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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, Brian LoFermento, but I am not the only Brian in today's episode, because we have got an incredible entrepreneur and a great guest here for you today, because we are going to be talking about something that I feel like it has lost its sex appeal over the past few years in the world of marketing and social media and all these gimmicks and trends.
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But, at the end of the day, search engine optimization is so important for us and, spoiler alert the more that other people ignore it for sexier alternatives, the more that there is an opportunity for you to excel when it comes to SEO.
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And we're doing it with an amazing guest, someone who loves SEO and is amazing at what he does.
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The first testimonial that I read about today's guest, someone said I wanna work with Brian forever.
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So let me introduce you to him.
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His name is Brian Odo.
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After seven years of marketing agency life, Brian ditched the nine to five to start his own search engine optimization and UX solo consultant business called Odo Digital.
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While traveling the country with his now fiance, While living in six cities over the past two years, Brian has been fortunate enough to work with large enterprise brands like Amex, Charles Schwab and DirecTV, as well as many small local businesses.
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In addition to his agency, Odo Digital, he also started a newsletter, which I love the name of his newsletter.
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It is Free at Lance.
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So it's a little bit of a play on freelance Free at Lance, which provides tips for people looking to make the leap into self-employment.
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So this is someone who not only loves SEO, not only loves the user experience, but also loves business and entrepreneurship as well.
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So I'm excited about this one.
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I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Brian Odo.
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All right, Brian, I am so very excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first.
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Welcome to the show.
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Thank you so much for having me, Brian.
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I really appreciate it.
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Heck.
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Yes.
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Well, we are going to get into a lot of good stuff.
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You already heard me tease it a little bit.
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I feel like SEO is so often overlooked in today's world.
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But before we get to that stuff, I'm sure it plays into your background as well.
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So take us beyond the bio.
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Who's Brian?
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How'd you start doing all these cool things so?
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this was a story that actually got told me, I think a couple of years ago, because I don't remember it.
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But my mom told me that she knew that I was destined for entrepreneurship because in the second grade I got sent to the principal's office because I learned how to use a copy machine.
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I made copies of my own homework passes and I would sell them out of my locker for $5 a piece and so got a little bit of trouble there.
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But she knew ever since that moment, I think, I was just destined to be in this life, and so it started way back from then.
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That was my intro to entrepreneurship and then from there I had a fairly standard marketing timeline of joining an agency out in Chicago.
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I had gotten my start in account management and then from there moved to a couple of different ones, some that specialized more in the digital shelf SEO, amazon.
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So I loved combining the experience from more creative agencies and different channel backgrounds and then started working my way slowly to focus on SEO and that's really where I got my taste.
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And then, from that jumping off point to starting my own consultancy, I wanted to bring that back into the fold.
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So instead of just specializing SEO which is my bread and butter.
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It is what I love.
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I love combining it with just more holistic marketing practices and getting my clients excited about reaching the right consumers and feeling like they don't have to sacrifice their brand message and their voice and their user experience for the sake of a search engine or a bot which, when I start talking about SEO, sometimes their eyes glaze over.
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It's my job to educate them and make it feel like it's not this big bad wolf in the room that's going to take their marketing efforts away.
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It's something that is additive and can really help take their brand to new places.
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Yes, I love that overview, brian, especially because it seems like us two young Brians were just out there hustling in our very young days.
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I remember I was charging people 20 bucks to pop dents out of their car with like these shower suction cups that I had seen on late night television.
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So it's funny.
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You and I just saw that opportunity everywhere and you heard I'm going to use that as a segue for search engine optimization.
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It's a huge opportunity.
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It's always been since the advent of the internet.
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Now, of course, the algorithms have changed and the way that the world of SEO works has very much changed over the years.
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But I want to start there about the fact that it has lost a lot of its appeal because people they do have their eyes turned and their heads turned towards social media, towards marketing funnels, towards all these other things.
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Why is SEO still at the cornerstone of such an effective marketing strategy?
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Is?
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SEO still at the cornerstone of such an effective marketing strategy?
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Yeah, I think for one too.
