063: Wil’s Wisdom: Weaving Value, Vision, and Virtue in Digital Marketing 

Danny Gavin (00:01.35)

Hello everyone, I’m Danny Gavin, founder of Optige Marketing Professor and the host of the Digital Marketing Mentor. Today we have Will Reynolds, who’s the founder and VP of Innovation at Seer Interactive, one of the most highly regarded digital marketing agencies in the United States. A former teacher with a knack of advertising, Will is passionate about growth. He’s been helping companies develop SEO and digital marketing strategy since 1999. Will is also a sought after keynote speaker due to his profound knowledge and practical approach towards AI, SEO, PPC and digital strategy.

 

Will started Seer Interactive back in 2002 after his boss wouldn’t let him volunteer on his lunch break. A philanthropist at heart, he had the first few Seer team members sign contracts committing to giving back to the community, a promise they live out to this day. Will has truly set the bar for what a digital marketing agency founder can and should be. He’s definitely the Michael Jordan or LeBron James, if you prefer, of digital agency founders. Today, we’re going to talk about mentorship, how AI impacts SEO, and a little bit about foundership with agencies. How are you, Will?

 

Wil Reynolds (01:01.162)

I’m doing awesome, but we’re more of an Allen Iverson family over here in Philadelphia.

 

Danny Gavin (01:04.204)

Oh, I’m sorry, a Philly guy.

 

Wil Reynolds (01:08.094)

a little undersized and scrappy. That’s us.

 

Danny Gavin (01:11.759)

I love it. So cool. Well, you know, people always make jokes about people starting off podcasts like, oh, how much I love you. But Will, I mean, obviously I look up a lot to you. It’s such an honor to have you here today. I know you have such a busy schedule. So thank you for carving out time today for me.

 

Wil Reynolds (01:28.618)

Yeah, no, you got it, brother. You got it.

 

Danny Gavin (01:30.787)

Cool. All right, so let’s jump right in. Love to know about where you went to school and what you studied.

 

Wil Reynolds (01:36.982)

I went to the University of Delaware and I studied education. So I went to college to be a high school teacher.

 

Danny Gavin (01:42.927)

And what about teaching interests you? Was it something that happened to you in your youth or was it just you felt that was the way you could get to people?

 

Wil Reynolds (01:53.902)

Everybody remembers their favorite teachers until the day they fucking die. And all my clients aren’t gonna remember me. All my team members aren’t gonna remember me or have interactions with me, but a teacher is. And I’ve always thought that the ability to have that kind of an impact on someone’s life is really cool. It also keeps you young. You have to kind of stay on your toes. Where so much of…

 

i feel like work is how long you’ve been doing it is how people think makes you good or not at it. Whereas teaching is like, dude, when you started teaching, maybe the hot thing was Hannah Montana, and now you’re teaching and it’s freaking Black Panther. You know what I mean? Like you have to find a way to relate on the fly. And then you also have to create breakthroughs for people. You get to help them to see the world. I was an economics teacher, so it was really cool to help people to understand how the world works and how the world around them works and what makes things happen. So those are some of the things that I loved about it.

 

Danny Gavin (02:53.667)

That’s so cool. So I know there’s always a question that comes up about, do you need to go to college? Do you need to get a degree, especially when it comes to digital marketing? What’s your perspective on that?

 

Wil Reynolds (03:09.207)

No, no, the only people I mean, I don’t know. Like it’s a resounding no. There’s too much YouTube, there’s too many, like people are so accessible these days. Like you can learn from some of the best people on the planet that do this stuff. They’re accessible. So no, I would say, I would tell people like the things that I learned in college were more about how to interact with people.

 

um, how to be persuasive. You know, I was in like a super nerdy fraternity and like, you know, I was our social chairman. So I was like, how can I get the sororities who don’t want to hang out with us to want to hang out with us? Right. I can’t just rely on the big name. So you have to like, start to like to think in new ways to solve problems. And you know, those were the things that I learned in school. Like it was nothing about any of this stuff.

 

Danny Gavin (04:01.619)

Is there a pressure, I don’t know, in the company or outside the company where it’s like, oh, someone has to have a four year degree that sets a certain bar, a certain standard. Does that, does that ever come up?

 

Wil Reynolds (04:14.522)

Nah, because I got rid of that shit like five or six years ago. I was just like, we’re not doing that. Like, we’re just not doing it because I’m a strong believer in, I want to be a place that has doors open to hungry people who want to win and they don’t all come looking and with the same background and the same stuff all the time, you know,

 

Danny Gavin (04:31.251)

Yeah, totally. So let’s jump into mentorship. How would you define a mentor?

 

Wil Reynolds (04:43.47)

For me, it’s somebody who is, I’m really picky about this, who puts enough time into understanding you that can give you feedback that helps you to see yourself in ways that you cannot see yourself.

 

Danny Gavin (05:03.263)

I love that definition. And that kind of raises the bar, right? Cause it’s not easy to find someone like that.

 

Wil Reynolds (05:10.946)

No, like I have one, maybe two now, but I’ve always sought them out for sure.

 

Danny Gavin (05:22.167)

So let’s actually talk about one of them. I’m gonna put the comment that you put about him, but Steve Gerard, in a world of people wanting to ask me about my success, he’s the one person who, let me say that again, he’s the one person who consistently gives it to me straight. He’s a great one. Tell me about Steve.

 

Wil Reynolds (05:28.022)

Yeah.

 

Wil Reynolds (05:40.938)

Um, so I got, I had won some award that I didn’t even want to apply for, you know, and Crystal’s like, you should apply for this one. It was like something through, um, Bill Clinton’s foundation. So, because Bill Clinton had located his, um, office in Harlem and really kind of had this like, wait a second when companies locate in inner cities, they have a spillover effect that I believe Bill Clinton even was like, I didn’t realize I’d have this potential impact. So then he’s like, I want to build out awards and things for companies that are dedicated to the inner city.

