Ryan Jones on SEO, AI, and the Evolution of Digital Marketing

So Ryan, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me.

I'm, I'm real excited to make some real bad decisions today.

So curious to see what we get up to.

So, so the last time we saw each other, you had literally just launched

SERPrecon, which is your side project.

you're running SEO for Razorfish, So tell us a little bit about SERPrecon.

Yeah, so SerpRecon is my software tool.

It's not affiliated with Razorfish or my agency.

I have a partner that, you know, I own, I own a majority share, but I

have a partner in the web dev space that's helping me with this tool.

but yeah, so SerpRecon.

com and it's essentially, it's filling a gap we found in the

marketplace of other SEO tools.

readers might be familiar with the Google leak that came out or the Yandex leak

that came out about a year and a half ago.

as I dove into those leaks and those codes, one thing I realized is, holy

crap, our mental model of SEO is broken.

Like we think of things like keyword density and domain authority and TF IDF.

And when we looked at the code for this actual search engines.

They didn't use any of that crap.

And so I started doing this research and I'm like, Hey,

what are they actually using?

How do they actually work?

And we found patents and research papers and open source code from search engines.

And I was like, I can code all this stuff.

This isn't that hard.

And so I put together a tool that looks at.

Your website against everybody else that ranks from their content analysis

point of view, using the actual method metrics that search engines use.

I mean, that I mean, they might have different, slightly different weights

and, you know, you know, coefficients in their numbers, but using the same

methods and the same techniques, the same type of machine learning

and vectors and what not And so.

Essentially, you can optimize your content the way a search engine is

going to measure it to be optimized.

So it helps you in the content creation process, but you can also track

rankings over time and understand not just who went up and down, but why.

Was it, you know, their lexical relevance?

Their semantic relevance?

Was it a page rank issue?

You know, what actually happened?

What metrics?

mattered to make those rankings change.

And so it's been a pretty fun learning experience and an eventful launch.

you know, had a positive first month, so can't say that much, that much bad about

it, but we're kind of learning as we go, not so much in the tool, but in how

to run a company and how to run a tool.

Yeah, because I think when, when I saw you at PubCon, you were definitely,

stressed out because I think again, I'm thinking to myself, I couldn't

have thought of a worse day to launch a new tool than when you're kind of like

walking around the, the halls of a trade show in Vegas, because like one, the

signals for kind of cells are pretty, pretty, weak in, in the hotels, generally

speaking, and, two, you're obviously very busy, hanging out with people and

lunches and, Breakfast and whatever else.

And I just, yeah, I mean, I, I admire you for kind of doing

it, but, Yeah, I would have

loved to launch it earlier.

It was, it was hectic.

I would have loved to launch it earlier than PubCon and then just, you know,

talk about it at PubCon, but I figured, all right, I'm going to be on a stage.

And after PubCon, I was doing three more shows that month at different conferences.

And I saw like, I had to get it launched.

Cause I'm going to be on four different stages.

And it was like, all right, I need to get this out there to people.

Like, this is my shot, but.

At the same time, we were kind of fixing some bugs on the fly and,

you know, nothing major, right?

Like the tool works, we tested all that, but you can never test everything that

a user might do, or things people might, ways people might treat stuff, or things

they might type into boxes, right?

they always, we thought we tested everything great, there's always a couple

bugs that slip through and You know, big shout out to my partner, Matt, who

runs Monello, web dev agency, because he had his team on the ground, working on

this stuff and, you know, coordinating with me while I was on stage at PubCon.

So it was, it was a fun launch, but you know, we.

No major bugs, thankfully, everything worked.

But, we got a little minor bug squash now and we're working on redesigning some

sales pages and homepages and stuff and also adding more features to the tool.

But it was, it was kind of crazy, like never launched a product

before and it was, it was fun.

And the SEO community are not, they're not shy and kind of coming

forward with an opinion, even if you haven't asked for one.

So how, how is Serprecon being received?

it's, it's mixed right now.

a lot of the.

Expert technical SEOs are loving it.

there's a few out there.

Is

that experts or like actual experts?

Yeah, that's well, we'll go with both, right?

A mix of both.

but I, what I did find is I have to do a lot of education.

Because there are still a lot of SEOs that are still working off that same checklist

that like Rand Fishkin or Brett Tabke or Matt Cutts wrote in like 2006, right?

And those checklists aren't right anymore.

There's, there's, there's stuff that we don't use, but there's still a

lot of tools out there using it.

There's a lot of SEOs with that broken mindset.

They're, they're still in the completely, you know, lexical model.

And by lexical, I mean words on page, right?

Oh, this, this website has the word seven times.

So you should add it eight.

You'll outrank that.

That's not how stuff works.

We've gone fully semantic.

You know this, it's vectors, it's cosine similarity.

It's, you know, the meaning of words with all the machine learning models and, and

even AI and our tools just didn't keep up.

So we have to kind of educate into how you can use this, which has been my challenge.

So I'm looking forward to launching a blog soon to help educate.

but you know, when I get to sit down with people and show them how to use it,

they're like, Oh yes, this makes sense.

I need this.

So.

Just need to do more of that.

Yeah.

So I think I always find like, you know, if, if you have to kind of like

explain it to people, then, you know, you're probably doing something wrong.

Cause it does, it does mean you're restricted by the number

of demos that you can do yourself.

you probably need to get to the point where just record a few of them.

