Austin Mullins: Becoming an SEO and Content Craftsman, Agency Builder and Thought Leader

Full Episode Page: Austin Mullins: Becoming an SEO and Content Craftsman, Agency Builder and Thought Leader

Episode Summary:  In this conversation, Austin Mullins discusses the importance of effective communication in business and the value of gaining experience and expertise. He shares his journey from copywriting to sales to starting his own agency, Conversion Media. Austin emphasizes the need for personalized and relevant content marketing, considering the intent and awareness stage of the audience. He also highlights the tension between wanting a definite path in marketing while acknowledging the limitations of data visibility. The conversation covers the importance of both tangible and intangible aspects of marketing, the need for prioritization in technical SEO, the value of understanding the audience, the limitations of AI in content creation, and the SEO skills assessment and coaching program.

Takeaways

• Gaining experience and expertise through practice and exposure to different industries can enhance your skills and knowledge.
• There is a tension between wanting a definite path in marketing and the limitations of data visibility. 
• Technical SEO should be prioritized based on estimated impact and ROI
• Content marketing is a portfolio game where not everything will work, but enough quality work will yield results
• The SEO skills assessment helps measure skills maturity and plan learning and development initiatives
• Upskilling existing team members can be more effective than hiring senior SEO talent
•  Access the free Ascent SEO Skills Assessment tool here. 

Where to Find Austin:

• Conversion Media
• Ascent SEO Coaching
• Austin on LinkedIn
• Austin on X
• Austin Mullins tBOJ Guest Profile

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Transcript

Nick (00:00)
told you a couple of times, like, you know, the reason that I started

harassing you and is trying to get more information from you is because I found some something online. I think it was it started with an article that you had written. It wasn't about the topic other than like this dude was able to say something really.

concise, really clear, it made sense to me. And like, this was not my area of expertise, right? So I guess you could, we could say you dumbed it down. But like, it was just so well communicated. And so I'm like, well, I'm going to go look for this dude and find some more information from him. And so then I got in touch with you. I've told you that a few times and you kind of do the like,

And I'm not saying that it's not authentic, but like you're humble about the things that you've done. But Do you feel like you're a good communicator about those things or do other people tell you that?

Austin Mullins (00:59)
Yes, but only a lot more so more recently, I guess. And so I think part of it is just like over the past few years, I've gotten a lot of reps in. I've done a lot of one -on -one consulting and mentoring and such across so many brands. So I think I've gotten a lot better at it, like over the past little bit. And so it's only now that I'm willing to like, you know, do more things like this. And, you know, I would like to write more publicly and produce more content and things like that. But.

Yeah, I guess my own confidence level with it has gone up quite a bit over the past two or three years in terms of being more public with how I think about these things and not just keeping that in like client conversations and conversations with teammates, which I mean, I'm also fairly young. So it probably would have looked weird me doing it even a few years ago. I would have been like visibly kind of, you know, not quite experienced enough.

Nick (01:55)
Maybe, I don't know. I've been having some of these interviews and some of the people that I've talked to would probably want to go to work on your belief system there about like, how much does that really matter? I'm not going to do that. Whatever, you know, whatever has changed or evolved in you that is kind of turning what you know loose, good. Because like,

Austin Mullins (02:03)
I mean.

That's right.

Nick (02:18)
at every interaction that I've had with you, it's been consistent. And I think that's what we need more of. Business owners need more people who do what you do, who can make fucking sense.

Austin Mullins (02:31)
Yeah, people really doubt the importance I think of having a bunch of like just talking to a bunch of people and trying to help a bunch of people in whatever your specialty is because like

If you're trying to make everything transactional and you're trying to have everything having like definite purpose or payoff, you miss a lot of that of just like, I just want more exposure. I just want faster velocity. I just want people to ask me questions. I don't quite know the answer to, but I can find the answer faster than they can. And then I end up, you know, you do that over and over and over. And suddenly like, I've thought through a bunch of questions. Nobody else has, you know, and you do, you can connect more dots cause you've seen more. I think agency life is like that a little bit too.

Nick (03:07)
Yeah.

Austin Mullins (03:13)
I've always said, like, in SEO, and I'm sure this is true for some other disciplines as well, but I find that years of experience is a really bad barometer for how much somebody knows. Because for instance, somebody that's been in -house in an SEO role working on one brand, one website.

for years straight tends to not know near as much as someone that's been working in an agency and had a much faster velocity of companies they were working on and different industries and had to deliver on tighter timelines and things like that. So it's like within those years, they got a lot more experience and a lot more exposure. Not to say that in -house folks can't be very good as well, but lots of people that work in -house and are really good have also spent some time in like agency life or, you know, client work in some sense where they had to juggle more projects.

And I think that's good for people's skills development. It almost feels like speed running your career in a way of, in terms of experience.

Nick (04:01)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah, which is, so that's a cool way to phrase it. I mean, I think you, so I know mastery is a big, is a big word for you, right? Like we've talked about that before, pursuing mastery and you know, you, yeah. And you have like kind of, you've built your own, your path to where you're at. Like now, agency owner,

Austin Mullins (04:23)
the pursuit of it.

Nick (04:34)
someone like an expert voice in the content marketing SEO communities. I mean, I like make no secret about what I think about the information that you share in your perspective. But, and you know, now your level of competence has gotten to be such that you're comfortable like putting yourself out there more, but it didn't happen by accident, right? So could like give us the...

the Reader's Digest version of your backstory. Like, what got you here?

Austin Mullins (05:07)
I mentioned that I kind of like was naturally inclined towards some of this media production stuff. So early on, you know, was exposed to photography and learning Photoshop and Premiere. And that all came from really my grandfather who was really into photography. And so I was learning that sort of stuff in like middle school. And then as I got into high school, I was always really good at academic writing.

Nick (05:08)
Thank you.