 

So I was like, I don’t know, I’m not submitting for this. I’m not really an awards guy. And Crystal’s like, you should do this one. And then she wrote the whole thing up and was like, all you have to do is send it. So I sent it and we got connected. So they did matchmaking between different people that were like Inc 5000 companies and CEOs of other companies that were maybe on that trajectory someday. And that’s how I got connected to Steve Girard. So thanks, Bill.

 

Danny Gavin (06:41.303)

So how does Steve look at you and present those aspects of you that maybe aren’t so clearly seen?

 

Wil Reynolds (06:51.434)

Well, let me just give you an example. It’s the best way for me to, so one day we’re in our office and you’re super small and he can recognize that I have an energy about my work that could create a problem. And the problem was he goes, you’re going to accidentally burn out a lot of people in your company that are young. And I was like, what do you mean? And he’s like, you don’t think you’re special. And I’m like, well, isn’t that usually a good thing? And he’s like, yeah.

 

for 99% of people, but not you. He’s like, you keep downplaying your special skills, which then makes other people feel like, you literally are saying to people, well, I started this when I was 22, like, you know, this is doable. And he’s like, you downplay a set of skills that you have so significantly that it makes, you set this bar that other people are gonna burn themselves out trying to live up to because you’re like, I’m no one special. I went to school to be a teacher. I don’t know HTML.

 

I don’t, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t, but yet here I am. You can do it too, it’s not that hard. He was, I don’t think I was saying it that way, but he’s like, you’re gonna accidentally burn people out because just by the way that you work and how much you downplay your unique skills and your successes, he’s like, it makes people feel that it’s attainable and easy, and then they find out the hard way after working really hard that maybe it’s not.

 

Danny Gavin (08:13.571)

It kind of goes in line with, I think, what you mentioned, I don’t remember if it was last week, but about job titles, right? That for CEOs, like, it means nothing, right? I’ve got these great people and, you know, and they’re doing great work, but for actual employees, that job title is really important. You wanna talk about that a little bit as well?

 

Wil Reynolds (08:31.65)

Well, that was another Steve Girard thing. This guy has been a godsend. Because he said to me, he’s direct. He was like, the only person that doesn’t care about the job, a job title is a CEO. You know, and I’m like, what do you mean? And he’s like, he’s like, this really matters for people. And you’re just downplaying, again, you’re just downplaying it as we’re all in the boat together. And sometimes you’re my boss and you have to tell me what to do and sometimes I need to tell you what to do. He’s like, man,

 

all that kumbaya shit, get that out of here. It’s like your people need to know where they stand in the organization. And we have, for right or wrong, our society does that with job titles. And it was that mixed with a little bit of time listening to the hard things about hard things on a long drive across the country that helped me to realize like, yeah, me not having titles at some point actually hurt my employees more because I left them trying to make up a job title when they left. Like…

 

Alison O’Brien was one of our SEOs. She’s an amazing human. She’s now an SEO at another company and hasn’t worked at SERE for probably 12 years. And she had gotten promoted three times when she was at SERE like every year just boom, boom. And she left SERE as an associate. And it was like, damn, right? Like she’s like, I now have to try to find a way to talk through my career progression. So I made more work.

 

for an amazing employee because I didn’t want to have titles, which could have set her up to be. And I think, you know, when you’re getting a lot of resumes in and you’re going through them, it’s one of the things that you just scan for, right? Which is why title inflation is a fucking, you know, it’s a motherfucker because, you know, it’s like, oh, if I can just give you a title, it opens up more opportunities to you, right? Cause HR people are just dialed into, well, if you were there for that long and you didn’t get a, you know?

 

So it just helped me so much to be like, all right, that’s not the way that I want to be because my goal is to put my employees in the best position possible to get their next job. And I was not helping them with that. So therefore I knew it was time for me to change that.

 

Danny Gavin (10:30.819)

It’s a really amazing insight. So let’s talk about who you mentor in your current position. So I know you mentor people indirectly, directly, but I also think let’s like under this umbrella of mentorship of you, yeah, going outside of the actual walls of SIR and trying to influence people and show them the opportunities. Love you to talk about that.

 

Wil Reynolds (10:51.63)

I have a hard time calling myself a mentor, right? Because again, I started off being like, you know, Steve Girard would look at me, I mean, he was with, he’s still with me. But like, there was a time, I’d say for a good six year run where he would like to run my off sites, right? And he would call me and other executives out on our bullshit. And he would look at our finances every month. So when I’m like that, things are great. He’s like, how that thing’s going great. You know, like, he had to but he had to be invested enough to know me enough. And know my numbers enough.

 

to actually be a mentor, right? And I think so often when I don’t know anybody that, I don’t mean I don’t know anyone that well, but I don’t know them at that level of complexity that Steve Girard knew about me and my business. So therefore I have a hard time thinking of myself as mentoring people because he set the bar so high that it was like, oh man, if I don’t have your financials, then I’m a guy with some freaking advice, but I’m not your mentor because

 

It’s one of the things I love about finances.

 

In the absence of financials, if you’re a business owner that I’m getting everything I’m giving you has no context. It’s like, if I don’t know where you’ve come from, then like all of my advice, like how many people out there are giving advice to people. And it’s like, well, dude, your parents were rich. So therefore, it was easier for you to start your first thing, but they don’t know that I’m not from that. So therefore, their advice isn’t that helpful. It’s helpful. It might be inspiring, but it’s not actually mentorship, in my opinion. It’s like advice peddling, right?

 

And I try to be really careful about advice peddling because I don’t know enough of anyone’s story because I’m running my own thing to truly be a mentor to them. And I bet you a lot of people would say I mentor them, but they and I have different definitions of that because I’m just giving advice. I don’t know if that’s mentorship in my opinion.

 

Danny Gavin (12:42.775)

So with your definition of mentorship, do you push that concept at all within your company? Like, you know, people higher up, helping the people lower down, but really understanding where they came from.

 

Wil Reynolds (12:58.038)

You know, it’s funny, like, that’s a good question, but I, I don’t know if I do a good job of that or not. I don’t, um, I make myself hyper available to my team. Um, my executives make people make themselves available. Um,

 

But I’ll tell you, I do not know, you know, someone’s like, are you scaling that? Like in a way that I could look at and be like yes or no, I’m not so sure. But I bet you it happens. It’s like one of those things that I know happens. Like dude, I got some feedback two days ago from one of our alumni and it was the most glowing, like she hasn’t worked with us for like six years, seven years, and her name is Liz Joyce. And she just glowed the most.