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Maybe it's lost some of its appeal because it's been so ingrained into our life and even with the advent of AI and large language models and people using ChatGPT, one of the first things you do when you want to find information about something whether it's navigational, or you're doing it for education purposes, or even if you're ready to make a purchase or hire somebody usually your journey starts at a search engine, whether that is Google, YouTube again, or even now ChatGPT.
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So I think it just allows a lot of brands and players, especially for ones who might not have the budget for some of these sexier channels, to at least establish a presence.
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Let's get our website in order.
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Let's make sure people can find us.
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You know, I I think, even though there are so many sophisticated brands out there, there's still a lot of people that need our help to refresh their website and make it usable and functional and findable, so that when somebody hears about your brand, you're putting your best foot forward.
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So I think that's the first play and then from there, okay, can we actually build this out where you can become the face of this service or be at the forefront when somebody makes a search that your brand shows up.
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That's still so powerful, even though it is starting to look different and different as time goes on.
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Yeah, and I think one of the other unique things about SEO, brian, is that in most other marketing channels we can see instant results.
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I can make a social media post and I'll start getting likes within a few minutes, or I can launch a paid ad campaign on Facebook and start seeing clicks or, at the very least, impressions start coming through.
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Seo is a little bit of the dark arts you kind of alluded to in your overview, which is it's mysterious.
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People have no idea what they're getting when they sign up with someone who specializes in SEO.
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Talk to us about that unique nature of the fact that we do some work, and I want you to demystify what that work looks like.
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So we do some work today and we hope it starts generating traffic and getting us up the search engine results pages maybe months from now.
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Talk to us about the realities behind the scenes.
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Yeah, and I think that is such an important point when you hire an agency or a consultant, it's just the expectation setting and being able to communicate what a campaign should look like.
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And then what are those leading indicators?
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What does success look like?
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Because it might not translate, you might not get your ROI today, but how do we know that we're at least headed in the right direction?
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So that all of a sudden, that new web page turns into impressions and keyword rankings.
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All of a sudden, we're starting to get clicks and traffic, and then all of a sudden, we're starting to get conversions and now we can actually see that our efforts have been connected there.
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When I at first dove into SEO, when everybody would talk about, oh, what Google likes and Google's, it felt like they were talking about the Wizard of Oz and oh, there's hundreds of different ranking factors.
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I think so much of my job is helping communicate and cut through the noise in terms of what should we be prioritizing and paying attention to, and instead of focusing on the minutiae and a lot of times it's hey, we know we want to connect with these users because this is who you want to market towards.
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In order to do that, we are going to need these things and we're going to need to make sure that it's relevant, valuable, there's no technical blockers and then, at the end of the day, people are also talking about our brand as an authority in that space.
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So we look at that more so in those SEO pillars.
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I like to focus on that a lot more than the hundreds of small ranking factors, unless I'm obviously talking with another SEO and we want to get in the weeds.
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I do love talking about it, but in terms of client communication, it's very important.
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Yeah, I love the fact that you recognize.
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You know we could obviously geek out about this stuff for hours and hours and hours, Brian, but where I really want to go, because one of the distinctions that I don't think your average business owner understands of course, there's a million factors, but I want to keep it, at least in this part, high level with regards to on pagers SEO versus off page SEO, and I don't think people understand.
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I started back in 2008, my first business and backlinks back then.
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This is such a public confession.
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I've actually never said this anywhere, Brian, but we used to sell backlinks.
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That was a thing back in the early 2000s because Google and other search engines didn't know how to detect that type of stuff.
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Of course, they're so much smarter today and we'll talk about how smart search engines are these days, but talk to us about what the heck is a backlink.
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What's on-page SEO versus off-page SEO?
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Sure.
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So when we talk about on page, you can more or less think of it as content or the keywords that you're using on the page, and then the context that surrounds it.
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And so if I wanted to rank for accounting services, you have certain elements on the page your headline.
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On the back end there's a thing called a title tag.
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You want to make sure that both bots and users know that when they land on this page, this is generally what the page is about, and your copy should also reflect that, and so should your imagery and your testimonials should all be related to what that page is about.
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So the more specific and relevant and valuable you can make that.
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That is one key factor that a search engine would have to use.
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A search engine is kind of like a recruiter or a librarian.
