Extended Version with Direct Quotes
Host: Jeremy Rivera (Unscripted SEO Podcast)
Guest: Katie Wagner, President & CEO of KWSM Digital Marketing, read the episode recap here
From CNN to Digital Marketing
Jeremy Rivera: Hello, I’m Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted SEO podcast host. I’m here with Katie Wagner, who’s going to introduce herself, her company, and what makes her an expert in her field.
Katie Wagner: Hi Jeremy, I’m Katie Wagner. I’m the president and CEO of KWSM, a digital marketing agency. We specialize in lead generation.
We’ve been doing it for 15 years. I started the agency in 2010. Before that, I was a television anchor. I spent 15 years as a journalist. I retired from CNN in 2009 and then opened the agency.
“I think there are a lot of crossover skills. And certainly today with the way SEO is going, brand journalism has never been more important. And so we really lean into that at the agency.”
The Evolution of SEO: A New Landscape
Jeremy Rivera: I love that perspective. I’m going to pick your brain so hard on this because from my perspective…
SEO has moved out of the niche moment where we were Google reverse engineers. That was it. Now we have to re-enter, because we had that funneling moment. We had AltaVista, Yahoo, MSN, before it became Bing, you know, Google just grew and grew until it just like sat so fat in the middle and gave so much traffic and it was relatively easy.
The bad, you know, black hat SEO was really easy to separate out and say, well, if you’re buying a ton of links from spam farms, yeah, that’s bad and you’re going to get slapped out. That was super easy.
But then we got rich snippets and then rich snippets have now turned into AI overviews. We got the helpful content update. We got the ridiculous posturing around E-E-A-T. And now we have the new layer of both AI overviews and Gemini, but then we have these interloper LLM based channels and search mechanisms, ChatGPT, Claude, and the like that are eating up that top of the funnel.
I think that what good SEOs always were doing, we were finding link building opportunities that were actually, you know, credentialed places, mentions of a business, a story, somebody writing about an event. These were all things that were in the tool chest for SEOs, but I don’t know why they got such neglect. Maybe because it was just easier to talk about, you know, getting guest posts and you know, how, what percentage of anchor text should be targeted to the page versus branded.
But I see so much change in the ecosystem. I would like your perspective on how journalism and the journalistic approach fits into the SEO perspective throughout time.
Brand Journalism: The Unchanging Bedrock
Katie Wagner: Yeah, absolutely. Well, it’s never a dull moment. That’s for sure. We’ve certainly seen a lot of change.
“But for me, the journalistic perspective is sort of the bedrock that hasn’t changed. It’s just shifted its place in our content strategy.”
“So for me, brand journalism is creating deeper stories around the humans in a business. These things feature interviews with our clients, case studies, stats, metrics, like it’s really deep content that talks about specific instances of our clients doing whatever they do best, products and services and that sort of thing.”
“But it’s more about the use case and the examples of that use case than it is about features and benefits.”
And that content used to be most of what we created for our clients and we could rank it pretty well. Like you said, we could link out to studies and stats and things. We could plant it and have it bring in a lot of impressions and a lot of clicks and a lot of traffic.
The Two-Tier Content Strategy
“It’s more bottom of the funnel content and we have to create this new layer of top of the funnel content that is aimed at the AI overviews and providing the basic information that doesn’t have to be deep. It’s more informational, educational, and it’s not designed to convert because my agency specializes in lead generation, but we don’t try to convert with that AI overview content.”
“What we’re trying to do is get mentioned there to show up there because there’s, in my opinion, anecdotal evidence that the more you show up in those overviews, the more your deeper content gets seeded in the first page rankings and you get traffic from the search engine results page.”
Katie explains the strategy further:
“And so what we do is create that top of funnel content that’s just educational, it’s building credibility, it’s not designed to convert, it’s just designed to educate our audience. And then those brand journalism pieces that are designed to convert, that are designed to hit people later on in the decision funnel, we then plant those, they show up on the first page.”
The Quality Over Quantity Result
“We get fewer clicks than we have, but most of those clicks will convert because at that point they’ve got the educational information they need on the SERP, but they’re clicking through really only to convert now.”
