Unscripted SEO Interview With Former CNN Anchor & Journalist Katie Wagner

Jeremy Rivera: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted SEO podcast host. I'm here with Katie Wagner, who's going to introduce herself, her company, and what makes her an expert in her field.

Katie Wagner: Hi Jeremy, I'm Katie Wagner. I'm the president and CEO of KWSM, a digital marketing agency. We specialize in lead generation.

We've been doing it for 15 years. I started the agency in 2010. Before that, I was a television anchor. I spent 15 years as a journalist. I retired from CNN in 2009 and then opened the agency.

I think there are a lot of crossover skills. Certainly today with the way SEO is going, brand journalism has never been more important. We really lean into that at the agency.

The Evolution of SEO: From Reverse Engineering to Brand Journalism

Jeremy Rivera: I love that perspective. I'm going to pick your brain so hard on this because from my perspective, SEO has moved out of the niche moment where we were Google reverse engineers. That was it.

Now we have to re-enter because we had that funneling moment. We had AltaVista, Yahoo, MSN before it became Bing. Google just grew and grew until it sat so fat in the middle and gave so much traffic, and it was relatively easy. The bad black hat SEO was really easy to separate out and say, "Well, if you're buying a ton of links from spam farms, yeah, that's bad and you're going to get slapped out."

But then we got rich snippets, and rich snippets have now turned into AI overviews. We got the helpful content update. We got the ridiculous posturing around E-E-A-T. Now we have this new layer of both AI overviews and Gemini, plus these interloper LLM-based channels and search mechanisms—ChatGPT, Claude, and the like—that are eating up that top of the funnel.

What good SEOs always were doing was finding link-building opportunities that were actually credentialed places: mentions of a business, a story, somebody writing about an event. These were all things that were in the tool chest for SEOs, but I don't know why they got such neglect.

I'd like your perspective on how journalism and the journalistic approach fits into the SEO perspective throughout time.

Brand Journalism as the Bedrock Strategy

Katie Wagner: It's never a dull moment, that's for sure. We've certainly seen a lot of change. But for me, the journalistic perspective is the bedrock that hasn't changed—it's just shifted its place in our content strategy.

Brand journalism is creating deeper stories around the humans in a business. These feature interviews with our clients, case studies, stats, metrics. It's really deep content that talks about specific instances of our clients doing whatever they do best—products and services. But it's more about the use case and examples of that use case than it is about features and benefits.

That content used to be most of what we created for our clients, and we could rank it pretty well. We could link out to studies and stats and plant it to bring in a lot of impressions, clicks, and traffic.

The New Two-Layer Strategy

Now it's more bottom-of-funnel content, and we have to create this new layer of top-of-funnel content that is aimed at the AI overviews and providing basic information that doesn't have to be deep. It's more informational, educational, and it's not designed to convert because my agency specializes in lead generation, but we don't try to convert with that AI overview content.

What we're trying to do is get mentioned there, to show up there, because there's anecdotal evidence that the more you show up in those overviews, the more your deeper content gets seeded in the first-page rankings and you get traffic from the search engine results page.

We create that top-of-funnel content that's just educational, building credibility, not designed to convert—just designed to educate our audience. Then those brand journalism pieces that are designed to convert and hit people later in the decision funnel, we plant those. They show up on the first page.

We get fewer clicks than we used to, but most of those clicks will convert because at that point they've got the educational information they need on the SERP, but they're clicking through really only to convert now. We see a lot more leads being generated from each click than we have in the past, and I attribute that to the deeper brand journalism content we're creating and placing lower in the funnel.

The Reality of Reduced Traffic but Higher Quality

Jeremy Rivera: I think that is the flip side of what the alligator mouth disconnects. It's a shame that Google is lying to us. It's a shame that they're saying there's totally equal or even more traffic. Stop lying. Stop trying to gaslight us. We know there isn't. Just acknowledge it and say, "Yes, we are eating your lunch, but the traffic that we're sending you is more qualified."

