I recently had a fantastic conversation with Charlie Sells of Clarity Over Everything on the Unscripted SEO Podcast. Charlie brings 15 years of experience in brand messaging and positioning, including four years at Dave Ramsey’s Ramsey Solutions. Our discussion covered everything from service business branding challenges to the evolution of SEO in the age of AI.
Here are the key insights from our conversation that I think every small business owner and SEO professional needs to hear.
The Service Business Branding Challenge
One of the first things we tackled was a question I think about constantly: How do you develop a brand when you’re doing the same thing as everyone else in your niche? Whether you’re installing precast concrete walls or running a roofing company, the service itself isn’t unique. So what actually creates differentiation?
Charlie’s approach is refreshingly practical. “We look at the data. We look at everything top to bottom and say what is working now, where are the gaps, where are the opportunities. And I will typically try to find where there are inconsistencies first so that we can then create a roadmap together to implement things really slowly.”
He makes a great point about service-based businesses: “Service-based businesses are just like bowling alleys—they’re trying to stay hyper local.” You don’t drive past a bowling alley wondering if there’s a better one three states over. The same principle applies to most service businesses.
The problem? Business owners often think too big. “If they try to think too big and too regional, that’s where you really start to spin your tires because you’re not necessarily competing across the state. You may not even be competing with somebody super nationally.” His advice is about “narrowing your focus and not feeling like you have to do all of the things all of the time—that’s the most important piece.”
The Two Things Charlie Looks For in Every Brand
When Charlie works with clients, he’s “always looking for two things: one, are we being really consistent?”
He gets specific about what consistency means: “Every touchpoint of our brand—does it look the same, does it sound the same, does it feel the same on a sales call, social media, website, emails, in-person interactions, whatever that is? Always looking for consistency.”
The second thing? “Are you really leaning into your unique competitive advantage?”
Charlie shared a perfect example of this principle in action. He’s been working with a client in Florida in the event and conference staffing space. They were overwhelmed trying to figure out how to compete with national companies. But when Charlie dug into their brand, he discovered something powerful: “They’re the most trusted name in conference and event staff. Their retention rate is like in the 80s and 90s. It’s ridiculous.”
His advice to them was simple but transformative: “Don’t try to be bigger. Don’t try to be flashier. Don’t try to be anything other than who you are.”
The result? “Now that we’ve started to dial in that messaging, they’re so much more confident in the communication that they send out to their clients because they know that they already have that trust built. They’re also not so overwhelmed by feeling like we have to do X, Y, and Z in order to grow.”
The Power of Branded Search (And Why SEOs Miss It)
This is where the conversation got really interesting for me personally. I admitted that 10 years ago, I remember specifically telling a client, “Okay, well this is your Google Search Console. These are your branded queries. We’re going to ignore those. We want to focus just on the non-branded keywords and phrases.”
I was wrong. And given the changes to Google in 2023—particularly around the Helpful Content Update and the heavy emphasis on brand identity—I think a lot of SEOs have been wrong about this.
Charlie’s time at Ramsey Solutions taught him valuable lessons about “the balance between branded and non-branded. Branded, you have that on lockdown” when you’ve built decades of brand equity. “But when it came to non-branded, we also were very strategic about saying, maybe there is just some things that we need to refresh, not create from scratch, and let Google crawl that. Then we go from position 10 to position seven and we don’t have to go from position one million to position 100, right?”
His advice for small businesses? “If they will get their branded terms right, then you can focus on the non-branded terms. But shiny object syndrome is rampant amongst entrepreneurs and businesses, myself included, where we always want the bigger and the better when we should just do the basic foundational stuff that will make a big difference.”
I’ve seen firsthand how important these basics are. I had a client whose brand name was “Save Fry Oil.” You can imagine the SERP—AI overviews, videos, articles all about how to save fry oil. They didn’t show up as a brand entity at all. No sidebar, no brand recognition. Their entity was a mess because they didn’t have an about page. They hadn’t created an entity home for themselves where Google could gather and validate information.
After adding an about page and getting anchor tags from various sources for the brand name, we eventually solved that problem. Now they show up as an entity.
Charlie was emphatic about the basics: “If you don’t have the basics set up—and I would even call your Google business listing and some of those keyword components just super basic—you’re in trouble.”
He shared a story about auditing a Nashville brand where “within 10 minutes I knew we had a big problem. I searched on Google for their business name, for their website, and I couldn’t find it. It was gone.”
Why does this matter? Because “search engines are the yellow pages today. You want to make it easy for somebody to just find you like that.”