“So we see a lot more leads being generated from each click than we have in the past. And I attribute that to the deeper brand journalism content we’re creating and placing lower.”
The Traffic Reality: Stop the Gaslighting
Jeremy Rivera: I think that is the flip side of what the alligator mouth disconnects. It’s a shame that Google is lying to us. It’s a shame that they’re saying, there’s totally, there’s equal or there’s even more traffic. Stop lying. Stop trying to gaslight us. We know there isn’t.
Just acknowledge it and just say, yes, we are eating your lunch. But if you, you know, but the traffic that we’re sending you is more qualified. I think that that is true, that there is more. Because if you do happen to get a click through on your citation from an LLM, and you’ve tracked it, that’s a much deeper query.
Jeremy shares his personal experience:
“I use Claude every day to generate content, to write my kids homeschool curriculum at the co-op that I just taught at this morning. Claude helped me come up with the survival guide workbook that we’re working through. But when I wanted to get that first-hand experience or see videos of how to actually change that twine, change a raspberry bush into cordage, that’s something you have to see.”
“The type of information I could get out of LLMs was kind of limited. And you know, you still have to go deeper and you have to get specific sources and you have to have firsthand accounts and you have to have video showing it.”
Embracing the New Reality
Katie Wagner: Well, and I think if we think about the end user to our clients’ clients, there’s still a place for all that AI content and all the overview content. It is still building credibility for the brand.
“I don’t actually care that fewer traffic, less traffic is coming back to the website. I care that more of it converts and that’s, if we can let go of the ego around, you know, I’m getting less click through, I’m getting less traffic to the website.”
“In my business, because we’re lead gen, I don’t really have ego in those numbers as long as a percentage of it is actually turning into customers for my clients.”
“And so I think some of it is like, yeah, it hurt our feelings at first and it was hard to swallow. But then if you take a step back, you say, well, wait, this world isn’t bad as long as you know how to play in it.”
Beyond Conversions: Revenue-Focused Marketing
Jeremy Rivera: I think that that focus is interesting and it’s a step further into the ecosystem than a lot of SEOs usually played. I always took a lot of extra steps to understand that conversion rate and then the secondary conversion rate.
Because just because you capture somebody’s information on a form or they make a call or they submit their information through a form of some type, join a community, sign up for a tool or make a phone call, there’s still more to that process. And a lot of SEOs just called it a day. They would look at, I got fantastic conversion rate off of this page. You can read more about building holistic SEO strategies in our other content.
“Well, I’m sorry friend, but that didn’t cut it then and it certainly is going to cut it even less now because the value, you’re right, the value is condensed and when you get half as many clicks and you aren’t paying attention to leads, you don’t know if you’re getting the same amount of leads and you might not know how many sales came out of that.”
Jeremy asks about the lead qualification process, MQLs, SQLs, and feedback loops.
Katie Wagner: Yeah, and I think the answer to that depends really on the type of business.
“But one of the things that we do when we sign a client is we vet that process. How do they follow up with leads? What does that sales process look like? What does their nurturing process look like? Because you’re right, a conversion on a website is only half the battle. Getting that all the way to a client is a process.”
Revenue-First Metrics
“I like metrics just as much as the next person does. But what I really like is revenue.”
“And so we are talking to our clients about, did that sale convert? Was that an ideal client? How much was the value of that client? I can tell you for each of our clients, how much revenue are we generating every month, every year, every five years, not just how many clicks did we have, how many conversions did we have. I actually need to know that that translated into money because that’s the ROI we’re providing.”
“And so we’re also not only concerned with the conversion, we’re also concerned with remarketing and the nurturing and that process of getting that lead to an actual paying customer client. So we spend a lot of time talking to our customers about that.”
Katie describes their ongoing engagement:
“We have weekly calls with their sales team about, tell me about the prospects you’ve talked to from our efforts? Are they good? Are they not good? Have you closed them? Have you not closed them? If not, why not? We’ll go deep on that.”