 

Danny Gavin (13:26.26)

Okay, that’s fair.

 

Wil Reynolds (13:44.662)

freaking feedback. It was like the best way to start my morning. Like me, and I don’t need that. Like I don’t need taps on the back. I know what I’ve built. I know that the impact we’ve had on people’s lives and their careers and their community, like I recognize that the bigger our company name gets, the better that is for our employees when they go to get new jobs. So, you know, I know these things and I underestimated how helpful it was to hear them back. It’s interesting, right? Like I underestimated how deeply meaningful it meant for me to have somebody that worked with me for that long.

 

Tell me those kinds of things. And I have a bunch of employees that do that too. But it just happened like two days ago. So it’s kind of fresh to be like, damn, you know, and she would definitely be like, well, I can’t believe you make the time. You know, you’re a huge mentor to me. Then it’s like, yeah, my definition would be like, I gotta know you a lot deeper to truly mentor you. Cause a good mentor, they’re gonna press you. To me, a mentor presses you, right? They understand where you’re trying to go and they have the time to invest in you, to find the areas where what you say you want.

 

is not consistent with the activities you’re taking on a daily basis. And most times that comes in the form of coaching because you pay somebody to do that for you or therapy, right? Whereas for me, I’m more like a, I know I’m mentoring by the traditional sense and I know my teams are being mentored by the traditional sense. But for me, it’s like, nothing’s better than grabbing somebody who wants to go be great and to be like, it’s not gonna be easy, but I’m gonna constantly, you probably won’t even like it.

 

Danny Gavin (14:53.356)

Yeah.

 

Wil Reynolds (15:12.046)

because I’m gonna constantly be like, you need to change your definition of success because the last definition you gave me, I can’t see shit that’s associated with you being on that path. And there’s nothing wrong with changing your definition of success, but you can’t say you want this and then wake up and do this every day and then expect me to continue to invest my time. And Steve Girardi said things like that to me too, where it’s like, well, I’m not gonna invest my time anymore, dude, because like, you know, it’s over. And because like now you wanna do this and I’m good at it.

 

mentoring on these things, which is, I think, is another thing that over the years that my mentors have had for me, because I’ve outgrown most of my mentors, which is crazy. But you know, I remember one of them sat me down and he was like, dude, you’re going to outgrow me at some point. And when you do fire me as a mentor, right, and as an advisor, because you will have gotten problems bigger than I’ve ever seen. And that means I did my job.

 

And I was like, ooh, because I’m such a loyalist. I was like, John, I won’t ever get rid of you. You’re the best. And he’s like, no, I actually want you to. He’s like, if your company continues to grow at the level that it is, he’s like, three years from now, I shouldn’t be advising you on much of anything anymore. And that was an important thing to learn about a mentor of mine as well early in my career, my first mentor ever in business.

 

Danny Gavin (16:27.691)

So I think kind of moving off a little bit, but still related, I feel like you have your eye on the prize. And with that, your schedule is tight, right? I have family, I have work, but I know that you also like to help people, right? So I feel like there’s like this push and a pull. How do you stay so strict to that schedule? And I’m sure people are reaching out, can you help with this or that? What do you do to manage that?

 

Wil Reynolds (16:51.33)

I stack rank people in my life.

 

Danny Gavin (16:55.415)

explain.

 

Wil Reynolds (16:57.898)

I have an order. My mom’s in that order, my dad’s in that order, my nieces are in that order, my kids are in that order, my wife’s in that order, right? So whenever I run out of time, as long as I spend it in the priority order, I’m very comfortable with running out of time. And that sometimes means that I’m not gonna be the son that I wanna be. And I have to accept that, because I was the father that I wanted to be, or the husband that I wanted to be. Sometimes I can’t be the mentor I wanted to be. Sometimes I don’t have time.

 

to spend time with some of these amazing young people that come into our company, whether they work at CIRA, whether they’re part of the volunteer work that I do. But I track all my hours, so I know when I’m also not being the person I wanna be as well. So I know that like this first quarter, I was under my volunteer goal by probably about like 20%, 25%, right? And I’m like, all right, cool, let me kick that shit up. Like I need to get back to who I say, if I say I wanna be this guy, then I gotta look for the data so that I can course correct.

 

and not wake up someday and be like, well, I cared a lot about volunteerism, but I never tracked it. So I didn’t realize that I hadn’t done it for six months. You know,

 

Danny Gavin (18:02.743)

Yeah, and I think that is really applicable to family, right? Because especially if you’re busy and you have this huge business, it’s very easy to, like I like to say, like, you know, oh, they love me and I don’t have to make the time, but you have to, and I love that you are pushing that forward.

 

Wil Reynolds (18:20.078)

And you also have to define what being a great father means to you. You know, like too many of us are chasing somebody else’s definition of what it means to be a good dad. So then you’re, Oh, you know, this person’s like, Oh, now I get to spend all this time. My kid, I work at home or I sold my business. And now I get to spend all this time. And then we look at that and we’re like, Oh man, like I could barely squeeze in three hours this week for quality time. It’s like, man, I got.

 

I have come up with my own definition, you know, in my own mind of like, what feels like being like I’m being a good dad and I’m prioritizing time with my kids. And I don’t let other people’s definition affect my own because otherwise you’re just on the treadmill of feeling bad about yourself, you know.

 

Danny Gavin (18:59.455)

Yeah. So let’s talk about VP of Innovation. Has that always been your role? I know you don’t necessarily like to call yourself CEO because you’re not necessarily in that seat, but being that VP of Innovation and coming out and always thinking, always pondering, was that always something or something more recent?

 

Wil Reynolds (19:17.35)

That’s always been there. I just didn’t have it officially in my title because I’m not big on titles, but we covered that. But no, I think it’s insanely fun.

 

Danny Gavin (19:22.882)

Right.

