The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™

How to Use AI Without Destroying Quality, Trust, or Margins With Nick Avaria

• MatthewBertram.com

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We dig into why traffic is fragmenting, why single-channel expertise won’t cut it, and how expert generalists, stronger offers, and brand strategy are now the true growth levers. We share a practical path from productized “done-for-you” to higher-margin “done-with-you,” plus frameworks for attribution, remote team performance, and human-in-the-loop AI.

• AI-driven traffic shifts and platform changes
• Generalists with deep skills as the new edge
• Offers, positioning, and CRO over channel tricks
• Human-in-the-loop standards to avoid AI slop
• Done-with-you consulting to expand TAM and margin
• Retainers, value pricing, and capacity planning
• Attribution redesign and qualification signals
• Objectives, metrics, KPIs, and NPS for retention

Guest Contact Information: 

Website: agencyacquisitions.io

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nickavaria

Twitter/X: x.com/Nick_Avaria

YouTube: youtube.com/@AgencyAcquisitions

Instagram: instagram.com/nick_avaria

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Free SEO Consultation: www.ewrdigital.com/discovery-call

With over 5 million downloads, The Best SEO Podcast has been the go-to show for digital marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs wanting real-world strategies to grow online. 

Now, host Matthew Bertram — creator of LLM Visibility™ and the LLM Visibility Stack™, and Lead Strategist at EWR Digital — takes the conversation beyond traditional SEO into the AI era of discoverability. 

Each week, Matthew dives into the tactics, frameworks, and insights that matter most in a world where search engines, large language models, and answer engines are reshaping how people find, trust, and choose businesses. From SEO and AI-driven marketing to executive-level growth strategy, you’ll hear expert interviews, deep-dive discussions, and actionable strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve. 

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SPEAKER_01:

This is the unknown secrets of internet marketing. Your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential, let's get started.

SPEAKER_00:

Howdy, welcome back to another fun filled episode of The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I know I am trying to say the best SEO podcast, and I will have a new intro soon. I appreciate it. If you go to any channel, we have the handle best SEO podcast as well as best SEO podcast.com. We are sponsored by EWR, my agency. I don't mention it enough. Um I have an awesome guest for you today, somebody that we had a pretty great conversation before. And I had to say, let's save this for the audience. So um I I I have Nick here with me from uh agencyacquisitions.io. Nick, um welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_02:

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00:

So really a conversation that has been happening really since COVID, and then really since like all these AI updates and like traffic is basically half of traffic has just left Google, gone everywhere else. So you can't just be an expert in Google and Facebook anymore. We were talking about how you need to become a full funnel builder. I'm looking at like the type of issues that clients are dealing with and going, man, like you gotta you gotta embed somebody in these companies as like a fractional CMO because the things that are getting thrown at you from all the AI stuff to everything else, like you buy a service out of the box, like hey, you buy SEO or Facebook ads out of the box, that doesn't solve their problem anymore. Like you it's not like you it everything's fanned out. So you got to be an expert in everything and you and not just like like just not like a generalist, but like an expert in everything because things are not gonna go well. We're talking about new stuff all the time. I I walked into a client's office today, actually, and they were showing me data that I had never seen before that basically 27% of what show LMs is not even indexed in Google. And I was like, okay, like where's this data coming from? Let's look at the study. Why is that? And then the conversation went into um are the LLMs reaching behind the paid wall. We talked about a lot of um what uh what is it? Um uh uh uh what is the what is the website that mirrors the website that so so you don't get hacked a bunch? What is it called?

SPEAKER_02:

It's called Oh I totally yeah, I know exactly what you mean and totally forget it's the name.

SPEAKER_00:

My brain is my brain is so fried right now, but it but essentially I'll I'll think of it here in a second. And and essentially it was like are the and there was that big up, there was the big thing where they put the switch on and they said, Hey, we're gonna block all the content and you got to turn it back on if you want the LOMs to see it. And essentially it's like, is that what's happening? Is the is the AI accessing stuff that's not indexed in the Google Directory because it's private, because you know Google doesn't respect no follow. Um, the AIs are just like trying to find information. So, where are they pulling the information from to give you that answer? They're looking at like mirror sites like Wayback Machine or where wherever to find this content that is is being blocked. Um, and so like I didn't know the answer, right?

SPEAKER_02:

And so and I don't think that like it's reasonable for anybody to know the end because like I think technology is moving at such a fast pace at this point, and you know, like to to bring it to the whole point of around like you know, the the front like do we need more fractional CMOs or the like the full funnel builder like thought, right? Is I think what we're gonna be seeing, and I think it's still early days, is sort of like the the re raising of the generalist.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, yeah, right, where and the branding, the branding expert, and because you're not you don't have tracking, like like madmen is coming back, which I I love that.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and and I mean you could say it's like, well, it's because AI is taking up like the the more specialist roles or whatever else have you, but I don't necessarily think that we're talking about like a generalist, like kind of like a renaissance man that knows a little bit about anything. It's like I think we're talking about more so like maybe like a Leonardo da Vinci type character, where it's like knows a lot of things really well, so it's like that kind of generalist. It's like it's a generalist that could be a specialist at like four different things, and this is giving rise to like a problem because there's not that many of those people out there, and people have gone really far down the rabbit hole of being like, say, like a meta, like mean the flavor of the day.