And kind of pick the best ones out the best versions of each one and then push

that together in a kind of like an FAQ or you know, here's how to do this.

Here's how to do that.

I think I think it's always interesting.

I've always found whenever I've used tools, sometimes you see people.

Using the tools and they use them for completely different reasons.

And maybe the people who originated originally came up with the

idea of creating them, right?

I mean, the one that always kind of got me was scrape box, right?

Scrape box was kind of like a bit like a swiss army knife that everyone

used it for certain things on.

I was using it for, you know, probably completely different reasons that other

people because it came with functionality built in, But I think a lot of the

developers sometimes they they throw so many features into it without really.

kind of thinking of what is the business case for this, so would you

say that the tool SERPrecon is kind of more beneficial for, enterprise

level companies, or is it kind of more pitched more at the sort of mid level?

So, I'm trying to pitch it to both, obviously.

I think it's for anybody that's trying to create content or wondering

why their content's not ranking.

So we've got some great stuff in there where.

You know, instead of just looking at keyword research, we can dissect every

site that ranks for your query and we can take out the entities and we can use BERT,

you know, Google's BERT's open source.

So we extract keywords from everybody's content, the key topics

of it, the same way Google does.

And we can put all that stuff in, we use a little bit of AI, we can put all

that into a content outline for you and say, hey, if you want to rank for

this topic based on everybody else that actually ranks, here's the outline.

Here's the words and the entities and the topics to include.

Here's the outline of what the content that the users are looking for.

Here's the intent match of the user, right?

You can give all that to your copywriter and say, go.

And so we've got some enterprise SEOs using it.

There's some big companies, using the tool.

And then there's a whole bunch of small independents using the starter plan.

Doing the same thing and it's having great success.

You know, I'm, I'm dogfooding it internally on some clients and on my

own personal sites and, you know, the people that are following the advice

and following the, the recommendations.

It's, it's working out pretty well.

So I'm excited, excited to share it and expand it.

and in terms, in terms, yeah, you

when it comes to kind of pricing, I mean, how do you arrive at your pricing model?

Because I always find sometimes that's the biggest challenge.

You know, you look at, you look at some of the tools that exist.

You know, they kind of started off and they were affordable and then, you know,

for whatever reason, like they, they become ridiculously expensive over time.

Yeah, I actually think I'm not charging enough.

so we, we went around and around with the pricing model.

And I, one thing I said to my partners, I was like, we have to make this

affordable to the small SEO consultant, because I have a lot of friends that

are SEO consultants, they take side contract, you know, they don't work

for a major company or anything.

And if you want all the tools, you can't afford it.

You might sign a client and your entire client's budget just

pays for six or seven tools.

That's not sustainable.

Yeah.

So I said, I always want to have.

You know, a cheap plan, and I don't want to severely limit the features in it.

And so we have a $10 a month plan that anybody can use.

And the features aren't limited.

The amount of reports you can run is limited, but you get right now,

every feature that the tool does.

except maybe the ability to schedule them monthly or weekly.

And that's because, you know, I don't want you to use all your credits on one

report, but you, you get every feature.

You don't, there's no data.

We're not giving you that we have for the, for the light account.

So you can do the work you need to do.

And, you know, I don't want to price out the small SEOs and at the same time,

we have plans for enterprises too, but it was really important to me that.

Everybody be able to use this because our message of evolve your SEO tools

doesn't work if we price people out of it.

one of the things that again, I found very unsavory with some of the, the companies

that I've worked with again, I've been working with some of the vendors that

I've got, like for many, many years, Probably in some cases, like five, six

years, I paid them consistently regularly every month, you know, and all of a

sudden you'll just find that, you know, a subscription has gone up from like.

$29.99 to $45.

And I'm thinking.

I know inflation's kind of like creeping up a bit, but you know, 29 to 45 seems

like a bit of a jump or they're imposing some restrictions in terms of this

functionality is not working anymore.

I mean, HubSpot's the one that killed me.

They introduced some new AI functionality in their tool and

you have to pay for it, right?

And it's stupidly expensive if you want to use it, They used to

give you firmographic information.

So you type in a prospective name, type in the name of the company, the domain, and

they would give you, How big the company is, how many employees they have, all

that sort of stuff, and they're basically saying you want that information.

You have to pay for it, I've always kind of worked worked on the basis

that you know, you should be loyal to the people that are loyal to you.

That helped you kind of like initially, there's some companies I

work with where what they understand the concept of grandfathering.

So what they've done is they basically said for new people, okay, This is the

pricing mechanism for existing people.

You stick with what you have, So, the odd price increase because of,

you know, increased cost of cloud cloud storage and lots of stuff.

Fine.

But, you know, like when they jack it up dramatically just to chase money

doesn't doesn't really sit right with me.

No, and, and I've got some tools where, you know, they've, I've same boat.

I've got some tools we use at Razorfish where the price has gone

up and other tools where we've been grandfathered in for like 15 years now.

And, you know, we're getting a crazy deal, but kudos to those

tools because we still use them.

Cause in most cases, I

mean, an agency isn't going to go.

you know, like companies put their prices up by 50%, so I'm just going to

go and jack up all my clients prices by 50%, you know, but typically, you

know, the overheads of tools is probably one of the biggest overheads that most

agencies have in, in, over and above people, you know, the tools that they

use are the, the kind of the biggest sort of, you know, variable that can

really kind of impact the bottom line.

There's a lot, there's definitely a lot.

