James Dooley Interviews Steve Toth from SEO Notebook

James Dooley: When I have an idea I want to share it with the world, we don't have any lock-in to our clients' websites. You know, SEO agencies, a lot of them will take on projects that they should just not be taking on. Because of that, today I'm joined with Steve Toof from SEO Notebook. Good having you, Steve. Steve Toof: Hey James, good to be here. James Dooley: I'm going to jump straight into it. I'm not going to start talking about the past, Fresh Books, because I think a lot of people have heard it already. I'm going to jump straight into your Saigon talk and The Go-Giver. So can you just try to expand on that for anyone who didn't watch it? And the question is, have you always had that personality trait, or has it been like a mentor that's told you that the more you give, the more you might get back in return? Steve Toof: I've always been very, you know, when I have an idea I want to share it with the world. You know, even back when I was working at companies, I started things like knowledge sharing lunch and learns. We had a thing called the 9:55 at one agency where 10 minutes before the first meetings took place of the day, we did knowledge sharing. So I've always been, you know, one of those people who loves to share things. And with respect to The Go-Giver, there's obviously sharing is important, but the main thing that they stressed there is sharing at scale, right? So sharing not just between you and another person or a couple of people, but trying to share with as many people at once as possible. So you know, that was one of the main tenants that I evolved into. And for me, that channel was initially LinkedIn, and then eventually the newsletter kind of replaced that. But those two are still my biggest channels per se. And giving away all that, you know, and not holding anything back as such is super important. And then, you know, the next thing is really giving away at scale and then letting people know how they can help you, right? So for me, you can hire me to become a consultant, you can come to my conference, you can subscribe to my newsletter, things like that. And then, finally, you just have to be open to receiving people's help, right? So it wasn't a conscious thing that anybody really told me to do. It was actually something somebody mentioned to me. They said, Steve, what you're doing sounds like The Go-Giver. I read the book, and then that has since guided a lot of my business decisions in terms of how I promote myself. James Dooley: Sounds great. So let's jump on to one or two things that you just mentioned there. The conference, SEO IRL. When is the next one and where is it? I presume it's in Canada and probably around Toronto. But like for anyone that doesn't know about it, who's talking as well? Because I know that like Mike King, yourself, BBE, people at Faros are coming over. Like can you expand a little bit more about the SEO IRL conference? Steve Toof: Yeah, for sure. So this will be the fourth one. Prior to this event that's happening October 4th, 2024, we had hosted three evenings essentially. So the evenings were a bit more low-key, not as many speakers, but still a really great place to network. So we just kind of got it kickstarted that way. And now we're going to be doing a full day event, so not quite two days, but just one day. As you mentioned, Mike King headlining, Fairy Kazone, BB, Shiv Naran, who's very well known in the SaaS SEO space, Viv, who you might know from some of the conference talks, Kakar, and then we're probably going to announce a couple more, along with a panel that we're doing there. And essentially, you know, I just looked at the scene in Toronto. We have so many great marketers and so many SEOs, and we didn't really have an event to call our own. So you know, me being in a position where I could help get the word out to my subscribers and people who follow me on LinkedIn, and also the network of people who I'm connected with, it just felt like it was the right time. So the first event was in October 2022, and then our upcoming fourth event is going to be on October 4th. So in there, you spoke about your subscribers. Obviously, SEO Notebook has absolutely exploded over the years. If anyone doesn't know who Steve Toof is or SEO Notebook, I strongly recommend you start subscribing. So where did the idea come from with regards to SEO Notebook? And what are your plans for that brand? And just back onto the conference, what are your plans for SEO IRL? Are you going to try and make it a two or three day event as well? Steve Toof: Yeah, so just to go back to the initial question, you know, I would consider myself as somebody who's very creative but not very well organised. That's not a strength of mine. Now, like, you know, I have an assistant to help me with all that, didn't really back in the day. But it was born the idea of just keeping everything in Evernote was my first idea, just for my own purposes. You know, I've been reading, testing, you know, had an idea for that, and I didn't really have, you know, it was all going into like emails to myself, Slack messages to myself, Post-it notes on my desk. There was no good central place for it. So I just had the idea to get Evernote at the time, and then like a day later I thought, well, wow, like I've already populated this Evernote with a bunch of really valuable stuff. What if I just created an email list to essentially email one page from that notebook out per week? And that was in 2019, and I've