In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Tom Malesic, Founder and President of EZMarketing — a full-service digital marketing agency he founded in 1997, originally as a web development shop. Over 28 years, Tom has watched the industry evolve from hand-coded websites to AI-replicated YouTube channels, and his team of 27 has navigated all of it while staying focused on one client type: small businesses.
The conversation is a practical playbook — why the website has to be the center of everything, how to extract competitive positioning from a business owner who can’t write, why building 50 town pages per keyword still works, how to structure pages so LLMs and Google both surface them, and why the compound effect of marketing is the thing small business owners most consistently underestimate.
The Website Is the Bar — The Dating Analogy
Tom opens with his core framework: every other marketing activity depends on the website. If the website fails, everything fails with it.
His analogy: imagine showing up to a bar in the jeans and t-shirt you mowed the lawn in. Nobody talks to you — that’s a bad website design. OK, you look great but you open your mouth and say something stupid — that’s bad copy. And if you look great and say smart things but never ask for a date — that’s a website with no call to action. All three have to work. The website is the bar. Everything else just drives people there.
Client Voice Extraction: The One Question That Unlocks Copy
Tom’s intake question for new clients: “What do your competitors do wrong that you do right?” Business owners almost always know the answer — they’ve heard the complaints, fixed the problems, and have the differentiation already in their heads. They just can’t write it themselves. The interview surfaces it. The result is copy built on the founder’s actual competitive positioning rather than generic marketing language lifted from the industry at large.
On photography: authentic beats stock every time. An imperfect real photo of the actual team or job site signals credibility in a way a Getty Images handshake never does. Small business owners often resist this, but the conversion difference is real.
Local SEO: The Town Page Strategy
Tom’s local SEO tactic for businesses with a defined service radius: build 50 town pages per core keyword. For tight service areas, target towns with populations under 2,000 — smaller towns mean more page opportunities within the radius and far less competition. Pair each service keyword with its own grid of town pages. The goal is dense geographic coverage, not one well-optimized city page.
For businesses expanding nationally, his advice: don’t scrub existing local signals when adding new markets. Add adjacent geographies progressively. Pulling local signals to go national destroys equity you’ve already built.
Getting New Pages Indexed: The Google Posts Trick
New service pages can sit uncrawled for weeks. Tom’s fix: get one external link to the page, plus a Google Business Profile post linking to it. That combination reliably accelerates indexation. He pairs it with a practice of daily photo uploads to the GBP — which generates content for posts and contributes to profile presence at the same time.
H2s and H3s as Questions — The LLM Visibility Play
Tom’s structural advice for getting surfaced in LLM results: convert your H2s and H3s from sales headlines into explicit questions. Every section of a page is technically answering a question — you just have to identify what that question is and format the heading accordingly.
The practical effect: when someone asks ChatGPT a specific question, pages whose section headings mirror that question structure get pulled. FAQ sections embedded throughout service pages (not isolated on a standalone FAQ page) reinforce this. The structure serves Google and LLMs simultaneously.
Three Readers — Now Four
Tom’s mental model for page structure and length: every long-form page serves multiple readers at once.
- The scanner — reads only the H2s and H3s, decides if the page is worth their time
- The reader — reads every word, wants all the detail
- Google — reads everything and rewards depth and coverage
- ChatGPT — reads everything and responds to question-structured headings
Small business owners resist long pages because they personally scan — they don’t realize they’re not the target reader. Write long, structure it well, and you serve all four simultaneously.
The Compound Effect of Marketing
Tom’s consistent frustration with small business clients: they try to do one thing and do it cheap. His counter: every additional marketing channel you add multiplies the value of the ones you already have. One thing done well is good. Two things makes each one better than it would be alone. Three things is exponential. The compounding is real, and most small business owners never experience it because they stop at one.
The Agency Has Become an Editor
Tom describes how his 27-person team has shifted: from content creators to editors of AI output. They build an agent trained on the client’s voice, products, and brand language. The agent drafts. The team edits. The creative skill has moved from writing to training and editing — a fundamentally different workflow that produces more volume at higher consistency.
He expects the same shift to come next in design (AI-generated images and video) and then web development (AI-built sites). His framing: it’s the same transition the industry made when WordPress replaced hand-coding. Uncomfortable at first, obviously right in retrospect.
The AI Clone on YouTube
Tom has already replicated himself with an AI video clone. His marketing manager runs the YouTube channel using the clone — Tom’s words, Tom’s likeness, no camera setup required. He doesn’t stand in front of a camera anymore. The channel runs. This is what the “agency as editor” model looks like applied to video content.
Key Quotes
“The website is the center of all your marketing. If that piece sucks, it doesn’t really matter. Anything else you do is also terrible.”
— Tom Malesic
“Business owners don’t understand the compound effect of marketing. If you’re doing one thing great — well, if you did two things, it’s going to make that one thing even better. If you did three things, it becomes exponential. They try to Mickey Mouse it and make it cheaper.”
— Tom Malesic
“You’ve got to hit three types of readers: Tom the scanner who reads the H2s, my wife the reader who reads everything, and Google who wants to know everything. Write long pages — they hate it, but Google loves it and now ChatGPT too.”
— Tom Malesic
About Tom Malesic
Tom Malesic is Founder and President of EZMarketing, a full-service digital marketing agency he founded in 1997. Based in Pennsylvania, EZMarketing specializes in small business clients and offers web design, SEO, content, and digital advertising services. Tom also runs an Easy Marketing YouTube channel featuring his AI video clone.