Austin Mullins (05:28)
And I was obsessed with the idea of figuring out like, how, how can you use the internet to do business or whatever that means, in a vague sense when you're that young. and the resources were much lower quality back then. It's, it's hard to really emphasize just how bad the quality of information on the internet was then compared to now in my opinion. But, but anyway, I would occasionally stumble upon gems and was learning. and I, at the time I was like senior year of high school, I was.

working on what is now called Upwork, but was then called ODesk. So like a big freelancer platform doing just the worst kinds of copywriting you can imagine. The work output was okay, but just like the oddest gigs you can imagine. And then as I got a little deeper into that, like immediately post high school.

already was having that weird effect of working across so many industries, like wrote for the Association of American Medical Colleges, also wrote for a company that did conveyor belts for mines, also wrote for real estate companies in Australia, like I was all over the place. Didn't have any niche specialty at that point. So I ended up doing that for a while, came to where I could support myself with copywriting, kind of scrape by, did that for a bit. I took a gap year after high school.

And then I grew up in a family of public school teachers. So they very aggressively persuaded me that I needed to go to college, which basically I hadn't wanted to do it because I was like,

If I'm going to go to college, I'm going into finance. And if I can't get into an Ivy league or Duke or Stanford or something, then I'm not going to do it. So that was my point of view on it, but was persuaded to go give it a try. And I had scholarships and such anyway. Didn't cost me anything. So I went and gave that a try for a year, but it wrecked the business. Like I found I could not do both at the same time. The business was too unstable anyway, you know, it required a lot of my attention to keep that going. So it came out of that.

after a year of that and I'm like, yeah, I'm not doing this. I'm dropping out. I don't want to be a finance major. This is horrible. Turns out should have been an econ major. That's what I like. Hate accounting. But that's neither here nor there. So anyway, go in from that. I'm now super broke. I'm like, I need to learn sales. I'm really bad at sales. And so I stumbled across a talk that this guy had done on like how to do cold email and how to do like sales off of cold leads.

I was like, this guy knows what he's talking about. So I looked up the company he worked for and cold pitched my way into working for this agency. I was like, Hey, I want to come work for you and do sales. I don't know how it works, but I landed an interview and then interviewed with the other co -founder and then got that job. So start working in sales. Much to my surprise, they did not have a robust sales trading program, which is in hindsight, not at all surprising for a company of that stage. But.

Nick (08:26)
I don't know.

Austin Mullins (08:28)
Pretty much I was just immediately thrown into active sales calls very quickly. And so, but again, just like getting the reps in of like, well, I've got this many meetings to do and they're going to keep asking me why these deals aren't moving forward. And so I better figure this out right quick. And had to get over a lot of like weird mental blocks too of when you're not used to selling five figure contracts. And that seems like an astronomical sum of money to you. And you haven't yet learned that it's.

really just an ROI calculation of whether they think they're gonna get that back out of the efforts. That can be quite intimidating.

Nick (09:06)
Were you thinking about that at the time? Like, is that how you kind of coached yourself through it? It's like, it's just an ROI calculation. Like, let me get my head around it and I can present it to them. Or is that something you've since figured out?

Austin Mullins (09:18)
I mean, that was something I figured out at the time, because I had to figure out how to present it. Otherwise, like my clear nervousness with putting forward these amounts was going to kill every deal. And, you know, of course that's actually true, right? Like once you see it spelled out and then you realize that actually is how, how the buying side of this is thinking through the decision is basically, do I trust these people to pull this off? And do I think the ROI is there? Then it became, okay.

Nick (09:28)
Yeah, okay.

Austin Mullins (09:44)
Those are the two things I need to both make sure are actually there and then convince you are.

Nick (09:48)
just not everybody, not all of us are able to put our rational mind to work in those circumstances at that age. And I'm making some assumptions about your age, but like probably in your twenties then, right?

Austin Mullins (10:02)
I would have been 19 or 20, yeah, when I first started out. But yeah, I don't think I would have been able to do it if it had just been me though. Like, had I not had the external accountability of like, well, I've still got to do this, you know, I've still got to send an easy number of, you know, hit my email quota and attend all these meetings and be expected, you know, to drive these deals forward. Like I think if it had just been me, I would have found some excuse not to do it.

Nick (10:04)
Yeah. Pretty savvy for a 19 year old.

Yeah.

Austin Mullins (10:33)
and not gotten those reps in at that point because it was so uncomfortable.

Nick (10:37)
that makes sense.

Austin Mullins (10:37)
I don't know, maybe a good takeaway for some people is if you can engineer external accountability, at least for me, that tends to work well of like, I don't want to do a thing. Let's make sure there's somebody I'm answerable to. They don't have to be, yeah, it doesn't have to be super authoritarian, but just like someone I don't want to disappoint.

Nick (10:57)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even if they don't even realize that it's, it's driving some accountability in you, as long as you are being more accountable, like that's the goal. So whatever environment, create an environment for yourself that does that.

Austin Mullins (11:05)
Hmm.

Yeah.

right? Like you have update meetings with clients and it's like, okay, I can manage to this meeting because I know, you know, when I show up at this call, I'm expected to be, you know, have results and output to talk about and also be a sharp strategy mind that has been thinking about their brand and has ideas and, you know, so, but you have a definite deadline for when that needs to happen. You know, it's like, okay, once a month meeting with this company and their internal marketing team.

I better be ready by the time that date rolls around.

Nick (11:42)
Yeah, and this is something that you jumped into not because it came easy to you, because you wanted to learn sales.

Austin Mullins (11:49)
Yeah, the sales part. Yeah. Yeah, it was really because I wanted to learn sales because I knew that was a weak point for me, right? Like, I think the largest deal I'd sold up to that point was like, definitely sub 5000. Like it had to be like one or two grand was like a big deal for me to sell as a copywriting project at the time.

Nick (12:07)
Yeah. So, I mean, I think there's another takeaway too, right? It's like, you don't just lean into the things that are coming easy to you. You knew you were going to need this competency. So what do we got to do to sharpen that saw? And it's sometimes uncomfortable.

Austin Mullins (12:24)
Yeah. And how, yeah, and that side of like, if it's uncomfortable and you have a lot of resistance to it, at least for me, it really helps to engineer some sort of external accountability so that you don't like.