And I think, I'm afraid we're going to see an increase across the

agency pretty soon too, because.

Google just did that, Major infrastructure change where they blocked a lot of

scrapers and everybody had to scramble.

And, essentially for, for those that didn't follow the news that may be

listening is Google, if you're not rendering JavaScript, they basically

blocked you from using search.

So if you just, you used to be able to search Google without

JavaScript on and now try it.

You can't, it doesn't work.

And a lot of this people that were scraping Google for rankings and

getting that data were not rendering the page fully with JavaScript.

They were, you know, they didn't need to and rendering is expensive.

Well, now they all have to render it.

And so I'm, a lot of the tools made that switch and, you know, they, they got their

tools back up and running, pretty quickly.

but no one's changed their pricing yet.

And rendering is definitely a little more expensive than, than just scraping,

you know, the old fashioned way.

So I'm waiting to see what happens with a lot of the other tools.

you know, luckily on SERPrecon, we're, we're rendering pages anyway.

So it, while it did take us down for a little bit, because some of

the vendor API's we use to take us down for like a day or two.

because some of our peers weren't up, but it doesn't really break our tool

that much, or it's not really going to affect our pricing that much, I

don't think, because we were already rendering, having to render stuff

anyway to get the data we wanted to get.

I watched, at, PubCon, Will Reynolds was talking about, he talked about,

you know, chat GPT and AI an awful lot, And how, you know, although he was

seeing like a lot less, Search queries.

He wasn't seeing a drop in kind of inquiries for services, And a lot

of that was kind of being taken by You know, people using, you know,

perplexity of Claude or what have you, what do you, what do you kind of

thoughts in terms of how that's going to sort of shake up the landscape?

I don't think it's going to shake it up that much.

I was just having this conversation with, with a friend of mine on

Facebook earlier this morning.

And so there's two parts to it is.

The first part is in the SEO business and second part is AI

usage in general versus search.

And so I kind of want to address both.

The, the, the first step thing is we're lucky in SEO because AI works on the

same principles as search engines.

The same information retrieval principles, right?

It's still vector, vectorizing content, using transformers, things like that.

You know, it's still using the semantic stuff we do for SEO.

So.

As SEOs, we are very well positioned to take advantage of this AI thing,

because all the work we're doing, if we've kept up with SEO and

we're still not following those old checklists from the 2000s, right?

If we've kept up, we're doing the right stuff to optimize for AI.

We're already doing it.

And we just need to kind of make a couple of tweaks here and there and,

you know, change how we approach things.

But most of our work is the same, but the future of AI.

I don't think it's going to be a search box people type into or a

destination website people go to.

I think we're going to see search, search and AI be more ingrained

into a device itself into a browser.

Right.

There may be a day where I don't go to Google or I don't go to chat GPT.

I just start typing into my device or browser or talk to my device or whatnot.

And.

It does a search, right?

It's still looking at webpages and it feeds me back an AI response

after doing that search of webpages.

But it's not going to give me a list of 10 blue links.

It's, you know, it's going to be seamless.

It's going to be kind of hidden.

We'll see search, search behind the scenes.

We'll see AI behind the scenes.

There'll be integrated and conjoined in some way that no one really

understands, but as marketers, we're still gonna want to be in it.

you know, AI is going to be an answer that search, that AI, that

thing that there's going to be.

And answer a recommendation.

It's going to mention a brand's going to talk about something and we're

still going to want to be there.

And to me, that still requires marketing.

It still requires influencing that search, even though it's not a

real search, inference, influencing that AI and getting our message and

getting our clients brands out there.

So.

I think the way we do our work changes, but the essentially the work we do, I

don't think it's going to change that much

the 10 blue links, I mean, you know, I used to love the 10 blue

links cause it gave the opportunity to have 10 paid links as well.

So three along the top and seven down the side.

so for me, I didn't like the idea of the 10 blue links going away, the 10 blue

links has been on death row for like so long, Because that's not what people want.

They want the answer, not.

You know, one of 10 answers, Because, you know, more often than not, you've

got like click pimps, arbitrage, this whole bunch of stuff that's

not really giving you the answer.

It's like the next step in the puzzle, I'm looking for the answer to this.

Well, this one tells me there's a kind of comparison side.

This gives me three places.

Well, that's not really the answer I wanted, right?

I wanted one One sort of suggestion, and I think, you know, if you can

get to the point where, you know, if it is AI that gives you the

ability to be able to extract that information, this is my information,

Give me the answer, I typed into AI.

I've said, I'm doing a presentation, can you suggest some outfits to wear?

It didn't actually ask me to say, What gender are you?

How old are you or anything like that?

You know what?

What's the kind of target audience?

It said, Well, you may want to kind of like choose a nice blouse and a skirt, And

I'm thinking to myself, Well, you know, if it had asked me those questions, it

could have done it done a better job in answering it, And I think sometimes that

that's the piece that I think is missing.

That was always the bit with with, you know, it.

Again, with paid searches, sort of, I would always look for the

anomalies of the misspellings.

I mean, I used to love it when I could find really incredibly cheap misspellings.

I'm not insulting the person that's made the misspelling because some

of the words, you know, It's kind of obvious the way they spell it

is is, you know, you think it's the right way, but it's the wrong way.

And it used to be that, let's say the main keyword would be 10 a click and the

misspelling would be 10 cents a click.

And I'm like, I'll take the 10 cents all day long.