Customer Research and Reverse Engineering Success
Katie reveals a critical part of their process:
“And actually at the beginning of an engagement, we actually interview our clients’ customers, the happy ones, to talk about when you were looking for this type of service or product, how did you begin that search? What were you looking for? What appealed to you or didn’t appeal to you?”
“We try to get into their head about what they need to see in search results. What kind of content are they looking for to be able to convert down the road?”
“And then we sort of reverse engineer and build programs around that. And that can be different for every client.”
Content Requirements
“And then the top of the funnel content is easy. It’s educational, it’s industry-based, it’s general FAQs. But they must have information for this deeper brand journalism content, meaning do you have case studies and testimonials and stats and metrics about your own business that we can leverage?”
“Can we make these deep credibility pieces about work you’ve actually done in the world that will help you convert? And when I can get somebody to click on one of those pieces on a search engine page and go back to the website, they are only going there to convert.”
“And so it’s a mix. We’re looking at the whole funnel before we get started, doing a lot of deep research and then reverse engineering what that process needs to look like.”
Building Customer Loyalty Through Content
Jeremy Rivera: I love that idea. I was talking to my friend, Michael McDougald of Right Thing Agency, about vector embeddings and understanding relevance score. He said, one of the best tests of your relevance is did it come from one of your customers?
Matt Brooks of SEOteric mentioned treating your site not only as a first look station, but thinking about what are you offering to bring them back?
What are you providing on that site that people are going to be returning for again and again?
Jeremy emphasizes:
“Because sometimes, you know, like if you’re offering like a CPR training class, yes, you know, you do want to have like some general stuff about your CPR process. But you also should have those guides, you know, when they’re doing those classes and say, okay, go home and study. This is how much weight you should be putting on. Go look at the compression, download the mnemonic from the website, go grab this tool, watch this tutorial. All of these things should be looping back your existing customers to reinforce your brand, arm them and make things shareable and interesting.”
Near Bound Marketing and Customer Journey Mapping
Katie Wagner: Yes, I love so much about that. I’m going to call that near bound marketing.
“But one of the things I wanted to mention is we actually put IP detection and heat maps on every client site so that we can see them engaging with those resources. And when they come back, we know what they’ve done. We know how long they’re spending.”
“And that’s a customer journey that you can map. How many times does somebody come back? What do they engage with before they convert, so to speak, and become a paying customer? And I love that idea of becoming a resource and really being the hub for all the information they need around your particular area of expertise.”
The Power of Strategic Partnerships
“What you’re actually talking about is something I call near bound marketing, which is marketing through strategic partners into new audiences that already have trust with those partners. And sometimes the partner is your existing client.”
“It doesn’t have to be a business sometimes it’s getting your customer or your client to talk to their audience about how much you’ve helped them. And you can leverage that not only in a referral sense, but you can create a lot of content using that customer.”
Katie illustrates with an example:
“If you’re doing a case study or a testimonial video or something like that, and you leverage that as content you’re putting out there, now you’re getting in front of their audience and they’re like, hey, that’s Jeremy. And he used Katie’s company. I should call Katie’s company because I trust Jeremy.”
“Anytime you can leverage those additional people in your ecosystem, that’s the warmest lead you can get. That’s the best way to send somebody to your site.”
Referral Relationships and Professional Networks
Jeremy Rivera: Larry H. Parker got me $3.5 million. You know, there was those ad campaigns in the 90s based off of, you know, them having these quotes from people that won big with their firm. And, it’s whether it’s a law office, you know, or if you’re a commercial real estate agent, like there is proof in that pudding.
Jeremy shares a personal story about buying his house and the value of referrals from his real estate agent Kate:
“I remember when I bought this house here and I was talking to Kate, our real estate agent, she was more helpful… I have an inspector guy. You got to also, as a service business owner, you should really, if you’re a custom home builder, I work with several custom home builders, and I always encourage them to create referral relationships.”
He emphasizes the two-way nature:
“You may subcontract out to them but you may also get a pitch that doesn’t right size, you know, it doesn’t fit your criteria and you can actually make a referral amount off of it but you also like it’s a two-way street of being having that card having that call of like you know what that’s more custom carpentry and Joe does a really good job and then you’ve made a connection of that person to Joe and maybe they come back for something else. It doesn’t have to always be extractive.”