I don't know, like in some cases it can be lighter and you can almost like passively gain the experience by slowly getting the reps in, or you push yourself in a situation like that where it's like, no, I'm immersed in this and have external accountability. I think either one can work, but the point being it's much easier to just step away from it or be avoidant, you know, if it's purely internally motivated, but nobody else, you know, expecting it. Or maybe that's just mental illness. I don't know.

Nick (13:09)
Yeah, I mean, there we can, you can definitely make a case for, well, we can present it in a lot of different ways, but I think there's the kind of takeaways that I think business owners need is like trying to find a balance of working on things that like the strengths versus shoring up the weaknesses and the thing and getting outside of the comfort zone, right? Because you, you know, you.

There's a lot of information out there about that kind of thing. And it is important to make sure that you can follow your strengths and you do get the most out of them. You can't totally ignore our weaknesses. And some of them are things that are like table stakes. You've got to be able, you have to understand, if you're gonna own a business, you have to understand how sales works and not just like mechanically, but the, you know, the creating demand and like,

enabling people to go further down the process, prospects to come further down the process and exchange money for your product. If those things don't happen, business doesn't happen.

Austin Mullins (14:17)
Yeah. It's really hard to ignore those. Like it's interesting. You can think about the same thing as like in you as an operator versus the business as a unit, right?

And like in both cases, there are things that are table stakes, right? Like a founder needs to understand sales. They should understand the basics of the major channels that drive demand for their product. They should understand the operation side well enough. I don't think you have to understand admin all that much, just as much as you need to stay on the compliance side of the law. But then there are a million other things you could do, or you could double down on more sales, more operations, more of the key marketing channels.

and often you'll move faster, but if you're missing one of those key pieces, it's just going to fall apart.

So I was in that sales role, ended up becoming quite good at it after a while. And then became like their head of sales, but that's a wildly inflated title. I had like a handful of it was basically I was an account exec that had a few SDRs under me. But, you know, I was the one that was good at closing. So that's what I was doing. The upside downside to that, I don't know, it was a definite downside at the time, but I learned a lot was.

This company was pretty mismanaged. And so I ended up filling in a ton on the operations and account management side, because I would sell these deals based off the strength of the relationship I built with these people. But then I also felt accountable to make sure they actually got, you know, what I promised them. And that was not really happening on the operations side. So I often had to step in and like really drive there. And so then one of the co -founders decided to very suddenly fire everyone one day.

Nick (15:48)
Then you had to do it.

Austin Mullins (16:01)
and basically offer that everyone can come back and make about half of what they were making. And since I was driving about 90 % of the revenue of that company, I was not willing to do that. I had already, I kind of skipped over, I had started what was then called Conversion Creatives on the side, which was at the time just a pure play link building agency. That was all we did. And we only had like two clients where, but just doing link building services as a side gig.

And so I was doing that and, you know, soon as I'm like, well, rug kind of got pulled out from under me here. I wasn't planning to leave yet. I was planning to leave maybe a year after that. And so I'm like, well, this seems like the most obvious thing to go into is this little side gig I have. Let me see if I can make that work as a full -time business. So I went into that. And since I had the copywriting kind of background, it became fairly obvious to start offering content services along with link building.

And then I needed to learn the third pillar of SEO, which is technical SEO. So I started to pick some of that up and some design stuff and such. But essentially at that point, that became my full -time thing. Started to grow the client base very slowly, very painfully at first. And yeah, just picked up those additional skills along the way. At some point rebranded the firm from conversion creatives to conversion media.

largely because people kept getting confused and thinking we were a CRO agency, which not that we don't think about conversions, but we don't do hardcore, you know, CRO where you're doing split tests across large amount of traffic and looking at heat maps and recorded user sessions and stuff like that. We tend to do like best practices CRO. I'm like, this is what, you know, the best brands are doing and kind of establish patterns of what works. And so, anywho, the point being rebranded that.

You know, grew a hired a few more people and basically what I've been doing ever since.

Nick (18:04)
Okay. Yeah. So that's now the present day where, so conversion media is the agency and,

you mind sharing more your methodology.

Austin Mullins (18:16)
okay. When we're thinking about, like I largely think about content marketing and mostly content marketing where we're primarily leveraging organic channels. So the number one would be search engines, but then that could also be distributed across social or what have you. I tend to think of...

Like assets is existing at different stages of awareness and to address different intents. so like, let's take just the SEO frame, right? Like we will go and do comprehensive keyword research across a bunch of competitors in a space and then try to answer four questions. We'll look at, okay, you know, is this topic that we might go compete on remotely related to the business? Like, is it even relevant to what we're, where we're trying to, who we're trying to engage with, what they care about, what we're trying to sell.

So that's question number one. Question number two becomes, can we compete? So it's just having a mind for like, how crowded is this space? What do I have in terms of resources? Can I even get noticed for this thing or does there have to be another way of going about it? And then, or in the case of SEO, that's like, can I rank? Do I have the link authority? And then question number three becomes, okay.

If I were to rank for this or have this asset do super well, how am I going to convert the traffic? And that's where you get into some interesting considerations of matching both the intent of what sort of information the user was looking for. So in search, we see things like, we see how to and DIY queries. Those are pretty straightforward. You want long form explainer content. Could be written, could be video, what have you. We also see things like commercial comparison queries, where,

You know you want to make a purchasing decision, but you are looking to see the options compared and contrasted and kind of have a short list built for you to kind of streamline that decision making process, right? So that's a more valuable lower funnel query than the general informational queries above that, right? Or then you could have something that's like a transactional query, right? Where it's like, I just want to buy this specific thing.

where that's pretty straightforward, right? That's where you see like e -commerce product pages and things like that rank. So think about like, what is the intent, right? What is the user trying to do or trying to learn about or trying to accomplish? And then the other side of that is thinking about like, where are they at in the stages of awareness? So thinking through Eugene Schwartz's model of stages of awareness, basically you go from completely unaware, you have like,

problem aware, solution aware, aware of your specific solution, and then they just need to be sold on like why pull the trigger on it, right? And so you can think about like there's, you know, this search intent or the intent with which they're seeking information. And then there's also this like how far down the awareness are you at? And the two are not perfectly correlated, right? Like you could have someone that's seeking information that is like, what is this broad topic?

