Host: Jeremy Rivera – Unscripted SEO Podcast
Guest: Chris Turnbull, Founder of Catalyst Marketing
Listen to the full unscripted conversation and explore more episodes at UnscriptedSEO.com
In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Chris Turnbull, founder of Catalyst Marketing, for an unfiltered discussion about how SEO has evolved over 13+ years. From Google’s monopolistic behavior to the rise of AI overviews, they explore why local SEO has remained surprisingly stable while broader search continues to fragment across multiple platforms.
Chris shares insights from his journey from apprentice SEO to agency founder, specializing in performance marketing for local service businesses. The conversation dives deep into the breakdown of traditional content marketing, the rise of user-generated content, and why Reddit posts now carry the same weight as backlinks from 2015. No scripts, no fluff – just raw insights from two SEO veterans who’ve navigated every algorithm shift.
Killer Quotes from the Interview
Jeremy Rivera:
“It feels like we have been demoted to beta testers as the public. And it used to be that the outcry, the outrage would shut down a company if they launched a product prematurely that had even one hundredth of the error rate that we’re seeing with these LLM tools, with AI overviews.”
“Their tagline to begin with was, ‘we organize the world’s data.’ And now it seems like ‘we are the world’s data.’ They want to be the source of truth.”
“Getting a huge upvoted post on Reddit now carries as much weight and value as getting a huge backlink did in 2015.”
Chris Turnbull:
“What worked in SEO five years ago is still working now to get people ranking for those high intent terms. There’s been some changes, but I think a lot of it really is like you’re saying about these other competitors and these LLMs.”
“It’s dragging a lot of people that just focused on SEO into the wider sort of marketing sphere. We’re actually looking at things perhaps they wouldn’t have before, which is impacting search now.”
“Is there a post website world? What does that look like? These are all big, almost existential questions when it comes to search.”
Key Takeaways
- Local SEO has remained surprisingly stable – The fundamentals like Google Business Profile optimization, citations, reviews, and community involvement that worked 15 years ago still drive results today, even as broader SEO has been disrupted.
- The content creation paradox is unsustainable – Google demands businesses create content “for humans” while simultaneously using that content to train AI systems that may eliminate the need for users to visit the original sources, breaking the traditional content-traffic exchange.
- Multi-platform presence is now essential – Success requires treating your website as one tentacle of an octopus rather than the central hub, with Reddit posts, LinkedIn articles, and social media mentions carrying similar weight to traditional backlinks.
- User-generated content and social proof dominate AI results – LLMs heavily weight reviews, Reddit discussions, and authentic human conversations when providing recommendations, making genuine community participation more valuable than traditional link building.
- The role of SEOs is expanding into general marketing – Modern search optimization requires understanding email marketing, social media, digital PR, and brand building as integrated components rather than separate disciplines.
Introduction & Background
Jeremy Rivera: Hello, I’m Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. Chris, why don’t you give yourself an introduction to everybody and let us know why we should trust you.
Chris Turnbull: Jeremy, thanks for having me. Yeah, so my name is Chris. I’m the founder here at Catalyst Marketing, but my journey into SEO kind of started about 13 years ago next month. So I started as just an apprentice working on SEO with some pretty small accounts to begin with, just in a small agency work.
But then from there, I’ve just, I feel like I’ve kind of been everywhere in terms of industry, the size of the accounts I’ve worked on and you know going that far back as well it feels like looking back on what we’ve got now with SEO and how it’s changed is just massive and I really didn’t think it had changed for a long time but the last three to five years it just accelerated hugely.
Starting years ago as small agencies and I’ve worked my way up through working on some pretty large global accounts working in-house with some really big insurance firms as well and yeah some. My freelancing career kind of took me to some interesting parts as well, but over the last four five years or so, since about 2021, I’ve been mainly focused on cash lists, working with local service businesses. And that’s kind of been where I’ve honed in on a lot of local SEO over the last four or five years.
The Evolution of Search & Early SEO Days
Jeremy Rivera: I’ve had a similar path, you know, started with real estate agents, commercial real estate, as a website hosting person, just answering questions led to, you know, doing my reading the SEO book by Aaron Wall, you know, listening to the early founders of SEO, hold cord on Twitter, and just kind of experimenting with everything.