SPEAKER_00:

I mean, you know, I don't know what this thing's like, it's like it or the Andromeda, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

It's like because it's like you know, all of a sudden, if you had some historical campaigns running, they're they're working real well still, but if you're turning them off and back on or like duplicating them or whatever, they're not working anymore, like they used to. And it really begs the question of the value of like what the end like that this ad buyer's like if if they're a meta-only expert, it's like, well, now what matters? It's like, well, your offer matters, so they need to consult on the actual offer, they need to consult on like what the positioning is given the brand. So they need to be able to like understand and interpret brand, they need to be able to, you know, almost like CRO the landing page and like make it all congruent with the ads. Like, this is no longer in the scope of like a digital strategist that specializes on a specific platform anymore. Like, the skill set needs to be so much broader to be able to get these like top-tier results. And like, I think that we're gonna see the shift happen like more and more as these platforms like move into like these sort of like AI models that are doing like I'm not gonna say the easy work, but it's the it's the job of processing huge amounts of data that we don't even have access to anyway, because they're never gonna give it to us.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, well, also the level of knowledge that you have to have, like in prompt engineering to to deal with these AIs, and you got to understand what's going on. Like, we we were running uh a national ad campaign, and I had to keep turning it off, like my paid ad guys had to keep turning it off, turning it back on. And the client's like, why do you keep turning this on and turning it back off? It was optimizing for spam. So it was getting spam and then it was showing it more to get more spam. And so it was like you had to turn it off, turn it on to like get it in the right track, right? And and and that and then even the conversation I was having before, what what I'm what I'm saying, I think we're saying the same thing is you can't just take somebody that's good at one thing and and and maybe they know about the other stuff, but they don't know how to solve the problem and throw them into an environment with a client because a client's looking for outcomes, a client's looking for results. And you know, we we had actually started kind of like the pre-interview talking about the the messy middle for agencies to grow. And it's when you commoditize the services. And we have a lot of great commoditized services. You can buy it off the shelf, it can do this, but but now we're having to become a general contractor and layer in these things, but also we're having to become the architect to say, well, this is not working. We have to modify that, we have to change that. That's creating a lot more high-touch accounts, which is needed to maintain the client. But if you're selling a retainer, every time you touch that account, you go upside down, right? Or or or your margin get gets eaten up. And also what we were talking about too is I was saying, hey, we're landing a lot of new business because we're doing a lot of AI stuff and and people need that. And I think there's a lot of lip service out there of what's what's happening. And because I mean, I just had a a text conversation I'm on an account with like another uh another SEO company, and they're saying, hey, well, A's I is the same thing as traditional. I haven't seen like anything, blah, blah. I don't have time to have that debate. Uh, you know, and and I said, but the client sitting there in the middle going, like, what do I do? I don't I need to live education, Alicia, right?

SPEAKER_02:

Because to your point, like they're looking for outcomes. It's like, hey, all these things are great, but what does it mean to like the actual goals? Like, I have a this Q1 goal, I have this Q2 goal, you know, for next year. Like, how are we lining up to like meet this thing? And I think that the main challenge for like whether you're like a freelancer or an agency moving forward is you're going to need more of these strategic generalists, yeah. And their price right now isn't overly high, but their price is going to command a premium in the very near future. Because I and I think, Matt, like what you said kind of like hit it the nail on the head. It's like, well, the point is that these people need to talk to the client, yeah. And and and the second that you have to make these people client-facing, the amount their bandwidth to actually do the strategic work goes way, way down because now they have to be like the primary communicators. And generally, this is the type of person that you want to protect their time with, like an account management interface. And so you're gonna get less work out of them in terms of like numbers of clients that they can affect because of it, while the demand for these people is gonna increase. And as an agency, like that's not a great position to be in, because that means you're gonna have to acquire very expensive talent that everybody else wants, which is gonna drive their price further. I think if you're a freelancer, it's like a pretty big advantage if you already have the skill set. If you don't have the skill set, it is actually like a pretty big danger. Um yeah, no.

SPEAKER_00:

I mean, I I think there's gonna be a bifurcation, right? Because if you if you're a if you're a very narrow specialist, you know how to one do one thing, but if you don't have that the orchestration of like the rest of the team to do it, and then the level of communication, I'm just thinking about like small business clients, right? Like a small business client, they have kind of a threshold or a price point that they can afford and they want to be able to buy that and they want to be able to get the outcomes that they're getting. And I I had a conversation actually yesterday with a client that was like going through the busy season, they're coming back. They're like, hey, we want to, we want to scale up. And I and and I said, look, 58.5% of the traffic has left Google and it's not coming back. Like how people are searching is completely different. And she's like, so we have to do all this other stuff. And I said, well, no, but you're gonna have to do more than you're doing now, and we're gonna have to prioritize where we need to go. And yes, it's gonna be more and it's gonna be more expensive. And I know that that's not a good answer, but that's the real answer, is it's it to impact the results in the way you want to. Like, I even saw this data point on B2B. Okay. Remember it was like 11 touch points, like to close the deal?