Okay, odds are someone that just discovered the market you're competing in is not going to immediately become a customer. Right. and then you, but you might have another, you know, informational search or query or, you know, people, someone just seeking information, right. But it's much more specific, right. And just knowing to even ask that question indicates some level of sophistication or experience with the market or just like being further down that awareness funnel. Right. And so.

when we're creating content, I think one of the biggest misses I see across all sorts of brands is that they don't, A, think through this, right? So like what content type is right to address the intent here? How should we speak given what this intent says about the person likely to be reading this, right? So to go back to my example, like very introductory material for absolute beginners should probably be far less technical than your, you know.

really detailed material that's catered towards people that are already have experience in the market. But then also people don't customize their CTAs, right? So you want your CTA to be the next most obvious step in from where they're at in the stage of awareness to the next step. And so you often see brands that push everything to demos or trials or a buy now button when in actuality they might be producing content assets that address higher levels of awareness where

That's not the appropriate next action yet, right? Again, they, you know, exactly.

Nick (22:49)
You're trying to take them too far with that. You need really need to get them to take the next step, not jump all the way to hop in the sack with you.

Austin Mullins (22:58)
Exactly. So if you can like, you know, get that soft commitment that earns you some trust that, you know, will allow you to basically gain permission to continue to market to them because they trust you, then you're more likely to make that sale later. So I think that's a common miss by a ton of brands.

Nick (23:18)
Yeah, for sure. So here's the thing. So I say yes, for sure, because like that's a mistake that we've

So we've always had, I've always had this thing where it was,

frustrating to me to not be able to figure out like, or to get an answer or any insight as to, well, how much should we ask of them? Like how do we figure out how many steps this should require?

Austin Mullins (23:43)
Yeah, typically you're just trying to get them to do the next thing, but I don't know, that becomes a little muddier in the middle of the funnel because it's often, you can create like lots of mid funnel assets. And often at that point, you're trying to give them something that maybe gives them a bit more information or presents it in a different format, but also you're trying to basically get that permission to continue marketing them, right? So if somebody will download an industry report or...

use an interactive quiz or calculator related to something they just read. And you know, that's email gated. They're probably aware that you're going to email them. You're maybe going to run retargeting ads, what have you, and present offers to try to get them back in the funnel. And I think that makes sense. So then it's all comes about like, well, what is compelling to them, right? Like what would they actually find valuable enough to do that? Because they know that this is taking that next step. So what's going to be worth it or what's going to keep their interest enough or...

provide that additional context that they need or that information they haven't quite gotten yet. And sometimes that's just answering the next obvious follow ups, right? So like, if I am, you know, looking into something maybe that's compliance driven, right? Where there's a law I've got to comply with and I'm reading about, you know, all this stuff on, you know, how to, you know, stay within the letter of the law, but then you have a SaaS solution that will help me streamline that, then.

maybe it's something that describes what that looks like to actually get it set up and you know something like that where maybe I'm not ready to pull the trigger yet. I don't necessarily want to commit to a demo and have somebody tell me this live because I know they're going to be you know pushier about moving the deal forward but I want that kind of let me do almost like product investigation on my own if I'm now convinced that I need some sort of solution in that space so yeah it's almost always kind of

maybe all the way the next step or maybe just a half step on the way there, but trying to move them further down that direction.

Nick (25:38)
Yeah, okay. And you're basically, you're talking about a three or four stage journey.

Austin Mullins (25:46)
Yeah, it's interesting. The companies we work with, it's often not as well defined as that. So you, I mean, you end up buckling them all into MQLs or SQLs, but I would argue like within MQLs, there's a huge variance in just how far along and qualified they are. And really good brands will segment out that messaging based off how they came in and what sort of user profile they are. And...

Nick (25:56)
Mm -hmm.

Austin Mullins (26:10)
If it's sales assisted, sophisticated brands will take those email addresses and run them through like data enrichment software, like Clearbit reveal and figure out which titles match with their ICP and you know, the types of companies they want to work with and go do manual followups. So, I mean, there's a lot you can do once you get that data in the door in terms of how do we make these touch points as personalized and as relevant as possible to everybody, depending on where they came in. But I don't normally think of it in quite as rigid a funnel model as.

Nick (26:36)
-huh.

Austin Mullins (26:40)
everybody goes through this stage and this stage and this stage. Like sometimes you catch people that are already three steps into the four deep, the moment they come in and that's awesome. And often smaller brands can't support building out all of that content infrastructure at once. So they often have to start mostly bottom of funnel and work their way up actually, because, you know, higher, at least in search like higher traffic queries are often very competitive. So are the most valuable transactional queries, but you know.

Smaller brands often start bottom of funnel, but longer tail and like addressing more specific things and then gradually broaden it out as they're able to prove that the channel works. I don't know. That's kind of SEO specific.

Nick (27:22)
Yeah, so, but I'm hearing, so a lot of the things that in your explanation there that are the type of things that got my attention and there's a method behind it all.

And it doesn't feel like nothing feels willy -nilly. Whereas, you know, the experience that I'd had with so many marketers and experts, They're just not that methodology. There's not the logic behind it. Like what you just.

explained, right? It's, there's some engineering at work behind what you're talking about.

Austin Mullins (27:59)
That's an interesting discussion because there's a lot of, there's a tension there between, see this across tons of people where there's this, like there's two things happening at once, at least, I might come up with a third as I say this, but there's like this want for a definite path, right? Where like, I think this has now gone too far, arguably, where like...