But I’ve seen a lot change too. It’s interesting because I also have ended up with like a really big focus on like home service businesses, SEO and local SEO. Just it is a different game. It’s funny. I think the local SEO game has stayed the most the same while changing. I feel like some of the bigger, you know, big content publisher SEO has changed.
There are literally SEO niches that no longer exist because Google’s pretty much consumed them. Like when I started, the hotel industry niche was separate and distinct, but now Google has its hands firmly around the throat of that. And it seems like…
The more we turn around, more Google, you know, Google even replaced what emoji directory recently where you can now type in an emoji and just copy it and instead of going to the emojipedia. How do you view the search evolution from being what it was when you started to I think it went super insanely Google monopolistic for a minute.
And everything SEOs did was 100% obsessed with only Google. But now it looks like we’re widening that funnel out. How do things change as they go back to how they were?
Chris Turnbull: Yes, yeah. And you know what, think about the early days as well, and you were just mentioning some of the people that you read and listened to. I don’t know if you watched, but it was quite big back when I was first learning SEO, was obviously Rand at Moz with these whiteboard Fridays. And he’s just always been a huge authority figure, you know, obviously, you know, has kind of founded Moz and made a big impact on like the SEO industry as a whole.
But I still follow him now on LinkedIn and I see everything he’s posting and the work that he’s doing with Spark Toro and everything at the moment. And I find that really interesting. Everything that he’s talking about, like the zero click marketing and how prevalent brand is becoming. Have you watched much of him before?
The Changing Nature of Search Results
Jeremy Rivera: Absolutely. I mean, was the counterpoint. I actually ended up working with Raven Tools, which was kind of the opposite side. We kind of saw ourselves as competition for Moz when it comes to the SEO SaaS service game. You know, even before Ahrefs was a thing, know, SEMrush was a very niche tool.
When Moz and Raven Tools were fighting things out in the SaaS SEO world. So yeah, definitely paid a lot of attention to a lot of the things he said and a lot of things that his agency model actually did. I think he has been kind of the Nostradamus of the future of search, seeing the trend of, okay, well, you know,
We had 10 blue links and now we went universal. And once it went universal, showing all of these different types of results, it was that next step when featured snippets kind of became a thing. And that really was, I think, the biggest change in direction for Google as far as what it was trying to be to the public.
And it became much less about being a trusted quality moderator in that process to actually owning and displaying and being the arbitrator and being the source of truth. Their tagline to begin with was, “we organize the world’s data.” And now it seems like “we are the world’s data.” They want to be the
There’s all of these situations you get into now of like the as AJ Cohn, my favorite author, know, blindfiveyearold.com. He says, you know, is it “gook enough”? Like, can you get these results? And they’re just acceptable enough to like pass the bar. You know, there’s the meme now of enshitification of search results of…
You know, it’s culturally like there’s the enshitification of all these things where these tech companies come in and they take control and monopolize it and it’s just somehow just worse for having such like a heavy handed control of it. And that is so true when you can Google and ask for kitchen recipes and get ones that include gasoline.
I think I said this in a prior interview last week that’s coming out of – It feels like we have been demoted to beta testers as the public. And it used to be that the outcry, the outrage would shut down a company if they launched a product prematurely that had even one hundredth of the error rate that we’re seeing with these LLM tools, with AI overviews.
I remember distinctly some search results that came up in 2014 that were so scandalous that they got them so wrong that there was practically a public apology from the search engineers for having released that update that would display search results that way. That was so egregious. And now we have just run into this…
Age of lawlessness. It seems like with corporations are so large that they can just push this out and say, “good enough.”
Corporate Power & Testing on Live Users
Chris Turnbull: Yeah, yeah, no, you’re 100% right. And I was watching a video only yesterday actually, and somebody was talking about how the corporations, what they get away with now compared to what they were allowed to get away with. Like back in the early 90s, and I used an example that I wasn’t too familiar with. I think it was something about when Microsoft kind of forced you to have a browser as part of the operating system. And there was a big fuss about that. I wasn’t too sure, I wasn’t too aware of it. But he was comparing it to what’s happening today, which…
As you say, it’s essentially these corporations sort of crowdsourcing, crowd testing, just as it goes, just like basing it on live rollouts. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, then they, you know, they try and change and everything, but it really does feel like they’re just kind of testing and making it up as we go. And yeah, you’re right. We do put up with a lot. And I think it’s even more difficult when you’ve got clients as well, that they see stuff happening, they see changes and you’re thinking, I’m not even seeing the same sort of search results where I’m not even, I haven’t heard about this, not an update. And then in six months later, hear about what they rolled out and now what the final version is.