 

Wil Reynolds (19:32.238)

to be gifted at some point in your life, the ability to work in an industry with a bunch of really smart people. It’s like a gift to find something that a bunch of really smart people in your industry didn’t see. Like that is like gold. It’s like in the sense of, and not because it grows the business, it’s because it helps you to contribute to your industry in a meaningful way. And it helps you to challenge the status quo.

 

And you’re like, Hey guys, like, why are we doing our jobs this way? And then I get to hold a mirror up to our industry sometimes and be like, now let me show you a different way to do this. Right. And it comes full circle back to teaching. Like I used to not call speaking at conferences, I used to not call that BD. And I remember one day somebody was really upset with me because I’m like, I don’t do BD. They’re like, you speak at conferences. And I’m like,

 

that’s not BD. And they looked at me like I had, you know, like they looked at me like, like you fucking liar, right? It was very, they were very like, you could tell, I could tell they were upset by my answer. And I like it, but it’s not BD. And then eventually they were like, oh my God, he’s that naive. And it’s like, yeah, like I didn’t, I never went on stage to get deals. I went on stage to help people be better at their jobs. It’s like a teacher, right? Like teachers don’t go on stage to get likes and ratings and.

 

get business or whatever the version of that would be from a teacher, your success is not whether or not you got a lead from your presentation that day in the classroom. Your success is when people left, had they learned something that made them better for the next stage of whatever they’re gonna do. And I think 90% of the people in our industry speak at conferences so that they can get leads. And everybody feels that when you’re in the room listening to these people.

 

And I like to challenge that as well, because then it also raises the bar for our speakers to be like, yo, like everything doesn’t have to end with like a lead form or like, here’s my Twitter handle, you know, reach out to me. It’s like, nah, we work in search, bro. If you really drop that good as shit, I’m gonna find you. You’re not that hard, right? But we have this belief that if we don’t put our contact information in the presentation, it’s like, yeah, you know why you’re putting it in?

 

Wil Reynolds (21:52.982)

because you don’t believe that your shit’s good enough that people are gonna Google you afterwards.

 

Danny Gavin (22:02.611)

It’s a lot about self confidence.

 

Wil Reynolds (22:05.706)

Well, that comes from data. Um, that comes from data. Like I have speaker ratings going back for almost 18 years. So I’ve gotten to see when I was bad, when I was good, I’ve gotten to AB test my style, right? So the data is what gives me confidence, not anything else. Right. Um, because it’s, you’re kind of naked up there when you’re up there, you’re on your own. You’re trying to like,

 

Danny Gavin (22:07.444)

Okay.

 

Wil Reynolds (22:34.406)

you’re passionate about a topic hopefully, and you’re trying to drop knowledge to people and help them to do their jobs better. And then you get all these ratings back and you feel horrible about it sometimes. And you learn from that. But the other thing is somebody recently tweeted a link to something that I had posted 13 or 14 years ago. And it was about I think it was about titles or something. And this was in a private group of

 

entrepreneurs that own agencies. And I was like, man, that means somebody is still reading that shit 13 years later. And I think sometimes as speakers, we put so much pressure on ourselves to please the entire audience, but you don’t realize that sometimes it’s maybe even if everybody panned you, but three people thought you were great. Like that still means you had a positive impact on someone’s career trajectory. And I think all of that is valuable.

 

Danny Gavin (23:35.587)

So pivoting to SEO and AI. So with SGE in Google, some have said the death of SEO is here. Alternatively, why even use Google when you can use ChatGBT? And just to quote you from LinkedIn, some folks might think I’m starting to lean anti-SEO. I’m pro low friction for customers to get answers that suit their needs. And I’m open to letting that approach take me wherever it takes me in my agency because it follows customers, data, and trends.

 

So how are you approaching this huge change in SEO with your clients and your teammates?

 

Wil Reynolds (24:09.451)

Uh…

 

buckle up. It’s gonna be

 

Wil Reynolds (24:17.646)

It’s gonna be, it’s gonna be fun.

 

You know, SEO, when I first started, was a lot of fun because there weren’t rules yet. Old dudes like me couldn’t be like, this is how it’s done in the industry, right? There were no old dudes in 99 and 2000 doing SEO. Everybody was like, look at this shit, like, this is crazy. We’re all trying to figure it out together. And we were forced to share with each other and learn with each other. And eventually it just became like, yo, if I can rank on Google, I’ve done my job. And my people didn’t really have to.

 

do all that exploration and all that like, man, like there’s all there’s like a new model like every week and what does that mean? And what is this? So like anytime when the job gets complex, I’ve been showing this at some presentations where I’m like, this is what SEO used to look like. And you’re showing like how the open directory powered this and that and that Google powered this and that and Yahoo and you had ink to me powering all these search engines. And you’re like,

 

We used to have to be these guys. We would have to literally sit around and be like, okay, do I really think that Direct Hit by T-OMA is really gonna take off? And is it worth me spending time trying to figure that out? Or should I just continue to optimize my open directory post because it powers all these other things? And that’s, you know what I’m saying? Like we had to actually think and make our own bets. And today it’s just like, well, what does Google want? Let’s just follow Danny Sullivan. That’s all you gotta do, right? Or whatever they say to do, you know? And I realized with this AI shit that…

 

I thrive at times where there are no rules and bets need to be made. And that’s why I’m saying I’m looking at what makes, what makes getting answers easiest for customers. And I’m going to follow that because the customer will win, right? The customer will win. And it’s like, so you’re telling me the best way to get people answers today is to have them search for something. Try to find which website thinks it might answer it.

 

Wil Reynolds (26:10.114)

they click on that website, they get to close all the cookie consent pop-ups, your own pop-up. Cause God forbid you just let somebody read the content. Then I’m trying to find out where the content is relative to all your ads and all the crap around it. And I’m going, so I would rather go through that than to just type in my question. And then inevitably you Google something, you learn something new. You’re now like, wow, that’s a new word for me. So now you’ve got to Google that word.