With digital marketing, we were so used to everything being measurable, especially a few years ago, before all the privacy laws started to pull back on our data visibility, right? And the major platforms started to kind of throttle how much of that data we can see, sometimes in well -meaning ways and often in ham -handed ways. But there's that want for like, we want everything to be a definite like.

is this going to work? Can we prove it? Can we model it out? You know, even sometimes doing like, you know, in larger companies, you're doing like actual financial projections and trying to figure out, you know, rough ROI ahead of time before you, you know, allocate budget to an initiative. And so there's that desire for that, which I think sometimes leads people to be short -sighted in that they either think marketers are lying to them if they can't be definite about everything or that they are.

Or they're skipping over things that are very hard to measure but very valuable So like branding work is like that where it's very hard to prove the ROI of a branding effort But I can tell you just anecdotally that when we work with clients that have great brands. Everything is easier We rank easier people publishers say yes to us for link building easier Like people are just more likely to engage with the brand and it's such an intangible It's like hard to sell, you know, all these tiny like everything's gonna work slightly better if you invest in this

because it's like, it's not directly measurable. On the other hand, you have like marketers that are wasting time on things that don't really matter. Like I see this all the time with, you know, SEO agencies, like audit on page and technical SEO audits where they'll make a bunch of suggestions, but they don't prioritize them very well. And so technical SEO is one of these topics where like, you can just keep going and going and going and going. Like there's, there's so many things you could do that are technically correct, but.

there's so many such a like diminishing returns effect past a certain point that it's like, to me, I'm not a technical perfectionist. I'm very much a, and I don't think it's good to be a technical perfectionist actually. Like I view it as a sign of immaturity where you don't yet know how to make the trade -offs of estimated impact in ROI versus cost of implementation. And so when you are just trying to drive everything towards pure technical perfection,

you're making the company do things that it shouldn't be doing because they don't make sense for the amount of resources it's going to take. So I think like those two things can both be true at the same time, right? Like it is true that a lot of marketers are making recommendations that don't necessarily make any sense. It's also true that we don't always know exactly what's going to work before it is. And I view like content marketing is kind of a portfolio game where it's like, if we knock it out of the park every time, 20 % of what we do is going to work really well.

Problem is I don't know which 20 % until we do it. So we've just got to do a bunch of really good stuff that should work. And then some of it actually will. And we may never find out why. Sometimes it's quite surprising what works and what doesn't. But if we do enough the right way, then it tends to work out in the long run.

Nick (31:10)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah, and I'll take that, right? So like, here's my philosophy on how I think that should go as a business owner talking to a marketing agency. Like, okay, I know nothing is certain. I know you're gonna have to get in there and figure a lot of this stuff out. What I need to know, I need you to show me upfront is like, this is like our likely starting point.

And if you can speak to that with some clarity and you can answer a few questions, then like you earned the opportunity with me at least to get started. And, and then I'm going to trust you to figure it out and adapt along the way as you learn some things. And some of that means like learning this didn't work. I'm okay with all of that. What I'm not okay with is this SEO takes a long time. So.

Six, we won't know anything for six months. Well, I think that's bullshit. Like I think there'll be some something effect, some effect that we can see in sooner than that, right? Like surely we can at least maybe see some impressions go up that there's a sign of life, but there.

Austin Mullins (32:43)
Yeah, usually you see, like, I don't know if you think they're like lead and lag metrics, but that's how I think they're right. So it's like with SEO, it's okay. First, can we just get output metrics right? Right? Like, can we produce content and build links and like address these major technical issues at the speed and quality that we planned on? Right? Like, can we just do that? Right? Like, can we actually produce what we said we would?

And then secondarily, you should start to see like, okay, some rankings increases, some increase to keyword footprint. So just the total number of keywords you're competing on. And some move up and then like you see moves and impressions and clicks. And then you should see, okay, now we're seeing traffic. Is that going into conversions and then you can optimize kind of, then you have the whole funnel, right? So you can start to tinker with different areas and figure out where your bucket is leaking.

Nick (33:33)
Yeah. Like so for the 11 gazillion agencies out there, that's all you have to say to me to like clear up some of this, the murkiness, right? It's like, here's how this should go. And even if it doesn't, then I can come back to Austin and at whatever point he said, and the next thing we should say, see is this, if we don't see that then okay, Austin, do you have any idea why? Maybe you do. Maybe you don't, but I bet you have an idea of where we're going to go next. And.

That worked, that's fine.

Austin Mullins (34:05)
And if you can, it also helps you, you know, if you're a service provider, it's like, well, you want your customer to buy into the frame you have of how this is likely to pan out. Cause you don't want people looking for step four results at step two. Cause then it's like, of course that's going to look bad. Right? Like, you know, if that was the expectation and that was not in your eyes, a reasonable expectation, then you did a poor job setting that expectation and not just setting it once, but you kind of have to keep reiterating it. Just same as you do if you're like,

trying to get core principles adopted by your team. Like, how do you do that? You reference them over and over and over and over until people inherently are like, okay, like this is now my frame through which I view the thing as well.

Nick (34:48)
Yeah, exactly. And I don't think that you can get buy -in from someone on your staff. If you say, it's going to take a long time, like just sit tight and you'll know in a year. Like good luck selling that. Right. So agencies don't try to sell based off of a, like, you know, you're not going to know. We're not going to have any idea if anything's working, doing anything for six months.

Austin Mullins (35:03)
Yeah.

Yeah. No, not often. And that's a weird thing with like people that are real focused on like contract lock -ins too and things like that. I'm like, I wouldn't want to do business that way myself. Cause I'm like, I don't want somebody locked in for six more months if they are no longer happy with us. Like that's, that's a tense situation to have to deal with for that long.

Nick (35:19)
And buyers don't buy from people who sell like that.

Okay.

Austin Mullins (35:42)
rather not do that. Like if it's not going well and it's that bad that we don't feel like there's a path forward then let's let's cut our losses you know.