done that every week since July 2019. So this is now five years of SEO Notebook, and you know, it's been amazing thus far, completely changed my life, and allowed me to become a successful full-time entrepreneur. So I'm very grateful that I had this idea and that I followed through on it, because there's obviously, we all have many ideas, and sometimes we don't follow through, and it's when you follow through that you get the reward. So in terms of plans for SEO Notebook itself, I really just want to keep going with the status quo right now. As long as I'm still doing SEO, I'm still inspired to put things in the notebook. You know, I have partnerships through there as some affiliate. I could potentially put all that content on my website, but I would much rather kind of give it away to the people who really follow me and not make it too public by putting like every one of my strategies on my website. And then with IRL, the plan is to just keep expanding it. So this next event is just an extension of what happened before, and then, you know, just depending on how big the attendee list grows and what the event feedback is like, because we always take event feedback, you know, kind of using that as inspiration to enhance the following one. And then with Notebook, you know, it's allowed me to become a consultant per se. And over the years, I've also grown my team now to like 13 or 14 people. And that has now parlayed into something called Notebook Agency, so it's notebook.agency, and we're kind of a hybrid model between consulting and agency, which you can get into a little bit later as well. But that's kind of where the direction I see SEO Notebook going is basically to funnel leads for this enterprise SEO agency that we started. James Dooley: Sounds great. So obviously you've not missed a note every single week, obviously now for several years. Where do you manage to find, because obviously quite a lot of your notes they're very innovative, forward-thinking, they're one of the first places that people learn about kind of what you come up with. Where do you kind of get the information from? And two, now it's grown a little bit more, like is it still you that's probably trying to source the next big thing to put as the next note? Steve Toof: It's still me. I'm still in control, full editorial control of what goes in SEO Notebook. I would say, honestly, it comes out of actually doing SEO. So if I wasn't, if I was just sitting on the sidelines as you know, CEO of my agency and not involved in what was going on, I wouldn't have the inspiration to do SEO Notebook. You know, it just is all born exactly from the actual work. And the nice thing about it is now I can spend more time on research and development. And obviously, you know, with where AI has taken us in the last just under two years, that's also provided such a bounty in terms of things that I can mess around with, experiment with, be inspired by. You know, I've featured things that you have said in SEO Notebook before. I'm always got my antenna out for the people who I follow and respect, and I'm happy to also slot them into certain notes as well. So it just really, by this point, five years in, I've just got a rhythm and a flow. The emails go out on Tuesday. I usually don't think about it on Tuesday or Wednesday. I just kind of take those as days where I don't have to prepare anything. And then, you know, if I ever have kind of a lull and I'm not sure what to do, I also have a backlog list of different inspiration that I've taken. So I'm always sort of earmarking things I've heard, things I've done. But usually, the work that and the easiest notes for me to create are the notes that I'm inspired by that week. So I always try to lean towards that. James Dooley: Yeah, and obviously from SEO Notebook now you've said that the agency's come along, and with regards to the agency, it's mainly consultancy. What's kind of made you go down the consultancy route as opposed to a lot of like people go down the agency route and want to do the full fulfillment? Remember you telling me that you try not to ever sign into a client's website? You just kind of direct them. Why have you taken that approach? Steve Toof: Yeah, we don't have any logins to our clients' websites. The truthful reason is that in 2018 I took on a client and there was a web development project that went very awry with like broken forms and awful developers and all this kind of stuff that really put me off of having anything to do with that. So that was just a real learning there. But then I realised, you know, that was right when I started working at Fresh Books in 2018. And then, you know, as I went along and worked at that company, I realised that the way they operate is just that they like taking in recommendations from their vendors versus having the vendors actually touch the website. Because some of these websites, you know, like we work with a company that has like a 3.2 billion valuation. There's no way in hell I'm ever going to get to even log in to anything with respect to that website. It's sometimes even hard to get Google Search Console for some of these clients. Not to say that like that's been a very rare circumstance where we haven't been able to get that, but I'm just letting you know that you can even run into stuff like that. James Dooley: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And then obviously with a consultant, is it would you say is it just the SEO that you're consulting them on, or is it like wide-scale