Breaking Down Team Silos Through Communication
I brought up something Matt Brooks of SEOteric told me: SEO’s superpower is communication. As an SEO, you carry a value message that gives you an entree to talk to the email team, the content team, the sales team. You can show them how SEO supports their goals and vice versa.
Charlie completely agrees. He sees this all the time with clients who think they need one specific thing—usually social media. His response is always: “What happens after you do social media? What are you trying to get them to do? If there is no strategy for what happens after that, you’re just going to be wasting your time.”
When he digs deeper, clients often admit: “Yeah, I don’t really love my website” or “I wish I would have built this thing” or “Somebody looked at it five years ago and I’ve sort of maintained it.” And Charlie sees immediately that “there’s no cohesive experience here. There’s no ecosystem.”
This concept of the ecosystem is crucial. Charlie explains: “If everything in your ecosystem is speaking the same language, then it’s going to work.” But too many businesses have “pieces that are missing where it’s not an H1 or it’s not an H2 or there’s no alt text or whatever. It’s just all of those missed opportunities that they could be taking advantage of.”
When Good Ideas Land in the Wrong Place
One of my favorite insights from Charlie is how he helps clients understand that not every good idea belongs everywhere. “In the course of our conversation, I can’t tell you how many times I have said to some of the people, very well-intentioned, very good ideas: ‘Just because it doesn’t belong here doesn’t mean it doesn’t belong somewhere.'”
This is huge. “A lot of them have really great ideas that have some legs and have some merit, but plugging it into the right place, that’s the key that I think they’re missing.” Maybe that direct-to-camera welcome video would be perfect for an email sequence but wrong for the homepage.
Charlie’s most surprising piece of advice? “If the weight of your business lands on your website, you have a problem.”
He explains: “Because now you’re no longer thinking about the value, the service, the experience that you’re providing. You’re just assuming that this one billboard, so to speak, is going to be the thing.”
Your website has value. “But it’s not the most important thing. So if you can break that traditional mindset with small business owners and leaders, then you can start to lead them into the other areas that are really going to move the needle in other parts of their ecosystem.”
The Technical Details That Actually Matter
Charlie shared another story about his staffing client that perfectly illustrates why technical SEO still matters. “When I was looking at keyword research, I was like, ‘Why do you not have this in an H1? You should have the city that you’re in and event and conference staff as a keyword in here.’ And they’re like, ‘Well, it’s in the graphic at the top of our page.'”
The problem? It was “in a designed graphic that can’t be crawled, that had no alt text. I’m like, ‘Nobody cares about that and Google’s not recognizing it.’ And they were just going, ‘We had no idea.'”
This happens constantly. “Small business owners—they’re so good at doing what they do, but there are some things that they either outsource and never check up on, or they built it once and assume that that’s going to be the thing that is going to last forever.”
The solution is simple: “You have to plant a flag in the ground and say, here I am, and make it easy for people to find you.”
I shared my own horror story from 2007 when a client insisted all their text be converted to images for a specific font. I had them literally sign a document acknowledging I’d explained three times that Google wouldn’t be able to read it. A week after launch: “Our website’s gone offline!”
We both agreed—sometimes you just have to get that signature and let clients learn the hard way.
Link Building in the Age of LLMs
I asked Charlie about how link building and brand building have changed because of large language models. My friend Michael McDougall has pointed out that we don’t have to argue about DR values anymore—we just need to get our names out there so we’ll be picked up in ChatGPT.
Charlie’s take is nuanced. “I probably have an unpopular opinion about this because I understand the importance. I think we’re going really fast, maybe even so fast as we’re out driving our headlights a little bit where we can’t see where this is supposed to lead next.”
Yes, “LLMs are changing exactly how search is done, how information is aggregated, where you show up, how you show up, all that kind of stuff.” But Charlie’s encouraging his clients to “go way more grassroots and find ways to get on podcasts with niche audiences that are actually in their ICP that are going to move the needle.”
He’s also “encouraging my clients in particular to narrow their vision and narrow their scope a little bit when it comes to that” rather than chasing every new platform and trend.
Most importantly: “I don’t think traditional SEO is dead still. I think it still matters. I know that there’s always a propensity to say the new thing is here, so focus on the new thing and forget the old stuff”—that’s just shiny object syndrome again.
At the end of the day, “somebody is still looking for what you have and whether you give it to them organically on social media or paid on social media or through your website or through your content or backlinks or whatever—it still matters that you match intent more than anything else.”
The Reality Behind LLMs and Search
I brought up my conversation with Alejandro Meyerhans of Get Me Links, who explained that when LLMs don’t have an answer in their training data, they literally go search on Google or Bing. They’re “a very fancy interface to search results.” Those first-tier results are being powered by traditional search, not through the LLM’s own index.
