Fatrank Podcast

Here’s the cleaned transcript with clear speaker labels for James Dooley and Steven Toth.

James Dooley: When I have an idea I want to share it with the world. We do not have any log in to our clients’ websites. You know SEO agencies. A lot of them will take on projects that they should just not be taking on. So today I’m joined with Steve Toth from SEO Notebook. Good having you Steve.

Steven Toth: Hey James. Good to be here.

James Dooley: I’m going to jump straight into it. I’m not going to start talking about the past FreshBooks because I think a lot of people have heard it already. I’m going to jump straight into your Saigon talk and The Go-Giver. Can you expand on that for anyone that didn’t watch it. Have you always had that personality trait or has it been like a mentor that told you that the more you give, the more you might get back in return?

Steven Toth: I’ve always been very, you know, when I have an idea I want to share it with the world. Even back when I was working at companies I started things like knowledge sharing lunch and learns. We had a thing called the 9:55 at one agency where 10 minutes before the first meetings took place of the day we did a knowledge sharing. So I’ve always been one of those people who loves to share things. With respect to The Go-Giver, sharing is important, but the main thing they stressed there is sharing at scale. Sharing not just between you and another person or a couple people, but trying to share with as many people at once as possible. That was one of the main tenets that I evolved into. For me that channel was initially LinkedIn and then eventually the newsletter kind of replaced that, but those two are still my biggest channels per se. Giving away all that and not holding anything back is super important. The next thing is really giving away at scale and then letting people know how they can help you. For me you can hire me to become a consultant. You can come to my conference. You can subscribe to my newsletter. Things like that. Finally you just have to be open to receiving people’s help. It wasn’t a conscious thing that anybody really told me to do. It was actually something somebody mentioned to me. They said Steve, what you’re doing sounds like The Go-Giver. I read the book and then that has since guided a lot of my business decisions in terms of how I promote myself.

James Dooley: Sounds great. So let’s jump on to one or two things you just mentioned there. The conference, SEO IRL. When is the next one and where is it? I presume it’s in Canada and probably around Toronto. For anyone that doesn’t know about it, who’s talking as well? I know Mike King, yourself, and people at conferences are coming over. Can you expand a little bit more about the SEO IRL conference?

Steven Toth: Yeah for sure. This will be the fourth one. Prior to this event that’s happening October 4th 2024, we had hosted three evenings essentially. The evenings were a bit more low key. Not as many speakers, but still a really great place to network. We got it kickstarted that way. Now we’re going to be doing a full day event. Not quite two days, but just one day. As you mentioned, Mike King headlining. Farley, Kaszone, BB, Shiv Naran who’s very well known in the SaaS SEO space, Viv who you might know from some of the conferences, Kakar, and then we’re probably going to announce a couple more along with a panel. Essentially I looked at the scene in Toronto. We have so many great marketers and so many SEOs and we didn’t really have an event to call our own. Me being in a position where I could help get the word out to my subscribers and people who follow me on LinkedIn and also the network of people I’m connected with, it felt like the right time. The first event was in October 2022 and our upcoming fourth event is going to be on October 4th.

James Dooley: So in there you spoke about your subscribers. SEO Notebook has absolutely exploded over the years. If anyone doesn’t know who Steve Toth is or SEO Notebook, I strongly recommend you start subscribing. Where did the idea come from with regards to SEO Notebook and what’s your plans for that brand? Back onto the conference, what’s your plans for SEO IRL? Are you going to try and make it a two or three day event as well?

Steven Toth: Just to go back to the initial question, I would consider myself as somebody who’s very creative but not very well organised. That’s not a strength of mine. I have an assistant to help me with all that. I didn’t really back in the day. The idea was born from keeping everything in Evernote for my own purposes. I’d been reading, testing, had an idea for that, and it was all going into emails to myself, Slack messages to myself, Post-it notes on my desk. There was no good central place for it. I got Evernote at the time and then like a day later I thought, I’ve already populated this Evernote with a bunch of really valuable stuff. What if I created an email list to email one page from that notebook out per week? That was in 2019 and I’ve done that every week since July 2019. This is now five years of SEO Notebook. It’s been amazing thus far. Completely changed my life and allowed me to become a successful full-time entrepreneur. I’m very grateful that I had this idea and that I followed through on it. We all have many ideas and sometimes we don’t follow through. It’s when you follow through that you get the reward. In terms of plans for SEO Notebook itself, I really want to keep going with the status quo right now. As long as I’m still doing SEO, I’m still inspired to put things in the notebook. I have partnerships through there as some affiliate. I could potentially put all that content on my website, but I would much rather give it away to the people who really follow me and not make it too public by putting every one of my strategies on my website. With IRL, the plan is to keep expanding it. This next event is an extension of what happened before. Depending on how big the attendee list grows and what the event feedback is like, we use that to enhance the following one. With Notebook, it’s allowed me to become a consultant per se. Over the years I’ve grown my team to like 13 or 14 people. That has parlayed into something called Notebook Agency. It’s notebook.agency. We’re kind of a hybrid model between consulting and an agency.