 

as part of another thing, because you’re still trying to solve the problem. So now each time you learn something, you’ve got to go back and refine your query and all that stuff. And chat-chip-y-tee, you’re like, oh, that’s a great answer, but my kid’s four years old. Oh, and it’s also a girl, so I don’t like that example. And it’s like, oh, well, let me put it to you this way. Let me put it to you that way, versus the amount of searches and clicks and closing out pop-ups and where’s the content, versus where’s the ad. And…

 

Everybody’s trying to make the ads look like content because they need to make money on that. And you’re just like, man, there’s so much friction there that I can’t imagine that that’s gonna be the world 10 years from now, 20 years from now. I just can’t imagine. Why would you wanna go through all that friction?

 

Danny Gavin (27:16.663)

So do you feel like Google ads or the ad side of Google is actually like their biggest shackles? Like that’s just gonna hold them back from totally embracing the new world.

 

Wil Reynolds (27:24.682)

thousand percent. And they just proved it again last week. So I started this is where you know, some of this stuff, you know, we’ve been around for a while, right? And, and oftentimes, what I would say to young people, and I would, you know, talk to them in groups or provide some mentorship, and I’d be like, Hey, guys, like, anytime you can jump in an industry where the rules aren’t written, you can really advance your career like, so quickly. And I’m like, you know, you can learn stuff about Google or TikTok today that I don’t know.

 

because I can’t stay on top of all of it. And when it comes to Google and paid, what I’ve been saying to people is like, Google’s not good at disrupting themselves. And the proof that I’ve been giving to people recently is, look at how quickly Apple launched ITP or whatever, IPT, ITP, whatever it is, their privacy platform. They announced it and had it rolled out in like 12 months. And that was like five years ago or whatever.

 

And Google’s like, Oh, you just killed all of our cookies. If you’re on an Apple device and that’s not good. And Facebook at the time cratered, right? So like Apple applied that pressure and Google’s now like, Oh, by the end of 2023, we’re going to have 1% of all the browsers are going to be using our new privacy platform. And now they just pushed something like that out to 2025 or something. And you’re like, wow. So Apple did this like six years ago and got it done, announced it six,

 

Seven years ago, I got it done in 12 to 18 months. You then announced shortly thereafter, oh, we’re gonna do it too. And we’re waiting five years from now. And then last week, you just literally said, oh, we’re gonna push it back another year to get to like one and a half or 2% of the browsers are using your privacy platform because it fucks with how they make money. And I think the saddest thing about the state of Google today, which is a way over talked thing in our community, I believe. But the way that I look at it is you literally

 

were rewarded for years for going from one ad to two. It’s like, I don’t mean to say it this way, cause I’m not that smart, but it’s like one line of code, add a second ad, one line of code, add a third ad, one line of code, add a fourth ad, and just make money, print money, print money. And then it’s like, take the yellow box and make it slightly less yellow. So then people don’t know it’s an ad and then do this. So it’s less and then do that. So it’s less. And then it’s like, wow, you guys never really looked at yourself in the mirror.

 

Wil Reynolds (29:53.13)

and said, how can I make a better ad experience for people? You just have to add another line of code, change the layout. You already had to have some code to create a color behind the paid search ads. So then you just made it lighter. Like I can do that, right? I can do that. So I think Google’s, they’re kind of screwed because they’re gonna have to kill parts of their cash cow in order to lean into people getting easier answers. And…

 

I think you just look at Apple launching the privacy sandbox or whatever they call it and then how Google’s reacted to it, how long it’s taken. And I’m like, that does not bode well for Google.

 

Danny Gavin (30:32.883)

And I think people don’t want to say it, but people like you do want to say it. I’m saying like, it’s scary to say that. So how do you look from an agency perspective? Obviously a lot of, a lot of the work, a lot of the money is from SEO paid search. So doesn’t that scare you a bit?

 

Wil Reynolds (30:48.87)

No, because people need answers. I don’t think the market for questions is going to drop. Now that chat GPT is here. And this is how I think it through. So the internet started with directories if you wanted to find other sites. So once you wanted to get off of AOL or Prodigy or whatever you were on, I was a Prodigy guy. Like once you wanted to leave the platform, it was like you didn’t know domains to search for, right? You just.

 

went to directories, Yahoo directory. Oh, okay. But then there became too many freaking websites that solved problems. And then Yahoo became like, oh, page one of 30 for a locksmith or whatever, right? So then you’re like, well, that doesn’t work. And then Google was like, oh, why don’t we build something where you can type what you want in so you don’t have to follow this branch of a branch of a branch of a branch to then get like 900 different answers alphabetized.

 

Right. That’s not the right way to get an answer. So let us do a search thing. Right. So I go, all right, let’s imagine that we’re doing that. So now let’s apply that same thinking. This is the one area, Danny, where like us being old dudes in this industry actually gives us a leg up over the new guys, right? Because we’re like, wait, we’ve already seen this, bro. Like, so AI is making it ridiculously easy for people to write content of all varying qualities. So we’re back to the same problem.

 

Now you’re gonna have 10 times the amount of content. I don’t want my answer to be 10 times longer, which means that now chat search engines, for lack of a better word, wherever you wanna call them, because everybody, you know, I love watching SEOs get their panties in a bunch on something that has nothing to do with customers. It’s not a chat search engine. Like, what the fuck ever? Like, customers are searching for answers there, right? So now we’re living in a world where you’re like, all these people are producing content.

 

faster than ever, which now means the chat search engines have the exact problem that the search engine solved for the Yahoo directory. And you go, oh, you need a system to allow people to search, which is gonna be easy to spam if it’s just like keyword driven, right? So, oh, we need a trust metric. Oh, page rank. Oh, because Will doesn’t want a 10 times longer answer, just because we are indexing 10 times more content, Will wants an answer that he can read and understand with minimal friction.

 

Wil Reynolds (33:15.426)

But I now have a million documents to select to put into my small answer for Will. How am I gonna do that, Sam Altman? You’ve got to have something that puts a ranking signal somehow on, well, if I get the content from the New York Times and this site and that site, like, do I value that more? And do I trust that more than somebody else who just wrote it? Like, I think these problems will.

