Sound Bites
“It’s not you, it’s me.” Nice one Rye Smith
Summary
In this engaging conversation, Andrew Glyntzos interviews Rye Smith from Spruik Digital, exploring Rye’s journey into the SEO industry, the evolution of SEO practices, and the significant impact of AI on digital marketing.
They discuss the importance of quality backlinks, the ethical considerations in SEO, and the need for authenticity in content creation. The conversation emphasizes the entrepreneurial mindset required for success in SEO and how small businesses can leverage AI tools to enhance their visibility and efficiency. Rye shares insights on the future of SEO, highlighting the blend of creativity and technology as a driving force in the industry.
Takeaways
👉🏾 Rye Smith’s journey into SEO began with web design in the late 90s.
👉🏾SEO can transform a business overnight, as seen in Rye’s parents’ cleaning business.
👉🏾The SEO landscape has changed significantly over the past decade, especially with AI.
👉🏾Quality backlinks are crucial for SEO success, but the methods of acquiring them are evolving.
👉🏾Ethics in SEO is a contentious topic, with many agencies resorting to questionable practices.
👉🏾AI tools can enhance content creation but should be used wisely and not as a crutch.
👉🏾Building authority and authenticity is essential for long-term SEO success.
👉🏾The future of SEO requires an entrepreneurial mindset and a focus on business goals.
👉🏾Small businesses can leverage AI to improve their online presence and efficiency.
👉🏾Creativity and technology are converging, creating new opportunities in digital marketing.
Full episode here –> https://lnkd.in/gARa-Jie
Andrew Glyntzos (00:01.07)
Hey everyone, I have Rye Smith from Sprick Digital with me today. So Rye, I have other SEOs on my channel, people that I’ve known in the industry, but I’m starting a new series and you are the first guest of this new series and you are the first guest, an SEO that I’m having on the show that I’ve never actually spoken to before. So I’m like, I know nothing about you. I just see a post on, it’s a blog.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (00:26.302)
Blind date.
Andrew Glyntzos (00:30.39)
And this can go as awkward as a blind date, alright? Or it could be absolutely sensational, but before-
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (00:32.424)
Ugh.
It’s not you, it’s me. I won’t return the text messages. I won’t ghost you, Andrew. How’s that? That’s…
Andrew Glyntzos (00:41.454)
Mate, I’ve got thick skin, it’s alright. So I’ve got no actual idea how this is gonna go. I’m not prepared, I don’t have questions. But tell me a little bit about you first. Back off air, we talked about a lot of interesting shit that we wanna get on air. But just tell me a little bit about yourself. Tell me how you got into the SEO industry. We can take this any way and direction you wanna go. You’re the guest, right? So that’s called Greek hospitality, yeah?
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (00:48.574)
That’s good.
Andrew Glyntzos (01:12.058)
We’ll take it anywhere you like to go. yeah, so yeah, just tell me a little bit about yourself and how you got into SDR.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (01:16.606)
Awesome.
Yeah, fantastic. So I’m a massive nerd. So I started in the world of, you know, IT, web design and all that fun stuff back in the late 90s. So if you remember, even before the age of MySpace, Neopets, Neopets was a website was probably 12 and you used to be able to customize your profile and put MIDI files on there and gifts and all that. sort of fell in love with.
Andrew Glyntzos (01:42.456)
Was that like a Geo series?
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (01:43.75)
It was all my, well, I was doing GeoCity’s websites as well, but there was sort of, you know, a little bit of that kind of creativity involved and it’s just really, really fun. and sort of fell in love with it sort of after that. So, very early on, this would have been like, you know, sort of we’re talking, you know, sorry.
Andrew Glyntzos (02:07.426)
Are you good?
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (02:07.964)
Sorry, mate, there we go. Spotify just kicked in. Rob Thomas started playing. Sorry about that. Yeah, so started very, very early on. And mum and dad had a cleaning business at the time. So this would have been the early 2000s. And so I built them a website and they were all really happy with that. And as I sort of went through high school, I started tinkering with the website until Google obviously became a big thing. And one day they’re just phones started.
Andrew Glyntzos (02:13.504)
What?
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (02:33.458)
just ringing off the hook and they’re like, what the hell’s going on? We’re getting all this business coming into the day. And I was sort of standing sheepishly in the corner and I’m like, you know, I’ve done some stuff with the SEO and getting you all these leads. So it actually transformed mum and dad’s business overnight, SEO. So I’ve sort of had a bit of a love affair with it ever since then. Cause as you would know, businesses, if they get this stuff right, it is make or break. And I think you got a bit of a case study that I’ve seen on LinkedIn.
about the fact that, you know, if it’s done poorly, it can make such a big difference to, yeah, how a whether a business survives or thrives. And, yeah, so then essentially after that, followed me all the way through school did odd jobs. You know, when I was 12, my first job was $600 website for a company my dad was working for, which was pretty cool. And then yeah, we went out on my own about 10 years ago. First, first business out in the wild. And yeah, just sort of been running
agencies and doing the whole, you know, backwards and forwards between in-house agency, I’ve sold an agency, I’ve built up agencies. And then, yeah, a few months back decided to go all in again, after sort of seeing what’s out there in the industry. And we’ll deep dive into all that. But yeah, it’s, yeah, back out into the to the SEO world again. So yeah, big digital native.
Andrew Glyntzos (03:56.183)
So would you say your story, that’s awesome, would you say your story is kind of like web design, which is very similar to mine, so that’s exactly how I started, diploma in web development. So you actually migrated from web design into SEO about 10 years ago?
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (04:14.536)
about that. mean, I still tinker. So with with the sort of advent of AI tools, I’m sort of, you know, spitting up websites and playing around with different frameworks now, which which is great fun. But look, I’m creative, but I’ve never been good with Photoshop or anything like that. And I think I think these days in order to create like a really good brand and visual, I think you need, you know, the skills there, which have probably surpassed me. But in terms of the technical stuff, I mean,
you know, massive, massive interest in that. yeah, started back to the GeoCities websites and would do websites for soccer clubs that I was playing for or cricket clubs. And, you know, it’s just, it was a good creative outlet, but also from a technical perspective back then, it was a lot more, you know, hands on in terms of code. And I think that from, again, from an SEO perspective, I think if you’ve got that…
Andrew Glyntzos (04:47.768)
Mm.
Andrew Glyntzos (04:52.311)
in us.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (05:07.058)
bass it’s a it’s a cheat code to doing this sort of stuff really well.
Andrew Glyntzos (05:12.558)
So what was some of the big things you noticed at SEO when you sort of started? What was, I mean, 10 years ago, I’m assuming that would have been around 2015. That would have been Penguin or Hummingbird era. Maybe around.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (05:25.47)
Yep. Yeah. Look, I mean, I’ll take it even back, so that, you know, 2025 years and it’s, you know, all the all the black hat gray hat stuff used to be able to check suburbs online and then or hide the text or hide the color and I was honestly the glory days, right? When you actually got reports back on, know, authority score and page score, and you’d have, you know, little plugins that would tell you and then obviously over the years, that’s just
Andrew Glyntzos (05:35.074)
Yeah.
Andrew Glyntzos (05:39.191)
Yeah, yeah.