This should have ended the “SEO is dead” plague once and for all. I’ve been in this industry since 2007, and every four years there’s a new panic. Mobile was going to kill SEO. Voice search was going to kill SEO. Now it’s AI and LLMs.
This time felt particularly fierce—six months of articles declaring SEO dead, followed by grifters selling solutions to the “problem,” followed by people realizing it wasn’t working and coming back to fundamentals.
What do you do for LLMs? You write content and get backlinks. You write content and get mentions. It’s back to core fundamentals, powered by brand—getting those signals out and amplifying them.
Charlie’s Two Essential Switches
As we wrapped up, I asked Charlie about his two non-negotiable starting points when onboarding a new client.
First: Adopt a mindset of curiosity. “You’ve got to have a mindset of curiosity. If you are certain, if you are dead set, if you are rigid in your thinking about your brand, then this is not going to go well.”
His favorite question to ask clients is: “What is it like to be on the receiving end of your brand?”
Not what your metrics say. Not what your reviews say. “You can’t just go by what your customers say. You can’t just go by what the reviews come in as or what your performance metrics are. You’ve really got to put yourself in the seat of your customer and you’ve got to think what would it be like for me to receive this experience?”
Charlie stays objective and analyzes the data: “When I looked at all four of your competitors, I knew immediately who they were for and who they were not. And I can tell you what your differentiator is and if you will lean into that then you will start to see that kind of traction that you’ve been after for so long but it has to come from a posture of—I will entertain the doubts. I will entertain the data. I will actually lean into the disbelief.”
Second: Hold it with an open hand. “I think what has happened in social media has now translated into the entrepreneur space where we feel like there is one thing that we could do to boost sales. There’s one lever that we can pull in order to flood our funnel. There’s one lead campaign that is going to make our year absolutely explode.”
That’s not reality. “I take a very slow approach to that where, yeah, there are things where in the midst of an audit or in the course of our conversations in my research that we’re going to have to fix immediately. Sometimes that means consolidating systems and platforms. Sometimes it’s as simple as we have to stop doing this right now because it’s bleeding us dry. But then there’s a larger roadmap that transpires from there.”
The key is thinking long-term: “We’ve got to zoom out and not just think end of the month, end of the quarter. We’ve got to think about if where we want to be a year from now is our goal. What has to be true between now and then in order for us to do that?”
The Technical Work Clients Can’t See
One challenge Charlie faces constantly is helping clients understand the value of work they can’t see. “You are not going to understand all of these words that I’m about to use. You don’t care about DNS records. You don’t care about taxonomy. You don’t care about metadata and all of that. I know it works, and you’re just going to have to trust me that some of the work we’re going to do is not going to be seen from a visual standpoint.”
This is a real mental block for entrepreneurs: “If I can’t see it, I don’t know that it’s working. If I can’t see it or it doesn’t support something that is super visual or super public, then why am I even doing it right now?”
Charlie coaches clients through this barrier. Recently he told a client in simple terms what he was going to fix. “And they were like, ‘Cool, just go do it. I think it will work.’ And that’s all you can ask for.”
Those are the best clients, honestly. Sometimes it’s nice to have someone who’s super technical and you can dive deep. But sometimes it’s also nice when someone just says, “Go forth and do the work.”
Final Thoughts: Clarity Over Everything
This conversation reinforced something I’ve learned working with everyone from Jason Barnard of Kalicube on entity optimization to various clients like Atlanta Legal Care on brand and entity association: the fundamentals matter more than ever.
Charlie’s approach through Clarity Over Everything is refreshingly grounded. He’s not chasing every new trend or promising silver bullets. He’s helping businesses get their basics right, build consistent ecosystems, and lean into their actual competitive advantages.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by your brand strategy, if you’re wondering whether you’re being consistent or just chasing shiny objects, Charlie has created a free assessment at clarityovereverything.com. It helps you see “how clear and aligned or how confused and complex are you” and includes action items “to start moving away from the path to brand erosion and really into brand momentum.”
The conversation also reminded me why I love doing this podcast. Whether it’s talking to technical SEOs like Chris Rydburg (who worked with Charlie at Ramsey Solutions and is absolutely brilliant at connecting dots nobody else sees) or brand strategists like Charlie, there’s always more to learn about how search, brand, and business success interconnect.
At the end of the day, Charlie’s philosophy is simple: “I help businesses get clear so they can move faster and do more of what they love—which is building successful brands that actually serve their customers well.”
That’s something I can get behind.
Connect with Charlie Sells:
- Website: clarityovereverything.com
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/charlie-sells
Listen to the full episode on the Unscripted SEO Podcast for even more insights on brand building, SEO strategy, and navigating the evolving search landscape.