SPEAKER_02:

Way more now.

SPEAKER_00:

It's 30. Okay. I don't like that. Someone brought that up on uh uh a previous podcast, and I they gave me like the well, because we've commoditized being able to get in front of people, like social media, like blah blah, like whatever else have you.

SPEAKER_02:

It's like we've commoditized the ability to get in front of people like very easily. Like, I remember you know, there's like a client that I was speaking with that they're like, I've been on your newsletter for the last like eight months, and I decided to reach out. I'm like, I I've sent a lot of newsletters in eight eight months, like not that many, like one or two a week, kind of thing, but that's a lot of like it's like we that's well past 30 touch points, right? The trust, the trust level to engage with somebody, and then and then the you hit that deal the the that word on the head though, because like I think we are in a position now where marketing in general is low trust. So I think that like look, everybody now is a media company, right? Because social media, etc., we've democratized the ability to get like before, you know. If we if we go back, you know, 50 years, it's like if you weren't on TV or radio, like you were no one, right? Now everybody can be somebody, you just need to be engaging enough. But being engaging enough doesn't mean that you're good at what you do, right? So you have a whole bunch of people that have attention, and then they figured out, okay, now that I have attention, now what do I sell people? So like that thing that they're selling ain't that good, frankly. And I think that this is where I'm seeing on the market as a whole, like, and I'm gonna kind of bring this back to like maybe like agencies and freelancers more so than anything, is you're what what I'm seeing is that profitability of agencies and freelancers is going down um pretty quickly over the last two years.

SPEAKER_00:

The expectation with AI is from the client side, is you should be able to do more with less as well.

SPEAKER_02:

And so you the problem is that you can do more with less if it's slop, like the AI slop conversation, right? And so, like, look, I ran into this exact same problem at like my own agency, like even like a month ago. Like, we had an individual that was producing like AI slop for clients, like whether it was the ad copy, whether it was like it was like suggestions, they were grabbing client data and like you know, basically like AI processing it, you know, and like we're like the the results that were coming back were nonsensical. And our position, even internally at my own agency, has changed to say, hey, like this is like human first, AI is our helper. AI is not like they're they're sort of like the doer, but they're not the strategist, we're the strategist, and nothing goes out without us like at least editing and and surveying it in some way, shape, or form. If you're producing something that is like 90% AI as the end outcome without review, it's like you're probably on the wrong side of the equation, and we're gonna get into trouble here.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, so concepts around that, like that I've talked about, or like human in the loop, and certainly like I think co-pilot was a great name, right? It it you you you need to have that that and you need to you can't they can't be in charge yet, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It can expand what someone can do, they can reach into more, but if you don't know what good looks like, you don't know what the output's gonna be produced, and somebody that's experienced can look at it and go, that's wrong. Like we actually had a situation with a client where we were doing some analysis with a client and it wasn't grounded enough and it just made up some stuff, right? Like the hallucinations, I think, are still at like 36%. And so then so then what we did is we're like, okay, we're building like a workflow now where one AI is checking the other AI first before we have a human elopes with the like LLM ops that like we're setting up. But but I wouldn't have thought that like even if you ask it, you're like, hey, are you lying to me? Are you creating this? No, no, no, this is right. And then it's like it's it's still not right. It's like you can't even trust what the outputs are unless you know what it should be. Is this gonna get close? And you go, okay, that's better, but it's on target.

SPEAKER_02:

