In a recent episode of the Unscripted SEO podcast, KWSM CEO Katie Wagner shared her expert insights on the profound shifts in search engine optimization (SEO) and the enduring importance of brand journalism as a bedrock for modern content strategy.
Drawing on her 15 years as a television anchor and journalist before founding KWSM in 2010, Katie discussed with host Jeremy Rivera how the industry has shifted from relying on technical “Google reverse engineers” to focusing on deeply valuable, story-centric content. This conversation highlights KWSM’s strategic approach to digital marketing and lead generation, leveraging this unique perspective to craft comprehensive digital marketing strategies that help businesses connect with customers and ultimately translate clicks into revenue.
Listen to the show: Unscripted SEO Podcast
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. And certainly today, with the way SEO is going, brand journalism has never been more important. And so we really lean into that at the agency.
The Evolution of SEO: From Technical to Editorial
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, you know, Google just grew and grew until it just sat so fat in the middle and gave so much traffic, and it was relatively easy.
The bad, you know, 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. That was super easy.
But then we got rich snippets, and then rich snippets have now turned into AI overviews. We got the helpful content update. We got the ridiculous posturing around E-E-A-T. And now we have the new layer of both AI overviews and Gemini, but then we have these interloper LLM-based channels and search mechanisms, like ChatGPT and Claude, that are eating up that top of the funnel.
What good SEOs always did was find link-building opportunities that were actually, you know, 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 were so neglected.
I would like your perspective on how journalism and the journalistic approach have evolved in relation to SEO over time.
Brand Journalism as the Bedrock
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.
For me, brand journalism is creating deeper stories around the humans in a business. These things feature interviews with our clients, case studies, stats, metrics – really deep content that talks about specific instances of our clients doing whatever they do best, products and services, and that sort of thing.
But it’s more about the use case and its examples than it is about features and benefits. And that content used to be most of what we created for our clients, and we could rank it pretty well. Like you said, we could link out to studies, stats, and other things. We could plant it and have it bring in a lot of impressions, clicks, and traffic.
The Two-Tier Content Strategy
It’s more bottom-of-the-funnel content, and we need to create a new layer of top-of-the-funnel content focused on AI overviews, 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, in my opinion, 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.
What we do is create top-of-funnel content that’s purely educational. It builds credibility and isn’t designed to convert; it’s just meant to educate our audience. And then those brand journalism pieces that are designed to convert and hit people later on in the decision funnel, we plant those; they show up on the first page.
We get fewer clicks than before, but most of those clicks will convert because, by that point, they’ve got the educational information they need on the SERP. They’re clicking through mainly to convert now. So we see a lot more leads being generated from each click than we have in the past.
Quality Over Quantity: The Traffic Reality
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, there’s equal, or there’s even more traffic. Stop lying. Stop trying to gaslight us. We know there isn’t.
Just acknowledge it and just say, “Yes, we are eating your lunch. But, you know, the traffic we’re sending you is more qualified.” I think that is true.
Because if you do 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 that twine, change a raspberry bush into cordage, that’s something you have to see.
The type of information I could get out of LLMs was somewhat limited. You still have to go deeper, get specific sources, have firsthand accounts, and include video showing it. So there are all of these next things.
Katie Wagner: If we think about the end user to our clients’ clients, there’s still a place for all that AI content and all the overview content. It is still building credibility for the brand.
I don’t actually care that there’s less traffic coming back to the website. I care that more of it converts, and that’s if we can let go of the ego around getting fewer click-throughs 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. And so I think some of it is like, yeah, it hurt our feelings at first, and it was hard to swallow. But then 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.
Beyond Conversions: Revenue-Focused Marketing
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 a lot of extra steps to understand both the primary conversion rate and the secondary conversion rate.
Just because you capture somebody’s information on a form or they make a call or they submit their information through a form of some type, join a community, sign up for a tool, or make a phone call, there’s still more to that process. And a lot of SEOs just called it a day. You can read more about building holistic SEO strategies in our other content.
Let’s talk a little bit further down the funnel and how your marketing at the higher part of the funnel impacts that middle stage of the funnel, right before they actually purchase.
Katie Wagner: The answer to that depends really on the type of business. But one of the things that 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?
Because you’re right, a conversion on a website is only half the battle. Getting that all the way to a client is a process.
