The SEO Agency Rollercoaster with Olivia Tapper and Thomas Phillips of DTC SEO Agency

[Music] welcome to the SEO agency roller coaster podcast here we sit down with agency leaders to fuel the Ambitions of upand cominging SEO entrepreneurs equipping them with the insights they need to start grow and scale up the noo agency think of it as a road map to success packed with lessons from industry leaders who have been there and done that my name is angre zudy from Mr ranking and as always I joined by my co-host agency coach Chris Simmons of the OMG Center and of the worshipful company of entrepreneurs today we're thrilled to have Olivia Tapper and Thomas Phillips of the DTC SEO agency and pet portraits.com on the show we're excited to uncover the highs lows and game-changing moments of running a digital agency so if you're ready to take control of your future and AO buckle up for a thrilling and insightful ride welcome everybody nice to meet you both absolutely start before we started

for the audience's benefit if you're not watching this you should try and watch it and have a look at Thomas's Formula 1 merch in the background there I'm sure he bought them from a reputable dtoc company both of you because there's two of you we don't often have two Founders on a on a on a recording so um I'm going to put the first part of this question over to you Thomas so if you could just tell us a little bit about you know your Journeys in digital marketing and and how you got into this and then kind of where you combine forces or how that works that' be great yeah absolutely yeah I started my first online or proper online company when I was 13 um I was building little miniature finger skateboards like little te teexs uh in my dad's garage so to 39 different countries in the first year and yeah it just kind of took off from there I just quickly realized like oh wow okay you know I could build a website I can Market it through SEO at the time and forums and then I just quickly realized like okay sky's the limit like we could build anything uh around this and then yeah I had like one job for nine months and I was like this is not for me um full-time job and then yeah we just went through and had a bunch of different

joint ventures we built massive content affiliate websites scaled uh and exited 16 different brands at this point yeah and then we're at the point with the agency now where basically just so many people in in my network were asking us to do SEO for them and I never wanted to do it and I never wanted to feel like we had a or I had a boss you know like so to speak um but it's been extremely rewarding which has been uh a total 180 compared to what I thought it would be which is fantastic so yeah we're now at this point and scaling uh other DDC Brands which is super fun and and Olivia tell us the the story of how you two joined forces where where did that come in yeah so I think Thomas has the entrepreneur background obviously starting out when he was 13 I have more the business and corporate background so I have an engineer degree I worked in tech companies within management and working with leadership teams I think he saw that he needed me in order to scale a business and set up the structure around it so he has fantastic ideas he

has so much knowledge in his head but I am the one that is extract that and put that into the operational processor so yeah we make a great team the perfect yin and yang of visionary and implement the ideal combination for two leaders in an agency that's perfect what was it that that kind of inspired you to to start dtoc SEO agency then what was the was it literally Thomas just people saying I want to buy stuff from you or you know was there was there something else there that that kind of was that you that sign up on the government website to start a business what was the real kind of push it was literally just the number of people just saying hey can you do SEO for us and I over the last 18 years i' just been like no I am not interested we only do we only work on our own Brands and then yeah it just got to the point where we're like this actually makes total sense yeah we relocated over to Austin so everything's now based in Austin Texas yeah and it just it just made total sense to do so use our existing team that that we also use to rank our own websites and we're now just scaling up on that front so

it's been been great and to add to that I think it's also the mindset shift from Thomas thinking that he has like a boss which would be a client instead of moving from that to like he can help other agencies or other team uh teams to grow so helping out websites who grow uh online I think that's really the core of it it's telling with good agency leaders their level of employability Elsewhere um the chances of you being employed somewhere else is quite low not just cuz you don't want to but you know the chances of you being able to say yes to a boss all the time and and like Olivia just said you kind of have to change that mindset to they're not a well they are a client but they're not your boss you're working with them not for them and that's a mindset shift in in there as well but yeah all credit to you both besides your partnership that resulted in the DTC SEO agency you have another business as well I just wanted to find out how did this idea for pet portes come about and what was the motivation to venture into a whole different market with the custom pet art yeah great question so it was really around uh we had another website that was um in a