And I think the fundamental problem that you're seeing because, like, look, it's like being in an agency or a freelancer is like sort of like a it's it's generally like a younger person's game. Like, they're a lot of people move, you know, they move client side at a certain age, right? The problem that I'm seeing with like some of the the younger hires is that a lot of their training is because they've like prompted the LLMs to like tell them their knowledge, and so they're basically their basis of knowledge is the large language model, so it's like the self-fulfilling loop where they're like even if they query it with a great prompt, they're like, this is good, and the reason they think that this is good is because that's where they learn from in the first place, so it's like a circular thing, like there's no outside input to their knowledge, and like for the less experienced people, like I'm talking, like you know, you you came up in the last couple of years, kind of thing, and like your your most current knowledge is all based off of like AI from somebody, like regurgitate or whatever else have you, that level of critical thinking experience isn't there yet. And so we're running into a problem really quickly, in my opinion, where that ability of critical thought and experience is gonna come at like a massive premium into the market. And the problem, like, like look, there's a problem and an opportunity here. In my opinion, done for you services as an agency is no longer enough. And I've been saying this for I think 18 to 24 months now. I think that all agencies should have done with you services, and a different name for done with you services is basically consulting. Yes, okay. There's many reasons that I that I'm passionate about this because, like, look, number one, when people say, Hey, like, my ideal client profile is this kind of client, I'm like, okay, what's the total addressable market of that? And they're like, Oh, there's like 80,000 of these businesses in the US. I'm like, Great, but that's not your total addressable market. They're like, What do you mean? Like, that's how many businesses there are there are of this size, blah blah. I'm like, but not all those businesses are willing to go out of like some of those businesses do all their marketing in-house. Yeah, it's not your total addressable market. That's just how many of those businesses exist. So, like, and by the way, there's different industries. Some industries bring everything in-house, other industries want to like put everything out to an agency. So there's like there's like a percentage, right, of how many clients in that addressable market you can even target. But here's my point when you add things like done with you, or can like call it consulting, if you will, you expand the total addressable market because some clients don't want somebody to do all the work for them. Some clients want you to come in and train their team on how to do it and be a second set of eyes, yeah. Right. Or maybe they just got burned by another agency and like they can come to you and like you can help them stand up their team as like a consultant, right? At a much higher hourly rate, of course.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, well, I I can tell you like one of the other buckets that I don't think you mentioned, I'd love for you to speak to it. And it's something we we were mainly selling packages, right? We were selling the packages. Here's what you're getting delivered, and and it was typically we were spending more and more time explaining. Like, so what did you what did you get from a consulting or reporting standpoint? Unless you bought like a specific package, you were getting a monthly snapshot because it like you know, like then you were getting some kind of like understanding of an audit by a consultant that made a video and kind of told you where you were, and here are your deliverables, right? So here are your deliverables based on your package, here's your monthly report, which maybe it's more like a stand shop, and then there's a video that is like the audit or analysis of what's happening and what we should do. We were finding also in email, we were sending everything by email, and we could tell that they weren't watching the videos. Okay. So it's like we're we're giving this information to you, and then we go, okay, well, a lot of these clients need to talk to somebody monthly. Okay, well, we layered that that on there. Okay, a lot of these clients need to talk to somebody weekly, right? Or then they're like starting to throw stuff at you. And so then we we started offering these packages of um, you know, you know, they're somewhere on the spectrum from done for you to we're gonna you we're gonna train your team and and you're gonna do it, right? I I found somewhere in the middle of like we have a problem. We basically need you to come in and fix it. And we just need we don't know what we need. We just need like a blanket retainer and we want you to come in and just fix everything, augment where you need to augment, plug in what you need to plug in, but like let's decide the strategy and we trust you. Well, that was tapping my team pretty heavily, and we were we were burning a lot of hours, which was what which like Like it was okay because we were getting billed for what we're doing, but then more and more people needed that solution. So then I'm like, Well, we only have this many hours, we only have this many people, like, and so it's like I'm giving you my team here, I'm giving you my strategists here. Okay, you you you only think you need 10% of their time, but you really need 25 or 30%.

SPEAKER_02:

I think that this is the problem with the market right now, though. It's like I don't think people actually know what it takes given like the shift in technology, they're so fast now, right? And in my mind, like the the time to do these, you know, packages that are like, hey, here's your monthly packages, what it costs, like it's not based off of hours necessarily, it's more like value-based pricing. It makes sense in a in a in a more static environment where like you know the inputs, you know the outputs. But the second that the clients maybe a bit bigger, maybe a little bit closer to like mid high, mid, or like enterprise level clients, um, you're getting into more of like a custom thing where the the inputs and the outputs are sort of like unknown to some degree. And the the grayer it is and like the foggier it is, the better we are to actually just do like a retainer model where we say to them, hey, like pay this five or 10k retainer, whatever it is, and we'll track our hours and deduct them at this hourly rate from the retainer. Because, you know, like and and I think over the last I mean decade in in agency plus like the the hourly model has really caught like a lot of like flack for being like oh it's so bad and it sucks. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no. It's it's actually great for specific situations, but the question is, is the situation that we're in the ideal situation to deploy this model or not? Right?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, okay, yeah. Well, so so that we're getting a lot more situations where that is what needs to happen, or they're not going to get the outcomes they want. And then how are we supposed to, as an agency, scale because we don't know the demands to deliver for the client? And then if you're adding adding new clients too quickly and you're bringing new people on that are not working together or gelled, okay, there's there's an uptake of that that time. And so we've had to limit taking on new clients because we can't handle that demand, right?

SPEAKER_02:

And so then it's like, okay, well, it's the scalability aspect of like the the problem is that you have like two opposing forces, like, in my opinion, and I think that this is like just what the market is right now. If you are the type of agency or freelancer that is getting a lot of business right now, the problem is that the changes to technology are very disruptive to your way of doing things through others specifically, right? So all your standard operating procedures, all like your you know, mapping of like who does what is kind of going out the window in real time as these things get applied, which makes it like kind of unstable. And like saying to yourself, well, hey, like we're just gonna redo the SOP. It's like, well, you're you're gonna redo the SOP every like month, because like that's kind of what's needed right now, and it's a huge, it's a huge issue, and these things are counterproductive to scaling profitably, yeah. Like they they just are, and you know the the the only antidote to this is to hire people with higher levels of experience, yes, and and skill, and this is exactly goes back to the first point of like you know at the beginning of the discussion of like these people, these these highly specialized generalists, yeah, which is kind of like uh interesting juxtaposition, it's like they're gonna be in such huge demand for that reason, right? And so, like the cost it becomes cost prohibitive. So you have to sell at a premium, and you have to sell hours at a premium, which is like never a nice thing to do. It's like, hey, pay this retainer, and by the way, like I have to charge you like$350 an hour for this because the person that's doing the work is so expensive, right?

