the clients are like earning a pretty decent amount, like a few grand a month off of ChatGPT. I’m like, this is interesting. So yeah, yeah. So, we’re leaning in massively more on that, and the conversion rate as well is just through the roof, which is nuts. So, a big area of focus.

Olivia:

So I think it’s about the Rossi that we’re kind of coining as the term so ‘return on SEO investment’. So it’s super difficult to attribute what is actually an SEO sale. And when we go into all these tracking systems that clients are using sometimes, it’s like crediting paid ads all day long, but not the SEO. So we’re working with TripleL to develop this dashboard uniquely with them around SEO so that we can properly attribute ROSI and that they can see the contribution to the marketing funnel.

Andrew:

I wanted to ask if you think that generative engine optimization is gonna be a service that you’re going be offering like at a full scale soon or not necessarily you, but is this something that you’re considering? Because the way I see it, it’s part of marketing, it’s part of SEO, but it also maybe deserves its own, not branding, because like geo, when I see geo, I think about geography, like the term generative engine optimization is becoming more and more real and people are starting to ask these questions. And I’m just wondering what are your thoughts on it and how much benefits do you think it can give you or do you think you should just continue working on the SEO marketing side of things, just doing the branding, just focusing heavily on branding and that will just pay off at the very end, even with regard to generative search engines.

Thomas:

Yeah, I think that’s a great question, Andrew. Yeah, I mean, we’ve definitely toyed with it and we went back over the goals over the weekend and definitely added like SEO AI onto the list of what we want the agency to be and become. But I think that there’s so many terms being thrown around, like I’m not even sure what the right term would be right now, let alone the clients, especially with the limited knowledge that they have of SEO even at the start of things. 

But it’s certainly something that we’re integrating and integrating a lot more into the processes of what we’re already doing and working on. But, yeah, it can definitely be something we add on. I don’t know if we’d have that as a separate service per se, because it ties in directly with the work that we’re currently doing. It’s just a slight adjustment on things, which is great. 

Andrew:

The reason why I’m asking is because a lot of clients usually just see something very hypey, hype worthy online and they just directly send it to their agency like, I want this. They don’t understand how much time goes into it and how much value they will ultimately get. Because like zero clicks, you just have to do so much just to get potentially mentioned there, recommended. I’m just, yeah, it’s a very tricky thing. Throughout the whole year, we’ve been talking about this, trying to understand what the real value for businesses is. Because for users, I understand it. Like you just get a clear answer or not clear, but they could get an answer because it’s up to debate, right? How clear that answer is. 

Another question is about the biggest goal that you had in 2024, last year, and what your plan is for this year. And once again, I just want to focus on one thing like what was the primary objective last year and this year?

Thomas:

Yeah. So last year it would have been fully migrate and move over to Austin and start hiring here, especially for the agency side of things, which has been a big tick in the box. This year, we’re actually building out another way bigger brand. I think this is going to be the biggest thing that we’ve built and worked on to date, which is going to be super interesting, but using it as a client in the agency, which is going to be super fun. So. that is a big, big focus, I would say. Olivia, do you have anything?

Olivia:

From my end, it’s about building up the team and doing excellence, right? So it’s about ensuring quality for our clients. We had a client coming in this week, actually, who had just been burnt by another SEO agency. Basically, we were looking through a site, we were like, these links are PBNs, it’s tagged to your website. So I think from our end, it’s just about continuously showing that we care for our clients and that they are gonna get great results. And that is hard. That is a lot of work, but it’s extremely rewarding.

Chris:

So I’ve got a little quick fire round here. So the best way I’m going to do this, because it’s with two of you, is we’ll start with Thomas and straight to Olivia. No time for breaks. Straight first thought for the answer. So Thomas, what is the best advice you’ve ever received?

Thomas:

Yeah, it was very personal to what I asked. I think it was basically to completely get every single thing out of a niche and then move on as opposed to jumping into multiple different things. I think that was the biggest thing at that point in my time.

Chris:

Lovely. Olivia, best advice you’ve ever received.

Olivia:

I think it’s just about accepting the moments and the situation that you’re in and like stress is something that you create yourself and you can label the feelings the way you want to label them, right? So at the end of the day, you do as much as you can and then you wake up the next day and you get on it again.

Chris:

Lots of people give very terrible unsolicited advice. So, Thomas, what was the worst advice you ever received?