similar space doing just custom print products essentially and we were testing out a bunch of different products and Custom Pet Portraits just it just kind of took off and we were like huh this is interesting so we very quickly built a website in 24 hours uh printed pet memories at the time that started to take off and then we were like right we need to solidify this brand here like we need to make it official you know make it proper and we were having a discussion quick yesterday on this and Olivia brought up that we actually did a uh a quite a big poll around the the name of it and what the public the general public thought of the name and it was actually that it came up that they thought it was uh Memorial like all it was was Memorial because of the me memories name presumably so we basically went through ended up acquiring pet portraits.com yeah and then built and scaled that out so it was kind of kind of an accidental thing falling onto it and then yeah just snowboard into a much bigger brand website now it's pretty cool I

might have to get one you started when you started off both Ventures with both companies what were the initial setbacks or maybe challenges that you experienc and how did you overcome them the initial ones uh Olivia if you could so I'd say the first thing was just extracting everything that Thomas had in his head so he has done SEO for so many years it's like and we still work on it right it's a continuous working progress things pop up he's the one that kind of goes out there identify new trends all that thing and then I am the one that has to operationalize it ensure that we roll it out to our clients and always continue to work with Excellence so that was one of the initial challenges so must you have any more I think uh from a pet portrait side of things was venturing into paid ads and it's a little bit outside of agency side of things but like we'd have basically zero experience with with paid traffic uh it was just always been SEO so that was an interesting roller coaster of things I feel the the pain of a lot of DC Brands who are heavily reliant on the paid side of things is real ups and downs you know

you make a bunch of profit one day and then everything gets sucked up the next day so it's you're back to square one so it's a yeah I'm happy to be back in SEO you mentioned that that uh pet it was called uh printed pet memories and the reason was the people associated with a different thing and that's why the rebranding came about do you have any any similar issues with uh the agency with the DTC SEO agency are there any thoughts about rebranding because I'm I'm not suggesting anything I'm just thinking this because uh SE ranking had a rebranding and we had our reasons for it and we just thought it would just sort of revitalize our efforts and uh I'm just asking if it are you considering any anything to sort of change the the way people perceive your brand yeah I think I think it's a great question because we get people coming to us who are B2B uh and we're like oh we also do B2B by the way it's just the name um but we also get a lot of people coming to us who are you know DDC Brands which is fantastic so we've kind of thought about it but at the same time it it hasn't I feel like it hasn't held us back yet so we'll probably just leave it

as it is for now we also rank very well for uh DDC SEO yeah there you go there it is um just on part of Andrew's question there about um running Pet Portraits and dtoc agency is notoriously well stressful lots of things go on all the time how are you handling the two running concurrently are there naturally a client of D Toc is probably Pet Portraits from from that perspective um but but how are you managing the the balance there I'm guessing Olivia there's quite a lot of operational things under the hood there to keep Thomas out of the way yeah so we started uh with press portraits a little bit before we started with the agency so we had time to set up all the processes we built our spoke system so that all the artists and the interaction between them and the customers are happening seamlessly so there there's not a lot of things that we need to step in on and manage within Pet Portraits which has given us the opportunity to really focus and prioritize dcso agency um and that's really where the effort lies right now

I'm hands up I don't bet I rarely practice SEO these days um but I can smell a bad one a myof should we say so I don't know the answer to this anymore but how are you tailoring some of your strategies to sort focus more on D Toc versus um B2B because quite a lot B2B is lead focused and things like that where as DC is I want it and I want it now so the types of queries are always different things is it strategically different these days uh what What's the what's the approach yeah I think it's a great question yeah I mean a lot of it comes back around to attribution side of things so like for B2B and Lead genen You know it's more like okay how do we link into their go high level account as an example which is obviously a to totally different ball game to how do we link into their triple well you know which is obviously a lot easier so the kind of queries are I guess similar in that sense SEO is is similar across across the uh the board but the way that we do things is we build out a 365 day plan before we onboard a client to basically show them like this is exactly