Revenue-First Metrics
I like metrics just as much as the next person does. But what I really like is revenue. We are asking our clients – 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 are generating every month, every year, every five years, not just how many clicks we have, but also how many conversions we have. I actually need to know how that translates into money because that’s the ROI we’re providing.
And so we’re also not only concerned with the conversion, we’re also concerned with remarketing and the nurturing, and that process of getting that lead to an actual paying customer client. So we spend a lot of time talking to our customers about that.
MQLs and SQLs are fine, but like, where are the actual paying clients at the end of the day? And we get feedback from the sales team. We have weekly calls with their sales team, during which they tell us about the prospects they’ve talked to from our efforts. Are they good? Are they not good? Have you closed them? Have you not closed them? If not, why not? We’ll go deep on that.
Customer Research and Reverse Engineering
Katie Wagner: At the beginning of an engagement, we actually interview our clients’ customers, the happy ones, to discuss when they were looking for this type of service or product, how they began that search. What were they looking for? What appealed or didn’t appeal to them?
We try to get into their head about what they need to see in search results. What kind of content are they looking for to be able to convert down the road?
And then we sort of reverse engineer and build programs around that. And that can be different for every client.
And then the top of the funnel content is easy. It’s educational, it’s industry-based, and it’s general FAQs. But they must have information for this deeper brand journalism content, meaning, 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? And 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.
Building Customer Loyalty and Repeat Engagement
Jeremy Rivera: I love that idea. I was talking to my friend, Michael McDougald of Right Thing Agency, about vector embeddings and understanding relevance scores. He said, one of the best tests of your relevance is did it come from one of your customers?
Matt Brooks of SEOteric mentioned treating your site not only as a first look station, but thinking about what are you offering to bring them back?
What are you providing on that site that people are going to be returning to 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.
Katie Wagner: Yes, I love so much about that. I’m going to call that near-bound marketing. But one of the things I wanted to mention is that we actually put IP detection and heat maps on every client site so that we can see them engaging with those resources. And when they come back, we know what they’ve done. We know how long they’re spending.
And that’s a customer journey that you can map. How many times does somebody come back? What do they engage with before they convert, so to speak, and become a paying customer?
Near-Bound Marketing Strategy
What you’re actually talking about is something I call near-bound marketing, which is marketing through strategic partners into new audiences that already have trust with those partners. And sometimes the partner is your existing client.
It doesn’t have to be a business; sometimes it’s getting your customer or your client to talk to their audience about how much you’ve helped them. And you can leverage that not only in a referral sense but also by creating a lot of content using that customer.
If you’re doing a case study or a testimonial video or something like that, and you leverage that as content you’re putting out there, 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.
Case Study: Save Fry Oil Brand Building
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, I mean, it weaves in and out because one brand that I worked with, Save Fry Oil, they have an industrial product that makes fry oil cleaner. Awesome, right? But you literally could not search their brand name. When you search Save Fry Oil, it would come up with, you know, like how to save your fry oil with spaces or altogether, it would not show their brand name.
Even though they had existed online for a year, they’re real products. They’re international. They had a website. They’ve done a lot of marketing. They’ve done paid ads. They’ve done social media ads. But they needed Google to understand their brand.
They didn’t even have an about page on their homepage. Half of it was actually because things that were in development were like fuzzed over or fuzzed out. You never actually said your brand name anywhere on the page in text. It was just in an image. They didn’t have an about page saying where they were based or how many employees they had.
The Podcast Solution
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, and one of those things was, of course, devices, and Frylow is one of those devices, but the whole thing was actually targeted towards restaurateurs.
The point was to actually have those interesting conversations between chefs for chefs to consume on social media to share it out, and talking to popular chefs having popular chefs with Instagram followings interviewing other popular chefs, and then getting the blowback, the cross-channel flow of them mentioned Frylow.
They started getting inquiries and queries, and we finally got Google to recognize we existed as a brand, and now organic traffic is up 248% over the last six months.
Katie Wagner: You have to have that entire ecosystem or the infrastructure created, and it is good for consumers, right? There’s so much educational information out there for us. We can go pretty deep before ever being sold to, before we have to engage.
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. And 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 then may lead back to your product or your service eventually.
PR and Media Relations in the Digital Age
Jeremy Rivera: Let’s talk about PR press releases and pushing digital media content and making connections with existing journalists or publications. I feel like that’s a poorly understood area of digital marketing that holds a lot of value.