SPEAKER_00:

You got it, you got inflation, right? You got also like a lot of these tools, you got brand new tools, and like, yeah, you're inching up more towards a a fractional CMO or something like that. And there's no other way around it. And so then I'm thinking these these like if you if you're working at the small end of the market, and a lot of people go in on the on the small side of the market, you're working like um service-based businesses or something like that, it's very commoditized, you're running PPC, you're doing SEO, whatever. Um they can't afford what's needed to happen. Like, and I think I think agencies are pricing stuff wrong because they don't want to charge what's needed to happen. And then that's where the churn comes in because they're not getting the outcomes they need because they didn't charge. Because in the client's mind, they're like, man, 10K is a ton of money. And then in your head, you're like, man, that's gonna be like 60K to get that funnel up and going or whatever it is, right? Like, and it and so like there's there's a disconnect, and then AI is in the mix, and so that that's a change in it. I I mean, I I I could I'll I'll tell you a funny story really quick. I I started using a uh a tool to do some entity SEO, okay. And uh I was like one of the first to like get this tool from like they they're actually selling it to agencies. So I was like, it's it's priced in Italian dollars. Okay. So so the US dollars dropped, okay, over the last, let's say, eight months. It's gone up over 70% of the tool. So then I had to like get on the phone and say, like, guys, like, um is there a way to like talk to finance to get like like you've doubled almost your price on me on this price point because I'm like going, this is just ticking up. Like, but it's that's that's just one of the all the other factors that are that are getting peppered on what's happening. And then you got clients that the drop of 50% of traffic or more, they've lost it. They're like, well, I need another agency because this agency doesn't know what they're doing. So then you go to another agency and they're like, oh yeah, we do XYZ. Okay, we didn't get the result we needed because they're buying those buckets of product type services because the playbook hasn't changed. And so now you got really frustrated clients that that we're talking to. And I have to like, it gets escalated to me, and I have to say, okay, like let's break it down. What's going on with you? We need to do a strategy session, which they like a lot of clients that are service-based clients, or even B2B, I don't know what it is. Tell you, tell me what your experience has been.

SPEAKER_02:

I think the problem is that like 10 years ago, or even like less than that, everybody sold strategy at the front end of every single engagement, and like the clients like yeah, they're like every time I switch an agency, I need to like do another strategy, and it's another sunk cost of like anywhere between like eight and twenty K at on the low end, right? And it like they just got fatigued, and then this is where everybody specialized, right? So everybody specialized into like I now specialize in like you know, plumbers, or like I specialize in lawyers, and I specialize in whatever as a means of avoiding the strategy because it's like I know the strategy because I have 20 clients that are lawyers, and you're another lawyer. Guess what? So I can plug you in, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, I think that we are in a period of time where like the I think that there's gonna be a resurgence of strategy, and specifically I would say brand strategy, yes. Um, but because like everything else is becoming way too commoditized in terms of like, I mean, you name it, you know, the type of attention that you're trying to get, like, there's way too many, like, you know, other people in that space generally competing. But you know, tying it back to like, well, what's the what's the business model problem here from like a agency freelancer? Like, if you charge money, our inventory is always time, right? So, like productizing a service, making it value-based pricing is a means of generating a higher billable value per hour. Yeah, and this is the whole conversation around like well, fractional CMO or like consulting done done with you, like it's all the same thing, and I see this as an opportunity to capture higher dollar per hour, yes, and transfer that higher dollar per hour into hiring these like top performers, very expensive people. So, like, I'm gonna give you an example for one client that I was working with, like these guys are like wizards at like Google SEO, they handle all types of accounts, right? And I said to them, like, look, you guys know so much, you really need to done like do done with you consulting in some way, shape, or form. And they said, Okay, we'll give it a try. And there was like a few deals that were coming in where people were asking them, like, hey, this seems kind of expensive. They wanted like, you know, like six, seven K to just do done for you. And they were like, Can you just like kind of teach me? And they started pitching it, you know, it's like, hey, instead of this, you can pay$4,000 a month, and what you get for$4,000 a month is we'll we'll basically hop on a call with you 45 minutes every single week, and we'll audit your account live with you. We'll show you what you did right and wrong, what the next steps are, blah blah. And it's like, okay, lo and behold, even with the pre-work and the post-work, which they basically squeeze into the last 15 minutes, yeah. Now they're billing a thousand dollars an hour. Like, they're done for you services, they're value-based price, they're not billing a thousand dollars an hour, they're not even billing three hundred dollars an hour on a value-based productize basis. So, like, guess what? The profitability of the company like shoots through the roof because instead of selling an hour for like, you know, even like on their like premium package, fully, you know, productize, it's like maybe two, two twenty-two fifty an hour. Now they're charging a thousand dollars an hour across like you know, 10 to 12 new clients. It's like that pulls up the average really fast, and it all goes to the bottom line, right?

SPEAKER_00:

It's co I mean it's coaching, right? Like it's a it's a coaching model, essentially, and and that's uh what everybody that's been listening to this for a long time, I keep saying I'm gonna do, and I I really need to do it.

SPEAKER_02:

I don't I think it's both because I think that from a business model perspective, doing the done for you services and like getting great results shows legitimacy in your craft. Like, I don't believe in being a coach in something that you're not yourself doing in some way, shape, or form. Right, like you've got to have your hands like kind of like on the pulse by actually doing the thing, or you miss it, especially with the way things are shifting now.