I think that is true—there is more qualified traffic. If you do happen to get a click-through on your citation from an LLM and you've tracked it, that's a much deeper query.

When I wanted to get that first-hand experience or see videos of how to actually change twine or change a raspberry bush into cordage, that's something you have to see. The type of information I could get out of LLMs was kind of limited. You still have to go deeper, get specific sources, firsthand accounts, and video showing it.

While I see some sandwich eating happening, you're right about the strategy. They still need to be able to cite sources, whether whatever tool is ingesting this content is pulling it from the live web or from its training dataset. Once that qualification process happens, that's further down the pipe.

Katie Wagner: I think if we think about the end user—our clients' clients—there's still a place for all that AI content and overview content. It is still building credibility for the brand. I don't actually care that fewer traffic is coming back to the website. I care that more of it converts.

If we can let go of the ego around getting less click-through and less traffic to the website... In my business, because we're lead gen, I don't really have ego in those numbers as long as a percentage of it is actually turning into customers for my clients.

Some of it hurt our feelings at first and was hard to swallow. But if you take a step back, you say, "Well wait, this world isn't bad as long as you know how to play in it."

Understanding the Full Conversion Funnel

Jeremy Rivera: That focus is interesting and it's a step further into the ecosystem than a lot of SEOs usually played. I always took extra steps to understand that conversion rate and then the secondary conversion rate.

Just because you capture somebody's information on a form or they make a call, there's still more to that process. A lot of SEOs just called it a day. They would look at, "I got a fantastic conversion rate off of this page."

But that didn't cut it then and it certainly won't cut it even less now because the value is condensed. When you get half as many clicks and you aren't paying attention to leads, you don't know if you're getting the same amount of leads, and you might not know how many sales came out of that.

Let's talk about the processes you use and conversations you have with your clients about the leads that come out. How well are they qualified? Are they topically matched? Is there a feedback loop?

Deep Client Integration and Revenue Tracking

Katie Wagner: The answer depends really on the type of business. But one of the things we do when we sign a client is we vet that process: How do they follow up with leads? What does that sales process look like? What does their nurturing process look like?

A conversion on a website is only half the battle. Getting that all the way to a client is a process. I like metrics just as much as the next person, but what I really like is revenue.

We're talking to our clients about: Did that sale convert? Was that an ideal client? How much was the value of that client? I can tell you for each of our clients how much revenue we're generating every month, every year—not just how many clicks or conversions we had. I need to know that translated into money because that's the ROI we're providing.

We're concerned not only with the conversion, but also with remarketing and nurturing and that process of getting that lead to an actual paying customer. We spend a lot of time talking to our customers about that. MQLs and SQLs are fine, but where are the actual paying clients at the end of the day?

The Research Process

We get feedback from the sales team. We have weekly calls with their sales team about the prospects they've talked to from our efforts. Are they good? Are they not good? Have you closed them? If not, why not?

At the beginning of an engagement, we actually interview our clients' customers—the happy ones—to talk about: When you were looking for this type of service or product, how did you begin that search? What were you looking for? What appealed to you or didn't appeal to you?

We try to get into their head about what they need to see in search results, what kind of content they're looking for to be able to convert down the road. Then we reverse engineer and build programs around that.

The top-of-funnel content is easy—it's educational, industry-based, general FAQs. But they must have information for this deeper brand journalism content: Do you have case studies and testimonials and stats and metrics about your own business that we can leverage? Can we make these deep credibility pieces about work you've actually done in the world that will help you convert?

When I can get somebody to click on one of those pieces on a search engine page and go back to the website, they are only going there to convert. I can show that has a much higher turnover rate or conversion rate.

The Power of Customer Testimonials and Near-Bound Marketing

Jeremy Rivera: I love that idea. One of the best tests of your relevance is: Did it come from one of your customers?

What are you offering to bring them back? What are you providing on that site that people are going to be returning for again and again? All of these things should be looping back to your existing customers to reinforce your brand, arm them, and make things shareable and interesting.

If local people who are your clients are engaging with those things, that's additional proof and a fantastic way to brand-build—the extension of word of mouth into the digital age.