marketing, so kind of guiding them a little bit on PPC or anything or social media? Is it literally just the SEO side of things? Steve Toof: The most we go into is CRO, but we only stick to SEO. And one of the main reasons for that is, you know, we don't employ account managers. So you're not talking to somebody who then has to translate what is actually going on to a person who has knowledge. The person who speaks to the client is a person who has knowledge, right? So initially that was me. But you know, in expanding the agency now, we have other strategists who meet with the clients. And if you have a multitude of different services under your company, you need that account manager point person to then translate to all the different departments. But if you're just focused on SEO, you can plop a strategist in there, and they have direct interaction with the client, and the client's needs go directly to the strategist. James Dooley: Yeah, and then obviously quite a lot of your marketing shows you as being an Enterprise SEO. For anyone who's watching this, what's the difference between an Enterprise SEO and let's say a traditional client SEO? Steve Toof: Yeah, lots of different things actually. But I think the biggest difference when you're an Enterprise SEO is you realise that it's not your job to create the entire strategy or to offer every last little bit, right? So you know, with Enterprise, you might have one person for strategy, you have another person for technical SEO, you have another person for link building, you have multiple link-building vendors, and you also have a skilled person at the other end. So you have SEO managers that you actually work with, right? So it's a lot different than you know, trying to educate a client, having that client tell you how to do your job, having that client constantly question you because they don't understand stuff. You're actually working with an educated person on the other end, and it makes the relationship a lot easier. So it's not exactly the most easy thing to break into because you kind of have to have some pedigree and like, you know, good resume and obviously like a host of Enterprise clients under your belt anyway. But the working relationship I would say is a lot more collaborative, and you kind of understand that you're like one piece in the puzzle. You're not just the agency that's expected to do everything. James Dooley: So what in your opinion is wrong at present with like the majority of like client SEO kind of models? Steve Toof: I think that, well, the one thing that I mentioned about account managers, you know, needing to be the liaison between the actual person who's skilled and knowledgeable, I have lots of other issues with. You know, SEO agencies, a lot of them will take on projects that they should just not be taking on because the client's not going to be competitive. And really, you know, like ripping off a lot of people. But that's also just borne out of the fact that not everybody has like, you know, a ton of opportunities, and they kind of have to take what they can get, right? So it is a Catch-22 situation with looking for an SEO agency is that you want somebody who's busy enough to be able to turn away shitty projects, but you don't want somebody who's too busy that they're not going to have the time to actually service you, right? So to me, it kind of, it's all about like, if you're hiring somebody, it's about the relationship that you have with that person and whether you trust them to be accountable to you, right? And I think that a lot of SEO agencies, when it's like a different salesperson trying to sell you, then you're passed off to an account manager who has a very low knowledge level of what's actually going on in the campaign. And then, you know, you've got your backend SEO person who might not even be that great to begin with. Like, you've just got a recipe for disaster. Whereas like, I've really tried my best to structure a company that has addressed a lot of those issues and basically, you know, given each one of my clients a relationship that they can really trust, whether it's with me or another strategist at the company. James Dooley: One second. It's just paused on the upload. I just need this to upload and then sure, take your time. We'll merge them both together. I spoke with the wife of the founder of Roblox today. She might be coming on as a client. I actually worked for his brother, like three years ago, and then they have like this cool kind of nonprofit that's funding research between gut health and mental health. And yeah, I spoke with her and her team today. Steve Toof: Sounds good. What do you think you're closing? James Dooley: Sorry, do you think you'll end up as a yeah, I do. Yeah, yeah, because I already know one of the marketing managers there as well. So it's like I've worked for her brother-in-law, and I know this other guy, Jeff, there. So like, hopefully, yeah, class do you check on the clients all over the world then? Is it? Steve Toof: Yeah, yeah, I have. Just speaking to somebody in Singapore right now. Taken on Estonia, UK, one Indian client once, Dubai. Yeah. James Dooley: Sounds good. How do I... your recording is still saying recording, isn't it? Steve Toof: Yeah, it does. James Dooley: How do I... can you stop your recording there or not? Don't leave the studio. Is there a stop recording button on? Steve Toof: Huh? If it's not, just leave it for now. I'll wait until this is uploaded, and then I don't actually know how I would stop recording, but