Jeremy Rivera: And with the removal of the search liaison process is a position is kind of just the final peg of, you know what? We care so little now about your feedback. We will tell you what your feedback is by holding a conference after our disastrous HCU decimates food bloggers, decimates travel bloggers, decimates publishers.
We’re going to have a few people and we’re going to tell you what your objective experience actually is while not changing anything in the algorithm to actually restore what is obviously, you know, a devastating, you know, modification or process, you know, like the lack of ability to recover from these HCU, the HCU penalties for so long, only in the last one or two algorithm updates have we seen anyone come back and
You know, like for that to be the state of the nature of the industry for two plus years since HCU came out. Like it’s hard to, it’s like, oh, that happened two years ago, but it’s been that way for this long that it is, okay, well, I guess we’ll die. You know, like I literally had, had we had a subcontract, we tried everything, we threw spaghetti at the wall and to her like, “sorry, you have to start a whole new site.” You know, we’ll grab a new domain.
Basically kind of restarted the business under a slightly different don’t different name with a quarter of the content and the that strategy worked it was the stupidest thing that I’ve ever seen you know and what was you know what what what we cut out was what actually Google had rewarded in the previous algorithm shot them up and then shot them in the face for the same thing so it’s like
You know, we’re kind of used to this poor behavior now, I guess. So in part of my heart says, now you have some competition. Now you have chat GPT perplexity and these secondary models coming in and starting to, you know, take some of the market share, know, Bing coming in and playing a genuine player, at least in terms of serving up index.
The Rise of Competition & Alternative Search Behaviors
Yes, thank you. Let’s have some competition with this monopolistic Google that is determined to Go further and further of destroying this, you know exchange of will create the content and you’ll drive people to it it’s like part of that social contract is broken down and I’m okay with a competition that okay.
Well, I I can’t I know that they’d be like there’s a lot of research a lot of people are trying to determine – Does GPT search, is it secondary to, is it replacement of search behavior or is it a different model? I think it’s a mixed bag. I think for the most part, how you interact with a chat GPT tool, there’s a fraction of it that mirrors some of the things that you were trying to do with search, but it ultimately is like an augmentory process. I think we do have to go back and go deeper.
You know, outside of the answers within LLM tools to find these answers. And some of that goes back to, you know, true search. And I’d love for this aspect of competition to help change the trajectory at Google. I don’t hold out much hope that it’s going to, but I can hope that competition might be a positive change factor.
Local SEO: What’s Stayed the Same vs. What’s Changed
Chris Turnbull: Yeah, no, definitely. No, I agree with you. I kind of didn’t really see it as like competition like that in the sense of what, I suppose that’s where I’m lucky to be working with a lot of local service businesses because that’s where there hasn’t been as much change as you said, in terms of how people are searching. And obviously you’ve kind of got the, the high intent keywords, which like the company, the near me local, any of these local based terms when people are actually searching. I feel like the majority of
What worked in SEO five years ago is still working now to get people ranking for those high intent terms. There’s been some changes, but I think a lot of it really is like you’re saying about these other competitors and these LLMs. There’s just more top of funnel and middle funnel sort of research going on there. And it’s trying to create that content, optimize for that. And then also think about what if that doesn’t turn into a click, how does that affect the rest of my marketing or how do they end up actually get into my client’s website and actually converting and becoming a customer off of those high intent keywords.
Jeremy Rivera: I think that is the question, know, like thinking about, you know, an Atlanta law office, you know, what is it that they are going to do differently for local search that they, that you wouldn’t have recommended in, you 2008 or 2015? Like I look at these and I think, you know, a lot of it stays the same, like, you know, to show, like,
ChatGPT now has a map feature for local. But how do you get in it? Well, you got to be a verified Bing business. You need to be in the Bing index period, which is helpful if you have index now. Like if you don’t have index now on your site and you’re on WordPress, you’re an idiot. It’s such an easy win.