SPEAKER_00:

I I I I was at a business conference and the guy was talking about AI, and I could tell by his answer, he has not been an AI because he was saying basically chat GBT five was like fine, and I was like, Chat GBT five sucks. Okay, I don't care, I'll argue with anybody. Chat GPT 4, bring that sucker back. That remembered everything. Claude just launched where you can you can now hear, you can you can listen to the finger on the pulse, right?

SPEAKER_02:

That's like he doesn't have it.

SPEAKER_00:

Like, and I'm like, you're the guy, you're the head guy pitching this thing, and I can tell you're like three, four months back, you're not in it. Well, if someone's gonna pay a premium for you and you're the lead manager, it's like people pay a premium for the nuance, right?

SPEAKER_02:

And the nuance cannot be generated without first hand experience, it's just not possible. And I think, like, you know, like one of the conversations I had with this, like one other client was they said to me, Well, like, well, you know, Nick, why can't I like I just kind of want to shut down my entire agency and just do this instead, right? And I'm like, Well, no, like it doesn't work that way because you need case studies, you need data, you need yeah, yeah. It's like it's like you're like the majority of your legitimacy comes from the fact that like you're doing this, yeah, right. And so if you take away the legitimacy of like doing this, what are you like left with? It's like, oh, you're just another coach. It's like who cares? It's like, you know how many coaches that are out there that like haven't done like a lick of what they've said that they've done, like that's like I think that's the majority of the market, it's probably like 90-95% of people that like you know got like an LLM to like spit out like a bunch of data, and they're like, This is my program, and this is what I teach people, and it's devoid of all nuance and real life experience, right? And so, like the the value comes in, like the the value in the done with you model housed inside of an agency is that doing the work via the agency gives you like a legitimacy, b like the actual know-how and the nuance required to actually get results rather than walk people through some like BS stuff that it's like sounds correct, but uh doesn't actually get them a result.

SPEAKER_00:

That I mean, this doesn't LLM visibility SEO podcast, like this goes back to eat, right? This is why Google added the experience component, and what you talked about is real experience, like also it's like oh, holding the product up or whatever. By the way, this is a water bottle that is tied to my phone and tells me what to drink. Okay, like I am building like a personal OS with like all this I app and all this, but but people yes, like people need to be connected ear to the ground. That's what people are paying for, and things are moving so quickly. If you are not doing the work, you're not gonna have that edge, and that's what people are buying, and that's that that's even in the writing, right? Like, yeah, I could just create a bunch of like slop, right? Like AI slop and put it out there. Oh, it's not getting indexed, oh, it's not random.

SPEAKER_02:

And by the way, you will get like and you will get the attention of people that you don't want, right? Like, because like look, I I think that for example, like, look, if if somebody said I have like this content strategy, I'm just gonna like do a bunch of prompts and say whatever it tells me to say without editing it. It's like I think it'll work. Like, here's the like here's the kicker, but for who is it for your ideal client profile? Do you think that you can move up market that way? It's like, I don't know about that. I think that you can get the beginners, the people that know like less than less, and that they were themselves didn't even query the AI, and so like to them, this is like brilliant, right? But to anybody that has the access to the same tool, like if you're representing the knowledge of the AI on its own without you like morphing it in some way at this juncture, it's not insightful, yeah, anymore. At least to the people that know what they're doing. You're not gonna fool the people that know what they're doing.

SPEAKER_00:

I I would tell you, even in in the last 30 days, really 45 days, I've seen a seed change. Like, just uh like people are just waking up to like I mean, I felt like the AI overviews, like this is me personally, the AI overviews were like a a let's slow people down from going to the LLMs till we figure out what we're gonna do and like get Gemini ready, right? And and Gemini's moving up in the leaderboards, it's it's doing better. Like, I'm starting to hear some debate about Google's gonna come out on top and you know, all this kind of stuff. But but I I can tell you, like I had clients last quarter going, we don't care about AI, like we're just using Google, but they've started to use the LLMs and now they're like, Oh, I need this, I need this, like now it's a big issue. I would also say the other thing that I'm hearing, I I'm curious how how how you're viewing it and and your your perspective is attribution. So I I have a client right now. Okay, like I have a client right now that like came in and analyzed what they're doing, and their lead flow is like down, down, down, down, down. And they're just spending more and more money on paid ads to get there because that was like last click attribution. And as I'm like interviewing people, I'm finding out like you stopped doing this, you stop doing that, because you're just looking at it from a two-dimensional like viewpoint and saying, this is just where the leads were coming from. I was like, no, there's a study, like one of the one of the guys I was interviewing uh a couple podcasts ago, there's a study out there that shows that your click-through rate is tied to how high your review score is and how many reviews and the consistency. So people in their customer journey are doing all these things that you're not seeing, but when they're ready to buy, also in like similar web data, I'm seeing the traffic that people are leaving the site. Okay. You know what one of the number one sources for a lot of the sites when I was doing a like a market analysis was like Claude or Chat GPT. Like that was where people were going. I was like, that's interesting. I started to think about it. It's like, no, people are finding out about the brand, maybe through the ads or whatever, a social, whatever you're doing. And then they ask so reputation management on what are they saying about your brand? Like, I have a publicly traded company or a company that's about to go public, and they're like, Hey, um, we don't like what Chat GPT is saying about us. Like, can you help us fix that? I'm like, these are new services and things that yeah, people haven't thought about. So it's like, I don't know.