Katie Wagner: I love so much about that. I'm going to call that near-bound marketing. We actually put IP detection and heat maps on every client site so we can see them engaging with those resources. When they come back, we know what they've done, how long they're spending. That's a customer journey you can map: How many times does somebody come back? What do they engage with before they convert?

Near-bound marketing is marketing through strategic partners into new audiences that already have trust with those partners. Sometimes the partner is your existing client. It's getting your customer or client to talk to their audience about how much you've helped them.

You can leverage that not only in a referral sense, but you can create content using that customer. If you're doing a case study or testimonial video, now you're getting in front of their audience and they're like, "Hey, that's Jeremy, and he used Katie's company. I should call Katie's company because I trust Jeremy."

Anytime you can leverage those additional people in your ecosystem, that's the warmest lead you can get.

Understanding Business Fundamentals for Better Marketing

Jeremy Rivera: Larry H. Parker got me $3.5 million—those ad campaigns in the '90s were based on quotes from people who won big with their firm. Whether it's a law office or commercial real estate agent, there is proof in that pudding.

As a service business owner, you should create referral relationships within your community. You may subcontract out to them, but you may also get a pitch that doesn't right-size or fit your criteria, and you can make a referral. It's a two-way street.

What I love about that is it starts to connect SEOs and marketing with understanding profit margin and pricing of products and services. A lot of SEOs and digital marketers are maybe too afraid to get into that because it's "business stuff." But really knowing what the profit margins are for that product line, understanding the economies of scale—if they land a really big client, how many more people will they need and is that easy or hard for them to do?

Sometimes driving more leads to the site can be a bad thing if they're not prepared for it and they get too big of a fish and get over their skis.

Katie Wagner: Marketing in general has changed so much over the past decade. I think it's our job to understand those business metrics now. I don't actually think I can do as good a job in my role as a lead generator if I don't understand all the profit margins and the different margins on the services.

I'm nervous about people who are scared to ask those questions because I can't do my job without knowing those things.

When we talk about referrals, we build trust with the prospect even when they don't hire us. We build trust with them. What's to say that prospect won't use the person you referred, but then also remember you for one of their friends that needs what you do?

Gone are the days when one tactic in a vacuum is going to generate all the business you need. I remember 15 years ago when I started the agency, that was true. We could do SEO in a vacuum or digital ads, and it would work. These days, it doesn't work alone. You have to have that entire infrastructure built out.

Case Study: Building Brand Recognition from Scratch

Jeremy Rivera: One brand I worked with, Save Fry Oil, has an industrial product that makes fry oil cleaner. But you literally could not search their brand name. When you searched "Save Fry Oil," it would come up with "how to save your fry oil" but not show their brand name.

Even though they had existed online for a year with real products, were international, had a website, done marketing and paid ads—they needed Google to understand their brand.

They didn't even have an About page. Half their homepage was fuzzed over because things were in development. There were no pictures, they never actually said what they did, never said their brand name anywhere on the page in text—it was just in an image. No About page saying where they were based, how many employees, what their sales numbers were. No articles proving they existed, no online references, no anchor text that said "Save Fry Oil."

The Solution: Restaurant Talks Podcast

We created a "Restaurant Talks by Save Fry Oil" podcast and started having chefs interview chefs about the challenges of running a cost-efficient kitchen. One of those things was devices, and Frylow is one of those devices, but the whole thing was targeted toward restaurateurs.

We had interesting conversations between chefs for chefs to consume on social media, having popular chefs with Instagram followings interviewing other popular chefs. We got the cross-channel flow where they mentioned Frylow, and they started getting inquiries and queries.

We finally got Google to recognize we existed as a brand, and now organic traffic is up 248% over the last six months. It's this combination of doing real-world stuff and having real conversations, plus putting out educational content like "Nine Reasons to Clean Your Fry Oil Cleaner" and comparative content.

You've got to connect everything—have a deliverable that can be downloaded that captures an email address, a drip campaign, follow-up on your leads. It's so much more now, but it's also a great time to be a consumer because businesses actually have to play the game in a deeper way.