what we're going to do these are the exact keywords we're going to go after the collection Pages products here's our reasoning here's how many links we're going to build here's kind of level of digital PR everything around that so we build everything out present that to them and everything is based off of what is actually required from makes sense so it's um yeah it's not just yeah pulling pulling the number out of nowhere yeah so it's uh yeah what is it going to take for that exact client with their particular website in their exact position right now to you know rank top three for for all the different keywords they want to go after yeah and I think as well to tap into that SEO is so much about user experience and understand being the customer and the client so regardless if it's B2B or d2c it all starts with really understanding the client and their customers that's what it all comes back around to and in the last couple of years there's been a big old shake up with um the elephant in the room AI um that you know lots of people are using it for everything some people are using it still for nothing in some

cases people are de developing it into Automation in the business rather than from an Ops point of view and things like that how are you making use of of AI and growing the agency and also sort of as an aside to that how are you making sure that the outcomes that you're using this for are consistent I have a little bit more conservative you when it comes to AI I think it's fantastic and you can apply it in a lot of different processes and speed up things but when it comes to SEO and when it comes to building out the client strategy and really mapping out the keyword keywords and building out the whole like structure of it you need to apply the human skills you need to really analyze the data go into it and there are SEO tools that you can just plug into your Shopify store and it would automatically update everything for you that is too good to be true it doesn't work that way so we are very conservative when it comes to Ai and we rely on skilled editors uh we rely on like really really in-depth knowledge about things because it's usually not accurate or reliable where are you using it on the on the ground Thomas what

what's the improve my emails research has been a big thing um we really don't use it in the agency like almost at all I feel like the output that I'm getting out of things after using chat a good year or so still it's just like that's not quite where I want to go with things and I don't know maybe that's I'm not a prompt engineer at this point you know to to get the best output but I I still just cannot rely on it you know like even if nine times out of 10 it's accurate we can't rely on nine times out of 10 like it has to be 10 out of 10 yeah we're we're still old school with it I also don't trust any AI content on the website like big red flag we have a a Stern talk with clients if if they admit to us that they've just output chat gvt content straight onto the website we just can't take the risk like it's just not it's just not worth it at all so we even have that in our contracts as well that if they do like roll that blog articles with AI Etc we cannot be accountable for how their website will react so we

really avoid AI in our content and in our processes as much as possible to ensure quality because that's at the end of the day it's about use experience and quality and a skilled editor is way better at writing and connecting with a user than Ai and chat would be yeah wanted to make a short transition talk about the team the composition of your team uh how it was when you started what it is now do you have like a team of Freelancers who you trust do you have a lot of In-House people just it'll be really helpful for our listeners just to find out how exactly your agency functions because a lot of them it's like a balance like a hybrid where you have in-house Freelancers so I'm just really curious to hear about DTC SEO agencies of course we started off with Freelancers and were heavily relied on that and now we're transitioning a bit more to hiring here in the US especially building out the team in Austin it depends on the role in the functionality of the role uh our link build team are still remote but when it comes to client facing team so we have a role called client strategy owner who is in direct

communication with the client building out the strategy understanding full SEO so it's a very tied operations to the client so we want to try to avoid as many layers as possible and rather have like experts in every single position so moving from freelancer to more regular employees and is there anything that you do to keep your team updated on the all the latest trends maybe personal growth maybe you send them on different courses just to make sure that they are up to date because once you just start working sometimes forget about just uh looking outside and uh keeping your finger on the pulse of the market just to make sure that everything's happening it's sort of a question of Team Management what is like how much do you dive into their activities how much do you suggest what they need to do or is it just a matter of hiring the right people who you can trust so I I already sort of putting words in your mouth I would just love to hear oh how how you do that ATC as your agency yeah so we have definitely team members that we task with doing research and we do that on a regular basis so that they are staying

up to Trends within their work space work environment that they're working in so it's definitely something that's super important I also see that Thomas one of his biggest roles is to just be on top of Trends he's you want to step in you network you ensure that you're out there know what's happening in the space and especially around like search GT is something that you're on top of right now yeah just keeping up to date with what is going on but I think Olivia uh mentors the team an awful lot especially around the manage managers um in the team I I think that's a very very big area is yeah coming from the corporate background of things um structuring everything in the correct way you know so the whole company structure is is set up we have the managers and then we have uh you know everyone working underneath so that whole setup is is very very good and I think Olivia is very good at yeah mentoring certain people into the role that they want to go into as well as which is great so I feel like you brushed over that pretty quick there in terms of yeah what we're looking at I