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They're matchmakers.
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They need to scour the whole entire internet filled with thousands and millions and millions of web pages and go.
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These are the 10 best results that I could find that I hope provide value to you, the user, and so our job is to make sure that we are available and that Google and these search engines know like, hey, this is a really good choice If somebody is looking up for these keywords.
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Here's our proof.
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This is my resume, to show that recruiter that we deserve to get an interview, so to speak.
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So that's on page.
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That is one factor, one lever that I would argue is the most important.
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It's relevance and value.
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Now, off page SEO, or off site SEO, is how people talk about you, because, guess what, you can get a job that way too.
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If you know somebody that already works in the company or in the industry and they have work experience with you and they talk very highly of you to that recruiting manager, you do have a leg up.
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And so if all of these other reputable websites are saying, hey, you're the best source of information and they provide links in their content that point back to your website, they're basically telling Google and search engines hey, you can trust them when they're talking about this topic and because of that, you should rank them higher for those keywords that they are writing about.
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And so it is a great way to not only get referral traffic if that's part of their user journey, but a lot of it.
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Are these signals to say, hey, you can really trust this brand when they talk about this particular subject?
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Now, as you alluded to, there is a whole entire industry and a whole entire deliverable and PR and digital PR play that revolves around this, where people go out and try to find these opportunities to then link back to themselves.
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That's all part of the mechanism, but just in terms of the basic there on page is what you can control on your site and then off page is what everyone else is saying about you, which is also important because it helps build trust.
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Yeah, I love the analogies and the stories you put in such simple terms, brian, so huge kudos to you when it comes to educating people.
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In this regard, I always think about it as just social reputation.
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I mean, you can say that you're amazing at what you do, and that's one thing, and somebody else can say that you're amazing at what you do, but the truth is, I, as the search engine, have to ask well, that person who's saying that Brian is amazing at what he does, are they even credible?
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And so it creates this huge giant web of social reputation, and obviously we want to be on the good side of that.
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And so, with that in mind, brian, I know that so many people in the world of SEO, they want to talk about these technical elements, but what really makes you stand out and the reason why we invited you on the show is because you also really stress and emphasize and practice you should also be doing good business for users.
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We don't do all of these things solely for the search engine.
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So a lot of people might be thinking, as they're hearing this episode of where can I get those links?
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Talk to us about those are real.
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The good business type of links, the good business strategies, the end user copy that we can have on our pages.
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Talk to us about how we should integrate real life good business into these things that we're doing, as opposed to just doing it for the search engines.
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Yeah, and that's something to think about too is that you can't get paid in clicks.
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That's something I always tell my clients as well.
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You know you need to make sure that those clicks turn into customers, and so, even if you were to game an algorithm and appear at the top of search, if somebody interacts with your content and it doesn't resonate with them, you're not getting a customer and they're not going to be the ones to champion your message, and so, even if it works for a short amount of time, you are going to fall short as a brand, and the number one thing that can keep a brand going is them really enjoying the experience they have with you, and your product and your service needs to be really strong, and so we want to make sure that we are incorporating these good business practices.
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So, from a link perspective, even from like a local business perspective, you'd think about well who would be valuable enough, who has an audience that has already been built that we can tap into, because they've already earned the trust of whoever follows them, that when we say something and we recommend our brand, it's going to matter.
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So there might be some local listing pages, your chamber of commerce, if people on Facebook are mentioning your brand, even though, again, we can get into the technical aspect of like do versus no follow links, but still being able to put out valuable enough content that is shareable, providing resources to journalists, doing first party data and having your own studies that get traction, because you've become such an authority in the space that you know so-and-so just came out with a new study.
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Here's what they have to say.
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I think it really is creating this shareable content and then understanding the distribution platforms and how to again like, borrow audiences that have already been built, increasing your chances that people will come and then link back to you, versus going and like paying a vendor off of Fiverr that's going to promise you know the stars and the moon for you, yeah for sure which you and I both know that does happen.
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I want to give a real life story.
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Back when I started my soccer blog in 2008,.