Andrew Glyntzos (05:43.352)
Yeah.
Andrew Glyntzos (05:51.801)
browser plugins. They were fantastic. Yeah.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (05:53.02)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, they were great in Internet Explorer. And yeah, just over the years, obviously, that’s been sort of eroded. And, you know, our jobs have probably become sort of harder and harder. To be fair, we get less visibility from Google. They don’t tell us they’ll change things on a whim and we get left in the dark. it’s look, I don’t particularly like Google per se. And I think if you’re an SEO, you don’t have to like Google.
So, you know, in the last 10 years, your point, I think the biggest change for me has been, you know, I thought there was a massive active community with Google. I thought they actually did really well communicating. And then over the last, again, even sort of three, four years, we’ve been treated with so much, you know, disdain. And it’s almost like we’re you know, we’re a pain more than a resource. it’s, yeah, so we…
We’re fires on that front, but also sort of industry-wide pressures too.
Andrew Glyntzos (06:56.458)
Yeah. And how are your clients finding the AI sort of transformation at the moment? Because I think SEO right now is going through, I mean, it’ll be 20 years soon for me, right? and I would say this is probably… Well, I always tell people the biggest transformations in Google, in SEO, is when there’s an actual shift in how we consume content and how we consume it.
So the user behavior, once that shifts and changes, the mobile era was probably a massive shift as well. I’m seeing, so for me, I’m looking at these algorithms, I don’t see for me historically algorithms being so much of a issue in my experience, to be honest. I think Google got better over time as well in certain areas.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (07:50.76)
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Andrew Glyntzos (07:53.261)
But in terms of us searching for things on Google with our mobile, was a major shift in how we built sites, was a major shift in how we did things. And I would say AI is not only the biggest, it’s probably the biggest shift in my time. That’s how I feel about it.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (08:07.486)
Yeah. Well, I remember looking through those through those reports like, you know, 2016 2017 and you’d actually go from and this happened within the space of probably 12 to 18 months. I remember you used to be able to open up GA and you’d have 60 % desktop 40 % mobile traffic. And then over the course of you know, like 612 18 months, like that that not just flipped but then started going into that, you know, the other direction. So now you’re looking down the barrel at
Andrew Glyntzos (08:25.582)
Yeah.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (08:35.262)
you know, obviously depends on sort of what sites you’re looking at, you know, a 70 30 split of mobile to desktop. And that that happened so, so, so quickly.
Andrew Glyntzos (08:45.26)
Yeah, absolutely it did. And that for me always comes down to when clients ask me about SEO, I don’t tell them what I’ve realised, maybe because I’m neuro, I try to connect dots in my brain, right? like I know I don’t want to lose them. I try to break it down for them in analogy.
I’m like, you know, whatever we do for SEO, and this has been my sort of mantra since I started my business in 2012, whatever we do, if it’s good for your business, it will be good for SEO.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (09:19.87)
Yeah, correct. Yeah.
Andrew Glyntzos (09:20.71)
And what you do in the offline world, your connections, your relationships, what does that look like? Well, that would translate into links. How do we become authority? Being an educator, are you somebody that people look up to? Well, that will also transform or translate into links. The technical side is we’re laying the foundation, we’re improving the site’s saturation visibility. That’s temporary. We can only go so far.
But once we start working on the content and making, what do we want links? We want want people, we want links because we want your business to be an authority and a resource.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (09:58.514)
Yep. Just on the, just on the linking front though, and I think you raise a really good point here. And I’ve got some massive thoughts on, this. What, what, did like, what does back linking look like today for you in that sense? Because I’ve spent a bit of time with, with agencies as I’ve done the toing and froing sort of in-house, out-of-house and it, was a little bit shocked to be honest with you, to, to see what massive agencies are doing. And I think,
Andrew Glyntzos (10:25.771)
it’s…
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (10:26.31)
I think clients would be shocked to see where their money is going as well. A lot of these so-called Australian based all onshore agencies seeing so much money, not just go overseas, but how their brands are actually being replicated on some of these junk blogs, even though they might have high authority. What’s your take on that? Because I think links is probably the most contentious topic in SEO for mine.
Andrew Glyntzos (10:56.01)
Mate, you’ve raised the hair in my arms and there’s a lot of hair in my arms to raise. So look, he’s very contentious. think he, look, it’s business.
I think that’s at the heart of the decision making. So you’ve got these larger SEO agencies with bigger margins, more difficult margins to make money in. They’ve got massive overheads. So when you give them $3,000 $4,000 a month and you want them to build content, now let’s say what it really is, about $2,000 a month, $3,000 a month, right? That’s just some of the more average.
budgets now which is just ludicrous to me right but for two to three thousand in you expecting them to build content to build links to do the technical to do the analytics like I mean first of all we needed to find what the role of the SEO even is now because that is that that’s that’s that’s a whole topic maybe there’s a whole discussion of itself right who’s actually but for me yes it’s it’s it’s doing a lot of bad work
I think partly because clients are also trying to be cost effective, if one way of putting it nicely.
and not really… The SEOs aren’t educated, not telling them what they need to… What you brilliantly said, I’m exactly the same. When soon someone asks me for a proposal, I say, you don’t want to see my proposal. If I’m going up against another agency with a proposal, forget about it, because my proposal sucks. The proposal is, you’re talking to me right now. That is the proposal. You’re dealing with someone with 20 years experience almost. This is what you’re going to get, right? Ask me anything you like, right? That’s the proposal.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (12:41.246)
So not these proposals that have 20 pages talking about their team and their wonderful office. We just get straight into it.
Andrew Glyntzos (12:48.009)
No, no, no, my proposal doesn’t look like a Christmas It certainly doesn’t look like a Christmas tree with the bells, right? So it looks like a dog’s breakfast, my proposal. But I’m hoping that the information is different. So to answer your question, think if I look, I wanted to start an SEO commission with four of my SEO buddies in the industry, right, that I trust, that I’ve known for a hell of a long time. Everyone
They didn’t want to do it for various reasons, right? The point is there has to be an authority of some sort. I don’t want the government to be the authority because they don’t know nothing about SEO, right? So I don’t want them to be the authority. Crikey. That’s worse. That will lead us down a worse path than we’re already on. But there needs to be a authority. There needs to be like a set of rules. But also, when I speak to the average client, like you said, they don’t know really what a quality link is. I always talk like
At the same time, Roy.
This is not 2013 anymore. There is an abundant of information out there on what a quality, what quality SEO looks like. There’s a lot of good talkers and speakers and people on YouTube that I kind of don’t want to push a lot of SEO content on there because I’m thinking there’s already a hell of a lot of good stuff out there. I might throw my perspective on things every now and then, but even with 20 years experience, I’m thinking, look, there’s no excuse anymore. Like they need to know what this stuff is because it is a matter of
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (14:08.328)
Yeah, great.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (14:15.888)
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Andrew Glyntzos (14:20.239)
their life or death of their business and their livelihood. Right? So in the agency’s defense of building bad links is they’ve got a lot of staff.