 

will show themselves. I think it’s really unpredictable right now and it’s really out there. But I think at the end of the day, they’re gonna need freaking algorithms to sort through the plethora of AI built content for the AI answer. People don’t want longer answers even when there is 10 times more content that’s been produced. So how are they gonna narrow it down to what’s most important? It’s gotta be something, right? So then I’m starting to look at C4, the common crawl and just being like, where did they use most of their tokens from?

 

because if most of the tokens you use, why would you crawl the New York Times more than you would crawl Seer Interactive? I don’t know. They write more content around more topics and they’re more trusted. Got it. So like, I’m thinking of the common crawl as an early like, okay, like you put more tokens against sites that you trusted more it looks like. So maybe I could be off here, but like that’s just optimizing for an algorithm again. So it’s like, okay, how do I understand what shows up and what answers show up and how frequently the same answer shows up?

 

Danny Gavin (34:33.315)

Mm-hmm.

 

Wil Reynolds (34:40.49)

and how often it gets a little spicy in terms of giving me different answers to the same questions. And I think that’ll be what the future of search kind of looks like, but it’s still an algorithm, dude, because there’s too much content out there and I don’t want longer answers.

 

Danny Gavin (34:54.547)

That’s amazing. Thank you for breaking that down in full detail, because it’s exactly, it’s literally, it’s deja vu if you’re gonna put it into two words, right? That’s all it is.

 

Wil Reynolds (35:05.91)

Deja vu, man, we’ve been here before, bro. So it’s like, let’s fucking go. Yes, it’s awesome. People have now like, I can now write a thousand pieces of content in like three hours. You’re like, great. So now they don’t want to show that crap in their, in their, in their LLMs. Like, I don’t think so because humans don’t want it. If Google doesn’t rank well, oh, I launched a brand new site and put a thousand pages on it.

 

Danny Gavin (35:08.236)

Hehehehe

 

Wil Reynolds (35:30.294)

If Google doesn’t want to rank that because humans don’t want to see it, Google’s trying to be a proxy for humans. Then why would an LLM be like, Oh, I’m just so like when it comes to getting facts and things about companies and questions people are going to ask. Yeah, I don’t know, man. We’ll see, but it’s been really fun because I’ve been typing in things like, tell me about seer interactive into many different platforms and seeing how the answers change over time and what they start picking up and what they stop picking up. And like everybody’s like, you know, Oh, the,

 

chat, what is it? Google Gemini Pro 1.5, it’s great. I’m like, it literally says that we have a headquarters in London. Like, how would you get that wrong, dog? Like, there shouldn’t be enough signals. But like, this is what early SEO was, before it was just like, oh, Google, title, description. It was literally like, how did London show up? And I think most people wanna talk about how wrong the answer is. The smart SEOs are the ones that are like.

 

Why do you think London? Now let me try to understand the semantics around my brand. And now I’m like, oh, so for some reason, you’re crawling or ingesting content from speaker pages or some crazy shit, I don’t know. And like Will spoke in London a lot because that’s the only thing that has ever triggered London and Seer Interactive. So I’m like.

 

Okay, I guess they’re crawling pages like that to answer their questions. So if my clients are speaking at events, maybe I can test for you for the next three months, something like that, right? Like, I don’t know. But like, by constantly looking for even the wrong answers, actually, the wrong answers give you more insight into where they’re crawling shit because you as a human know it’s wrong. Like you’re like, that’s the wrong answer. We’ve never been headquartered in London. We’ve never had an HQ anywhere outside of Philly and San Diego. Right? Now, maybe it’s spicy. Maybe it’s some spicy auto correct.

 

auto, you know, you know, auto fill thing. But it’s like, yeah, but why would all the cities you could have picked that you would have picked London, there’s a reason why you picked London, let’s go find that out. That’s going to be a lot of fun. And maybe the answer is there’s no answer. Because I’ve had some people that will never be answerable. And I’m like, well, I’m going to go try to find out if it is and if I can find any trails because it came from somewhere, didn’t it?

 

Danny Gavin (37:23.756)

Right.

 

Danny Gavin (37:30.691)

and enter it.

 

Danny Gavin (37:43.203)

But I love, I mean, the amazing thing is that you aren’t putting on blinders. I think a lot of people are. But I think this is so good. When you compare it to the early days, it should take that fear and drop it down. Because even what searches today started somewhere. So this has to start somewhere also.

 

Wil Reynolds (38:00.822)

Right. And if Google, if Gemini Pro 1.5 can get something that basic wrong about my business, then that’s an opportunity for someone else to succeed. So then what other, what other LLM is getting it right? Every time I ask, is it GPT four? Is it GPT five? Is it a mixed role? Is it the new five that

 

that Microsoft just launched? Is it perplexity? Right? So it’s like, Oh, who gets Philly right every time? So maybe I should ask the question. Tell me about C or interactive. Oh, Philly, Philly got it right every time Philly, San Diego, I see how you could get San Diego, but it’s really not our headquarters. Not as good. So then you start to be able to make bets again, who’s gonna make it and those of us that realize when Google came along, and all Google’s job was to do was to power Yahoo, because nobody went to google.com. Right?

 

you started seeing, oh snap, Google’s giving me better answers than Yahoo and AltaVista and Hotbot and Infoseek and Ione, right? So then you’re like, wait a second, I need to put some more bets over there. So when I see this from GPT, from Gemini 1.5, I start being like, ooh, maybe I need to go research another area and another LLM or search anywhere, whatever you wanna call it, right? Because I know people get all hot about that.

 

It’s like, okay, let me go maybe look at this other LLM that gets it right every time because long-term, they’re probably gonna win if Google can’t ever figure this out. And Google just launched 1.5 and spent millions of dollars to promote it. And it’s like, man, bro, that’s bad, bro. Like you thought I was headquartered in London, dog? Like, okay. And then you keep running it every week or every month to see, oh, but it got better in three weeks. Got it. Okay, let me keep betting on them. You know?

 

Danny Gavin (39:52.055)

So similarly, when we’re talking about agencies and just perspective of the industry, we know that a couple of weeks ago it was Sam Altman that said, all marketing is gonna be outsourced. And you were discussing what can we prepare to be in the top five to 10% of marketers. So what are you recommending digital marketers these days or how can they put themselves in a spot to be successful in the future?