What Google has done is just bundled them all together and said they're all 10 now.

So, you know, they kind of said, Oh, we've made it easier for you to kind of do.

It's like, well, it may be easier, but it's not cheaper.

unfortunately, not everyone could find the

There's a fun, fun anecdote.

And this goes back to, my days prior to Razorfish at a different

agency with a different client.

And I remember being in this meeting and we're, we're meeting with Yahoo.

And back when Yahoo was a search engine, right, this is going to date this story.

and Yahoo was like, Hey, it's Superbowl.

Cause we got Superbowl coming up, right?

Probably by the time this airs and they're like, Hey, it's Superbowl client.

Do you want to do a homepage takeover for the Superbowl this year?

You did it last year.

It was so many millions of dollars.

And you know, to have their, the whole Yahoo homepage being added for this

client and the CMO of this client was in the room and, and he was like,

No, we didn't get any ROI out of it.

Like, didn't really make sense for us to do.

I don't think we want it.

And the Yahoo rep shut her briefcase and she's like, alright, no problem, you

know, Toyota, and I'm making this up, the brand name, like Toyota wanted it

anyway, so we'll just sell it to them.

And the CMO immediately said, wait a minute, we'll take it.

And I remember sitting there saying, all right, you just said there's no

ROI of this, but Toyota wants it.

So now you want it.

And that's almost the attitude we need to take with AI, because we're

not going to measure the clicks in, you know, last click attribution.

We're not going to see it, but someone's message is going to be there.

Yeah.

Right.

Some, it's going to recommend something and somebody, and if it's not us.

It's going to be someone else that we don't want it to be.

And so as marketers, I think, you know, it's time to move beyond

the traditional ways of measuring, measuring that attribution.

So it's funny.

We, we went through this kind of complete sort of like a role reversal, A lot of

money flooded into digital because it was so measurable, trackable, accountable,

And then, you know, they introduced other channels, So, you know, you obviously

lost some of the data with iOS 14.

5 and app tracking transparency, So all that data vanished as a result of that.

So you moved into the whole You know, the probabilistic and deterministic

conversions rather than actual data, which marketers hated, But then you

look at other channels like, you know, take influences, So many people kind of

moved into influences and it'd be like, well, okay, so I paid this TikToker

like 50 grand to kind of like promote my product, I made some sales, but

I have no idea how many of them were accountable to that particular person's.

Posts about my product, And equally, it may be that Tiktok may get not get

the direct kind of correlation of the uplifting sales, but there'll be some

kind of halo effect of additional search volume in Google, People go to Google type

in the brand that they've never heard of before, So even though people are typing

in a brand, they don't know the brand.

They've just heard of it somewhere else, So everyone assumes that, Oh,

well, I'm not going to bid on my brand because, you know, if they're

typing my brand, they know who we are.

It's like they know you.

Yeah.

Of you, they don't know anything about you because they've seen it somewhere else.

You need to provide them with the same experience as somebody who, you know,

is kind of like is well known to you.

So I think so much of that and so much of that is.

Unaccountable.

You can't really track it.

You can say, I know I spent this amount of money and then this amount of money

hit the bank, but I don't really know how it got there and that's always the

challenge, think that's, that's a, you know, we, we kind of moved into that realm

now rather than where we were, which where it was all trackable and transparent.

So,

yeah, it's the old David Ogilvie quote, right?

Where 50 percent of ad spend is wasted.

It's just, the problem is figuring out which 50 percent I quote older than I

am, I think, or I think that's older than 40 some years old, but it's, it

still holds true and I'm sure people at home can relate or people listening

to this can relate is how many people have had a client where and I know I've

worked with like 17 in this scenario where you'll do a TV commercial.

Let's say a Super Bowl ad because it's coming up, right?

We're a couple weeks away.

You do a Super Bowl ad and you'll measure that ad by YouTube views or ratings and,

you know, awards it wins and whatnot.

But the second you put that Super Bowl ad on your website,

now you're beholden to sales.

And so, wait a minute, why everywhere else that ad, when it ran on

TV, no one cared about sales.

It was views and awareness.

But the second you put a page on the website that has it, now it's, well,

that's not getting enough sales.

We've, we've fallen into that trap of just because we can track it.

It doesn't mean it's the right metric.

It doesn't mean it's the right way to measure something.

And I think we're going to have to adjust.

There's going to be some tough times coming.

Yeah.

I mean, like, like, you, you know, you talk to so many brands and they're.

They're trying to spend 90 percent of their money on, basically conversion

mechanisms rather than anything that's about brand awareness and engagement.

It's just literally everything's about conversions, conversion, conversions,

We've kind of spoil advertisers by giving them such good performance

for such a long period of time.

They expect it to be able to continue.

And unfortunately, right, I just don't think we're in a position to do that.

That's not to say that people aren't making, you know, sales.

I think Shopify had record sales last Black Friday than they've ever had.

And you would, you would say with all that was going on in the economy at the moment,

you would have thought that it might have been a bit softer, but it wasn't.

It was like, You know, double digits up on on the previous year, which

again, I was quite surprised about.

I thought it would have been much softer than it was.

but you know, but it's it's sort of, yeah, I just think so.

So much more of it is like it's it's unaccountable sales that have happened.

So, you know, again, I think that You see a lot of agencies and they

are, you know, just doing one thing.

So they're just doing Google.