Do I think it’s wrong and unethical? 100%. And what do these links look like? I’m still seeing the private blog networks. I’m still seeing the Web 2.0 spam. Some of the link buildings I’ve seen, like I do a lot with jewelers. Some of these SEO agencies are building links for jewelers. I’m like, I try to tell these clients, where do you actually think this link building is gonna go, guys? Like, I wanna ask the agencies the same question. What’s the end game here for you guys?
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (14:52.52)
Yeah.
Yeah. I think, I think you’ve raised for me anyway, you’ve raised two really good points in terms of the bit of an SEO authority. We’d love to let’s let’s unpack that. But then also in terms of the back linking, this stuff unfortunately works. I think we’re in this sort of era where Google says one thing, but then we test and we learn and we go, well, hang on, this actually works. We’re not getting penalised. This works and hang on. And from an agency perspective, they can charge for it.
because they can show results so it’s I feel like it’s this weird kind of balance between you know what it looks crap it smells crap but guess what if we do it it works and that seems to be the most I guess effective way of you know getting a site ranking is some of those PBNs or you know some of those links and it’s just it’s that balance between hang on is this
Is it ethical? Is it the right thing to do? The client’s chomping at the bit. There’s just such a gray area. Yeah.
Andrew Glyntzos (15:53.696)
And correct, that for me, the client topic, like so I’m not trying to dig out the bad agency for doing bad work. They need to be held accountable. And I think there was a few stories out there where you thought on the news media, it could have been heading that way for certain people, right?
but the clients are trumping at the bit to get results. So you’ve got the pressure from the client, you’ve got low budgets, you’ve got staff and you’ve got overheads. And while I do think there’s a lot of donkey SEOs out there, I also do think there is legitimate SEOs out there that wanna get results that are forced into this corner to do the bad work because they’re generally under pressure and they feel like they’re at the mercy of their boss and at the clients. And so they’re looking…
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (16:38.696)
And I think there’s a distinction with bad work though too, in terms of like in backlinking. I mean, let’s be honest, if I get backlink and that improves client site, that’s okay, no problems. But like we were saying before, I think people would be shocked to learn where these websites are, who’s being paid for these and what the margin is on some of these backlinks too. So it’s…
Andrew Glyntzos (16:59.244)
Mm-hmm.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (17:07.826)
an idea that I’ve had for a long time and hear me out here. So we’re going to sort of theorize on air is that last check other than you know, money.9 now or nine honey or whatnot on their sub domains doesn’t really seem to be a PBN in Australia. It’s all overseas. And I think that’s the other thing too is, is I don’t think I’ve seen anything today that really outside of the major publishers is a sort of network of blog sites really that you can kind of get
get listed on unless I’ve been hiding under a rock and I’m not on an email list somewhere. But they all seem to be, you know, dot coms or dot bizzars or dot co’s all hosted overseas. So it’s, that’s what I think I would like to see. mean, hell, if PBNs are the way to go, if that’s how we have to do it, Google, it’d be great to have it locally. You know, have a local Australian gardening blog for your garden client to actually have some legitimate content on there. Awesome. Rather than this stuff looking like spam and looking like crap.
because it’s that, know, again, does it work? Will it work? It’s a bit of a test and learn, but yeah.
Andrew Glyntzos (18:11.726)
I think SEO is also, mean, I would, you would be careful with the PBNs in all because I don’t feel like anyone would really do them well. And if Google, I mean, it’s one of those things where, hey, look, if I get four or five links from legitimate sites, is that going to help? mean, whether you call that a PBN, if these sites are building legitimate content and they’re generating legitimate links and they’re not a link farm.
Right. And they’re only linking out a few times and they’re generally only linking to higher authority sites, not just seem to be just linking out to car sites and their garden. You know what mean? So I mean, you could call something like a PBR like that and it would get results. Well, of course it would, because what are they doing differently if they’re generating high quality links themselves, they’re producing high quality content, they’re user centric first and they just got this advertising part of their business to help them generate income.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (18:47.454)
Yeah
Andrew Glyntzos (19:04.91)
Well, how does Google know what a sponsored link looks like if it’s not even written as sponsored? So how will they know? But you’ve got to be careful because when you say PBN in Australia, people are going to start looking at what a PBN has traditionally been.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (19:08.466)
Yep, bingo. Yep, correct. Yeah. And I, yeah.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (19:22.026)
I think my definition of PBN is group of sites where you can grab some nice links from it. I just don’t think it’s done really well in Australia. You remember how they used to be magazine groups? So, know, again, the death of the magazine, but 15 years ago, you’d have APC, who would actually own, you know, they’d have a PC magazine, they’d have Women’s Weekly, they’d have all these different sort of, you know, categories or your interest groups.
you don’t outside again outside of the major media players who you know have everything on their sub domain. I think that’s a massive opportunity for you know a media group or an agency to actually spin up hey let’s let’s put out some really good content and let’s actually use that as a bit of a back linking sort of place.
Andrew Glyntzos (19:52.92)
Mm.
Andrew Glyntzos (20:04.182)
I mean, if you’re having a look at like, they’re doing it in the fashion space. So you will have obviously like a group of syndication of sites and they will come and approach me and my clients and say, hey, look, are you interested in advertising? Here’s our like five or six sites. It will charge like 25 grand. And basically we’ll put your link in an article, we follow blah, blah, But I’m like, but.
Here’s the thing, right, if you have a look like, cause I do so much work in competitive niches, like jewellery, it’s never gonna be enough because you still have link velocity as a metric. Okay? And if you start dealing with,
bigger client, like you look at Michael Hill, for example, or Prouds, or they get links naturally at a certain velocity, although not always relevant in terms, it could be from Westfields or it could be, know, but they’re getting a link at a velocity rate, okay, because of just who they are. And so with like, with our fun with these super competitive niches, velocities is as important as where the links actually coming from themselves.
And the only way you’re going to get a velocity is you’ve got to look also a little bit beyond SEO and start thinking also business and marketing and diversifying the channels a little too, right? I think the days of like if you’re in competitive niches like jewellery, like a fashion, I would have every day of the week, give me a site with a massively strong social media profile and I’ll transform that brand on SEO.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (21:45.47)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Andrew Glyntzos (21:46.255)
Give me a site with a good SEO profile without the velocity in six months with a weak social media profile. And that’s going to be an uphill battle. So it’s going to be a struggle. I learned that with Larson, right? So Larson was my baby for a decade, right? And we would rank first for engage at rings. And what I quickly realized is guess what? Even when we ranked first for engage at rings and a f-
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (21:51.646)
Mm-hmm. Bit of a struggle, yeah.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (21:57.982)
Mm-hmm.
Andrew Glyntzos (22:13.312)
I can’t, I won’t swear just in case we’re streaming live to LinkedIn. I went bald over that campaign to get first for Engage at Rings.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (22:22.716)
You
Andrew Glyntzos (22:24.078)
What I realised is the amount of time and effort and money, didn’t have the benefit, yes it had a benefit, of course it did, but it didn’t have the benefit in which you felt like it would at the time because guess what, Ry, the girls didn’t know where Larson was, we didn’t have a strong social media profile and I used to argue with the marketing manager and tell them we need to get more aggressive on social, this is coming from the SEO guy and I’m ranking first for engagements, I don’t really need to say anything to anybody.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (22:53.821)
Mm-hmm.