SPEAKER_02:

But the attribution model gets like real messy, right? Yeah, and it's like, and I think that like this is the whole problem of like thinking of things in a simplistic model, like such like as a funnel. There's an element of that. Like, I mean, like, look, it's like I could I we could sit here and like talk about you know marketing 101, where it's like three percent of the people that are currently out there are looking for your service, and then there's like you know, like another seven percent that is like problem aware and like you know, like solution aware, and like they're not doing anything right now, and blah blah so on and so forth, right? But I think the point is is that you know, like when it comes to like I mean pay-per-click advertisers, like attribution is a nightmare right now because like the example that you gave earlier, uh like uh just now, you know, of the hey, like we're paying, but the this client was paying, but they were getting no results, and it was giving them more and more spam leads because it was basically like optimizing for spam leads. I mean, I've I've heard of agencies and like even my own, like go as far as to say, like, okay, well, until like if it's like a B2B company, for example, until we hit like demo and or you know, as like sales qualified lead status, don't eat like automatically tell, like automatically attribute them as like not qualified. So it's like it's it's rather than disqualification, you know, it's you're feeding the system back like via like whatever, like your HubSpot or whatever have you. So instead of saying, like, hey, this is this is indeed disqualified, you're actually saying everything is disqualified unless I tell you otherwise, because like that's how far we have to go. And weirdly, like this is goes back to like the whole funnel building thing where you know, as an example, like I used to not be like a big fan of like selling, like, you know, like a document online or something, but I've seen a lot of people sell like you know, an absurdly underpriced thing, like, hey, like download this thing for like 50 bucks when it's clearly worth like a thousand and it's like a giveaway, because then you can tell like Meta or whoever to like optimize for purchase of that thing. And like because it has like the full access to like you know the actual data and how much money it made, it gives you like reasonable results, but you have to get like pretty clever about it, right? To some that's interesting.

SPEAKER_00:

I haven't I haven't heard something like that. I I mean, with the attribution, I about fell out of my seat when uh I was on some call and Ran Fishkin was talking, and he was just like, All right, so like attributions out the window, like run a billboard in this city, yeah, the same demographic in this city, and if you get a 10% uplift there. Spread it all out across, and I was like, and I was like, he's like, Dad, that's the best we got.

SPEAKER_02:

I was just like, well, like if you think about it, it's like, um, I'll put it to you this way, like in an example. Like, if you ran like a quiz funnel, right? Like on meta, for example, and you tell meta it's like optimized for people to fill out this quiz, right? And it's to a specific ICP that are gonna be like, Great, we're gonna send it in front of this ICP. Uh, now imagine that one of the questions in the quiz is like revenue ranges, like how much how much revenue you're currently doing per year. And now you tell Meta it's like actually the only ones that are qualified are the people that are doing like five million and above. That's a totally different signal that you're giving back to the platform, right? And so things like qualifying people based off of size, qualifying people based off of like number of employees on like a B2B side makes like a ton of sense. It really depends for like other for non-b2b, it's a little bit trickier in my opinion, right? Because like when you're talking B2C, it's like a lot of people can afford your stuff, right? Uh, especially depending on price point. But I think that like more so than ever, like you know, I was I was talking to somebody, I'm like, man, like Hyros and like triple whale and like all these other they're so expensive, and it's like, yep, and like what's your option? I'm like, good point. Like, what are you gonna do? Like, well, you gotta pay them because, like, you know, the funnels are no longer like this, like last click attribution no longer works. It like it, it it's not terrible, but I mean it's not what is gonna carry you forward from here on out, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so so we're talking about all these things, and one of the things we didn't even really get to was like remote teams, right? Remote team, like since COVID, everybody's coming in the market. I campaigns that I used to run don't work anymore because it's too saturated. You got you now, you got remote people, it's the norm. People don't want to work like in an office, like it's like pulling teeth to get them to come in. Like you've got all these different factors, right? And you're working with a lot of different agencies. I would love for you to like set the table on, and and I think we've talked about this a little bit, but let's put it together in kind of a concise abstract like theme of okay, where where is the market at? What are the things people are dealing with? And where where is it gonna be in 18 months? Because I mean, I'm having a conversation. I had a conversation earlier today about the layoffs that are coming from the the AI browsers that can do repetitive tasks for you. Okay, like I mean, I'm seeing like billers, you know, banks, like all this is gonna go to AI. So unless you're at the highest level, the people are at the highest level with the highest experience are are the ones that are safe.