mean search GPT obviously is is the elephant in the room uh you know AI search and everything like that keeping up to date on the trends so every Friday I think it is the team have like one to two hours hour where they basically go do their own research um and if there's anything that I'm spotting that I see on Twitter or whatever it might be you know I send to like our link building manager hey this is a new thing that's coming up please look into it it may be something it may be nothing it may help improve processes and then she'll then go improve all the processor from there work with Olivia on that and then keep things up to date so we're just constantly on top of of what is going on essentially and connecting back to that it's always about managing the workload and ensuring there's time for that kind of inspiration where they can actually dive into something so that's where I keep staying connected with the team to allocate time into what gives the most value so sometimes that's going to be two hours of research the one of the hardest things and this is this is a curveball because it's not on the on the set of questions that we've worked on so one of the hardest things I think in agencies is going away from deliverables

equal time or selling of time but ultimately people have time to do stuff and you're paying people for their time so there's always that kind of um working out the balance and you touched on it just there Olivia like working out where the value of that time comes in what is what is it that you guys do that I don't know you've got two two sites on paper they're the same but they they need different work so you how are you working out this five hours here is more valuable than that three hours there or something like that what is there is there something that you do to to manage that or run that I think it's about priorties so when it comes down to it client comes first so if it's client work that needs to be completed within a time frame that comes first and then of course it's about being off the team so have enough resources to allocate that padding time so I always try to have that kind of gap for the team where they can be creative where they can do things and when I see that okay you're starting to fill all your hours just with regular work we need to hire someone uh else as well so it's about continuously

monitoring and also ensuring that they have the creative time whether that is weekly or monthly and it also depends on the rool did I answer your question yeah from an Ops point of view you did so Thomas from a from a how long's a piece of string when it comes to value of time for title tags versus robots files or whatever it might be how are you kind of doing that mental gymnastics around that area so we work off of a like a credit system in the agency so let's say you know it's 20 20 credits per month that is essentially like a Time allocation to link building content and digital PR and then if there's any kind of technical SEO or anything else that's kind of require in that that's just bundled in we could probably do a little bit of a better job in terms of you know not bleeding over for one client you know I'm I'm I'm sure that that comes in but at the end of the day problem I don't care I I just don't care if it takes the team more time because we only take on a certain number of of new clients uh per

month and we have an exclusivity agreement we only take on one client in in that specific niche in the combination of that like we're very like a lown number agency if you'd call it that you know so we we make sure we have the buffer of time that the the client needs all of the the work from the team so yeah hope that answers the question a little better yeah and I think that's also sorry to tie that in the beginning we started off by doing just like full blown side SEO straight off the bat but we saw that we got scope creep so that's when we went into the kind of credit system where we learn like well we can't do everything quality unless we say hey this is so much credit it might take one hour or two hours you know it then has that wiggle room where it can take a bit more time if needs to be and that's the that's the the balance right so you've worked out based on credits some people do totally different methodologies to ultimately try and come out with this is the time that they've got or this is the outcome that they need and here you go Thomas your answer sounds very similar to my uh old thing that I probably

battered everyone in the agencies with which is I care about the outcome not the input if it takes you five minutes to do a job that makes someone Lots lots of money or lots and lots of clients that's better than spending five hours doing a job which arguably is kind of worthless and no one feels good about look looking to the Future though not just with the agency but also with um uh with your own DTC brand that you've got what are the challenges that you you think are going to sort of shape the future of the of the agency and maybe even the sector yeah I think uh search AI I think is just such a big one I definitely don't think SEO is going anywhere because at the end of the day people are still searching for something I think just the website that that they search on May start to change you know which which it is in especially in the marketing space but if I speak to like my parents for example they're like why would I use chat GPT like what the hell is that so I think the I think the adoption is a lot slower than I certainly thought like last year which is super interesting but leaning in massively on search GPT and and the the