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I was on the hunt for backlinks, of course, because I wanted to start getting more authority with regards to where I ranked, and what I started doing was just emailing other soccer blogs saying, hey, I'd love to write for you and just contribute really valuable content.
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All I ask for is a link at the bottom saying Brian is the chief writer at Premiership Talk, with a link back to my website.
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That's such a clear example of a really good collaboration, a powerful partnership that benefits all parties.
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And, brian, that's what I really appreciate about your services and the way that you approach SEO, which I want to tack onto it.
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Ux consulting, because we don't often see user experience consulting combined with SEO.
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Talk to us about that blending and in the intersection between SEO and UX, because we're obviously also gonna go with holistic website management shortly, but I want to start introducing all of these pieces so people can see how the entire puzzle looks at a macro level.
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so the first thing that I'll say is that I genuinely do love SEO and I find it really interesting.
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But above all else, and the reason why I even started my business, is because I really just love meaningful work and helping people and providing value and I don't really care what that looks like.
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I don't want to sell an SEO services if it's not the right channel for a business.
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I just want to help them, and so if that means doing UX, if that means even referring them out to a specialist in a different channel where I can't provide that service, I want to do that for them and I think that's the flexibility and the autonomy you have when you decide to do your own adventure.
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And then for me, just from, like a personal taste, like I love having different hobbies, I love having both an art and science, I like the technical aspect of SEO, but the user experience is okay.
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Great, you got them to your website.
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Is it usable?
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What does this design look like?
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Do you have, you know, this beautiful imagery?
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Is it easy to navigate?
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Because that is, at the end of the day, the ROI that a website owner and a CEO and a CMO would want to see out of it is making sure that their investment is ultimately you know they're they're getting more out of what they're trusting you with.
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So it's such a natural way to continue to keep a scope and a relationship going as well where you might build up all the fundamental principles of having really strong search presence.
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But then also, can we improve the user experience now that we actually do have more eyes on our site, you know, diving into CRO or conversion rate optimization?
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Can we start doing A-B testing and heat mapping and really dissecting all aspects of this user journey which is so important?
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So I might spread myself a little bit thin.
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I'm definitely more of a holistic or more like the T-shaped model, but it's just where my interest is and that's my passion.
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So I really love to spread myself around multiple disciplines and continue to learn and be able to provide those services as a semi one-stop shop.
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Yeah, and it shines through even in how effortlessly you rattle off.
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We could have done a podcast episode on any of those topics that you just threw out there, which is on conversion rate optimization we could do an entire episode about that.
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Heat mapping we could do an entire episode on that, and so I really want to showcase for listeners who are all business owners or soon to be business owners.
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Shout out to all the entrepreneurs out there about all the UX opportunities.
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Brian, I'm gonna put you on the spot here, because a lot of people we've obviously heard those acronyms UI, ux.
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Usually they're lumped in together.
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People very rarely make that distinction.
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What are some of the UX things that when you go to small business websites, you constantly see?
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Businesses getting wrong or businesses just ignoring?
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What are some of those low-hanging fruit opportunity areas that we, as business owners, should consider when it comes to the UX experience on our websites?
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Yeah, well, the reason why I like heat mapping in general too, and for those who might not have ever heard of it or haven't dabbled in it, there are a few applications that I can name now.
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Hotjar, crazy Egg, lucky Orange are all popular ones.
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I think Microsoft even has their own free version of this, but it's anonymous.
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But it records user sessions and it generates a heat maps.
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You can actually see where they're spending time on your web pages, you can see how far they scroll, you can see what they click on, and we like to make assumptions as marketers, saying okay, here's this very linear user journey.
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They're going to land on this blog and at the end of the blog that they're going to read, you know, till completion, a hundred percent.
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Now we're going to hit them with the CTA and then they're going to go to this resource and they're going to download that, and now we have a lead for our sales team.
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But it's messier than that and we're in this attention economy where people have multiple windows and they might be scrolling and not necessarily engaged in the content.
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So I think, from a user experience perspective, a lot of them, a lot of it is the issues that I'm seeing is just business owners and website owners making assumptions about how people are interacting with their content and what that journey looks like, versus actually using these tools that can tell you exactly how far someone's making it down the page.