Katie Wagner: They do. That's exactly what I'm talking about. You have to have that entire ecosystem or infrastructure created, and it is good for consumers. There's so much educational information out there for us. We can go pretty deep before ever being sold to.

You're giving a great example of a brand that became brand journalists and put out their own media, their own content that was a piece of content with value in and of itself beyond promoting the product. That's a really important play for brands these days.

Can you put out really engaging, valuable content that doesn't necessarily directly promote your products but can welcome consumers into that ecosystem, educate them, nurture them, and get them to ask the right questions that may lead back to your product or service eventually?

Leveraging PR and Media Relations

Jeremy Rivera: Let's talk about PR, press releases, and pushing digital media content, making connections with existing journalists or publications. I feel like that's an under-understood, poorly understood area of marketing. Having come from that world originally, I assume you're using some of those tactics and connections now.

Katie Wagner: Yes, we are using a lot of PR. Remember the days when you could put out a press release because you wanted the link and it was great for SEO? Those days are over. That's not why we do press releases anymore.

These days, we're doing it to leverage journalists, just like that near-bound marketing we were talking about where we leverage clients. We're leveraging journalists to reach an audience that already trusts them and have them talk about our brand.

The Press Digest Strategy

We send out a "press digest" where if there are topical news stories of the day, we'll pitch journalists on: "Here's how my client's company relates to that," or "Here's how they can comment on that."

What I know from being a journalist for many years is that if you make it easier for them, that is a welcome thing. They have to create a lot of content throughout the day and week. If we're saying, "Hey, there's this topical thing, you're going to do a story on it anyway, here's an angle where you can interview my client about this particular thing," they will likely pick that up.

We get our clients placed—whether it's quoted in an article online, a TV spot, radio interview, or podcast. All of those things are valuable. Yes, there's a link back to our client's website, but more than that, we're planting their expertise in front of the audience of that news outlet that already has trust built there.

Just by appearing in that space, we're transferring that trust and credibility. That does make warmer leads. If you hear somebody on a radio spot or podcast, then you go check out their website, you're going with the intent to go deeper. That's a much warmer visit than just coming across it organically.

Content Multiplication Strategy

We also use it to create content. Every media appearance gives us the opportunity to cut it up into reels or create a blog post about that experience or tip or information that was being shared.

If my client has a little TV spot and they're on for a minute and a half, we take that and make three different reels out of it. Then we publish a blog, then it goes out in the newsletter. We're constantly using that as top-of-funnel, bottom-of-funnel, and nurturing content depending on the platform.

The Power of Long-Form Content and Keyword Research

Jeremy Rivera: Ross Simmons probably trademarked it by now, but "create once and distribute forever" is his consistent tagline, and he's not wrong. There's so much value—a half-hour podcast is 30,000 to 40,000 words, and it's first person.

I think it is the ultimate expression of keyword research when you have two subject matter experts hashing it out. In order to have that depth of conversation over that amount of time, what we've talked about now wouldn't come up in SEMrush or Ahrefs. These are things where we've cut deeper and deeper.

If you're having your client go on podcasts or creating a podcast between two subject matter experts, you're generating really deep keyword research in a better way. It's also fantastic for sales research. If you're B2B and targeting a particular type of customer, you should be trying to get those people as guests and ask them: What are their pain points? What are they concerned about? How are they choosing this service that your business does?

Katie Wagner: Absolutely. It plays into thought leadership—putting your voice out there and having that piece of content that positions you as somebody with high expertise. That's the kind of content that comes up in those deeper funnel places and can help convert.

Anytime you're creating content for your business, I think there are myriad benefits and advantages and ways to use it. Some people aren't fans of this, but I think these days every brand has to be a content creator and they have to be journalists of their own brand and put out their own stuff, or else they're going to get lost in the sea of content out there.

There's just a lot more stuff out there, and it's easy to get lost unless you are leveraging your real expertise and your real ability to create content that only you or only your brand can create.