Case Study: Save Fry Oil – Building Brand Recognition
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, I mean, it weaves in and out because one brand that I worked with, Save Fry Oil, they have an industrial product that makes fry oil cleaner. Awesome, right?
The Problem
“But you literally could not search their brand name. When you search Save Fry Oil, it would come up with, you know, like how to save your fry oil with spaces or altogether, it would not show their brand name.”
“And even though they had existed online for a year, they’re real products. They’re international. They had a website. They’ve done a lot of marketing. They’ve done paid ads. They’ve done social media ads. But they needed Google to understand their brand.”
Jeremy describes the fundamental problems with their website:
“And so they didn’t even have an about page in their homepage. Half of it was actually because things were in development were like fuzzed over or fuzzed out… Oh, my thinking here is like, don’t have these three service lines. So like, we only have the Frylow and the other two are TBD. I’m like, then they shouldn’t be on the page. You should be talking about what you can do.”
“And when you get more stuff add it, but like, this is all pictures and you didn’t actually say what you did. You never actually said your brand name anywhere on the page in text. It was just in an image. They didn’t have an about page saying where they were based, how many employees they had. What were their sales numbers were like there weren’t any articles proving that they existed there weren’t any online references there were no anchor text that said save fried oil.”
The Solution: Restaurant Talks Podcast
“So we created a ‘Restaurant Talks by Save Fry Oil’ podcast and started having chefs interview chefs about the challenges of running a cost-efficient kitchen and one of those things was of course devices and Frylow is one of those devices, but the whole thing was actually targeted towards restaurateurs.”
Jeremy notes an important detail about proper terminology:
“There’s no N. Duncan, the owner, is very big on pointing out there’s no N in restaurateur. That’s restaurateur.”
The Strategy and Results
“But the point was to actually have those interesting conversations between chefs for chefs to consume on social media to share it out and talking to popular chefs having popular chefs with Instagram followings interviewing other popular chefs and then getting the blowback the cross-channel flow of they mentioned Frylow.”
“They started getting inquiries and queries and we finally got Google to recognize we existed as a brand and now organic traffic is up 248% over the last six months.”
The Holistic Approach
“So it’s just like this combination of doing real world stuff and having real conversations. But also they also put out the great nine reasons to clean your fry oil cleaner… You know, there was educational as well as the comparative. How does Frylow comparative fry less? You know, A versus B, like you got to do, you got to do it all.”
“Like it’s kind of like you got to connect, you know, you got to connect your, have a deliverable that can be downloaded that captures an email address. You got to have a drip campaign. You got to have follow up on your leads. And it’s so much, I don’t envy businesses because you have to do so much more now, but it’s also a great time to be a consumer because in order to show up, these businesses actually have to play the game in a deeper way.”
Katie Wagner: They do. Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.
“You have to have that entire ecosystem or the infrastructure created and it is good for consumers, right? There’s so much educational information out there for us. We can go pretty deep before ever being sold to, before we have to engage.”
Katie analyzes the Save Fry Oil strategy:
“You’re giving a great example of a brand that became brand journalists and put out their own media, their own content that was a piece of content with value in and of itself beyond promoting the product. And I think that’s a really important play for brands these days.”
“Can you put out really engaging, valuable content that doesn’t necessarily directly promote your products, but can welcome consumers into that ecosystem, educate them, nurture them, and get them to ask the right questions that then may lead back to your product or your service eventually.”
PR and Media Relations in the Digital Age
Jeremy Rivera: Let’s talk about PR press releases and pushing digital media content and making connections with existing journalists or publications. I feel like that’s an under-understood, a poorly understood area of marketing, digital marketing. I think that holds a lot of value.
Having come from that world originally, I assume that you’re using some of those tactics, still using some of those connections and tactics now. What does that look like? What should agencies or SEOs be aware of, as far as opportunity or pitfalls? And what are some of the basics that you use in your team?
The Evolution of Press Releases
Katie Wagner: Well, yes, we are using a lot of PR.