And then you have Google reviews. So like if you combine those three factors, it’s like, okay, well, like I would have told them in, you know, 2008, let’s get you verified on Google places or Google my business or Google profile, whatever the name de jure of that thing was. I it was Google places in 2008. And then, you know, let’s get you in MSN.
And then we’ll get you your citations, you know, are these kind of verifying factors as these basic directories gets you some local links and then actually do something in the community so that you show up. Like let’s do a trash cleanup, you know, let’s let’s be part of a charity drive. You know, know Zip Local has a free tool to find sponsorships in communities of organizations that are looking for
Funding for their fun run or funding for their duck boat charity race, whatever it might be. Those are things and actions in the community that I would have recommended then and I’m recommending them now. I like local SEO because there is kind of, hey, you’ve got a CPR class in a particular city, you need to…
You know, have the bottom of the funnel stuff to say, differentiate yourself. What would you say you do here? And then show up in the community. And what does that showing up look like? It’s, know, directories that’s getting listed in the city hall, you know, participating in the community. So it really, the more it’s changed, the more that local, think has stayed the same, which what has
For you changed in your process or is something that you think about now that you didn’t before when it comes to local SEO.
What’s Actually Changed in Local SEO Practice
Chris Turnbull: That’s a good question. I feel like, like you’re saying a lot that is still the same reviews, local schema has definitely become, I think it’s always been important, but obviously I think these are just something that used to carry less weight now seems to carry a little bit more weight I’m seeing. I mean, for example, we’ve kind of totally paused on a lot of any backlinks we were doing. Obviously we’re doing a lot of the citations and everything like that, but when we get a big link, we see it not boosting as much as we used to.
There used to be clients that would rank nationwide for quite a long tail keyword, for example. Then obviously that got eaten up by the snippets and the AI overview and they still get featured a little bit for some of it, but it used to be a really big traffic driver for some people. And even though it’s locally based, you’d still get some people, so if you’re selling expensive kitchens, for example, if they’re 100, 150 miles away, and obviously I’m in the UK, that’s a lot, and it’s about half the country’s length, so it’s not the furthest, you know.
So they would still could be interested. They could turn into customers, but at the end of the day, it still was, it was still was driving some good high intent traffic nonetheless. But that’s what it seems. The back links seem to impact more. Like you said, if you don’t have your basics in place, like being listed in Bing maps, Google maps, or having the reviews, mean, reviews are huge part of it as well. That’s kind of a bit of a make and break when it comes to a lot. Well, especially with the LLMs, because it seems to go
Massively on reviews. I think I’ve done a lot of test searches to see what it ought to try and figure out what its algorithm is, what’s it suggesting this is the best sort of company to go for. And a lot of it is always just reviews. But I think, like you’re saying, getting into the local community and how that’s kind of grown into digital PR, think digital PR has become quite a hot topic in SEO over the last year or so, maybe a little bit longer.
But I think that that’s really important. And it does come back to what you said you’d suggest basically almost 15, 16 years ago, which is kind of getting out there, doing local sponsorship events, local brand ones. So we’re trying to think of ways of how can we get more creative with our digital PR? What can we actually suggest clients do? And I think the interesting thing about how SEO is changing and obviously with AI and everything, I’m getting a lot of clients ask me questions and…
Essentially I’m saying, well, a lot has stayed the same. So you don’t have to worry too much when it comes to local SEO, but what is that? What is actually doing? think it’s dragging a lot of people that just focused on to SEO into the wider sort of marketing sphere. We’re actually looking at things perhaps they wouldn’t have before, which is impacting search now. So obviously a lot of brand mentions brand is becoming really big. And, um, I do like that search everywhere optimization phrase. I know there’s loads of different acronyms going around for at the moment, but it does seem that, you know, if you’re ranking or if you’ve got mentions on Reddit and you’ve got mentions on a blog or a forum, a local magazine or newspaper, LLMs are really picking up, notice that, and that’s all about brand marketing. And it’s just, it’s overlapping even more so into SEO. And I think it’s getting there for local SEO as well, especially as people start to get a bit more conversational
With the way they talk to these LLMs and they’re saying things like, well, “what’s the best one? Who can I go to that provides this” or anything like that, rather than just the high intent keywords that we’ve always focused on.