it is saying that it is recording. James Dooley: Yeah, it's just leave it. One second. I've literally got, I've just bought literally the top of the range MacBook, and ever since I've got it, my Riverside keeps cutting out with browser storage, and I cannot seem to find it. It's frustrating when you upgrade your equipment and it's shittier than the one you had. It's so annoying. Steve Toof: It's so annoying. James Dooley: So annoying. And just can I... I've had loads of people look into it. I just cannot seem to find the issue of why this is going on. I'm having to keep, and then you having to then get the editor then to merge the two clips together. And yeah, it's only a little bit. It's not much to do, but it's just annoying that you can't just fit it in one go and then done. We've got, yeah, we're going to go on to the DISC. One off this. So what is that? Obviously, the DISC is like the personality traits. What have you been doing with that then? Steve Toof: I just learned how to read people basically. And you know, Annie, right, Matt's girlfriend? So Annie works for me. Annie is a project manager at our company, and she's been really great with like helping suggest the right people in the right positions and like also, you know, communicating effectively with the team based on their DISC profiles. So I've known about DISC for a long time now, but really only started thinking intensely about it in terms of hiring and who we want to work with and even, you know, what the clients are with DISC and how to communicate with them. It's just become almost like a toolkit and like something that if I'm going to be doing business with somebody, I need to know their DISC profile in order to effectively communicate with them. James Dooley: Yeah, makes sense. You did it for your business too, right? Steve Toof: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. James Dooley: We did. There was two or three different ones. And I think now before we on-board anyone, we'll check them. For a video test with a video interview before then give them a face-to-face interview, and then we put them through this kind of role play to see where they'd fit into the business. And actually, I don't even know the full ins and outs of the recruitment side now, but in month one, they kind of put them in three different job roles to see how they would excel the most and whether they'd like it the most. And then the fourth week, then we put them back in the role that we think we're going to be taking them on for. Right, Steve? So you talk about you've got 13, 14 A-players within your team, and you've spoke a couple of times about using the DISC personality type test. Can you expand a little bit more on that and how you've got such a great team now? Steve Toof: Yeah, so DISC, for anybody who doesn't know, is essentially a personality test that's focused on how people like to be communicated to. So there's four quadrants: the D, the I, the S, and the C. So the D is the more direct, the I is the more influential, the C is the more conscientious, and the S is the more supportive type personality. And once you know where you fall into, it's also super important. I'm a C-D. You know, you're probably a D. D, James, a D-I. Once you know where you fit into, you understand, you can tell people straight up, this is how I like to be communicated to. I much rather prefer video than email, or a long email is totally fine if you want to do that instead of booking a meeting. And or, you know, if you put a person in a specific job, like sales, you don't probably don't want to put them into a C or an S type position. You probably want that person to be a D, S, or S-I. So it's about knowing the strengths and weaknesses of every personality quadrant per se and putting those people into the right position and then also empowering the rest of your team to understand DISC and how people prefer to be communicated to. And the end goal of that is just basically smoother operations. And to me, it's like a cheat code. When I worked at Fresh Books, they invested very heavily in DISC training. Like, it was nine weeks, like every week once a week for a full afternoon, we did DISC training. And then, since then, you know, I've made friends with Matt Singers, and you know, Matt's at his recent conference in Saigon, he had a mastermind retreat where we also did DISC sessions. And you know, just hugely valuable to me to understand that on a deep level. James Dooley: Yeah, that's brilliant. So I'm moving on very quickly because I've got a few questions from the community. I asked for the last couple of days. What questions have you got? And one of them is, how did you manage to move from solopreneur to agency owner? Steve Toof: Yeah, so I wouldn't say it was like a conscious move by any means. I was doing very well as a solopreneur. You know, I was doing like, I don't know, ten clients and just, you know, managing only a group of freelancers to support me and not a full-time staff. So that was, you know, really a great learning for me. I wouldn't say that it's the most like sustainable by any means, because you're very busy. You're the one doing the follow-ups. You're the one doing all the client communication and stuff like that. So I wouldn't say like I necessarily burnt out because I was still enjoying what I was doing, but it came to a point where some people had, you know, offered to work with me to help me essentially. And they were just really good people. And I said, you know, sure, why not? And then that just