“You remember the days when you could put out a press release because you wanted the link and it was great for SEO? And those days are over. That’s not why we do press releases anymore.”
“These days, we are doing it to leverage journalists, just like that near bound marketing we were talking about where we’re leveraging clients. We are leveraging journalists to reach an audience that already trusts them and have them talk about our brand.”
The Press Digest Strategy
“The relationships my agency has with journalists are important, of course, to get stories placed. And we do something like we send out a press digest, we call it, where if there are topical news stories of the day, we’ll pitch journalists on here’s how my client’s company relates to that, or here’s how they can comment on that.”
Katie shares her insider perspective:
“And what I know, Jeremy, from being a journalist for many years is that if you make it easier for them, that is a welcome thing. They have to create a lot of content throughout the day and the week. And so if we’re saying, hey, there’s this topical thing, you’re going to do a story on it anyway, here’s an angle where you can interview my client about this particular thing, they will likely pick that up.”
Building Trust Through Media Placement
“And we get our clients placed, whether it’s quoted in an article online or a TV spot or radio interview or even a podcast. All of those things are valuable. Yes, there’s a link back to our client’s website, but more than that, we’re planting their expertise in front of the audience of that news outlet that already has trust built there.”
“And just by appearing in that space, we’re transferring that trust and credibility. And that does make warmer leads. If you hear somebody on a radio spot or on a podcast, and then you go check out their website, you’re going with the intent to go deeper. And that is a much warmer visit to the website than just coming across it organically.”
Content Repurposing from Media Appearances
“And so we leverage those relationships in the near bound space quite a bit. And then we also use it to create content, right? Every media appearance gives us the opportunity to cut it up into reels or to create a blog post about that experience or that tip or information that was being shared.”
Katie explains their comprehensive approach:
“And so you and I were talking offline about the opportunity to take a piece of content and iterate it into many, many different types of content on different platforms. And we do that with every opportunity we get, right? Because it’s that holistic surrounding approach.”
“So if my client has a little TV spot and they’re on for a minute and a half, we take that and we make three different reels out of it. And then we publish a blog and then it goes out in the newsletter and we’re constantly using that as top of the funnel and bottom of the funnel and nurturing content depending on the platform.”
Create Once, Distribute Forever
Jeremy Rivera: I think Ross Simmonds has probably trademarked it by now, so hopefully he doesn’t come after me, but “create once and distribute forever.” It’s a consistent tagline and he’s not wrong.
“There’s so much value to a half hour podcast is 30,000 to 40,000 words. And it’s first person. I think that it is the ultimate expression of keyword research when you have two subject matter experts hashing it out because in order to have that depth of conversation over that amount of time, this wouldn’t come up in SEMrush, this wouldn’t be in Ahrefs, these are things where we’ve cut deeper and deeper and deeper.”
Podcasts as Research and Content
Jeremy continues:
“If you’re having your client go onto podcasts, you’re creating a podcast between two subject matter experts like I do for SEO Arcade, then you’re generating really deep keyword research in a better way.”
“It’s fantastic too for sales research like if you are a B2B and you’re targeting a particular type of customer then you should be trying to get those guests those people as guests and ask them what are their pain points, what are they concerned about, how are they choosing this X service that your side business does, and creating great content in the meantime. It’s a fantastic way to go about industry research as much as it is to generate content.”
Thought Leadership Through Content
Katie Wagner: Absolutely. Well, and it plays into thought leadership, right?
“Putting your voice out there and having that piece of content that positions you as somebody with high expertise, I think is really important. And that’s the kind of content that comes up in those deeper funnel places and can help convert.”
“So anytime you’re creating content for your business, I think there are myriad benefits and advantages and ways to use it.”
Every Brand Must Be a Content Creator
“And some people aren’t fans of this, but I think these days every brand has to be a content creator and they have to be journalists of their own brand and putting out their own stuff or else they’re going to get lost in the sea of content out there.”
Katie warns about the competition:
“Either from brands that are already doing it or from people that are using AI to create just volume, right? There’s just a lot more stuff out there and it’s easy to get lost unless you are leveraging your real expertise and your real ability to create content that only you or only your brand can create.”