Andrew Glyntzos (22:54.102)
Right? I can go fishing now for two months and my job is done and you can still pay me, right? But I’m like, you know what I noticed, right? And one of the two big mistakes that I made in that time, the girls still guess who they wanted to see. They still topped in engaged rings. And our impressions went…
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (22:57.81)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Andrew Glyntzos (23:12.994)
But our CTO went down, our average, our CTO went down dramatically because guess what? We sat a ranking for top keywords, but the girls didn’t know who we are. They see Larsson, then they see Tiffany, then they see Bulgari. Who are they still clicking on?
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (23:32.488)
Yeah, were they gonna click? Are they clicking on absolutely? So that I mean, that’s that power of brand. mean, I think this is awesome segue, segue into the AI space. I think this is this is like, probably the best, best little
Andrew Glyntzos (23:38.293)
is incredible.
Andrew Glyntzos (23:43.983)
Before we go there, I just wanted to end on that point where, yes, you brought back where I see everything going. In fact, that’s where I see this marketing going, right? So what I would prefer clients to kind of focus on, I think where the bigger, like if you wanna be a great SEO, which I’m sure you are.
Greatest, not just, in general, you’re thinking about building, you’re not building content for keywords. You’re building content for intent. You’re building content for brand. You’re building content for engagement. You’re building content for media exposure. You want to build relationships with journalists. You want, it’s going deeper and like all the AI metrics is still gonna run off brand. Game over.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (24:28.958)
Yep. Yep.
Andrew Glyntzos (24:30.542)
And so the brands and the businesses and what I’m hoping AI will do, and I’ll shut up, Brian, you can take it. I’m hoping, I told you, I’m Nuro, you get me started. what’s his? The passion will just rage, right? So where I think what I’m hoping AI will do, give the little jewelers, except like I’m just using them as the analogy here. I’m hoping to see them.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (24:39.962)
I love it. No, no, this is great, mate. The energy is infectious. I love it. This is awesome.
Andrew Glyntzos (24:56.502)
given an opportunity where creativity is propelled, whereas whether they might have the creativity historically, but they struggled on the execution because that’s where it cost a lot of money. So what I’m with AI is bringing down the execution costs and then helping entrepreneurs and smarter companies. I always say that my best clients are the best entrepreneurs. It just ironically falls that way.
best entrepreneur, that’s where I think a big part of where it’s going as well. SEOs don’t talk about that in the proposal. How fucking good are you as an entrepreneur? Right? They want to talk about their fucking team, but they don’t want to talk about how good their actual, hey, how good are you actually running a company? Right? So I think what I’m hoping with AI is giving the small guy a chance to
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (25:34.814)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Andrew Glyntzos (25:50.315)
reduce execution costs and it basically comes down to your intellectual property and your creativity and your out of the box thinking. I’m hoping that when people talk to me about AOA, I’m like, well, AOA does that. We’re going to see a massive shift in the economy because now excellence and entrepreneurial skill and creativity will be rewarded.
And people that can just have big wallets like the Woolworths, they can just keep transforming into the next or migrating to the next medium. They’re going to realise that, we actually going to have to think about things differently. That’s what I’m hoping we see where we go.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (26:31.742)
No, I think with what you’re saying though, I think this is such a, and then not just SEO, just in terms of like you’re saying across the economy. I know from my perspective, AI, people go, what’s your superpower? And we all have our own independent thoughts, we’ve all got our own creativity, we’ve all got our own ideas. For me, my superpower at the moment is AI, because I can actually go from what’s in here,
out to an actual MVP or a prototype or whatever it is that I’m working on. We’re talking like minutes as opposed to days now and we’re talking like automated systems that you know might update meta descriptions or automated systems that are posting on socials for me from other content out there which is still valuable which is saving me a hell of a lot of admin time but there’s also stuff that I’ve wanted to work on for ages too. We’re talking
you know, little games and websites that I’ve been sitting on for, I’m talking like sitting on it for years because of the lack of technical skills. And, you know, I’ve done the whole many, moons ago, did the whole outsourcing dev stuff overseas and the quality was crap. Constant issues coming backwards and forwards. was, you your project managing a team and, you know, you’re not getting sort of much done. You’ve got a real good vision in here as to how you want it done.
And now with things like Claude, a massive Claude user, I can build all this stuff now. It’s there. So to your point about supercharging this stuff and getting the creativity there, I don’t need a developer. I’ve got enough of a background in what I’ve done. And I understand database design and those sorts of things that I’ve now got the tools to build this stuff that I wasn’t able to before. then, I guess mapping that all back to
to digital marketing. You know, wish this was around a couple of years ago when GA4 came on the scene. So it’s just, you know, I’ve written quite a bit about this too, is it’s not going to be the tech people who win in this war. I think it’s actually going to be the creative and artistic people. I really do. And this is what a lot of people in the arts don’t actually understand and realize is what their superpower is. Their superpower is being able to write and their superpower is
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (28:52.42)
being able to be very specific and out of the box thinking and some of the best stuff you get from AI is all because of the prompt. So the stuff coming out of nano banana at the moment, you know, the stuff that I put into Claude, I get lazy, I just type a one line sentence and it spits out a bit of junk and it’s like, all right, look, let’s go and plan it. Let’s put a nice prompt together. and then voila, I’ve got what I wanted first time around. So I think, you know, the
the creative industry and being able to kind of put together a well-written detailed prompt is going to get you that sort of end goal. So like to your point, it’s going to bring down time to market, but it’s also bridging the whole kind of the technical and the creative side. And I think we’re going to find that we’re meeting in the middle sort of more often than not, but you and I are having this talk, but I just feel like the world is still
a couple of years behind, especially in bigger organizations who have still got people using copilot from Microsoft for goodness sake. So I’ve used copilot and it’s like it’s had a car accident and it’s frontal lobes not in a great condition versus Claude and, and Codex and whatnot. So I feel really sorry for the people in stuck in these big enterprises whose first interaction with AI is copilot or they use the free version of chat GPT because if they paid the 20, $30 a month.
they literally get a second brain for them. And it’s just funny. It’s crazy. Yep.
Andrew Glyntzos (30:22.574)
it’s it’s it’s it’s just next level man and using it like people still using these AI tools like, you know, like for fun, you know, and there’s like they’re not they’re not seeing the forest for the trees. Right. Like where is this going? Right. Where how do you think I’m going to put you on the spot? Right. Because I like to do that with people like.
Sorry, this is what I do. You can put me on the spot. How do you think the small business can, I mean, if you’re talking to a small business owner today, I’ve just got to lead the other day like this property management company’s got like four pages.
They asked me to sort of do like a Loom video and explain what I would do. So I did that. I’ll send it to them. How would you help a sort of like a small business like let’s say property management type, whatever, right? Finance services, asset management, whatever. If they’ve got like four or five page website, do you target IA? Do you look at, would you just focus on them?
using AI where would you where would you go to help them to like if they were like look we’re not getting any visibility how do you kind of help the smaller guys you just give them tools to use as descriptions and be like here’s that
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (31:43.24)
Yeah, good, good, good, good question. mean, it’s classic SEO response, it depends, right? And to your point before, though, I think it all comes back to business goals, right? So it’s the, know, are we going to just, are we just going to build content out for content sake? Probably not. I think from a small business perspective, what I see a lot is really shit social media, right? And especially from a wording perspective.