evolved into, you know, growing my team over the last couple of years. So it wasn't really a conscious thing. It was more just taking advantage of the great people around me and having them come on board to help. And then the next question in there is, how to leverage automation or AI within your agency? James Dooley: Sure. So like there's just so much endless inspiration for that, right? Like, one of the things that we're doing, you know, just based off a note that I actually spoke about in my Chiang Mai talk, was just a way to write like fully optimised title tags with AI without just asking AI to write me a title tag. So what we do is, you know, we scrape the SERP, the top 100 results, and we count the instances of the words in those different title tags. Then we get a list of most often used words in those title tags, and then we ask AI to write us title tag variations using only those words and then also adding some unique value onto those using those words, right? So that way we're getting, you know, an informed title tag based on what's currently ranking, not just what ChatGPT thinks is a good title tag. And you know, just automating that, right? So we do a lot of work with Python. We have a few different in-house tools that we use as well. So basically, you know, in doing SEO Notebook, I had also done many strategies that weren't necessarily automated that I have now automated as well. So I think the easiest way to get started with that is just Python, because the development time is so short, and you can make lots of mistakes, and it's not going to cost you a big resource-heavy developer or UI that you have to go and tweak and all this stuff. You can just iterate very, very fast. And yeah, that's how I would do that. And then basically what we do is we've got a server that everybody can log into, like a Windows 10 server, and then we just run the scripts out there. So some of these scripts can take up to 12 hours with, you know, browser automation and stuff involved. And then, you know, we just log in the next day, and it's done. Then another one just pops up. James Dooley: Now it says, Steve, what do you focus on and what do you avoid within your agency to make it great? Steve Toof: I want to stay away from basically anything that has to do with touching the website. So that's just an obvious one. But when it comes to, like, things to stay away from, sometimes like, you know, clients can be a little bit too critical of the content. So like, does this content speak perfectly about the brand, or we do this but we don't do that? So I basically tell the clients that like we need to obviously focus on getting the stuff up there as soon as possible. And then, you know, once it ranks, then we can tweak it if it really starts to bug you at this point. But it basically comes down to educating the client as much as possible and not worrying too much about the fine details of the content and just expressing that you know, getting it live and indexed and giving it time to rank is most important. And that if it's still bugging you when it's ranking, we can go ahead and make tweaks at that point. James Dooley: And then one pops up here. It says, Steve, you are always providing up-to-date notes with SEO Notebook and obviously showing some great case studies. Why do you think Notebook Agency is better than all the competition? Well, what sets you apart from the competition in your opinion? Steve Toof: Yeah, I mean, at any agency, you're only as good as your strategy team. That's my belief. And the team that I've built up now is just incredibly smart people. There are you know, people from all walks of life. Former computer scientists, former mechanical engineers, people who have twenty-plus years of SEO experience, but not just like fair-weather experience, like intense, everyday kind of SEO-obsessed experience. So it really boils down to the quality of the people at the agency, and I don't think that most agencies are able to have the opportunities that I have to hire because I have a lot of people wanting to come and work for me, and I only pick the best. And you know, I feel like I'm also still very involved in many of the strategies that we put forth. So you know, I guess I'm biased, but I would say that we have just a really A-list team. We also have the luxury of saying no to clients that we don't think are going to be successful. We do a thorough audit before we actually sign on any client. We scope the project entirely, and if we don't think that we can make a big difference, then we just don't take them on. So therefore, our success rate is naturally higher because of that. And yeah, we just have a really great time working with our clients. So yeah, I don't know. I'm obviously biased, but that's sort of some of the reasons. James Dooley: Sounds good. Name one thing about the business mindset that you've never said before to anyone on the Internet. So they're not going to see it on your notebook. Is there anything that you've never said before about business or your mindset? Steve Toof: That's a good question. It's put you on the spot, hasn't it? James Dooley: Yeah, it has. Steve Toof: That, uh, I guess, oh, that's a really good question. I think I might have thought through this one before, but now I don't remember. Something that I haven't said before about business is maybe like, you know, me personally being like a very introverted person. I thought for many years that that would hold me back, especially with respect to sales or whatnot. But that