The Rise of User-Generated Content & Social Proof
Jeremy Rivera: I agree. I think it’s as much about now. I was talking to Matt Brooks of SEO, Tarek of how, you know, reputation is now echoed in a different way on social media. And there’s kind of a broadening and a narrowing because they used to be like forums were its own unique separate thing.
And then you had, you know, social media sites. But now, like, you’ve got these straddlers of, like, you know, voice.ai, you’ve got Reddit, subreddits, you’ve got LinkedIn Pulse, you have kind of these UGC sources that both LLMs and Google are both turning to for answers because they are, you know, they’re answers from people.
You know, and we kind of, we kind of oversat. I think we, we saw the opportunity in the field of like going after these keyword research, these keyword research phrases, but we kind of ran into a problem on the local service side, didn’t we, of how many, every single plumber answering the question of “how to spot a leaky faucet.” Google then has one trillion triplicate articles
Which it incentivized the creation of. They created this problem, but now they have this massive problem of all of these marketing agencies putting out a perfectly good answer to the point of where it’s just so duplicate that there’s nothing unique about it. So then we see the folding in of these social media results. So if you are trying to sell your stair handrail system, you know, so like
It doesn’t matter if there’s articles about it. Did somebody on Reddit, their uncle installed that stair handrail system and it pulled out of the wall and they died. There’s this UG or it really worked really well and somebody on Reddit actually mentioned it. It’s kind of like they’re outsourcing the social proof with these hybrid platforms because I don’t like…
Reddit isn’t exactly a forum, it’s not exactly social media, it’s not exactly a content site, it is an abomination before the Lord, but it is, you know, it’s also in some ways, you know, like somewhat genuine conversations. And there’s this weird, like I’ve been on Reddit since the Narwhal bacon, it’s like, you know, 18 plus years. So there is kind of this self policing, like “don’t market to me, bro,” but…
And the flip coin of that are like, “oh, I’m totally marketing to you.” Like, yeah, well, you made a bacon underwear, woo. There’s this weird culture about it, but I think what I’m pointing out is that I think it’s a new opportunity, but it’s the same old opportunity at the same time. Like, hey, in 2009, I was recommending Go genuinely participate in forums. And I think it’s…
It has become, you know, reviews and like human verification that this event happened or this thing exists and like that UGC aspect is more important now.
From Link Building to Brand Mentions
Chris Turnbull: Yet definitely i do think it is more important and i i think at the same time yet one of my first also remember when i joined an agency as an apprentice in those 2017 and it was to basically go on behalf of their clients at the time it’s gone to different forums and start commenting on the forums is just get back links from forums but i think i was it was always done from the plane or the spectra of
Jeremy Rivera: Links.
Chris Turnbull: Okay, this is a really, yeah, it’s a backlink. This is an old forum. I don’t know how many people are gonna find it, if they’re gonna search for it. You know, is it, how many people are actually gonna read this and come to my company is more about the backlink side of things. And like I said, now I don’t think people are doing it for that anymore. They’re doing it for the LLMs or they’re doing it for the brand dimension. Because you know, it was always the thing that social mentions are good for SEO. You know, maybe 10, 15 years ago, they were good for SEO.
But they carried no weight ultimately and they didn’t impact your actual rank and position. That’s, it’s interesting how it’s changed. People have seen it as well. it’s still a mention. People are still going to read it, but maybe that is just the power of social media and the fact that things are, you know, they do stay ranked for a long time and a lot of people are seeing it.
The Breakdown of Walled Gardens
Jeremy Rivera: I think the difference too is the eradication of walled gardens. Well, everything is in a walled garden. And so think about it, like, you know, Facebook…
You know, evolve from you had to be logged in to see the content and that’s where you participated to. Then it was indexed and you know, Facebook pages were promoted for their organics reach and value and then Meta squeezed the life juice out of that and now it’s pay to play. But you know, that kind of squeezed traffic, the genuine participation of businesses to create unique content for Meta is no longer there. If you’re there, you’re paying.