Thomas:

Come party! Why are you not coming out anymore? You know, all of that kind of stuff. It’s like, well, I’m building something you’re not, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Chris:

Fair, totally reasonable. Olivia, worst advice you’ve ever received?

Olivia:

I would say it’s ‘don’t work too hard’. Growing up, I was continuously facing like, you’re so extreme, you go so much into things, chill a bit. But I think they didn’t know my goals. And they are not the people I aspire to be like, so working hard is definitely something I enjoy doing. And I’m going to continue to do so.

Chris:

Thomas, what’s the biggest mistake in your career that you’ve made to date that you’re willing to talk about?

Thomas:

Yeah, resting on my laurels. I’ve actually got a whole… I’ve just been featured in this book, this SEO book. I’ve got a whole chapter on me about my failures. I managed to get into that somehow. But yeah, essentially it was, we had a site that was up for sale for like 4.8 mil. We basically didn’t work on it for like a year and a half, completely rested on laurels. Obviously Google came in and updated things as they would. And yeah. Safe to say the offer that we wanted to get didn’t come through. Stupid decision, will never happen again. Good lesson learned.

Chris:

Olivia, I hope it’s a different mistake, but not as bad.

Olivia:

Yeah. So I wouldn’t say I have like one biggest mistake, but one that I’ve definitely thought about a lot is we tend to not want to fire people. And instead we’ve been like, you’re a great employee. You have a great mindset and attitude. We really like you. So we’ve taken them and be like, well, now we put you in this role instead, but they haven’t been equipped for that role. It hasn’t been their goal to work in that role. And so they haven’t been able to handle that role and we’ve had to fire them anyways. So I think just taking that hard discussion straight on instead of trying to reshape them into something that they don’t fit in.

Chris:

And that’s really hard. People businesses like agencies are really hard, especially if you’re good people. 

What’s the one thing if you had a magic wand, Thomas, magic wand that you bought from a brilliant reputable DTC client of yours, that you waved out and it would change one thing in the industry? What would that wand wave do?

Thomas:

Removing the snakes. God. Like Olivia was saying with the other SEO agency, we’re just shocked every single time we come across them. We’ve had two clients from them now and both we’ve had to do massive, massive disavows. It’s just insane. Absolutely insane. 

We actually posed as our own brands to other SEO agencies when we were getting started. And this one particular brand who advertise everywhere all over Instagram, they just use PBNs en masse and these insanely targeted anchor text, and they just absolutely destroy people’s websites. It’s nuts. Absolutely nuts. So that would be my biggest thing. I would waive that and say, you know, run an SEO agency if you’ve actually done SEO, you know, not the other way around.

Chris:

Olivia, what about you? You’ve got a lovely magic wand and you can use it one time. What’s it for?

Olivia:

I would say it’s the same because that’s the main pain point that we’re facing. It’s really clients coming in and they have been burned by either a 360 marketing agency who said that they’ve done SEO and then you’re like, well, what did they actually do? They worked a few blog posts. So like the whole understanding about the SEO space is skewed. So I think it’s really that like educating people on this and making them understand that we actually care and that SEO agency can be super good if they care about the clients.

Andrew:

Very negative note to end on. I’m hoping that the snakes will actually all go away because it’s just giving all of us a bad name and just have to convince more and more clients that this is the way to go. Yeah, unfortunately.

Chris:

Economics usually helps when times are tough. There’s a few snakes that do quite well and the rest disappear off somewhere else in some other industry. There’ll be a Trumpianism draining of the swamp in the sector at some point soon, I’m sure.

Thomas:

Excellent. Yeah, hopefully. Yeah, I think when they’ve just worked out the lead generation and sales side of things, they’re much better at the lead generation in sales than they are at SEO. That’s really where I think the agency side of things gets turned upside down. It’s not really the way it should be, but I can see why they get so many clients if they’re that good at selling snake oil.

Chris:

Well, you guys keep doing excellent work and be excellent and be that Texan shining light, making us all feel good about the future of the sector.

Andrew:

Yeah, I want to thank you for coming on and this is a wrap for today’s episode of the SEO Agency Rollercoaster. A huge thank you to Olivia Tapper and Thomas Phillips of the DTC SEO Agency for coming on, sharing their journeys and inspiring the next wave of SEO entrepreneurs. 

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