James Dooley: Sounds great. Obviously you’ve not missed a note every single week for several years. Where do you manage to find the information from? Quite a lot of your notes are very innovative and forward thinking. They’re one of the first places people learn about what you come up with. One, where do you get the information from, and two, now it’s grown a little bit more, is it still you sourcing the next big thing for the next note?

Steven Toth: It’s still me. I’m still in full editorial control of what goes in SEO Notebook. Honestly it comes out of actually doing SEO. If I was sitting on the sidelines as CEO of my agency and not involved in what was going on, I wouldn’t have the inspiration to do SEO Notebook. It is all born from the actual work. The nice thing now is I can spend more time on research and development. With where AI has taken us in the last under two years, that has provided such a bounty of things I can mess around with, experiment with, be inspired by. I’ve featured things that you have said in SEO Notebook before. I’m always got my antenna out for the people who I follow and respect and I’m happy to slot them into certain notes as well. Five years in, I’ve got a rhythm and flow. The emails go out on Tuesday. I usually don’t think about it on Tuesday or Wednesday. I take those as days where I don’t have to prepare anything. If I ever have a lull and I’m not sure what to do, I have a backlog list of different inspiration that I’ve taken. I’m always earmarking things I’ve heard. Usually the easiest notes for me to create are the notes I’m inspired by that week, so I try to lean towards that.

James Dooley: Obviously from SEO Notebook you’ve said the agency has come along. With the agency, it’s mainly consultancy. What’s made you go down the consultancy route as opposed to a lot of people going down the agency route and doing full fulfilment? I remember you telling me you try not to ever sign into a client’s website, you just direct them. Why have you taken that approach?

Steven Toth: We don’t have any logins to our clients’ websites. The truthful reason is that in 2018 I took on a client and there was a web development project that went very awry, with broken forms and awful developers. That really put me off having anything to do with that. Then I realised when I started working at FreshBooks in 2018 that the way they operate is taking in recommendations from vendors versus having vendors touch the website. Some of these websites, we work with a company that has like a 3.2 billion valuation. There’s no way I’m ever going to get to log in to anything. Sometimes it’s even hard to get Google Search Console for some clients. That’s rare, but it can happen.

James Dooley: With a consultant, is it just the SEO you’re consulting them on or is it wider scale marketing like PPC or social media? Or is it literally just the SEO side of things?

Steven Toth: The most we get into is CRO. But we only stick to SEO. One of the main reasons is we don’t employ account managers. You’re not talking to somebody who has to translate what’s going on to someone knowledgeable. The person who speaks to the client is a person who has knowledge. Initially that was me. Now in expanding the agency we have other strategists who meet with clients. If you have a multitude of services, you need an account manager point person to translate to all the departments. But if you’re focused on SEO you can put a strategist in and they have direct interaction with the client.

James Dooley: Quite a lot of your marketing shows you as being an enterprise SEO. For anyone watching, what’s the difference between enterprise SEO and a traditional client SEO?

Steven Toth: Lots of different things, but I think the biggest difference is you realise it’s not your job to create the entire strategy or offer every last little bit. With enterprise you might have one person for strategy, another for technical SEO, another for links. You might have multiple link building vendors. You also have a skilled person at the other end, SEO managers you work with. It’s different than educating a client who tells you how to do your job or constantly questions you because they don’t understand. You’re working with an educated person. The relationship is more collaborative. You understand you’re one piece in the puzzle, not an agency expected to do everything.

James Dooley: What in your opinion is wrong at present with the majority of client SEO models?

Steven Toth: The account manager issue is one. I have lots of other issues. SEO agencies will take on projects that they should not be taking on because the client’s not going to be competitive. That can be ripping people off. That’s borne out of not having a ton of opportunities so they take what they can get. It’s a catch 22. You want someone busy enough to turn away bad projects but not so busy that they cannot service you. It’s about the relationship and trust, and whether you trust them to be accountable. A lot of agencies have a salesperson sell you, then you’re passed off to an account manager with low knowledge, then a backend SEO person who might not be great. Recipe for disaster. I’ve structured a company that addresses those issues. Clients have a relationship they can trust, with me or another strategist.