And creating content and trying to interact with people on Instagram, on threads. But we couldn’t index it. And now Google’s now indexing Instagram videos. TikTok videos are indexed and showing up in SERPs. And LinkedIn Pulse, like I saw Lily Ray take the same article that wasn’t ranking on her site, put it on her LinkedIn Pulse as an article, pop, it’s now up there. And so what, again, what is old?
Barnacle SEO, you know, we used to talk about hey, you know create barnacles and they create on these little subsites And we’re like, okay, I guess but those aren’t really good links, but I’ll do it and then like hey that works it’s like The particles got bigger and the the particles have a life of their own now, you know So it’s the term isn’t quite right and to call them barnacle, but it’s more like
Distributive. It’s like market share owning like having more
Chris Turnbull: You’re talking about you talking about parasite SEO is that you’re using barnacle and parrot. Okay, cool. Yeah, just
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, Parasite SEO, Barnacle SEO. But they’re not parasite. They’re more, it’s more like arms of an octopus now. You know, like show, like if you think of your, I think, I’m going to float this. Tell me if you think this is true. It used to be that the website was the absolutely true dead center of your marketing universe.
And when it came to SEO and everything and you had kind of, know, SEO or social media could be kind of separate and you were building links, but you were building links to get your website ranked higher. Nine, times out of 10, like maybe one in a hundred links that you got was actually like a partnership that actually sent traffic. Now it feels like you must have tentacles going out
That draw people back, but the arms in and of themselves have their own value. And you could have like a very valuable referral relationship. And we need to, as SEOs, consider the multi-channel approach and not think of ourselves just as SEOs. We need to be better positioned in the ecosystem to take advantage of those marketing emails as much as placement of a citation.
Doing a press release and getting something on Reddit. Getting a huge upvoted post on Reddit now carries as much weight and value as getting a huge backlink did in 2015, right?
The Future of Search & Websites
Chris Turnbull: 100% 100% Yeah, I actually started writing a blog just the other week and it was mainly to kind of get my thoughts out something I wanted to use as promotional piece but to send to clients and speak about in terms of saying this is where SEO has been this is what’s happening at the moment and this is where I think it’s going and I got stuck toward the end where I was thinking about where it’s going because obviously the AI search mode for Google just got released in UK I think
Last week or two weeks ago, whenever it was. And I’ve been doing some tests. I’ve had a few clients in a screenshot saying, good. We’re showing up. And it’s a, it’s a bit of a black box. And when I started writing the end of the blog saying where, where the future of search is going, that’s where I started to get a bit stuck. And I was thinking, well, what does Google want? Does Google want this sort of platform where it’s going to eventually five, 10 years time AI keeps going, got this AI assistant, but it knows your preferences really well. It knows you as a person really well.
And when you’re searching for something, it’s taking all of that into consideration. do they really want, obviously everyone used to visit, you know, 20, 30, 40 sites. And then a few years ago, became about everyone just goes to five sites, you know, that people just go to Google, YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, whatever it might be. Is it, is that what face Google wants to basically, you know, grow into this, just to become this search assistant that has all these different, has all this data as you were talking about.
And it just lists it all. You don’t need to go to Facebook anymore. You don’t need to go to Tik TOK. We’ve got it all indexed. I’ll show you your favorite restaurants, top Tik TOK. I’ll take something from the Reddit post about it that mentions it. And it kind of gives it to you in this AI overview. Is that where we’re heading in terms of search? And that’s where it got me thinking about the website. was like, what role does a website play in terms of authority? And like you’re saying, being that absolute central hub of SEO. And we can already see it’s kind of, know,
Drifting away from that. And is there a post website world? What does that look like? I mean, these are all, I suppose, big, almost existential questions when it comes to search and things like that, and nobody can predict. But it’s definitely been playing on my mind thinking, you know, how relevant or how long does a website stay relevant and how much is needed in this LLM future?
The Content Creation Paradox
Jeremy Rivera: It’s a challenge because you know, you’re right. Like it picks up on the brand entity, but that’s spread out over multiple, you know, TikToks, Instagrams, you know, Reddit posts, all of these differing signals. It’s like Google wants to make it harder for itself, I guess, like, and distributing it out. But that’s kind of the outcome of it. But I it becomes
Very problematic very quickly of, you know, what is the incentive of these businesses to invest in the marketing that Google is leeching off of. You know, like, they’re…
Like how incentivized are we to create, you know, they want us to create content for humans, but they’re sending their robot to consume that content. So create content for humans for our bot to consume, but don’t create it for robots. You know, don’t you dare create stuff that just is going to rank because that’s bad, but also create a ton of content for us to consume so that we can give it to our users.