SPEAKER_02:

Like, I mean, like if you and if you're not there yet, it's like go train yourself, like watch every YouTube from like a reputable source, like pay for a course, like somewhere like you know, from somebody reputable again, like go do that. But I would say from like a remote team perspective, like here's the thing it's not like it was before. I think that the initial productivity spike that went up when we originally went uh remote after like post-COVID was because we had like a cultural connection because we were all in office, and then we were like reaping the reward of those relationships in productivity and the fact that like we knew each other, but now that you know there's turnover and teams and things like that, we don't know each other in that context anymore, and this is where like that connection is lost. So, like, number one, we need to be like way more intentional about generating connection between like ourselves and our teams and with and and setting up situations where they can set up that connection with each other. Number one, number two, skip level meetings. Like, if you have if you're like an owner and you have like a manager, or if you're a director and you have a manager below you and then the front line, you need to start doing skip level meetings at minimum quarterly to see how things are going. Like, this is a non-negotiable in this world. The other thing that I'm gonna say is that standard operating procedures are more important than pretty much any other time in history in business. Because before, if you didn't know how to do something, you could just like roll your chair over about like three feet and ask the person next to you, like, hey, I'm stuck. And now people, it's been proven that people will sit there stuck and not say anything and wait until they're next one-to-one with their manager, which could be days away and just be stuck the entire time. And that's not that's not reasonable, right? Um, another I'm gonna take a step further from standard operating procedures to say that every agency needs a racy matrix. And if you don't know what that is, please chat GPT it, it'll actually give you a pretty good answer about what it is, and then you need to implement a racy matrix in your own company. The the last thing, and I'm gonna say that this is the most important thing to be successful in a remote environment, is something that I call having objectives, metrics, and KPIs. Okay. Before we could judge people a lot on just like their work output, like, hey, are you doing the work? I don't think that's good enough anymore. Not in a remote only environment, okay? If you're in a remote only environment, you have to move into objectives, metrics, KPIs. What are objectives? Like in an agency, for example, an objective would be like client retention, right? So that's objective number one. An objective number two could be like client results, objective number three could be like productivity, like either dollars under management or like hours built, right? Doesn't matter. But for every objective, you need a metric. So for example, I want client retention as objective number one, that's the most important thing to me. What is the metric of client of client retention? Churn. I can measure churn, right? That's my metric, and I judge that objective by that metric. But churn is like a rear view mirror number, it's like really slow because, like, if the problem if a problem happens and I have a churn problem, it's already behind me. I can't really bring the client back. So I need a KPI in the truest sense, like key performance indicator. It is an indicator of performance of the metric that it's tied to would be net promoter score. Because a net promoter score, if somebody like scores me, like, say, like a three out of 10, so they're not that happy with me, that means that they're a churn risk. And if I salvage the account, I'm gonna prevent them from churning. And to me, this objective metric KPI thing is like the number one most important thing to install in a remote first team because now it's like, hey, are the numbers congruent to success? And are they in alignment with agency objectives overall and client objectives overall? And I call this triple net wins. It's like you need to set up objectives in a way where when people achieve them, it automatically creates a win for the client, for the agency, and for the person themselves, like the actual individual contributor themselves at the same time.

SPEAKER_00:

I love that. Nick, you dropped like a ton of value. I'm coming up against a hard stop. Um, how do people find out more? Because like you just you just gave a ton of stuff there. I'm gonna actually have to go back and listen to it again. There's definitely like some value in there for me that I want to like apply to what we're currently doing, even. And um, and so I I've really enjoyed this.

SPEAKER_02:

I'll leave the listeners behind with like a couple links, yeah. Um, so like some free resources. Like one of them is like a great dashboard that I use, and number two is like a free training uh that is like ungated just to like go check it out. It's a lot of the things that I we just talked about on this show, especially towards the end, of like how do you get optimal performance out of your team in a remote environment? And how do you optimize for your company and do right by your employees at the same time?

SPEAKER_00:

So you send me those links and I'll definitely get them in the show notes uh for when the episode airs. But is there like should they follow you on LinkedIn?

SPEAKER_02:

Um definitely follow me on LinkedIn, so net neckaveria A-V-A-R-I-A on the last name. Um, and also like you know, if you check out those resources, you you can always find me through those.

SPEAKER_00:

And agencyacquisitions.io. Uh, you go check out his site. He's got a great little funnel site there. If you're an agency owner and you're struggling, which I know that there's a lot of people out there, I'm in a small group, everybody's kind of sharing all the shifts, all the changes, everything's happening, you know, everything's moving at a thousand miles an hour. Uh Nick knows his stuff. We were talking a lot before uh the podcast, and I would love to keep uh this conversation going. Nick, I would love to have you back on. Um, uh, you know, everyone, uh if you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, which was the internet, but I'm not sure so much anymore. It might be LLMs at this point. And so uh AI, um, you know, reach out to Best SEO Podcasts uh and we can point you in the right direction. We're working with a lot of different agencies. We're we're we're we're pretty maxed out at EWR. We are taking on some new clients, but we're very, we're very picky about that. Um, Nick has a lot of great agencies that he's also working with. And so, you know, hopefully you like this podcast. If you did, please leave us a review. Please like watch it or like it on YouTube. Like, we're trying to move it over to YouTube and it looks like that. I'm gonna need to start running ads because I'm embarrassed. Um, but go check us out on YouTube at uh best sdeo podcast. Thank you so much, everyone, for listening. Until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now.

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Matt Bertram

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