different AI search engines to work out okay how can we rank first and that's really what we're starting to cover from a search GPT side of things like how we can come up first for curated lists uh and that's been very very interesting so we are implementing that across all of our clients uh at the moment to the point where we've also added like AI search like referrals onto our dashboard and we're also tracking the revenue that's coming from that as well as and some of the some of the clients are like earning pretty decent amount like bet good few few grand a month off off chat GPT I'm like is interesting thing so yeah yeah so we're we're leaning in massively more on that and the conversion rate as well is just through the roof which is not so big area of focus so I think it's well the Rossy uh that we kind of coiny Asa terms so return an SEO investment so it's super difficult to attribute what is actually an SEO sale and when we go into all these tracking systems that clients are using sometimes it's like crediting pay

ads uh all day long but not the SEO so we're working with trip well to develop this dashboard uniquely with them around SEO so that we can properly attribute Rossy and that they can see the contribution to the marketing funnel I wanted to ask if you think that generative engine optimization is going to be a service that you're going to be offering like at a full scale soon or not necessarily you but is this something that you're considering because the way I see it it's part of marketing it's part of SEO but it also maybe deserves its own not branding because like Geo when I see goo I think about geography but like the term Jour of engine optimization is becoming more and more real and people are starting to ask these questions and I'm just wondering what is your what are your thoughts on it and how do you how much um benefits do you think it can give you or do you think you should just continue working on the SEO marketing side of things just doing The Branding just focusing heavily on on branding and that will just pay off at the very end even with regard to Jive engines search engines yeah I think that's a great question Andrew yeah I mean we've

definitely toyed with it and we went back over the goals over the weekend and added like SEO aai onto the list of what we want the agency to to be and become but I think that there's there's so many terms being thrown around like I'm not even sure what the right term would be right now let alone the the clients uh especially with the limited knowledge that they have of SEO even at the start of things but it's certainly Something That We're integrating and integrating a lot more into the processes of of what we're already doing and working on but yeah it can definitely be something we add on I don't know if we'd have that as a separate service per se because it it ties in directly with the work that we're currently doing it's just a slight adjustment on things which is great but yeah we definitely reason why I said is because a lot of clients are usually just see something very hypy hype Worthy on online and they just just directly send it to their agency like I want this they don't understand like how much time goes into it how much how much value they get they will get ultimately because like zero clicks you just have to do so much just to get potentially

mentioned mentioned there but commend so I'm just yeah it's a very tricky thing and we're throughout the whole year we've been talking about this trying to understand like what the real value for businesses is because for users I understand it like users get a clear answer well not clear but they get get an answer because it's up to debate right how clear that answer is another question is about biggest goal that you had in last in 2024 last year and what the what your plan is uh for this year and once again I just want to focus on one thing like what what was the primary objective last year and this year yeah yeah so last year it would have been fully migrate and move over to Austin and start hiring here uh especially for for the agency side of things which has been a big tick in the Box um this year we're actually building out a another way bigger brand I think this is going to be the biggest thing that we've we've built and worked on to date which is going to be super interesting but using it as a a client in the agency uh which is going to be super fun so that is uh a

big big Focus I would say Olivia do you have anything from my end uh it's about building out the team and doing Excellence right so it's about ensuring quality for our clients uh we had a client coming in this week actually who had just been bured by another SEO agency basically we were looking through a site who were like these links are pbn's uh it's tagged your website so I think from our end it's just about continuously showing that we care for our clients and that they are going to get great results um and that is that is hard that is a lot of work uh but it's extremely rewarding so I've got a a little quick fire round here so the best way I'm going to do this because it's with with two of you is we'll start with Thomas and straight to Olivia no time for breaks straight first thought for the answer so Thomas what is the best advice you've ever received yeah it was very personal to to what I asked I think it was basically to completely get every single thing out of