It’s contradictory. And I don’t see a clear solution either from, you know, perplexity or chat GPT. The problem there is the same because, you know, there is no pure content anymore for LLMs to consume because we’re all using LLM tools to generate content. you know, I think it’s what 2014 was the last, like the oldest date before
Or 2012 before LLMs started generating any content on the internet. So everything predating that is pure to train on and everything after that is tainted to a particular degree and more and that’s going to accelerate more and more and more. So there’s definitely a information gain issue. I think part of it is solved in things like what we’re doing now, know, two experts discussing it
Recording content and there’s a hell of a lot of podcasters. you know, maybe that’s, you know, their plan is to, you know, extract and harvest from human to human conversation to generate new content going forward as their pure signal. you know, at some point what we know is going to be infected by what LLMs said. Right?
Chris Turnbull: Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. It’s kind of like, you know, does art influence life or does life influence art? And then it starts going round and round. think, yeah, where does it start and end? But I mean, I suppose it kind of brings me on to, like you say, people, you know, if it’s going to, you know, you can trust content that’s created on a podcast, can see it’s two people talking, is our LLM is going to be fed off of that. But when it comes to doing that for your client as well.
And actually providing that service for your clients. How are you tackling that in terms of, okay, we know that this is, you know, this is basically an octopus that we need to kind of service now in terms of SEO and we need to be here, here and here. And actually there’s so many new skills. it all search? How, where does the line draw between what is SEO and what should your social media person be doing?
The Blurring Lines of Digital Marketing Roles
Jeremy Rivera: That is something that I am currently asking myself. I mean, I converted my keyword research SaaS to just basically be a white label podcasting content marketing dynamic engine. So I find hosts and I find guests, turn that into content and turn that into links.
As a white label service for agencies to solve that particular problem. But that I also in that process, I’m creating like, hey, here’s your from this interview, here’s what you should be posting on these five social media channels. Here’s your LinkedIn pulse. Here’s a post for medium. Here’s a post for your subreddit. Like, so do I as the SEO then like go post to these social media channels or do I hand that off to a
Social media person and now is that social media person also, you know, posting to these owned distribution network sites, you know, because they’re that more of those are coming. Was it I think voice study AI like they allow you to monetize your content, but they allow followed links. So there’s so much reason to publish there as medium as subreddits, you know, showing up. So
Those are going to crop up more and more. So is that social media? Is that, you know, that’s why I think of myself more as a, know, SEO is a factor. How what we do is going to be more integrated with what used to be separate channels. And I’m very much more of a business consultant, a digital marketing business consulting in my freelance work.
Talking about, okay, well, you know, how are we going to show up as a brand across the board? Do you have your drip email campaign set up to capture soft leads? What are you creating for people to come back to creating your own platform and brand and value separate from search? You know, because you, you got to grow your audience and Google is only going to continue to choke that audience volume.
And so, yes, it’s more distilled so that it means more what actions those people, when they come to your site, you can’t afford to have a site that has a 0.5 % conversion rate anymore because you’re getting one, one, or you’re getting 50 % of the visitors who were before. You need to bump that, you need to pump that up. So it does change what we do. Maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t, I think it is a,
Ultimately a good thing, but it is hybridization of our skills and not being stuck to these labels or concepts of like, there’s a social media manager. Maybe that’s more of like our distribution, our content and audience acquisition manager.
The Evolution of SEO Roles & Agency Growth
Chris Turnbull: Yeah, yeah. And do you know what I think? So I started freelance in about 2016, 2017, about eight years ago or so. And I think it was quite straightforward then in terms of saying, okay, I do SEO and PPC. That’s what I do. This is how can help. This is how it works. And I’ve kind of gone through that phase of, well, I want as much work on as I can get to begin with, especially when you start a new, you’re okay, I need to get clients on. So you start saying yes to everything. And I do feel that the…
Well, I’ll go back to where it So going from the freelancer through to trying to transition into an agency. And now we’ve gone into quite a niche agency. And the reason for that is I noticed that, and I think I’m sure you saw it as well, that as you try to get into a bit more consultancy, there seems to be this trend of like fractional CMOs or the term fractional has popped up massively over two years. And I think that’s probably because as I felt as a freelancer, as know, search expanded.