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It's one of the most humbling experiences if you've ever written any content on the web page, to see, hey, 70% of people drop off after this third paragraph that we have.
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So if that's the case and you do want to include a CTA or some sort of promotional material, it needs to be above the fold, it needs to be very visible on your page, you need to utilize this particular space, and then you can test it, and then if you see that lift, then all of a sudden you know you're on to something and then you can continue to test and improve.
00:19:39.442 --> 00:19:57.805
So, to put it more succinctly, I think the first issue is just making assumptions when there are trackable options out there, and then I'd say the more tangible one, too, is just being really cognizant of hey, you might only have 10 to 15 seconds and you might have a bunch of scanners versus people really ingesting your content.
00:19:57.805 --> 00:20:04.003
So be very careful with the placement and make it so easy for them to get to that next step that you want them to contribute to.
00:20:04.585 --> 00:20:05.965
Yeah, really well said, brian.
00:20:05.965 --> 00:20:07.268
It's a scary world.
00:20:07.268 --> 00:20:12.153
There's a few metrics inside of Google Analytics that I used to cringe at, One of which is bounce rate.
00:20:12.153 --> 00:20:20.892
The other is average time on site, and I remember checking that and I was like people only come to my website for seven seconds.
00:20:20.892 --> 00:20:22.220
We have such a short amount of time to make that impression.
00:20:22.220 --> 00:20:26.603
So clarity is so key and understanding these things.
00:20:26.603 --> 00:20:27.065
You're right.
00:20:27.065 --> 00:20:28.869
Heat mapping software you just rattled off so many of those and I agree with you.
00:20:28.869 --> 00:20:33.277
I think Microsoft does have some sort of free solution that we can all use in our websites.
00:20:33.277 --> 00:20:36.226
We don't have to guess at many things anymore.
00:20:36.226 --> 00:20:38.230
That's the cool thing is, we can put things out there.
00:20:38.290 --> 00:20:41.586
But, brian, you said the C word before I did here today.
00:20:41.586 --> 00:20:48.888
You have interjected content into the conversation, and I feel like we've all heard that old marketing cliche of content is king.
00:20:48.888 --> 00:20:51.382
How important is content in 2025?
00:20:51.382 --> 00:20:54.609
What do people mean when they talk about that importance of content?
00:20:54.609 --> 00:20:57.685
Because we're all creating content, whether we realize it or not.
00:20:57.685 --> 00:21:01.143
Every conversation we have, every zoom meeting, all of its content.
00:21:01.143 --> 00:21:03.107
But what is content is king?
00:21:03.107 --> 00:21:06.983
What does that mean and what's the importance of it in our digital marketing efforts these days?
00:21:07.905 --> 00:21:27.971
So I think people somewhat overblown about how much SEO changes and has changed, but the point that I will agree on is that, now that we do have AI overviews from Google so when you make a Google search, you see the little synopsis at the top that's generated by AI People are going to chat GPT.
00:21:27.971 --> 00:21:40.603
What I will agree with is that a lot of SEOs and people in the industry are saying that content is becoming a little bit of a commodity because we have these tools that can generate this high funnel or upper funnel educational content at a click of a button.
00:21:40.603 --> 00:21:50.446
Okay, but in order for people to trust a brand and to trust you as an authority in the space, your content still absolutely matters.
00:21:50.446 --> 00:21:53.085
It's the words that you're using to demonstrate your expertise.
00:21:53.085 --> 00:21:55.935
You are creating content around these pain points.
00:21:55.935 --> 00:22:06.471
Not everybody is going to be ready to buy your product or they might not know about your brand, and so they say content is king, because this is a way to still get out in front of people.
00:22:06.619 --> 00:22:24.124
So generating this type of content at every user journey whether they know about your brand or not, and giving them the opportunity to either learn something new from you, establish a pain point, maybe compare you versus another brand and SEO has become so synonymous with this very elementary like what is content?
00:22:24.124 --> 00:22:27.156
Or you're just answering really simple questions you know people want, but it doesn't.
00:22:27.156 --> 00:22:45.011
It's not actually meaningful, and that's where I want to tear down that misconception, because you can still create around topics you know people are searching for, but using your expertise and your POV and having takes and having again these thoughts from from your brand, that can really be the difference maker.