a niche and then move on as opposed to jumping into multiple different things I think that was the biggest thing at that point in my time lovely Olivia best advice you've ever received I think it's just about accepting the moments and the situation that you're in and like stress is something that you create yourself and you can label the feelings the way you want to label them right so at the end of the day you do as much as you can and then you wake up the next day or you get on it again uh lots of people give very terrible unol Ed advice so Thomas what was the worst advice you ever received come party why are you not coming out anymore you know all of that kind of stuff it's like I'm building something you're not you know yeah yeah Fair totally reasonable Olivia worst advice you've ever received um I would say it's don't work too hard uh growing up I was continuously facing like oh you're so extreme you go so much into things chill a bit but I think they didn't know my goals and they are not the people I aspired to be like so

working hard is definitely something I enjoy doing and I'm going to Contin to do Thomas what's the biggest mistake in your career that you've made to date that you that you're willing to talk about yeah resting on my Laurels I've actually got a whole we I've just been featured in this book this SEO book um oh yeah I've got a whole chapter on me about my failures I managed to to get into there somehow um uh but yeah essentially it was we had a site that was up for sale for like 4.8 n we Bic didn't work on it for like a year and a half completely rested on The Laurels obviously Google came in and updated things as they would uh and yeah safe to say the the offer that we wanted to get didn't come through uh stupid decision will never happen again good lesson learn Olivia I hope it's a different mistake but not as bad yeah so I wouldn't say I have like one biggest mistake but one that I definitely thought about a lot is we tend to not want to fire people and instead of with been like like oh you're a great employee you have a great

mindset and attitude we really like you so we've taken them and be like well now I put you in this role instead but they haven't been equipped for that role it hasn't been their goal to work in that role and so they haven't been able to handle that role and we've had to fire them anyways so I think just taking that hard discussion straight on instead of like trying to reshape them into something that they don't fit in and that's really hard PE people businesses like agencies are really hard um especially if you're good people what's the one thing if you had a magic one Thomas uh Magic one that you bought from a brilliant reputable dtoc client of yours um that you waved out and it would change one thing in the industry what would that wand wave do oh go removing the snakes God like like Olivia was saying with the with the other SEO agency like I we're we're just shocked every single time I come come across them like we've had two clients from them now and both we've had to do massive massive disavows it's just insane absolutely insane so we we

actually posed as um our own Brands to other SEO agencies like when we were getting started and this one particular brand who advertised everywhere all over Instagram they they just use pbns on mass and they use insanely targeted anchor Texs and they just absolutely destroy people's websites and it's it's nuts absolutely nuts so that would be my biggest thing I would wave that and say you know run an SEO agency if you you if you've actually done SEO you know not the other way around yeah Olivia what what about you you've got a lovely magic wand and you can use it one time what's it for I would say it's the same because that's the main pain point that we're facing it's really clients coming in and they have been burnt by either a 360 marketing agency who said that they've done SEO and then you're like well what did they actually do they work a few blog posts so like the whole understanding about the SEO space is skewed so I think it's really that like educating people and making them understand that we actually care and that F agency can be super good if they care about the clients very negative

note to end on I'm hoping that the snakes will actually all go away because it's just bringing giving us all of us a bad name we just have to convince more and more clients that this is the way to go yeah unfortunately economics usually helps when times are tough that there's a few snakes that that do quite well and the rest disappear off somewhere else in some other industry so there there'll be a uh a trumpism draining of the swamp um in the sector at some point soon I'm sure excellent yeah hopefully yeah I I think when when they've just worked out the like lead generation and sales side of things you know they're much better at the lead generation and sales than they are at SEO you know that's really where the I think the agency side of things gets turned upside down it's not really the way it should be but you know I can see why they get so many clients if they're that good at selling snake oil well you guys keep doing excellent work and be excellent and be that um Texan uh Shining Light making us all feel uh feel good about the future of the sector yeah I want to thank you for

coming on and this is a wrap for today's episode of the SEO agency roller coaster a huge thank you to Olivia Tapper and Thomas Phillips of the DTC SEO Agency for coming on sharing their Journeys and inspiring the next wave of SEO entrepreneurs this podcast is powered by SE ranking the SEO tool set that helps agency scale smarter and Achieve lasting success if you're serious about building up your agency s ranking is here to help you make the Your Mark online hit subscribe for more expert insights motivation and agency growth hacks keep pushing forward stay ahead of the curve and remember your agency's success story starts with action [Music]