People were asking me, well, can you do this? Can you do that? And I was like, I suppose it is kind of SEO and I’m taking it all on. And then, you know, four years of doing it. And, and I had a bit of the refresh over COVID actually gave me a good break to think I need to drift away from this. want to start an agency. So I had that break to do it in. but yeah, I was asked to do so much more. was thinking, I don’t even know if I can do half this stuff. I don’t know what’s my role with it and everything like that. I can see why somebody would then be.
Birth to be a fractional CMO because then it’s like, okay, well, nobody can be an expert in executing all of these tasks. Like it has to be this sort of single person that can kind of coordinate it all and have an idea of where to take it. And obviously they are just a, it’s just consultancy at the end. But you know, it’s kind of got, they’ve added this extra layer onto it. But you know, and it’s kind of meant to be the leader of the strategy and everything. And
I kind of noticed the same sort of thing was happening when I first started the agency. We started taking more and more on, and that’s when we kind of went into, okay, we’re just doing performance marketing for local service businesses. And that’s because I know what it involves. I know how to service it. And I know what we don’t do as well. Well, of course, until organic search has become, you know, eight different things now. So that’s something to think about, but yeah, it is interesting to kind of see this growth happen over the last eight years or so into just, you have to now know.
Thousands of things to just be considered like a consultant in marketing or CMO.
Jeremy Rivera: I absolutely agree. I’ve talked to a dozen now, different fractional CMOs, and basically it boils down to, yeah, I’m a…
They can’t afford, they don’t want to pay $200,000 for a C-level position, but they want somebody in a semi C-level position who can orchestrate all of this insane stuff. Because finding a talent that they can forever adopt into that position seems too hard.
There’s so many loops, hoops to jump through. So it’s kind of the flexibility of being able to fire, you know, an agency, but also bringing somebody into the structure of the company itself. Whereas, you know, with an agency, you still have to have that, you have to have buy-in, but you also have to have like a key position that you’re interacting with. And so like their job becomes to manage the agency. You know, so some people like, well,
You know, I’ll just hire somebody who can then interact with all of our agencies, you know, whether they’re just SEO or email or whatever. So I kind of get the evolution of it. It’s fascinating because you’re right, Fractional did not exist as a concept. I think it’s new within this last six to eight years period. And what it means for our industry is certainly different.
That’s fascinating. I love it. Tell me a little bit more about Catalyst. Are you on a particular social media platform? What’s coming up for you guys if people want to get connected with you as we kind of wind down the interview?
Wrapping Up & Where to Connect
Chris Turnbull: Yeah, so Catalyst, like I said, we’re very focused on just being performance marketing for local service business owners at the moment. And I’m really focused on that. So I’ve recently created a school community around, you know, just kind of help local service business owners kind of, you know, find information, not just about marketing, but all sorts of things, you know, local politics, you know, accounting advice, growth, whatever it might be, because, you know, that’s a battle itself.
And I think trying to understand marketing is a layer on top of it. So I’ve recently created that school community so people can kind of come together and discuss that. I find them useful for, I mean, a few agency owner ones. So I find those really useful, but I’ll do the same. And yeah, that’s probably the biggest and newest thing that kind of started recently.
Jeremy Rivera: Awesome. Well, are you on more on LinkedIn, Twitter, Slack? If people want to hang out and chat with you, shoot the Braille. Where can they find you socially?
Chris Turnbull: LinkedIn. Yeah, LinkedIn’s the best. I am quite active on there. I’ve got a newsletter on there just about, you know, how small business owners can kind of start fixing their marketing, mainly around performance marketing based things, SEO, pay per click, email content, all that sort of stuff. Not too big on Instagram. I’m not charismatic enough for that, I don’t think. So yeah, mainly, yeah, shoot me a DM on LinkedIn if anybody wants to connect or anything like that. It’s probably the best place.