James Dooley: One second, it’s just paused on the upload.

Steven Toth: Sure, take your time.

James Dooley: We merge them both together. I spoke with the wife of the founder of Roblox today. Maybe coming on as a client. I actually worked for his brother three years ago. They have this cool non-profit funding research between gut health and mental health. I spoke with her and her team today.

Steven Toth: Sounds good. You think you’re closing?

James Dooley: Yeah I do. I already know one of the marketing managers there. I worked for her brother-in-law and I know this other guy Jeff there.

Steven Toth: Class. Do you check on clients all over the world then?

James Dooley: Yeah.

Steven Toth: I’m speaking to somebody in Singapore right now. Taken on Estonia, UK, one Indian client once, Dubai.

James Dooley: Sounds good. Yours is still saying recording, isn’t it?

Steven Toth: Yeah it does.

James Dooley: Can you stop your recording there or not? Don’t leave the studio. Is there a stop recording button?

Steven Toth: If it’s not, just leave it for now. I don’t actually know how I would stop recording but it is saying it is recording.

James Dooley: Leave it one second. I’ve just bought the top of the range MacBook and ever since I’ve got it my Riverside keeps cutting out with browser storage. I cannot seem to find it. It’s frustrating when you upgrade your equipment and it’s worse than the one you had. So annoying. I cannot seem to find the issue. I keep having to get the editor to merge the two clips together. It’s not much to do but it’s annoying that you cannot fit it in one go.

James Dooley: We’ve got, yeah, we’re going to go on to the DISC. The DISC is personality traits. What have you been doing with that then?

Steven Toth: I just learned how to read people basically. You know Annie, Mads’ girlfriend. Annie works for me. Annie is a project manager at our company and she’s been great helping suggest the right people in the right positions and communicating effectively with the team based on their DISC profiles. I’ve known about DISC for a long time but only started thinking about it intensely in terms of hiring and who we want to work with and what the clients are with DISC and how to communicate with them. It’s become a toolkit. If I’m doing business with somebody I need to know their DISC profile in order to communicate effectively.

James Dooley: Makes sense. You did it for your business too, right?

Steven Toth: Yeah.

James Dooley: We did. There was two or three different ones. Now before we onboard anyone we check them for a video test, then a face to face interview, then role play to see where they fit into the business. In month one we put them in three different job roles to see how they would excel and what they like most. Fourth week we put them back in the role we think we’re going to take them on for. Steve, you’ve got 13 or 14 A players within your team. You’ve spoken about DISC. Can you expand on that and how you’ve got such a great team now?

Steven Toth: DISC for anybody who doesn’t know is a personality test focused on how people like to be communicated to. There are four quadrants, D, I, S, and C. D is more direct. I is more influential. C is more conscientious. S is more supportive. Once you know where you fall, it’s super important. I’m a CD. You’re probably a DD. James a DI. Once you know where you fit, you can tell people straight up, this is how I like to be communicated to. I’d rather prefer video than email, or a long email is fine instead of booking a meeting. If you put a person in a job like sales, you probably don’t want a C or an S type. You want a DS or an SI. It’s about knowing strengths and weaknesses of each quadrant and putting people into the right position. It’s also about empowering the team to understand DISC and how people prefer to be communicated to. The end goal is smoother operations. To me it’s a cheat code. At FreshBooks they invested heavily in DISC training. It was nine weeks, once a week for a full afternoon. Since then I’ve made friends with Mads Singers. At his conference in Saigon he had a mastermind retreat where we also did DISC sessions. It’s hugely valuable to understand it on a deep level.

James Dooley: Brilliant. I’m moving on quickly because I’ve got a few questions from the community. One is how did you manage to move from solopreneur to agency owner?

Steven Toth: I wouldn’t say it was a conscious move. I was doing very well as a solopreneur. I was managing around 10 clients and just managing a group of freelancers to support me, not full-time staff. It was a great learning. It’s not the most sustainable because you’re very busy, doing follow ups and all client communication. I wouldn’t say I burnt out. I was enjoying it. It came to a point where some people offered to work with me to help me and they were really good people. I said sure, why not. That evolved into growing my team over the last couple of years. It wasn’t really a conscious thing. It was taking advantage of great people around me and having them come on board.

James Dooley: Another one is how to leverage automation or AI within your agency.