They're just doing Facebook or they're just doing TikTok, I think

you probably need to sort of spread yourself a bit more evenly and have a

presence kind of in multiple places.

Like, so you need to have your SEO locked up.

You need to have your paid search locked up, your paid social locked

up, your programmatic locked up, Your TV, you know, all the above the line.

It's all got to kind of like, yeah.

All tell the same story, but you know, be cohesive and kind of joined up.

Yeah.

I mean, a lot of people forget the marketing funnel, right?

And I mean, these days it kind of looks more like a crazy straw than a funnel.

Cause people are going all over the place to different things, but, to use the

funnel example, we've been so focused on the lower funnel that we forgot

to put more stuff into the top of it.

And instead, a lot of companies are just taking a plunger to that funnel and trying

to squeeze everything out quicker, but you're not putting anything else in.

And we see it, you know.

I've inherited, you know, campaigns from clients in the past where

they've, you know, set their Google ads up to optimize for conversions.

And when you look at it, it's just a broad match on the, on the,

company name or the brand name.

Well, those people are going to find you anyway, but cool.

You get to track it now.

Right.

You get to take credit for it and you can track it.

You're not filling the funnel.

You're just taking, switching the attribution of those people that were

already looking for your website.

So we, you know, we got to expand, we got to think about filling the funnel.

And as SEOs, we've been spoiled right back in the old days, especially

when we had all that keyword data and everything, we've been really,

really spoiled, but we didn't have to worry about filling the funnel.

We just had to worry about what converted and we could track it.

It was great.

And now we've got to become real marketers.

We, we got to come, you know, full, full circle and.

You know, full funnel marketers, essentially.

Yeah, it's funny.

I think a lot of the things that I think people have taken for

granted over the last few years are probably things that, that, certainly

e-commerce businesses are probably going to be mindful to kind of not do.

So things like, you know, free shipping, you know, free returns, all that

sort of thing, I just think those are probably going to be scrapped this

year because I think so many people.

Again, I've heard of, you know, influencers that are buying, you know,

luxury fashion items, getting them shipped out, trying them on, doing a

photo shoot, and then sending it back.

They don't even keep the product, They just kind of like send it So, You

know, and again, if you were the brand, it's kind of like to process that sale

cost you money, To process it on your website cost you money, To process the

merchant fees cost you money, To ship it out cost you money to kind of have it

brought back cost you money, You've got the depreciation of the actual product

because it's not a new product anymore.

It's a used product, So, you know, there's so many people that I think,

you know, they haven't really factored that into their overall metrics.

So, you And I think the more, the more people realize that they need to be

mindful of that, the better really.

Yeah.

And I just experienced that too.

And I'm seeing it change.

I, to tell a fun story, I just bought a piece of hockey equipment

and it, it said for waist sizes, 36 to 40 is an extra large.

And I'm a 37.

So I'm like, okay, I'm right in the middle of this range.

Let's get the extra large.

Right.

And, and I could not get that thing up over my calves, let alone even

my thigh, put this on, like, there was no way this is fitting anybody,

you know, it was the tiniest thing ever, like I could not wear it.

And so I emailed the company to do the exchange and they're like, Oh,

yeah, you know, it's going to cost you, you know, 14 to ship it to us.

But also we're in Canada, there's a 31 customs fee to ship this

through customs in Canada.

It's going to cost you like 45.

why don't we just give you a 50 percent off another one coupon, and you know, 50

percent off your purchase or whatever.

And, you know, you sell that one to someone else on the secondary markets

and that's what I ended up doing.

I sold it to a teammate of mine in the locker room.

I'm like, Hey, do you want this?

The tags are still on it.

It just, you know, it's, they, their sizes and charts way off because the thing that

cost me 75 was going to suddenly cost me 45 to return and it, it made no sense.

Yeah, because I remember setting up an account with this website called myus.

com.

So, you know, because I travel to the U. S. quite a lot, I thought it

would be handy to have somewhere where I could kind of like buy things in

the U. S., get it shipped to a kind of like a, an address in the U. S.

and then get it shipped from there.

But like to buy anything, I mean, you know, whatever, I just thought

it'd be like really, really cheap and it was so ridiculously expensive

to have anything shipped, right?

If you wanted to like, you know, Anything like let's say you wanted

to kind of like a phone a phone cover for your mobile, right?

It probably gets like 60 bucks to ship it right four dollars to buy

it 60 bucks to ship it I'm like, no, I don't think I need it that much.

So

yeah He used to work with Canadian people Still do but the one person would come to

our office every week and there's so many packages delivered for him into the u.

s Office that he would you know This person no longer works there,

so I don't want to get anybody in trouble with the IRS, but it's

because of the shipping and whatnot.

Right?

This person was Just getting so much stuff at the office and taking it back.

And

I got a, I got a few friends that, that, you know, they kind of go backwards and

forwards to the UK and I obviously go backwards and forwards to the U S right.

And we have this kind of like an unwritten contract where if I'm going

over to the U S I'll always buy stuff that they want, they like from the

UK that they can't get over there.

And I'll take some over.

And similarly, there's things that I like in the U S like Altoids as an example.

So I like Altoids.

You can't buy them over here.

But, you know, I had a friend that came over for a conference last, September.

She bought me like four tins of Alfie.

It was great, you know, so, you know, a little bit of contra stuff.

So

my, my favorite cologne is, is not really available.

It is available here, but it's like 400 or 500 bucks and I'm not paying that for

it, but it's like check and speak 88.