Understanding Business Fundamentals
Jeremy Rivera: What I love about that is that it starts to connect SEOs and marketing with understanding profit margin and pricing of products and services. I feel like a lot of SEOs and digital marketers are maybe too afraid to get into that because it’s like, “that’s business stuff.”
“But really knowing what the profit margins are for that product line, for that service model, understanding the economies of scale. If they do land a really big client, how many more people will they need and is that easy or hard for them to do? Are they ready to scale?”
Jeremy warns about over-delivering:
“Sometimes, deriving more leads to the site can be a bad thing if they are not prepared for it and they get too big of a fish and they get over their skis, they’re going to have reputation problems because they try to take on somebody too big and then they have an unstable, unattainable business model because that one client goes away and their business goes away.”
Marketing’s Evolved Role
Katie Wagner: Marketing in general has changed so much over the past decade or so.
“I think it’s our job to understand those business metrics now. I don’t actually think I can do as good a job in my role as a lead generator if I don’t understand all the profit margins and the different margins on the services and what is more likely to lead to more work for them and what’s less likely.”
“I mean, all of that I think is actually fundamental to creating a lead generation or an SEO or a marketing strategy these days. And so I’m nervous about people who are scared to ask those questions because I can’t do my job without knowing those things.”
The Ecosystem of Referrals and Trust
Katie returns to the referral concept:
“When we talk about Kate who referred the inspector to you, like the other thing we do with those referral or tangential relationships is we build trust with the prospect, even when we don’t hire or they don’t hire us themselves, we build trust with them.”
“And what’s to say that prospect won’t use the person you referred, but then also remember you for one of their friends that needs what you do. All of that is good out in the world. And that’s the ecosystem that I think you have to build around a lead generation or a marketing system these days.”
The End of Single-Tactic Marketing
“Gone are the days when one tactic in a vacuum is going to generate all the business you need. And I remember 15 years ago when I started the agency, that was true. We could do SEO in a vacuum or digital ads or something else, and it would work. And these days, it doesn’t work alone. You have to have that entire infrastructure built out.”
“And I think that’s, for me, why even agencies that specialize need to have partners in other areas or agencies like mine that own all of those areas. I think that’s really important these days.”
Connect with Katie Wagner
Jeremy Rivera: Let the people know where they can connect with you. Do you have a book or a webinar or content that they should be reading, a recent article? Is there a preferred social media platform that you go hardest on?
Katie Wagner: Absolutely. So my website is kwsmdigital.com and there’s a resources tab on there where you can see a lot of industry expert webinars and articles and podcasts we’ve done. So a lot of good digital marketing and lead gen content there.
And then the social media I’m on the most is LinkedIn. So it’s just Katie Wagner. I’m wearing a red dress in the picture and I would love to connect and continue conversations.
Jeremy Rivera: Thank you so much for your time. I’ll make sure that gets linked in the show notes and I’ll see you on LinkedIn.
Katie Wagner: That sounds great. Thanks, Jeremy.
Key Takeaways
- Brand Journalism is Essential: The journalistic approach creates deeper, more authentic content that converts better than traditional promotional content.
- Two-Tier Content Strategy: Create educational content for AI overviews (top funnel) and deeper brand journalism for conversion (bottom funnel).
- Quality Over Quantity: Fewer, more qualified clicks that convert are more valuable than high traffic volumes.
- Revenue is the Real Metric: Track actual revenue generated, not just leads, conversions, or traffic.
- Customer Research First: Interview happy customers to understand their journey and reverse engineer your content strategy.
- Near Bound Marketing: Leverage existing relationships, partnerships, and customer networks for warmer leads.
- Ecosystem Approach Required: Single tactics no longer work in isolation; comprehensive marketing infrastructure is essential.
- Content Repurposing Maximizes Value: Every piece of content should be repurposed across multiple platforms and formats.
- PR for Audience Access: Modern PR is about accessing trusted audiences through journalists, not link building.
- Business Fundamentals Matter: Modern marketers must understand profit margins, scaling capabilities, and business models to be effective.