 

Wil Reynolds (40:23.054)

If I could give one piece of advice, I have a really long blog post about this, but build a custom GPT that solves a problem in your company.

 

I think that puts you, I call it the five stages of AI career adoption. I think if you do that, you will easily. Easily. Oh no. I would say to you, no, you easily have a job for the next 10 years.

 

Like if you do that today, your thinking will take you to a place where you’ll probably be. Because like think about it, if a company’s like, well we…

 

If there’s a task that I’m paying 10 people to do, and one of them comes along and automates, let’s just say, 30% of it, right? Well, now I’ve got 10 people who don’t need to do 100% of work, they need to do 70% of the work. Well, then I can collapse all those folks down into a group of people that now put it at 100% for each one of them, and two people just lost their jobs. Do you think the person that lost their job was the person that built the custom GPT?

 

Danny Gavin (41:29.623)

Definitely not.

 

Wil Reynolds (41:30.814)

No. And now that person goes, well, there were 10 people. Now there’s seven to do the same work. And then when it goes to six, I’m still keeping you. When it goes to five, I’m still keeping you. When it goes to three, I’m still keeping you because you built the thing. And I think that for people that are building out custom GPTs, that’s the thing I would look for more than anything in someone today is where did you build a custom GPT as a digital marketer to remove certain types of work?

 

from your workflow because you’ve created exponential value, right? So that would just be my thing is like, you know, I would want to go into an interview today and be like, oh, here’s a custom GPT. You’re hiring me for an SEO role? Here’s an SEO problem. I built this custom GPT. Go ahead and put your stuff in there. Upload your screaming frog crawl, upload this, upload your GA data and now run it all. Now how would that person sound about the future of search over someone that’s like,

 

Yeah, you know, here’s my CSV. And then I’m gonna go into Google Analytics and look up these URLs and see their traffic dropped on the same day. You’re like, what? Both are creating the same value. Just one person likes to extract themselves from the value creation and go, let me just automate these parts so I can go work on something else that I find more interesting or exciting.

 

Danny Gavin (42:51.295)

So with regards to like, I guess, more traditional SEO and using AI for that, do you think it’s worth time now to like, you know, to do your keyword research, you know, using a chat GPT or an LLM or, you know, using, you know, to edit content in order to make it better. So is that something that you’re pushing or, you know, what do you think about that?

 

Wil Reynolds (43:18.354)

I like using AI to help me see blind spots. So if AI is…

 

Wil Reynolds (43:28.846)

If AIs happen to write your content, it is, it’s almost like, this is so hard for me to articulate because all this stuff is so new, you know, so I don’t have practice articulating it but um.

 

Danny Gavin (43:38.956)

Yeah.

 

Wil Reynolds (43:42.858)

If AI is writing your content, like there’s two, I think I’m a little bit ahead on the AI adoption curve. I’m gonna start there. And I could not be, and I sit in a lot of rooms where I’m humbled, but.

 

AI doesn’t write my content. AI helped me flesh out my ideas. So I ask AI not to write for me, I ask it to find out where I’m biased. Like where am I missing something that you’re expecting me to talk about? And then I make a decision as to whether or not I want to talk about that thing. I use it for idea aggregation. I use it to shoot holes through my ideas, right? So I’ve gotten really good at being on runs. I run almost every morning and I’ll be like, I’m thinking of this thing. Tell me where I’m wrong.

 

make me think better. I think a lot of people are like, Oh, they’re using the same tool. It’s interesting. You’re GPT for GPT for great. I wrote up this great article for me. I’m like, bro, like, get some original thoughts, and then run those through, right? Because I think I just wrote this post about, you know, contents getting so similar, and trying to break out of that mold. And then you’re like, wait a second, like, AI is going to make that technically worse, because it’s just a prediction on the next word to come.

 

So again, where do you create value? Having a typical idea? Where are you going to get somebody to help you think differently about the way the industry currently looks at things? Fucking chat GPT. Like ask it. Like given these answers, what’s it missing? How is it missing a 2024 context? So for me, like that’s one of the areas that I see. I use AI to help me think. I do not use it and I’ll have it write a blog post for me every once in a while.

 

But then by the time I go through and edit it at all, I’m like, yeah, it was like 90% me. Like it wasn’t, but then I’ll have it help me with punchier headlines and stuff. But like, I’m trying to drop original fucking thoughts. Nobody needs another SEO to say, you need to put the keywords in the title and the description. So like whatever an industry’s version is of the common knowledge, don’t even write that anymore. And you know what’s interesting is I haven’t talked about this anywhere.

 

Wil Reynolds (45:51.234)

because I’m gonna plan on talking about it at a few conferences. My whole strategy these days is you drop something hot on LinkedIn, right, an idea. Because writing a good blog post takes time. And I watch my company waste tons of time writing blog posts that weren’t really moving the needle for us because they were just the average knowledge of what was in the industry. So, because I took over all of our marketing a while ago and I’m like, I’m the only person on the marketing team. So I’m literally like hands on the keyboard, sending out tweets, sending out newsletters and shit. And it was great because it got me thinking differently.

 

So I think I might actually have an extra five minutes for you too. If we need to go over a little bit. No, I don’t, sorry. I thought I did, but I didn’t. I just looked at my calendar. But let me finish. I was gonna try brother. So I’ll drop something spicy on LinkedIn, right? And then I’ll watch how humans react to it. Shocker. SEO reward system has been

 

Danny Gavin (46:25.644)

Awesome.

 

Danny Gavin (46:31.552)

It’s okay, well.

 

You get points for trying.

 

Wil Reynolds (46:51.662)

rankings. Does it rank? Hey, let me talk about my rankings. Let me go show everybody my traffic, right? My new rankings are humans. So I like to put a spicy idea on LinkedIn. And see does anybody care? And then based on the commentary and basically, because it takes me five minutes, I got these ideas. I’m running around in the morning. I’m thinking about this shit. I put it into LinkedIn. And then I watch people’s reactions to it. If nobody cares, why am I writing a blog post about it? It may be common knowledge.