It's, it's from London.

And anytime I know someone going over there, I'd be like, get me,

get me a bottle of this because, it is ridiculously expensive here.

And I refuse to pay that much for it.

A third of that price in the duty free at, you know, at Heathrow, like,

it's like, you know, if you go to Abu

Dhabi or Dubai, you know, you can kind of go into any pharmacy over there and buy

so many things that are probably heavily restricted in the States or in the UK.

You can buy them over the counter, like.

in any quantity you want, right?

So, you know, I found myself kind of doing that with quite a lot of like,

you know, high strength, ibuprofens or paracetamols or something like that,

like probably treble the length, the strength that we have here in the UK.

you know, it always makes me laugh.

Like here in the UK, if I wanted to go and buy paracetamol, they'll

only sell you one packet, right?

So if I buy two packets to just store one for now and one for

later, one upstairs, one downstairs.

I can't do that, right?

So you almost have to go in in disguise, Or try and find separate chemists to

go and buy multiple packets of the same thing, which to me seems crazy,

You know, treat me like an adult.

Don't treat me like a child.

It's, it's ridiculous.

The same thing with allergy medicine, right?

Because they think you're going to make meth out of it.

And like, Every pharmacist and chemist I've ever talked to says it'd be the

worst drugs you could ever make if you made it out of allergy medicine,

and yet it's still restricted because, which is, if you have allergies,

it's a pain because like, you know, you're like, no, you just bought some.

Well, crap.

It's, you know, I left it in my suitcase or it's in my car.

Like I need, I need another box.

Right.

Yeah.

It becomes tough.

But yeah, you

want stuff to carry with you and stuff to leave at home, right?

So

here's the bad part, right?

We're talking about getting away, get away duties and pharmacy restrictions.

There we go.

Now we're, now we're into the bad decisions.

I like

it.

And it's funny.

Like, so, so I know, I know Ryan, we, we were talking kind of like at PubCon

and, you know, when we were trying to arrange this kind of meeting, we're

talking about like carrying a few extra pounds and hip replacements and

knees and problem problems with that.

you know, I mean, for me, it was again.

Because I had lost a bunch of weight.

I found that I the knee replacement that I thought I needed.

I actually didn't need.

I just needed to lose like 60 70 pounds, So you had a similar experience.

Is that right?

Yeah, I've had three knee surgeries as a result of playing sports my whole life.

hockey, yeah.

Football, baseball, wrestling for 14 or 15 years, right?

so many sports.

And, you know, after the third knee surgery, I put a little bit of weight.

because, you know, it's hard when you can't really walk or drive

for like a month and a half.

You just eat pizza and Chinese food all the time because it's all

all that you can get delivered.

And, you know, so I, I've been trying to delay the knee surgery, so I,

you know, I'm doing the same thing and I, I've recently lost about 40,

50 pounds, so I'll, I'll take it.

That's, Congrats.

It's a good number.

And yeah, it's amazing the difference it makes on the knees.

Unfortunately, I have no cartilage or meniscus left in either knee, so

knee replacements are in my future.

I've got a few years to go till 50.

not as, not that many as, as I want there to be, but.

I'm just trying to put off.

The benefit

though, rehab will be better, Rehab will be much better, much less painful.

Yeah, I mean, I'm just doing the math now, like a knee replacement

lasts about 25 years and.

I'm trying to put it off so I don't have to get two in my life, you know, I don't

want to have to have another surgery when I'm like 70 or 80 to do another knee

replacement because that sounds miserable.

I was talking to somebody who had a knee replacement in

trying to think in their 40s.

and then, you know, they were told that they would probably last like 15 years,

they've lasted a lot longer than that.

and, and then the question was, well, you know, what happens then,

you know, you get another one.

and then the question was, well, what happens then?

Well, you know, after that, it's probably amputation, It's like, well, that's a

bit severe, But you know, they can't just kind of keep replacing your knee.

They have to kind of eventually go, that's it.

There's no more.

You can't, can't really kind of get anything.

So.

Yeah.

I would probably urge anyone like again, I don't I know this is nothing to do with

digital marketing, But for me, I've met so many people in the space that in the

SEO PPC, we all have something in common.

We've all been much, much bigger than we are now.

And we've lost weight.

And we all feel so much better because of it, So if you listen to nothing else on

this podcast ever, just listen to that.

Know that if you overeat, you put on weight, and it will be bad for your

health, and it will be bad for your joints, And if you lose the weight,

your joints will really appreciate it.

I always kind of said to people, I used to go onto a plane, I would walk down

the aisle of the plane with my laptop bag over my shoulder, and I would literally,

I would say out loud, God, I really hope I'm not sitting next to a fat guy because

you could see people looking at me coming down the aisle going, Please make sure

he's not sitting next to So, you know, I think I used to kind of get to the point

where if I dropped something on the floor, I would say, Is that really important?

Do I need to, do I need that because half the time if I had to kind of

get on the floor in the plane, it would be an ordeal to get down there,

I just thought, you know what, I'm just going to leave that down there.

I don't think I need that anymore.

So, yeah, I feel so much better as a result of it.

Yeah, and like I said, the drugs are great, but, you know,

to anybody considering, you, you can't just take drugs.

You actually have to go to the gym or be active and watch what you eat in addition.

Like, I still play hockey three times a week, hence the

need for the knee replacement.

and, and, you know, diet and workout and stuff, but I'm, I'm feeling better.