Andrew Glyntzos (31:50.38)
Yeah.
Andrew Glyntzos (31:57.315)
Good answer.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (32:10.072)
And if anyone’s gonna be watching this or listening on, please do not use chat GPT images in your social. It’s AI slop, it looks horrible. It’s got that real brown sort of tinge to it. It’s awful. Please don’t do it because you’re actually doing more harm to your brand and business than anything else. But from a wording perspective, absolutely. it’s, you know, people will, I do a lot of stuff with hospitality and the hotels and.
Andrew Glyntzos (32:24.566)
Yeah.
Andrew Glyntzos (32:37.901)
Mm-hmm.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (32:38.05)
you know, wineries and restaurants. And the first place people will look is your Instagram page. So it’s, you know, there’s something that I can’t help with and that’s imagery. And that’s so like so often overlooked. I know it has to happen. So, but not leaning on AI for that. That’s the, that’s the single most authentic thing you can do for your business is to, you know, get the real deal happening. So in a world of AI, that’s what I would say. but it, it’s also the wording and it’s also what you’re crafting in terms of your message to
Andrew Glyntzos (33:01.133)
Mm.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (33:07.838)
So, you know, if you’re not great with the English language or you don’t know what to come up with, think ChatGPT and those tools are great from an ideation point of view, but don’t copy and paste it, right? Get rid of the dashes, get rid of the quotation marks. If you work around it long enough, and I’m sure you know, you can spot it from a mile away. you know, using these AI tools for anything content related on a website is also a pretty bad idea.
because Google and Co are pretty good at picking that stuff up too. So what I, my biggest, I guess, insight with a lot of these businesses is use it as a tool, not a crutch and a thing that you rely on. But to your point regarding kind of SEO sort of more specifically, what I’m finding at least anyway is working in terms of say AI visibility is being authoritative and is writing about the topic or service that you offer.
And being really detailed in that. let’s say you’re a property manager and you want to talk about, know, how do I choose the best property manager? I find that talking locally about it is a great idea. So if you’re in the southern suburbs of Adelaide and that’s your catchment area, try and stick to that and try and be that kind of authoritative figure in that particular region. I find that AI locally does really, really well in terms of
sort of matching and giving options for that specific catchment rather than trying to tackle the whole state, know, the whole of Victoria, keep to your little pockets and then sort of build out from there. And one of the biggest, biggest takeaways, and this works honestly, every time, if you’ve got a set of blogs, I’ll say this to anybody watching on, if you’ve got a set of blogs, summarise them at the top, like the table of contents is literally the quickest way to get into the AI overviews, but into chat GPT too, like it’s…
Andrew Glyntzos (34:54.062)
That’s proven to work. It’s proven to work.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (35:02.558)
is I feel like it’s a bit grey hat in terms of like we were talking about this 25 years ago, hiding your suburbs on a page works. This is exactly it. Table of contents at the top of the blog summarizing it because as they as the crawlers come through, you know this but as the crawlers come through, they’re looking for bit of an overview as to what it’s about. They don’t want to consume a bunch of content. If you can make their job easy at the top of the page, happy days. So that’s really that’s a hack, I guess at the moment that’s a tactic.
Andrew Glyntzos (35:31.203)
Yeah.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (35:31.262)
So in terms of that, but I guess to your strategy piece, you four or five page websites. Look, I always sort of recommend that you want to sort of, you know, expand that and build that over time if you can. Topic clustering. So again, another sort of proven topic on this is, you know, if you are talking about property management, let’s say you are a real estate company and you’ve got property management division, you’ve got, I don’t know, buyer’s agents or an auctioneer service, you really want to try and kind of, you know, create.
little homes for that content and then branch that out. So, you know, and you’d be amazed at, again, you’re probably not amazed because you’ve probably seen it in the wild, but the amount of businesses that don’t even do that aspect of it correctly is crazy. And again, that’s probably where I’d sort of lean into a little bit of the AI tools, use it as a base, use it as a really good starting point to craft some content. And then what you really want to do is just sort of localize it and sort of talk about it because
in this age of AI, authenticity and originality and people like you and me, mate, we’re actually going to win because you see on LinkedIn, people are churning out, comment SEO to get my playbook. And you can read it. The SEO playbook that they’re trying to sprout is all AI generated. It’s absolute crap, right? So in order to be able to stand out, and I think this probably transcends SEO,
is if your business is constantly putting out AI slop, you’re just going to get absolutely left in the dust. It’s about trying to change the way that you’re thinking about AI and not using it the way that the media is telling us it’s being used for. And that’s again, where the biggest wins are coming from. You know, if you’ve sat on a business idea, use AI to help kind of streamline and automate your process. Like it’s, it’s not just a content machine. It’s a
hang on, this thing can actually build me stuff and spit out working code that I can use to automate processes in my business. can, you know, build that little program to help with the finance team or the account. You know, like it’s just, it is a different way of thinking. And that’s why I think the creatives of the world are going to win out of out of this big time.
Andrew Glyntzos (37:44.687)
Well, I think for AI there’s a lot of rhetoric. People ask me about AI, everyone asks about AI now, right? And I’m just like, listen, there is so much rhetoric on LinkedIn, I would probably put down 85 % of it as conjecture, right?
And that’s the nice thing to say about it. Probably a lot of bullshit. Right? The three things that I’ve seen work for myself with the case study is the TLDRs, the key takeaways, the list formats, the digital PR. Being a… It’s not so far, isn’t anything groundbreaking. Anything that falls outside of like someone writing, this works. I’m like, cool. You might be right. Show me a case study. Can’t show me.
So it’s like you need to start like you can’t otherwise you can just say in my opinion these things work I don’t have any sometimes I’m like I’m all about trusting the gut instinct I’ve noticed my guts got me out of a lot of battles over the years but it’s but it’s not an avoiding horror shows as well but it doesn’t but unless you’ve got the proven fact so yeah but everything you said man I think it’s I think it’s
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (38:41.84)
Yeah.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (38:54.204)
Here’s a little hack. I’ve actually used this for a couple of little businesses and when I experiment, I only ever do it on my personal projects or websites I’m doing for my mates for freebies or a bit of of a favour because I’ve actually seen a lot of agencies use or experiment with clients who are paying and I think that’s just it boggles my mind like you would not get away with that in any other industry. But that’s an aside.
Andrew Glyntzos (39:07.052)
Yeah.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (39:22.654)
asking chat GPT especially for a brand new website. I’ve actually just done a website for a nice pizza shop in Geelong, Tillage Pizza. Thank you for the shout out. a brand new website. Exactly, put the little screen up. And asking chat GPT, know, what’s the best pizza in Geelong? Absolutely nowhere. So then I asked it, oh, I’ve heard about this place. What do you think?
Andrew Glyntzos (39:34.169)
We’ll put it at the bottom, huh?
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (39:48.476)
yes, you’re absolutely right. Thank you. Tell me more. And so I put that to the test. you know, asking it and training it. And I I got a couple of friends to then go, what’s the best pizza in Geelong? Look, it’s popped up to the top. So I think there might be something there at the moment where it gets committed to memory or something. And so yeah, again, I feel like we’re in the age of grey hat, black hat with this AI stuff all over again. It’s quite funny. Yep. Yeah.