Nick (35:50)
Let's get out of here right on. Yeah. So I, I don't, I don't want this to sound like a grievance, but it kind of is like, it's another, those things that I expect you probably have a good answer for. We hadn't talked about this before, but like another conversation that I've had with a lot of marketers and I kind of tongue in cheek say like, this is the thing they do that pissed me off the most is when they,

ask a business owner, do you know who your ideal client is? Yes. Okay. Can I, you know, can you have your ICP or whatever the profile and you give them that profile and they're like, okay, off we go. And I don't know how many times I've said this to a marketer, but it's a lot. And I've never gotten a very good response, but it's always like, what if I'm wrong? Like, what if I'm wrong? What if I just gave you bad information? Why are we, why did you just take that at face value? So.

Austin Mullins (36:41)
I'm going to go ahead and close the video.

Nick (36:48)
Question to Austin is, how do you make sure that doesn't happen?

Austin Mullins (36:54)
I would often ask him formally who the audience is. So, I mean, people have ICP documentation that is good, then that's interesting to take a look at. But we're often trying to figure out like, who is the audience that this is targeted towards and keep it slightly broad. Like, I don't have a whole lot of use for like these made up ICPs. I actually prefer to see real examples of past clients. And I'm like, just send me the LinkedIn profiles of the past five decision makers.

that were good clients for you. Like I'd rather see that honestly, in a B2B context. I'm like, just show me actually who these people are, not like a made up name of Martha, whatever, who's 40 and has two and a half kids and lives in a suburb of Jersey city. I don't know. But, you know, then from there, ideally it's based off like actual data, right? Like I would much rather see,

Nick (37:42)
I love that, the past five link intro files.

Austin Mullins (37:51)
Again, in a B2B context, it's like, is your CRM data not good enough that we can just actually see the outputs of like, what were the job titles of everybody that closed in the last six months? So I'd much rather see that as like actual conversion data of who buys. And if it's, yeah.

Nick (38:04)
Mm -hmm.

Austin Mullins (38:12)
In some cases you find it out just from what performs, right? So like you actually do produce a bunch of media. Maybe you have several target audiences in mind, but then one just over indexes everything else and you end up leaning more that direction as a result of just kind of leaning into what works. You know, it's like, this sort of messaging performed better. Maybe actually this cohort is way more valuable to us than these other two, at least the way the brand is today. And so unless there's a really good reason to fight against that.

take the path of least resistance and just go where you're getting more traction.

Nick (38:41)
So you, I want to go back. You said you don't care that much for like the, the ICP ideal client profiles. and which is interesting to me with your writing background.

I think at the very least, the ICP is really good for kind of humanizing. When you're doing the writing, like when you're getting into the

Austin Mullins (38:59)
Mm.

I just think it's more, to me, it's more concrete mentally if it's a real person. It's like, ideally it's somebody that I've gotten to speak to that'd be even better. Right. So like, but if not, right. Then it's like, it's still to me is a more concrete picture to hold my mind. If I can, it's like, give me, you know, examples of real customers and I can go lightly cyber -stock them and get an idea of like how they communicate and like, you know, how they're existing in the world and what other things they're interested in. Where it's like.

when it's this kind of made up amalgamation of a person that's like the average of a bunch of customer research, to me that's much harder to hold in my mind as an actual audience that I care about at all, even as a writer. If that might.

Nick (39:46)
So you're using the persona, even if it's from a real person, you kind of use it very similarly to the way that we talk about it using ICP, but you want like, I want a human being. Got it.

Austin Mullins (39:59)
Yeah. Yeah. I guess I'll just have a strong preference for like, make the ICP an actual person. Obviously that means you shouldn't share that documentation super widely, or that could get a little weird, but like, as long as it stays just within the confines of the marketing team, it's like, no, like, and this is much easier for B2B than B2C stuff, right? But like B2B where it's like, okay, this is the, you know, the CISO of, you know, this mid cap company that we sold a deal to last quarter.

Nick (40:10)
Yeah.

Austin Mullins (40:27)
they are a very representative example of the type of people we're going after. Then it's like, great, like that is much more concrete for me to hold in my mind that I'm talking to Dan than it is, you know, a made up person who's just an avatar, you know.

Nick (40:42)
Yeah. Well, so this just hit me when you were saying it, and it kind of makes sense as to why that would be like you're preferring something that's more concrete versus this like amalgamation and, and the amalgamation is just, it blurs things a little bit. So if you think about like everybody on the planet now uses chat GPT and I think that it creates this content that, well, not everybody thinks it's great, but like we know it's garbage because it's.

It's just the average of all the shit that they can find, that it And that's why when you ask it to give you something, it spits out this kind of like lukewarmish, you know, meaningless blob of words, right? it's kind of the same thing. If you're going to take the average of everything.

Austin Mullins (41:24)
Yeah.

Nick (41:28)
That's what you're gonna get.

Austin Mullins (41:29)
Yeah, that's an interesting analogy. And it's also why the search engines are at least trying to push towards solving that problem. Now, I would argue they aren't doing a very good job yet, but they'll keep tinkering on it. I kind of tend to not think I'm smarter than all the engineers at Google combined. So mostly they don't get it right eventually. But even though lately they've been misstepping. But there are two things that they kind of, I think, are trying to do there. So one is they have this EAT standards. So.

Nick (41:45)
like they're gonna figure something out.

Austin Mullins (41:58)
expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Might be authority, either way. Especially focusing on the second one. So firsthand experience is something they're really looking for. And so like nowadays, if you want your content to do better in search, it's actually better to have like firsthand personal anecdotes inserted into the middle of what is otherwise like straight written, you know, maybe informational content. Because that's a thing.

I'm sure people could fake it with LLMs, right? But actual firsthand experience is harder. I suspect for similar reasons that something like Author Rank is going to come back. So the idea of it's better to tie content to a specific individual that has background and credentials and is published widely across different publications on similar topics and has active social media profiles that are interlinked to. And so you could see this whole idea of like trying to combat AI driven, like cheap content.

with looking for, okay, is this tied to a person that has real on the ground knowledge and firsthand experience? Now, for agencies trying to produce that, that means we have to produce the as good as what anybody else said version and then interview a subject matter expert and pull out those anecdotes and find a way to insert them into the content. And then we're often ghostwriting under their names. So let them sign off on it. And this is something I'm willing to stamp my name on, right?