 

It might be whatever. Then once I see it start to move, I’ll then do a spicier version of the original thing on LinkedIn again and see, is there staying power there? Like now I’ve written about this twice. Maybe I did a little Canva image or something to try to attract people to it. And you’re like, yep, they cared about that one even more than the first one. And then I go, all right, now I’m gonna go on a bunch of long runs and get all my ideas into Claude three and just run, run. And I might spend two hours jumping on ideas and then I’m gonna start to chat GPT or.

 

Claude or whatever, start to put those ideas into a format. And then I’m gonna turn that into a blog post. Now I’ve de-risked the time spent on blogging. And I’ve written blog posts, it took me 10 hours and nobody cared. I’ve also written blog posts that took me 10 hours and everybody seemed to care, right? And you’re like, well, I wanna do less of the one and more of the other one. So now I’m using this like, get the humans bought in early. Now you know you have something that humans are gonna care about, which means it’s gonna create value for me, whether it ranks or not.

 

which has been a very interesting pivot for me because now my success metric, my traffic from search is dropping like crazy. And I can’t wait to show this to people because all SEOs love to do is show traffic going up into the right as if we’re all fucking geniuses. I’m going to show my own website, half the traffic gone over the last like three or four years. But in the last six months, I’ve almost quadrupled my social, my organic social traffic from LinkedIn. And what that’s making me realize is I’m winning the humans.

 

And if I’m winning the humans, less friction, make humans think, create value for them, teach them something new. My three hottest blog posts this year have no search traffic because none of them rank for fucking anything, right? And most people are like, well, if they don’t rank for anything, Will, you failed. And then I open up my freaking social traffic and I go, I don’t think so, bro, because all these people, algorithms are a proxy for people. Google’s trying to figure out, well, what would make people trust it? What would make people value it?

 

Wil Reynolds (49:18.678)

I’m like, or you could actually just show it to people and then have them vote with their thumbs up and their comments and who they tag into shit, how often they put it in their own newsletters. That’s my new thing. What have I written that ended up in other people’s newsletters where they use UTMs? So now I can track what newsletter it’s coming from. And I’m like, I will take 10 people from a newsletter over every, which is a trusted curated thing over one person Googling it, which I don’t even know if I’m really solving their problem or not, you know?

 

Danny Gavin (49:46.067)

Yeah, I think you got it right and the search engines got it wrong. They’ve tried. They’ve, they’ve tried.

 

Wil Reynolds (49:49.902)

We’ll see, we’ll see, we’ll see. But winning people is it, bro. Like it hit me like a ton of bricks when I took over our marketing. If I’m like, wow, our traffic from LinkedIn is dog shit. And everybody says, oh, but you know, they’re not incentivizing you to send traffic off platform. And I’m like, oh, no, no. I’m getting three times the amount of traffic from LinkedIn that we did back in October and September. How did that happen? I completely changed the way that we did content.

 

it wasn’t searched first and then posted on LinkedIn and see if anybody cares. It was posted on LinkedIn first, see if anybody cares, then write from your heart and then slightly tweak the post a bit to try to get some search visibility if you want. But my goal was always to, I was using Google as a proxy to get to people and now I’m using social as the direct people themselves. And I’m saying, maybe the proxy and all the jumping around hoops that I do is watering down me coming up with actual content that the humans wanna read and get value from.

 

So maybe I should just write this off the humans want to get and see how it plays out. And so far this year, it’s been an interesting freaking test. And I can’t wait to share the data with people because it’s my own data. So I don’t have to worry about it being like client stuff or whatever, you know.

 

Danny Gavin (50:58.507)

Yeah, well, it’s been a pleasure watching your growth on social because I know for a while, I remember, I don’t remember if it was a couple of years ago, but it was like you had this whole thing about sharing pictures of yourself traveling, kind of like showing off why do I need to do that? So I felt like ever since that point, you pulled yourself back, but I feel like now you’re pushing yourself forward, but in the right way, right? By being that educational source, making people ponder, making people think, and really adding that value, not just to…

 

that direct people around you, but also to the industry at large.

 

Wil Reynolds (51:31.858)

Yeah, well, thank you for that. You know, it’s, I’ll leave you with this. The way that I pulled back was a mistake. It was good for me, but it wasn’t, it was good for me in one way, right? I learned a lot about myself when I couldn’t post pictures of things that I love to see. I love photography. When I’m no longer on Instagram, I, you know, I started not seeing things from friends and stuff like that. And I’ve, I’ve gotten okay with the fact that I’m not gonna see those things, right? What happened is I,

 

And I also am looking for joy in my feed. And what I find is I find a lot of outrage in my feed. Like I find a lot of misogyny, the world’s gonna burn up, all these poor black people, you know, it’s like so many things are outrage that I pulled out of that, unfollowed so many fucking people. Because even people in your industry sometimes take you down very non-joyous paths.

 

Danny Gavin (52:24.481)

Yeah.

 

Wil Reynolds (52:24.714)

And you’re like, actually the world is full of a lot of amazing and great people who just want to go to work and provide for their families. But if you log in to LinkedIn, sometimes they’re not LinkedIn, but like Twitter or whatever, you’d be like, the world’s burning and you’re like, everyONE is bad and every person in power is bad. And they always, you know, they’re not doing the right things. And you’re like, no, a lot of people are doing the right things. So I had to pull out of that because I just didn’t like seeing that shit on my daily.

 

But I will tell you, man, I missed a lot of stuff in that time. And it’s really been joyous for me to get back into following people like Cyrus and people like Lily Ray and all of that, because now I’m starting to see things that are making me think differently, but I had extracted myself so far out that it kind of hurt a little bit the way that I, it made me happier, but it also hurt my ability to see our industry in certain ways too, you know?

 

Danny Gavin (53:14.647)

Well, we’re glad you’re back. And, Will, thank you for being a guest on the Digital Marketing Mentor, and thank you listeners for tuning in to the Digital Marketing Mentor. We’ll chat with you next.

 

Wil Reynolds (53:24.802)

Thanks for having me.