I'm not quite where I want to be yet, but I'm getting close and,

you know, it's, It's been amazing difference on the knees, though.

So it's every what one pound is five pounds of pressure on the knee when

you're bending it and we're walking up and down stairs or something.

So yeah, it makes a difference.

Yeah.

And it's funny.

I mean, I always remember that there were some people that inspired

me back in the day to kind of like lose the weight, Because I

saw them and they looked amazing.

you know, and I know I've had lots of people kind of like reach out to me

privately and say, Hey, How much I've inspired them, I wasn't doing it for them.

I was doing it for myself, That's that's the thing.

I've always done it for me, But at the same time, it's nice to know that

you know that other people have gone.

Well, if Jim can do it, I can do it, right?

I mean, literally, all I did was when we went into lockdown, I just started

Because I needed the fresh air.

I needed to kind of get out and do a bit of exercise, I

wasn't doing anything at all.

you know, and I found it very cathartic.

It kind of gave me the ability to kind of clear my head.

you know, and it just became a habit, And I think it's like most things,

like anything that you do, if you do it often enough, it becomes a habit

and it becomes easy for you to do it.

So

yeah, and lockdown was the tough part, right?

I had just had micro fracture on my knee, which is a, you know,

a period of no weight bearing at all after for that recovery.

Right after I got the okay to start activities again, we went

into lockdown like, wow, crap.

And that was, that was a, that was a rough, rough patch for me.

Like, you know, you sat on the couch eating pizza and Chinese

food, like it was, it was rough.

So,

and it's funny, I mean, like, so I know that when, when, you know,

a lot of people go, you know, I like the, like to go to the gym.

Right.

And I've, I've, I've, I've, I've kind of discovered it.

I've spent a ton of time watching YouTube videos.

And I discovered that there's a whole bunch of, you know, people

that have posted videos where they, they have resistance bands, right?

And there's so many, you can virtually Like train any part of your body

with the resistance band and get just the same sort of output from that.

I mean, again, I usually, when I go out walking now, I have like an orange

bag that I stick over my shoulders.

It's got five resistance bands in it.

I just go to the park.

There's like metal posts.

I'll just kind of strap a resistance band to that, do some exercise

and it just, it just works, right?

I kind of cancelled my gym membership.

I didn't really see the point in paying a bunch of money for.

You know, a gym that I really wasn't kind of going to that frequently.

I remember saying to somebody, I, I belong to the gym.

I think I was paying probably 80 bucks a month.

I did it for 13 months.

I went to the gym once, and it was only cause my boiler broke

at home and I went for a shower.

So that was like an 850 shower that I had.

I just thought to myself, this is just not good value for money.

So I just scrapped the gym and, And bought myself some resistance bands.

And again, I can just throw them over my shoulders and and away we go.

I listened to again.

One of the reasons I started creating the podcast was I found

myself when I was going out walking, I could listen to podcasts.

I think sometimes music's good, But sometimes it's just good to

have, you know, podcasts to, to kind of listen to, to kind of help

you with your mental stimulation.

Do you have any apart from this one?

Do you have any good podcasts that you listen to on a regular basis?

I don't, I wish I did.

I was actually telling an employee the other day, I was like, so far this year,

I think I've been on more podcasts than I've listened to, and I need to change

that, but I just haven't had the time.

I've been, you know, with, with the razorfish job.

It's a demanding more than 40 hour a week job.

I've got the side project SERPrecon going on.

I've been addicted to cornhole lately.

you know, the yard game of beanbag on, you know, on a board with a hole in it.

I had to explain this to some international friends.

I saw a video, you're very good

at that.

Thank you.

yeah, right now I'm like 20 something in the state.

We'll see if that holds up for the year.

but I've been playing, you know, three nights a week now, sometimes four nights.

I'm actually going to New Mexico this Thursday.

So in three days, I'm going to New Mexico to, Playing a national

tournament there and, probably get my butt handed to me, but we'll see.

Aw, I'm going with some friends, it'll be a fun time at least.

But, I've been doing that too much, it's taking a lot of time,

and then I just got talked into actually going in with some buddies.

We're going to actually open our own bar, for Cornhole.

So, more so an investment from my point of view, because I do not

have the time to work at a bar.

Yeah.

I'm going to be investing in that.

And, matter of fact, I have to meet with an attorney right after I get off this

podcast with you, about that, but just, you know, biting off way more than I can

chew and it's taking a lot of my time.

So like most of my free time now, when I should be, you know, relaxing or doing

relaxing stuff is spent on other projects,

but again, most of the people I know in this space, if they had free time,

they would kind of like, they would lose their mind, mean, you know, I'm, I'm

at the point now where I'm probably.

old enough and maybe financially secure enough I could stop working if I wanted

to, But I think if I did that by like the Thursday, if I stopped on the

Monday, I'd be like climbing the walls.

I'd be like, I've got to go and do something, So, you know, there's

only so many walks you can go for, only so many coffees you can go for.

you know, I just like the, the stimulation that come like.

Again, working in an industry that is still to me.

I still consider it to be a kind of fairly fledgling industry, even though

I've been doing it for 26 years.

I don't know how long you've been doing it.

Probably quite a long time, To me, it's like I still think we're at the,

you know, the early stages of where it's eventually going to get to.

And I Again, I, I, I really enjoy the challenge that it presents itself.

It's never no two days of the same.

and I think if it ever got to the point where two days were the same,

I start getting bored with it.