Andrew Glyntzos (39:54.286)
and training it.
Andrew Glyntzos (40:03.04)
with…
Andrew Glyntzos (40:11.266)
It’s like SCR in 2007 again, like 2006 when I started playing around with meta keywords. I mean, that’s exactly where we are again. Meta keywords was fun. It was a lot of fun. When I started as a developer, I never used meta keywords in my entire life. Why would I put anything meta on a page? You can’t see it. I always found it was a waste of code. It was a waste of time.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (40:18.334)
Yeah.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (40:26.982)
Yeah, yeah, Yeah.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (40:34.088)
Do you think that just to your point then, you think that’s like, and I’ve encountered this too. you think, well, do you think there’s like a developer disconnect in terms of SEO still?
Andrew Glyntzos (40:38.604)
Run a case study.
Andrew Glyntzos (40:44.942)
I’m 100 % and I saw that with my client that went out of business and I think there’s a big disconnect a lot often times as well between people you’ve been working with for like here’s what my problem was when I worked with clients for seven eight years maybe just taking for granted that they know more about it than than I think they do because when a developer comes in and says get out of the way and let me do it and then have 80,000 404 broken pages
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (41:13.01)
Now that was a client that you looked after quite some time ago, wasn’t it? From when we were having a chat earlier, yeah?
Andrew Glyntzos (41:17.472)
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, it was. And I put up plenty of plenty of information on it. Now, I think partly this business has gone bad as well, because it’s just unfortunately, this business has got too big and became a beast that he couldn’t handle. But when I look back,
know. So 2013, 20, you know I used for screaming frog rhyme this is we went through a massive half a million URL site migration. Can you believe I didn’t lose any traffic when we relaunched it? Actually I think it actually grew by about a couple of thousand. It wasn’t nothing but I didn’t really see it as it growing by a couple of thousand. I saw it as
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (41:52.958)
Yeah, that’s incredible.
Andrew Glyntzos (42:04.396)
we just save like 40,000 because I’ve become known as the URL preservation guy. Every SEO they’ve got an itchy trigger finger to redirect URLs. I don’t like fair one redirects, I’m not a fan of them. So I don’t think they do what everyone thinks they do. And they get a lot worse when you start doing domain redirects. They don’t, they don’t, you could do, anyway. So that was.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (42:18.214)
Nah, nope.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (42:31.806)
Well, I can tell you, I was gonna say that just to that point though, it’s, well preserving the page, but it’s amazing the decisions that get made even at like the top enterprise level of domain switchovers. Just really quickly, I worked for a business that changed their brand. So they went from one domain that was up for about 15, 20 years and some genius in the IT department decided to rebadge to another domain without telling anyone.
Andrew Glyntzos (42:36.248)
Preserving pages.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (43:00.902)
and then switched over and it’s like why aren’t we getting any leads coming in now well it’s because you’ve got a fresh domain and you’re not getting listed for any of those keywords that you had domination for which kind of sounds a bit the same as you know some of the stuff that you’ve encountered over the years but yeah URL preservation rather than 301ing the lot is just makes sense
Andrew Glyntzos (43:20.11)
Well, if there’s a business case, like I’ve even recommended clients get off a 10, 12 year old domain if I do believe there’s a brand. Sometimes I get like websites where literally it’s like engage at ring Sydney Australia dot com dot EU and they’ve had that for 20 years. I’m like, well, if you want to become a brand, you’re going to need to change that. That’s inevitable. But when you’re dealing with a site, most of time I’ve done that, I’m dealing with a site that already has no traffic anyway.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (43:39.198)
Correct.
Andrew Glyntzos (43:47.727)
To do that with a site that’s getting 86,000, 90,000, you really got to have some business discussions there before you start changing it. I think, again, what I learned with Last in Jewelry, and I’ve said this on LinkedIn and even SEOs that I trust said, Andrew, I’m not sure I agree with you on that one. That’s fine. But for me, Ahrefs and SEMrush, they still, do you remember the old page rank? That was legit. And what was a cord, right?
Page rank. Was it domain rank? Or was it page rank? Page. Google works on page authority. What people, I actually, and you might disagree with me, that’s fine too. What I’ve learned from my migrations, the ones that were unsuccessful, or ones that I lost traffic in the earlier days, was I was careless. we’ll just redirect everything. Right?
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (44:22.078)
Page. Page ring. Yep.
Andrew Glyntzos (44:44.59)
We’ll keep the same number of internal links. We’ll keep the same number of content. We’re not changing in terms of, we’re not dropping important pages to going from 70, 80 internal links down to 20 internal links, etc., etc. They’re all still contextually linked. They’re all topically linked, etc., etc. So the IA as a whole is still staying the same.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (45:01.118)
you
Andrew Glyntzos (45:07.618)
But I was just careless with the three I once. Thinking, believing things because I’ve been told in the industry. Not believing shit because it’s based on my experience and my personal experiments. But I was just going to say, I was just going to end with, I’m not a fan of domain authority in the way people think about it.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (45:16.286)
Yep. Yep. Well, this will shock you. I’ve, yeah, go on.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (45:32.318)
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Andrew Glyntzos (45:34.515)
And I do believe, I hate to say, although I know where these tools should focus on, competitor analysis. Because I can’t see my competitor data. Outside of competitor analysis, including keyword analysis, that’s fine. I’ll kind of put that all into the competitor analysis brand. When they start putting all these bullshit metrics in, right?
Like, okay, news.com.au has a high DA. Well, no shit. It has a ton of links to pages. But I’ve seen a spammy. So I basically put down, we’ve got a lot of negative attention on LinkedIn from SEOs. You’re of shit. I just put down DA and DL is there to sell SEO software.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (45:57.192)
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (46:18.078)
100 % Yeah, it’s a Yep. 100 100 100 % I do 100 % I do it’s it’s it’s a what’s it’s proprietary metric. Correct. Absolutely. Yeah. I think I think there’s a lot of I think there’s a lot of the wrong voices to your point very much earlier. I think
Andrew Glyntzos (46:19.618)
So, okay, so you agree with me, okay. I’ve got SEOs that…
You think Google uses DA and DR? Not in the way that it’s a proprietary metric. That was my argument, and it was almost like I shot the sacred cow.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (46:45.252)
know, we’ve been doing this for 2025 years, right? We know what we’re talking about. But, you know, you won’t you won’t get listed in the top 20 SEO, you won’t get listed in the top SEO voices and all this sort of stuff. But I can tell you right now that a lot of these people who are banging on and going to these conferences and talking about this stuff, they haven’t been on the tools for a very long time at all. I mean, there’s a few exceptions. And I think, personally, I think the Aussie SEOs are the doers. And I think you’ve got, you know, you’re Brody Clarks and
Andrew Glyntzos (46:51.564)
I wanna get it over, I wanna get it over with.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (47:11.792)
and co of the world who are still in the nitty gritty. But what happens with a lot of these sort of evangelical SEO types is they get so far away from the day to day that all they’re doing is parroting what Google wants to tell them to get out there. so it’s yeah, again, and then you’ve got clients who are listening to all of this stuff and not actually understanding in the real world that hang on, like things are done a little bit differently. And I think there’s that, you know, a little disconnect, but to your point as well, I think again,
disconnects left, right and centre is, you know, brands that undergo these rebadges or redesigns. And to your point about retaining pages, I’ve seen it, I’ve been involved in it, websites with 8,000 pages and these again, you know, UXs or designers going on and we’re going to reduce it all down with here’s the page and you’re looking at these designs where the SEO hasn’t even been consulted and you’re like, okay, cool. Well, where do you…
want to put all this content that currently exists on this wonderfully performing page, where are the links? Where are the internal links? You’ve replaced all of the links with read mores or click here’s and there’s just like even in the biggest of businesses, billion dollar businesses, they’re not getting this stuff right. And it’s, yeah, maybe it’s just one of those, you know, things that we need to get used to. But I think there’s a much better way of doing things and it’s just.