So that's interesting. And then one more thought there is I also think the search engines are going to be driving towards information gain, right? So looking at, okay, we know pretty well what the average summary of what everybody said is, right? Like that's pretty easy for us to get at now. And so if you are not adding meaningful additional information beyond that, then you don't deserve a top spot, right? Because we already know that. In fact, we didn't even need to go visit your brand to learn that.

Nick (43:26)
Mm -hmm.

Austin Mullins (43:55)
Right? Like we could literally just generate that because we've crawled the entire internet already. So, I think information gain will, is probably a term you'll start to hear as well for that reason.

Nick (44:05)
so, you know, that means you need to have something unique to say. You need to have a unique perspective and it needs to be valuable. what does that look like when it gets, when it goes too far? Right. And I think of these antagonistic social media posts, you know, the, the engagement farming stuff. It's like, let me see how can I be.

extreme enough to irritate a bunch of people, but get a lot of engagement and a lot back and forth going because that's doesn't do me any good to blend in.

Austin Mullins (44:37)
Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I don't know that, you know, driving towards firsthand experience and information gain is necessarily going to make things more inflammatory. But I mean, you definitely see that trend on social. Does. Well, one interesting thing to me there is if you look at how profitable the firms are.

Nick (44:49)
Mm -hmm.

Austin Mullins (44:57)
you have a much more profitable social media firm if you actually are much more heavy handed with your content moderation. Meta makes tons more money than X. And yes, their ads targeting is better, but also advertisers are more willing to play ball with them because they don't allow so much inflammatory stuff on their platform and therefore more of it is advertiser friendly. And so you could also see the incentives here get a little mixed where you could definitely see actually the platforms.

Nick (45:18)
Yeah.

Austin Mullins (45:25)
which have traditionally not been able to keep up with the onslaught of content might also kind of, you know, they already are to some degree, like leverage AI in their favor as well to try to do content moderation faster, better at scale without having to hire tens of thousands of people to do it full -time. I mean, like they've pulled back on content moderation a little bit, but I feel like because that trend still remains that the more moderated platforms tend to be more profitable. I mean, look at TikTok.

probably the most censored social media platform there is. They launched TikTok shops, their financial results are absurd, you know.

Nick (46:02)
Yeah. Well, definitely we're in the middle of something changing

This impressive what's happening. It's impressive what's being brought to market. I mean, there are going to be bumps and it may take a little while, but a little while in today's terms, not a little while in even like five years ago terms. We're talking about months. They'll get it figured out.

Austin Mullins (46:25)
Yeah, this has been one of the fastest rate of the fastest rate of change I've ever seen in the sort of work I do. Yeah, the AI stuff is interesting. So I mean, I have several thoughts there. One is like broadly, I don't know about you, but I've become very focused on like brass tacks. What are the actual productivity gains to be had here? Cause I don't really care about using AI for its own sake. Like it's not sufficiently exciting to me that I want to just use it to use it. I'm like, I only care.

Nick (46:45)
Mm -hmm.

Austin Mullins (46:54)
you know, I'll tinker with it to figure out what it's capable of. Right. But beyond that, I'm like, I don't, if I, if it takes so long to engineer a prompt for a thing, I'm only going to do once that I saved no time by doing it that way versus just doing it with no AI assistance, then that to me is pointless. Okay. Like, so I only care about the things that it's meaningfully able to either make better. So at the end product is better or speed up without, you know, a noticeable reduction in quality. and so I,

really looking for like what those are. And so far it seems to be pretty narrow use cases. Now I could see that getting broader over time and I imagine it will. I also, okay, I'm going to go on about AI way longer than I thought. Interrupt me whenever you like. Another thought there is I think AI is a branded technology, is a B2B technology, and we are making a mistake by pushing it so hard on consumers. So like in the B2B space, it makes sense, right? Like we'd like the...

Nick (47:36)
Go for it.

Austin Mullins (47:52)
AI branding and we want to know how the underlying technology works a little more. But consumers had already been enjoying AI products for a long time, right? Like your phone recognizes faces that show up over and over and can match the names automatically. That is absolutely machine learning. We never bothered to brand that as AI and try to sell it to the public before. Or...

I mean, there have been a million examples. Like Google Translate kept getting better and better and better and better and better over years. All of that was AI, but we never bothered to call it AI. It's like to the consumer, it should just feel like magic because they only see it when it's really good and they don't care how it works or how much compute it takes or how you train it or what have you if it's just really good. So I don't get why we're trying to sell AI to the public. It's like make the features really good and then just sell them, hey, I made this cool new thing for you.

Nick (48:42)
so chat GPT is, is what is taken off, but like that's the figured out LLMs, right? It's not, it's not actually intelligent yet. So to me, that helped me kind of identify the scope and.

Like where I can get value out of it. And, and, but the intelligence is good. It's going to come because yeah, it's on its

Austin Mullins (49:07)
I do think it'll get better, although it's also, I mean, it's interesting to wonder when it will, when the rate of advancement will slow. I don't buy this argument that it's gonna become like recursive and train on itself to become better because the few examples we've seen of that, it gets dumber, right? Like when you train LLMs on the outputs of LLMs, they get worse, not better. So this idea that it's gonna train itself seems kind of outlandish to me. So it's like, okay.

Nick (49:24)
Right.

Austin Mullins (49:32)
we're gonna reach a wall here where we've hit the current limits of compute and the current limits of all the human available content we can crawl once we've gone to the ends of the earth to find it all. And then it's gonna have to slow down, right? Not that it will stop getting better, but the rate of improvement is gonna have to slow at that point.

Nick (49:51)
And we're like probably fringe if we haven't crossed beyond my depth.

we may come back to AI though. I do, I want to make sure that we spend time on some human intelligence and because we haven't talked about your, so we talked about mastery, but we didn't touch on your SEO, the skills assessment. And so like, what's your quick, description of that, but then talk about where you're going with it. What's the plan?