00:22:45.011 --> 00:22:50.112
So now everybody's doing content, but now how do you stand out in a saturated field?
00:22:50.112 --> 00:22:57.280
That is where you can start intertwining a lot more expertise and just real information from people.
00:22:58.303 --> 00:22:59.405
Yeah, really well said.
00:22:59.405 --> 00:23:03.063
And I even think about the fact that I mean, I'm a big fan of transcription tools.
00:23:03.063 --> 00:23:08.589
Anytime I'm on calls with clients or I'm on podcast interviews, all of these things get transcribed.
00:23:08.589 --> 00:23:11.365
And I ask AI what are some good content matter?
00:23:11.365 --> 00:23:16.527
What are some good subject matter things that I can focus on with regards to blog content or email newsletter content?
00:23:16.527 --> 00:23:19.300
I can use AI to make sense of those things.
00:23:19.300 --> 00:23:23.348
Actually, before I go on to the next line of questioning, brian, I want to ask you your perspective on it.
00:23:23.348 --> 00:23:25.353
What are good ways to use AI?
00:23:25.353 --> 00:23:31.799
Because, you're right, everyone's just pummeling out the same churned out content that everybody else is doing with very basic prompting.
00:23:31.799 --> 00:23:40.015
I've given one example of how I use it to have my own words, via transcriptions, at least play into the types of content that I'm putting out there.
00:23:40.015 --> 00:23:43.388
But what's your perspective on how we can use AI in a productive way?
00:23:43.589 --> 00:23:47.079
but what's your perspective on how we can use AI in a productive way?
00:23:47.079 --> 00:24:01.130
Yeah, I'm trying to boil it down to see where my thoughts are, because it's such an overwhelming topic that it can be so complicated in terms of what I want it to be used for and what I feel okay with using it for, and I'm trying to stay on top of it as much as possible.
00:24:01.130 --> 00:24:07.685
And where I found it be really useful is for speeding up really repetitive tasks or if I know what the end result needs.
00:24:07.685 --> 00:24:12.704
But I just need this script or formula or it can help me with like basic coding skills.
00:24:12.704 --> 00:24:20.449
I think anything that has objectivity to it I think is fair play and I think can be really useful for just doing things at scale.
00:24:20.449 --> 00:24:33.866
And so if you need to pull out a summary from a large you know huge PDF or multiple sources and it can kind of boil things down for you, if you need a regex that you need to pop in to do analysis, I think all of those things can be really fair.
00:24:33.866 --> 00:24:41.888
I've even done it to where it is multimodal, meaning that I fed it screenshots and then have gotten the text that I needed from it.
00:24:41.888 --> 00:24:50.307
So a client just gave me a ton of logos but didn't explain what exactly they were to, and I had to interpret that and then I was able to copy and paste.
00:24:50.307 --> 00:24:54.565
There's a bunch of little things in my day-to-day that I think it has sped up.
00:24:54.645 --> 00:25:10.994
I think where I would love to steer clients away from is, as a starting point, creating content with these tools, because, by definition, they are trained on things that already exist, and we just talked about how the barrier to entry here isn't that there's.
00:25:10.994 --> 00:25:12.378
You know, we're not filling this gap.
00:25:12.378 --> 00:25:14.854
Most of the content is already out there.
00:25:14.854 --> 00:25:17.803
It's that you need to either make it better or new, or yours.
00:25:17.803 --> 00:25:31.551
By definition, it's not producing thoughts from you that really stick out and are really interesting, whereas at least if you have your thoughts and your data, it can help clean up what you your first draft, and I think that's completely fair.
00:25:31.551 --> 00:25:39.098
But I do have a little bit of an issue with people making their starting point these tools and then trying to clean it up.
00:25:39.098 --> 00:25:44.257
I think the order of operations is really important in SEO and just content marketing in general.
00:25:44.877 --> 00:25:51.911
Yeah for sure, especially when a lot of people's beginning prompt is give me 30 days of social media content, it just starts writing all of these things.
00:25:51.911 --> 00:25:55.277
You're right, it's the exact same as everybody else and it's by nature.