Steven Toth: There’s endless inspiration. One thing we’re doing based off a note I spoke about in my Chiang Mai talk is a way to write fully optimised title tags with AI without just asking AI to write a title tag. We scrape the SERPs, the top 100 results. We count the instances of the words in those title tags. We get a list of most often used words. Then we ask AI to write title tag variations using only those words and adding unique value. That way we get an informed title tag based on what’s ranking, not what ChatGPT thinks is a good title tag. We automate that. We do a lot of work with Python. We have a few in-house tools. We have a server everyone can log into and we run scripts there. Some scripts can take up to 12 hours with browser automation. We log in the next day and it’s done. The easiest way to start is Python because development time is short. You can iterate fast.

James Dooley: Another question. Steve, what do you focus on and what do you avoid within your agency to make it great?

Steven Toth: I want to stay away from anything that has to do with touching the website. Also clients can be too critical of the content. Does this content speak perfectly about the brand, we do this but we don’t do that. I tell clients we need to get the stuff up as soon as possible and once it ranks we can tweak it if it bugs you. It comes down to educating the client and not worrying too much about fine details. Getting it live and indexed and giving it time to rank is most important.

James Dooley: Another one. Steve, you always provide up to date notes with SEO Notebook and show great case studies. Why do you think Notebook Agency is better than the competition? What sets you apart?

Steven Toth: At any agency you’re only as good as your strategy team. The team I built is incredibly smart. People from all walks of life. Former computer scientists, former mechanical engineers, people with 20 plus years of SEO experience, but intense everyday SEO obsessed experience. It boils down to quality of people. I have a lot of people wanting to work for me and I only pick the best. I’m still involved in many strategies. We have the luxury of saying no to clients we don’t think will be successful. We do a thorough audit before we sign anyone. We scope the project. If we don’t think we can make a big difference, we don’t take them on. Our success rate is higher because of that. We have a great time working with clients.

James Dooley: Name one thing about the business mindset that you’ve never said before to anyone on the internet. So they won’t see it on your notebook. Anything you’ve never said before?

Steven Toth: That’s a good question. It’s put me on the spot. Maybe me personally being a very introverted person, I thought for many years that would hold me back, especially with sales. At some point, if you want to be successful you have to put those things aside and be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Just go for it. The first time I spoke in front of 400 people at FreshBooks I was nervous, but I did it and then we got put up on a pedestal because people saw the great work. Same thing with interviews, client meetings, investor pitches. Put it aside and go for it. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

James Dooley: Name one thing somebody doesn’t know about you as an individual.

Steven Toth: I’ve been doing SEO for 14 years and for the first seven years I was not a very good SEO. I was passionate, but I don’t think I had notable case studies. I was spread too thin. I was reading Moz, listening to Matt Cutts, Google’s word as gospel, Barry Schwartz and all those types of things. It wasn’t until 2016 or 2017 that I started to follow people like Kyle Roof and Matt Diggity, people speaking more truth about SEO versus staying on Google’s safe side. I did grow a company’s traffic to around 40K a month, but I wouldn’t have been able to start a campaign from scratch and do a great job until I got exposure to black and grey hat and started learning from guys like Matt and Kyle.

James Dooley: Two great guys. Last two questions. If you could ask a Google engineer one question to understand the algorithm, what would you ask and why?

Steven Toth: I would want to know what’s the best way I could rank that minimises links. How can I rank without links? Topical authority is a big part, but what signals are just as important as links? What’s the baseline of links needed to be super competitive or become the next NerdWallet cost effectively? If I wanted to start a mega authority site, what’s the most cost effective way I could do that?

James Dooley: Last one. If you inherited Google tomorrow and could change one thing with the algorithm, not to please shareholders, to please users, what would you change and why?

Steven Toth: I would give smaller sites more visibility in search results. I would probably reduce the forced visibility Reddit has right now. If people search plus Reddit, fine, but don’t force it on users. There are many smaller sites producing great content that care about what they’re reviewing that aren’t getting visibility. I don’t want a future where the top 1,000 websites get 95% of the traffic. That should be distributed across more sites.

James Dooley: Couldn’t agree more. Steve, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Where’s the best place for someone to follow you, message you, or subscribe?

Steven Toth: SEONotebook.com. LinkedIn, Steven Toth. If you’re interested in the event, even if you can’t make October 4th 2024, go to SEOIRL.com and give us your email and we’ll let you know about the next event.

James Dooley: Steve, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you and I’ll see you soon in one of the meetups. Are you going to Chiang Mai?

Steven Toth: Definitely.

James Dooley: I’ll see you in Chiang Mai. Take care.

Steven Toth: Thanks James. Thank you. Bye.