But

yeah, I think I've been in this industry.

Wow.

Over 20 years.

It's safe to say I've been in the industry over 20 years.

Holy crap.

I did not realize I was that old and you just made me realize how old I am.

So.

Wow.

it's been a long time.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I was in my 30s when I started it and I'm now in my 60s, so.

Right out of college.

you know, I started as a software engineer, but my first ever job

out of college was also like, hey, Client wants this SEO thing.

He doesn't know what it is.

Can you figure that out for him?

December of 2004 is when that was.

So yeah, I

remember I started, I started life as an SEO person.

Like I wanted to kind of like do SEO.

and I got a client, I remember kind of like landing my first client.

And it was a 40 a month contract.

And I was like running around the living room saying to my

wife, like, I've got a client.

I've got a client.

She said, how much was it?

And I went 40 a month.

She goes.

You're going to need an awful lot of those, And I soon realized that

she was absolutely right that, you know, the, the, kind of the math

didn't really work up that well.

So, I started to kind of buy paid ads to try and get clients

that I could do SEO for.

And then I realized that there was a lot more money in the paid

side of things for me at least.

and it was something that kind of like I vibed more with, and I've

really been doing that ever since.

It's awesome.

Yeah.

It's, I mean, your first client's always exciting, even if it's

10 bucks, you know, and, you I'm in that with the tool right now.

Our lowest plan is 10.

So I still get excited at every signup, but again, I'm going to need a lot

of 10 signups for this thing to work.

It's funny.

Like, so I've always kind of found that the, the first dollar you make on

a. An initiative is the most exciting dollar you'll ever get, so I, I kind

of, I created a database of, basically brands and it's got, I think it's

got, LinkedIn profiles, Facebook ad, Facebook ad examples, Google ad examples.

Like, there's a whole bunch of stuff in there that, that kind of like tells

you about a particular brand in there.

Go to market strategy when it comes to advertising.

you know, that's just started to kind of like populate the list.

I got up to about 550.

And I thought, you know what?

I'm just going to throw a gumroad product on the back of it.

With an email data data sign up if you want it.

So you can kind of like have it for nothing.

But if you if you want to pay for it, you can pay for it as well.

So he paid me 10.

I got so excited about I'm thinking, It's 10 bucks, right?

I mean, it's kind of like I probably I buy like a beer in the chandelier

bar, you know in Vegas It cost me like 12 50 right and then it's

probably 15 50 with a tip, right?

So i'm thinking that's not even a beer, right?

But I still got excited because somebody thought it was valuable enough to give

me ten dollars for it Even though I was prepared to give it away for nothing.

So

yeah, that's awesome.

And oh man, Don't get me started on on the chandelier bar or the the parasol

bar in vegas I know we've all spent countless hours, at all of those and

far too many far too many

Hopefully be looking forward to that again this year though, right?

I don't know when we're all going to be back in vegas, but i'm not sure

I mean Like I should be going like next week.

I should be going to affiliate summit which is on in vegas and Everyone's

like, see you there, see you there.

And I made a kind of like a conscious, like, you know, grown up

adult decision not to go this year.

Which is like, it's.

It's never been heard of, But, to me, it just is the logical thing to

not go because I just felt it was kind of, you know, too close to the,

you know, too close to Christmas.

And, you know, just it, I just couldn't make it work for me.

So.

I still got to figure out this year's schedule.

I did so many conferences last year, for me, right?

Which is like seven or eight, but that's still a lot for me.

And I don't know what I'm doing this year.

I've, I've heard tentatively from three or four shows that I'm probably going

to mix in, but nothing concrete yet, but, we'll see, we'll see where it goes.

I know I probably need to do a whole bunch more.

I got a whole bunch of, surf recount stickers made up here.

I don't know if people can see, but, when I do get out.

When I do get out to the shows, you know, I need to start working this,

but, you know, also got to do the day job of recruiting some razorfish

clients while I'm at the shows.

But of

course you do.

Yeah.

I'm not sure.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, but again, I think it's good that you can kind of like

multi hat and kind of like make sure that, that you don't neglect your,

your kind of, your razorfish job.

In the pursuit of everything else.

So I think a lot a lot of people don't do that.

They kind of they end up sort of moonlighting for their own side gig

while they make a ton of money and they're not really doing their main job.

So I know that that's not something that you'd be doing at all.

No, the main job definitely comes first.

It's, it's paying the bills, keeping the lights on.

It's, it's the priority.

And it's, you know, it's, it's why I haven't done enough of the,

like the blog or the other stuff for, for the side tools yet.

And it's coming, it's coming.

We're working on it, but,

I'm sure you'll get there.

I'm sure you'll get there.

So Ryan, thank you so much for being on the show today.

I know that, all your contact details will be available in the show notes.

I'll make sure that there's information about SERPrecon.

And as you say, 10 bucks for kind of like the base level.

I think for brands that are kind of concerned about SEO,

it's almost like a no brainer.

So I'll make sure that people are aware of that in existence, and I'm

sure that they'll look forward to the blogs and the videos and the FAQs and

all that sort of stuff in due course.

But, It sounds like a good tool and good luck with the success and

I hope the bar goes well as well.

Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know what I'm getting into there.

Well, we'll find out but I appreciate you having me.

This has been so much fun and I'm looking forward to catching

up in person next chance we get.

Yep, look forward to that as well.

Take care.

Bye for now.