Austin Mullins (50:20)
Yeah, absolutely. So the SEO skills assessment in its current form, I really call it the light skills assessment, because I think I'm going to build out a bigger version of it later. But essentially, it's a 36 question assessment that covers the three main pillars of SEO. So you have technical and on -page, you have content strategy and production, and then you have link building. So those are like the three major pillars that make this channel work, right?

And so within that, I've found that there's a need in the market to be able to figure out where somebody's really at in terms of their skills maturity, right? So when you think through, like I said before, that years of experience aren't the best indicator for a field like this, right? So I need a real sense of like, what do you know across all these areas? And so the way I've put it into that assessment is,

using a typical leveling methodology. So I don't know if you've seen this coming out of business consulting, but you have P1 through P6 as your professional tiers, and then you typically have tiers that are one level off of that, that are management tiers. So like a P2, professional individual contributor, would be equivalent to a M1, like bottom level manager, and then they go up from there, and then you have the executive tiers above that. And so thinking through, I kind of mapped, I built out, it's not public yet, but this,

basically like skills roadmap for at each of these levels. If you're, you know, an organic focused content marketer who's doing like SEO work, what should you know across each of these three disciplines? And so it's just an attempt to measure that is really what it is. So people run their team through it and generate a scorecard that basically across all 36 questions that get progressively harder in these individual areas and then even down to subtopics. So like, what am I asking a question about? Is it about?

understanding search intent, is it about controlling, crawling and indexation? Is it about prospecting for link opportunities? Like it can be all sorts of stuff, right? Is it about schema and structured data, you know, all these topics we think through and we're able to give individual scores, sub scores across those disciplines and then an aggregate for how far along is someone, what sort of roles would they be suited for? You know, how far along are they?

But then also across a team, it becomes very useful to plan your learning and development efforts, right? So if I can ask questions and show, okay, my team's pretty weak on technical, actually, they're really weak on programmatic SEO, and we care about that because we're going to launch programmatic SEO initiative next year. I better get them up skilled on this over the next year because that's a weakness across the entire team. And so being able to see across a set of team members, like who's weak and who's strong becomes a very useful tool.

So you can see it being used kind of in two ways, right? One is a hiring tool for SEO talent. And then another is like a team assessment to power your learning and development initiatives. And so that's where it dovetails with what I'm trying to build out there, which is kind of this side business I have called Ascent SEO Coaching, which is mostly team focused SEO coaching, which is meant to solve the problem that senior SEO talent is like trying to hire really good software engineers.

It's really expensive, they're hard to find, they usually already have something pretty good going for them, and so they're hard to recruit. And so if you need senior SEO talent, which all those that pursue the channel seriously at some point do, it's actually far better if you can take the talent, you can already get your hands on and upscale them to become senior SEOs, than have them to hire people that already know they are senior SEOs and are established in those sorts of roles. So that's kind of the idea is like,

trying to backfill the gap of senior SEO talent for a lot of companies that need it by helping them upscale their current people. And those sorts of learning development initiatives are really hard to build out internally. Because let's say you have one or two, they're probably swamped. They're probably really busy. And so it's hard to get them to pull out and build curriculum.

Nick (54:19)
Well, and knowing a lot of things is not the same as being able to teach a lot of things, right? Or even assess these things. So you're kind of uniquely equipped. So nobody else is doing this? Do you know of anybody else who's doing this?

Austin Mullins (54:26)
Yeah.

I mean, there are a few other people that are doing different permutations of things like this. I mean, one example is somebody that builds what they call the SEO MBA, which is more focused on soft skills. So like executive presence and things like that, which I touch on, but it's not part of the assessment because that's too hard to assess in questions. But it's something we cover like in presentations and workshops, but I haven't built out like that's like self -guided.

So there's a lot of like self -guided courses as well, which I may build a variant of that at some point, but for now I'm very focused on like customizing, doing workshops to individual teams, giving them access to, you know, baseline SOPs that they can then go build on to kind of customize for their specific process. And I think keeping it more tailored like that and also doing live sessions where they're able to ask questions and such is probably a little faster in terms of skill acquisition for a lot of people.

Nick (55:30)
So what size business is this for?

Austin Mullins (55:33)
really I would just say like SEO teams between like, I can't imagine somebody do it with like less than three people, but it could go up to like, you know, if you've got a hundred people in your division, that would make sense. Obviously you need, needed that much more at that point, right? Cause you have that many more junior people. It's really just for people that have organic focused content marketing or search teams in, in -house, or if they are an agency themselves,

we've done it that way as well.

Nick (56:04)
mentioned the workshops and presentations. Are you doing any of those right now? Are you doing any speaking outside of your existing client base?

Austin Mullins (56:13)
Speaking, I've done a few podcasts, not doing any like speaking on stage, I do those workshops monthly with the people that are currently in Ascent and I do a lot of one -on -one mentoring as you know. But no, haven't done like speaking on stage yet, it's something I'm just starting to look into but it's not a world I know a lot about. I haven't even gone to all that many conferences, I've been to a handful in my life. So don't know that world super well up to this point.

Nick (56:40)
Yeah, well, I just think about, I mean, you've got the subject matter expertise is there, right? Like you've got your methodology, you can speak of these things really clearly. You have like a really thorough perspective and understanding of, of all the pieces at various levels. And you know, then you've got,

something really unique here with Ascent, I think. you've got plenty to share. There are a lot of businesses that need what you have. need to be like easier to find. That's what I'm getting at, Austin. That's what I've been trying to say. All of this.

Austin Mullins (57:08)
Yep. Yep. I'm slowly chipping away at it. It's slowly becoming more public with my thoughts. Definitely have a backlog of stuff I want to put out there too. Like if I can, right now I'm building out a course for Traffic Think Tank, Dash, SEMrush owns them, on how to do site migrations. I think once I'm done with that, probably going to produce more just like public facing video content to get some of these ideas out.

And I really appreciate you having me on as well.

Nick (57:37)
Yeah.

Of course, it's a pleasure. You have a ton to share, man, so keep cranking it out.

Austin Mullins (57:45)
Yeah, we'll