at some point, like, if you want to be successful, you just have to put those things aside and be comfortable with being uncomfortable at points. And just, you know, go for it, right? So the first time I had the opportunity to speak in front of 400 people at Fresh Books, I was really nervous, but I did that. And then, you know, we got put up on a pedestal at that company after that speech because people saw the great work that we were doing, right? So it's the same thing. Like, with anything in this world, like if you're nervous for an interview, if you're nervous for a client meeting, if you're nervous for an investor pitch, whatever it is, just put it aside and just go for it. You have nothing. You have literally nothing to lose, and you have everything to gain. So just, you know, put those things aside. James Dooley: So name one thing that somebody doesn't know about you as an individual? Steve Toof: Well, I've been doing SEO for 14 years. And I would say that for the first seven years, I was not a very good SEO. I was super passionate. I loved it, but I don't think I had any like notable case studies. I was, you know, doing, I was way spread too thin. I was, you know, reading MOOz, I was listening to, uh, I love, I think everybody should love Matt Cutts if you've been in it this long. But you know, I was like, it was like Google's word was gospel. What did Barry Schwartz say about this? All those types of things. And I wouldn't really say that, it wasn't until probably like 2016, 2017, that I really started to follow people like Kyle Roof and Matt Diggity and like, you know, people who were kind of speaking more truth about SEO versus just staying on Google's safe side when they spoke publicly. So I would say that, you know, I was still like, I loved it. Like, I blogged. I ranked on, I wrote. I wrote over 150 blogs for a company and grew their traffic to like 40K a month. That wasn't like crazy, but like it was something. But I would say like, you know, you could give me an SEO campaign to start from scratch, and I would have been able to do a good job until I really started learning, getting some exposure to black and grey hat. And then started learning from guys like Matt and Kyle. James Dooley: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, two great guys there that you've mentioned. Both dig and Kyle for great guys, for sure. So last two questions for you. If you could ask a Google engineer one question to understand the algorithm, what would you ask them and why? Steve Toof: I think I already know some of the answers to this question, but I would love to hear from them is, like, what's the best way that I could rank that is going to minimise links, right? Like, how can I just rank without links? I think obviously topical authority is a big part of that, but you know, what signals are going to be just as important as getting links? And like, you know, obviously, like, you know, what's the baseline of links that I would need to be super competitive, or like, become, you know, the next NerdWallet or whatever, right? Like, you know, how can I start a huge site like that cost-effectively? That would be probably the question that I'd want to ask them. And then, you know, obviously, I would love to know more about every attribute that's mentioned in the leak and whatnot. There are lots of questions I'm sure I could ask there. But I think I would want to ask them, like, if I wanted to start a mega-authority site, what's the most cost-effective way I could do that? James Dooley: And then the last one is slightly different, but again it's to do with Google. So if you inherited Google tomorrow and you could change one thing with the algorithm, what would you change and why? Steve Toof: So to make Google search better... what would, okay, so it's not to please shareholders, not to please shareholders, okay, to please the users? Yeah. I think I would give smaller sites more visibility in search results, and I would probably get rid of... I mean, if people search for, you know, plus Reddit, that's fine. But I think, you know, Reddit having the visibility that it has right now is really not a great thing for people who actually have valuable content to say. And if it's not, you know, let users who want to read about Reddit, let them put that in there. Don't force it upon users, right? And I think there are just so many smaller sites out there that produce great content, actually give a shit about the stuff that they're reviewing and all that kind of stuff, that are just not getting visibility. And you know, I don't want to move to a future where the top 1,000 websites in the world are getting 95% of the traffic and nobody else. I think that should be distributed across more sites. James Dooley: Yeah, I couldn't agree more, to be fair. So Steve, it's been an absolute pleasure asking you some questions. Where is the best place for someone to follow you or message you or subscribe? Like, what's the best place to get hold of you? Steve Toof: Yeah, seonnotebook.com, and I would say LinkedIn, Steve Toof. And then if you're interested in the event, or even if you can't make this October 4th 2024, just go to SEO IRL.com and give us your email, and we'll let you know about the next event. James Dooley: Well, Steve, it's been an absolute pleasure having you, and I'll see you soon in one of the meetups. Are you going to Chiang Mai? Steve Toof: Oh, definitely. Yeah, I'll see you in Chiang Mai. James Dooley: All right, take care. Steve Toof: Thanks, James. Thank you.