Having come from that world originally, I assume that you’re still using some of those connections and tactics now. What does that look like? What should agencies or SEOs be aware of?
Katie Wagner: Well, yes, we are using a lot of PR. You remember the days when you could put out a press release because you wanted the link, and it was great for SEO? And those days are over. That’s not why we do press releases anymore.
These days, we are doing it to leverage journalists, just like that near-bound marketing we were talking about, where we’re leveraging clients. We are leveraging journalists to reach an audience that already trusts them and have them talk about our brand.
The Press Digest Strategy
The relationships my agency has with journalists are important, of course, to get stories placed. And we do something like send out a press digest, which we call it, where if there are topical news stories of the day, we’ll pitch journalists on how my client’s company relates to them or how they can comment on them.
And what I know, Jeremy, 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 the week. And so 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.
Building Trust Through Media Placement
We get our clients placed, whether it’s quoted in an article online, a TV spot, a radio interview, or even a podcast. All of those things are valuable. Yes, there’s a link back to our client’s website, but more importantly, we’re showcasing their expertise to the audience of that news outlet, which already has trust built there.
And just by appearing in that space, we’re transferring that trust and credibility. And that does make warmer leads. If you hear someone on a radio spot or podcast and then check out their website, you’re going with the intent to explore further. And that is a much warmer visit to the website than just coming across it organically.
Create Once, Distribute Forever
Jeremy Rivera: I think Ross Simmonds has probably trademarked it by now, so hopefully he doesn’t come after me, but “create once and distribute forever.” It’s a consistent tagline, and he’s not wrong.
There’s so much value to a half-hour podcast is 30,000 to 40,000 words. And it’s first person. I think that it is the ultimate expression of keyword research when you have two subject matter experts hashing it out, because to have that depth of conversation over that amount of time, this wouldn’t come up in SEMrush, this wouldn’t be in Ahrefs, these are things where we’ve cut deeper and deeper and deeper.
Katie Wagner: Absolutely. Well, and it plays into thought leadership. Putting your voice out there and having that piece of content that positions you as somebody with high expertise, I think, is really important. And that’s the kind of content that comes up in those deeper funnel places and can help convert.
Every Brand Must Be a Content Creator
So anytime you’re creating content for your business, there are myriad benefits and advantages, and ways to use it. And 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.
Either from brands that are already doing it or from people who are using AI to create just volume, right? There’s just a lot more stuff out there, and it’s easy to get lost unless you leverage your real expertise and ability to create content that only you or your brand can create.
Understanding Business Fundamentals
Jeremy Rivera: What I love about that is that it starts to connect SEOs and marketing with understanding profit margin and pricing of products and services. I feel like a lot of SEOs and digital marketers are maybe too afraid to get into that because it’s like, “That’s business stuff.”
But really knowing what the profit margins are for that product line, for that service model, understanding the economies of scale. If they do land a really big client, how many more people will they need, and is that easy or hard for them to do? Are they ready to scale? Sometimes, generating more leads to the site can be problematic if they are not prepared for it.
Katie Wagner: Marketing in general has changed so much over the past decade or so. 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, and what is more likely to lead to more work for them, and what’s less likely.
All of that is actually fundamental to creating a lead generation, an SEO, or a marketing strategy these days. And so I’m nervous about people who are scared to ask those questions because I can’t do my job without knowing those things.
The Ecosystem Approach
Gone are the days when one tactic in a vacuum is going to generate all the business you need. And I remember 15 years ago when I started the agency, that was true. We could do SEO in a vacuum, or digital ads, or something else, and it would work. And these days, it doesn’t work alone. You have to have that entire infrastructure built out.
And that’s why even agencies that specialize need to have partners in other areas or agencies like mine that own all of those areas. That’s really important these days.
Connect with Katie Wagner
Jeremy Rivera: Let the people know where they can connect with you. Do you have a book, a webinar, or content that they should be reading, a recent article? Is there a preferred social media platform that you go hardest on?
Katie Wagner: My website is kwsmdigital.com, and there’s a resources tab on there where you can see a lot of industry expert webinars, articles, and podcasts we’ve done. There is a lot of good digital marketing and lead gen content there.
And then the social media I’m on the most is LinkedIn. I would love to connect and continue conversations.