Andrew Glyntzos (48:32.566)
Well, I actually want to get off. I remember during all my spare time, I used to have an office in Oran Park. you know where the second air, you’re from Victoria. the second, basically where my office was based was basically, you know, when the new Sydney airport is coming, the Western Sydney airport. I was only like, that office was only like 20 minutes away from that, right?
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (48:51.187)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yep, yep.
Andrew Glyntzos (48:57.294)
I used to have an office just to crawl. don’t want to get too, we’re going to lose dear. Our audience is not SEOs, our audience are business people, all right? So don’t want to get dug in the weeds. But I used to bring my gaming tower and I’m talking like, was like, remember the old, in 2019, 20.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (49:02.814)
Now this is good.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (49:07.87)
You
Andrew Glyntzos (49:21.262)
You know, the big, giant gaming towers with the dual GPUs and shit, right? And you had to all the airflow because I was a tight arse and you want to pay for… I was a tight arse, I didn’t pay for nitrogen cooling and all that shit, right? Keep it at minus 20, whatever the fuck it is. So I just had all these fans with the egg. There was good thing about that egg, that office was just egg, it was so cold and it was beautiful. You know what, I using script…
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (49:23.922)
Yep. Yep.
All the fans. Yep.
Ha ha ha.
Andrew Glyntzos (49:47.142)
screening frog to send me reports before AI. just basically lines of script and terminal code, just sending reports. What I was doing, so with the migration, I could tell you three or four things that did. Sounds on the surface, very simple. But then you actually have to go through half a million URLs and make sure that developers just don’t run off on their…
You know, they’re getting a bit crazy and frustrated. know, timelines are getting shorter. The clients are asking when is this going to get launched and there’s all pressure. So I didn’t want to make them fall out of their SEO scope that I’ve put together. So I would ever. How many SEOs you know have brought their gaming tower for the sole purpose because I needed like I like 48 gig on on on it. Right.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (50:14.27)
Mm-hmm.
Andrew Glyntzos (50:39.15)
Done and it’s just basically 40 gig of just memory site calls. Now screaming frog to be fair is a memory hog. So it needs to work on that. I’ve been emailing the owner. He’s got to do something. It’s still not, it’s still a bit of a memory hog. It’s gotten better. Anyway, you’re a nerd. like, you.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (50:57.874)
Yeah, I don’t know. I’ve used I feel sorry for the I’ll say enterprise SEO is where your IT team only gives you four or eight gig of RAM to run your your laptop and then it’s like, hang on, once you fire screaming frog up, that’s it, it’s burnt. You’re not you’re not doing anything else on that laptop for the rest of the day.
Andrew Glyntzos (51:08.792)
CyCross.
Andrew Glyntzos (51:14.446)
Well then you then you’re using then you got to use like a cloud base which is which like luma is pretty good. Anyway, I want to go down that road. But anyway, it was just it was crawling. It was comparing.
It was just I was just continuously calling the dev and they’re like they even messaged me going like you’re killing out. So what the fuck is this guy doing? He he’s smashing smashing my live server. And it was just all it was doing was in terminal was just like comparing URLs. Right. The number of internal links, other titles and descriptions changing, you know, the number of words on the page. It was just basically calculating. So to preserve page authority.
That was literally it. it was basically, and so we went from XCart, I don’t know if you’re familiar with XCart. Yeah, good, that’s why I’m bored. So we moved from XCart to Magento and very different ways of handling the content.
But all that to say that the amount I would have spent probably close, I never charged the client, probably about a thousand to fifteen hundred hours of continuous, I wasn’t paying the electricity bill, but it was just continuous crawling. And then sometimes, you know, the computer would cock it. So you had to, it would crash and so you had to do periodic backups. But I didn’t lose any traffic.
and then decides to say, thanks very much, Andrew, my developers doing SEO now. See, that’s the type of shit where you don’t, the client doesn’t know, doesn’t fully appreciate that the developers are not going to do that. They’re not going to, they’re not going to do that.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (53:00.582)
I just think SEO is still massively misunderstood. I know you’re on a very similar mission. We can sit here and say it’s massively misunderstood, but I’m huge on education and I really want to bring people, same as yourself, and bringing people along on this ride. And I think if any SEOers are listening and watching this or digital marketers, it’s, you know,
Andrew Glyntzos (53:16.28)
Correct.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (53:27.452)
bring your clients along for the ride in terms of the education piece because your job becomes easier over time too. But what we do is we actually bring everybody up with us, right? Like it’s been like a dark art for so long.
Andrew Glyntzos (53:38.2)
Correct.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (53:42.246)
And it’s all you not understanding backlinks. okay. Yeah, that’s just how Google does it. Or, you know, and I’ve seen sort of explanations like that given or really shitty monthly reports to what did you do? What did you do for the month? Tell the clients that what have you been up to? And in a lot of cases, I know for a fact, they haven’t done much at all. But I just think this this industry needs to do better because you would not get away with this in any other regulated industry. It is an unregulated area. And like, I don’t like
Andrew Glyntzos (54:09.006)
Yeah, but just be careful how often we say that. I don’t have the government to regulate it. But there needs to be a authority.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (54:11.684)
No, 100 % well, look, I mean, we don’t like you say, you don’t want government, you don’t want government intervention in this stuff. But it’s it’s, it’s, yeah, doing has to be has to be something out there. And because it’s there’s, there’s too many stories of, you know, clients not getting a good deal. So I guess any
business watching this in terms of, you know, what should you ask an SEO agency for? In my opinion, it’s a really well structured thought out plan. It’s a commitment to, you know, looking at things like get backlinks and your content, but also not just the digital sphere. If you’re an SEO agency or digital marketing agency is a bigger thing. If they’re not asking you about your business goals or your sales or what’s happening internally, you know, you’re not talking to the right person either, which goes back to our point.
before in terms of looking at bigger picture too. And from a reporting perspective, you know, not just a, this went up and this went down and this keyword went up and this keyword went down. It’s you really want to sort of know what people are doing, you know, through the month, what are you, what are you actually paying for? And, know, if you can get taken along for that, not a ride, if you can get taken along for the journey in terms of cool, show me, show me some of this stuff so I can actually help, you know.
build this collectively, think it’s really important too. So, yeah.
Andrew Glyntzos (55:30.607)
Right, on that point, you know you said you hit the nail on the head, you know you said your job becomes easier. You know how it becomes easier. When you start working with a client like Larson for 10 years, before they go on the bachelor, because I didn’t know this deal was happening behind the scenes, right? They start to ask you questions like, Andrew, when the smoke clears and no one’s talking about Matty and Laura anymore.
How do we take full advantage of for SEO long term? I think, shout out to Lars because from a client perspective in 20 years, that was the best question I’ve ever got asked. And I said, you know what we’re gonna do? We’re gonna track down every single journalist. We’re gonna write a whole ton of stories. So when the smoke clears, the links are there. And guess what?
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (56:19.262)
you’ve got something to show for it, yeah.
Andrew Glyntzos (56:22.402)
the links are still fucking there, right? And the competitors can see them, but very difficult to reverse engineer that. And I thought to your point about if a job becomes easier, I think as SEOs, think where the market is moving now, I think it’s more consulting than hands-on anyway. I think you need to start working with clients based upon whatever their goals and objectives. People ask me all the time, what budget can you work with? I can work with any budget that matches your goals and ambition.
If your wallet matches this, your mouth, we’ll work together. The moment that this becomes bigger than what you’re willing to pay, we don’t work together anymore. So as long as your goals and ambitions, if they’re not too competitive, then I will do everything. You better offer people like my ilk that I’m trying to meet every day so I can pass on work to other people, right?
So we can all benefit together, right? If you’re better, the service based SEO than I am, I’d rather give it to you, right? And then you’ll help me out. That’s the kind of relationships I want to build, right? But I think I’m no longer working with clients if they don’t have a team. I feel like my job as a 20 year SEO at this point is supplementary, complementary, strategic, top level.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (57:43.772)
Yeah. The guide. Yeah. Yep.
Andrew Glyntzos (57:44.846)
like getting like looking at the guy right the roadmap and actually what what my what my PR team love about me is more of the mentoring right so they love they’re a bit younger I mean I don’t know how old you are but 40 I feel like I’m an old dog and I still feel like I feel like when I when I go to the SEO shout out to James Norquay and his SEO conferences you should come up for one of them
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (58:02.91)
Not far off, mate. Not far behind you.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (58:09.256)
Yeah.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (58:13.182)
Uncle Andrew in the room? Is it sort of, you know, with all the younger folk?
Andrew Glyntzos (58:16.397)
Well, when we go to the real SEO conference after the conference, you know what I mean? Where the drink, which I don’t drink alcohol, but when all the drinks start getting in and people start getting happy and we start talking about the shit that you want to talk about.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (58:23.058)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Andrew Glyntzos (58:34.631)
You look around you and I think, man, it’s a 20 year old. I just feel like I’m just, shouldn’t be here. But yeah, I’m calling it the godfather. I talk like the godfather too. The godfather, I talk like him as well.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (58:40.638)
The Godfather, that’s even better.
father of SEO done. We’ve got your brand sorted mate. We’ve been talking about it for an hour. There we go. That could be another little campaign idea for you.
Andrew Glyntzos (58:53.427)
No, no, there’s a lot, there’s smarter. I think it’s, I think it’s getting good SEOs. I think the best conference that we could ever put on for me is sitting in a room like a pub, having really experienced SEOs and then letting the letting businesses ask questions. like, I get my mate is asking me James is like, would you be interested in being on a panel or talking? I don’t want I’ve got nothing to say.
Let the businesses ask me questions. They’re getting a lot like and I’m just going to bring it back to SEO. What I said at the start, it’s business intelligence. It’s entrepreneurial now. It’s all the technical side of it. Look, you look at all the big content sites like the BuzzFeed. Did they worry about technical SEO or did they build a brand to build?
Say whatever, even if their content is crap, right? They still got a whole tons of links. Did they have a great link builder, Ry? No, they didn’t. They had a good business model and a plan and an execution. Now, that may not always translate well to the everyday business, and that’s why we have jobs. But the point is, when you’re brand focused and understand that you are a branding company no matter what you do.
I think, and Google, I think, we both don’t like Google, but if Google can start building their algorithm, my dad is fished on three, he’s for the, my dad’s fished on three different continents, he’s 78 years old, he’s Greek, he’s fished in Asia, he’s fished in Africa, he’s fished in Europe, and he’s fished in Australia, right? For whatever. If he writes an article, how do I catch fish?
I don’t give a shit how many links he gets to that business or that page. That should outrank my article just because I know about SEO. I don’t know jack of all the shit about fishing. Right? So why should my article with 50 links be outranked by dad who’s fished for 50 years, fished on four different continents?
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (01:00:53.31)
is the resident authority on it, yeah.
Andrew Glyntzos (01:00:55.947)
He is the authority. He is what Google should be looking for. And apparently they are. But I’m hoping that becomes better as well. So SEOs don’t rank for content that they don’t know fuck all about. And the actual authorities. And I think that’s where I’m hoping because you’re not going to be worried about PBNs at that point. Our job becomes it.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (01:01:15.038)
We can only dream. We can only dream, mate. We can only dream.
Andrew Glyntzos (01:01:19.533)
So I think that’s where we’re going. So, Ry, you’ve got the closing. I don’t want to take up any more of your time. We’ll be going for an hour. It’s been absolutely fantastic. We’ll definitely need to do a part two. You’ve got the floor, the last three or four minutes, five minutes, whatever you want to take. Say whatever you want to say.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (01:01:37.406)
Oh, look, mate, it’s been good catching up. I know we’ve wanted to do this for quite some time. It’s, yeah, look, I think we’re in probably the biggest seismic shift in tech and SEO and digital marketing that we’ve seen. And again, you have a very unique perspective. I’m 38, by the way, just to clear the age thing up. So being around for ages like you have, and I don’t think I’ve seen anything this big since the turn of the millennium, to be fair.
You know, there’s lots of talk about being in an AI bubble. I don’t think we’ve even gotten started yet. This is completely different because I think the cost for people to get involved with, you know, the age of the internet, you know, you’re talking 1500 to $2,000 for a PC back then. This time around for corporations to set up big AI systems, especially, you know, self-hosted stuff, you’re not talking $2,000, you’re talking in the hundreds of thousands if they want to do…
self-hosted LLMs and and rag type setup. So we’re a long way from that point, but it’s, think people have this wonderful opportunity again, SEO, digital marketing, web building, whole, the whole thing to your point, entrepreneurial type stuff. Now is the time if you’ve been sitting on an idea or a concept or something you’ve wanted to build, now’s the time to actually do it and put your, you know.
put your put your money where your mouth is and actually get something up and up and going. So, you know, people who have had businesses who haven’t known how to do SEO, you can do it now with the help of these tools. You know, you want to build a website that lists all your favorite soccer teams from around the world and does something special bang, you could you can do that. I’m a man United fan. So well, had I have known that I might have reconsidered the invite. No, I’m kidding.
Andrew Glyntzos (01:03:18.945)
Yeah, good Liverpool.
I’ve got another podcast for you to come on, my Liverpool podcast. That is different discussion. Yeah, I’ll send that one to you.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (01:03:30.302)
the EPO, EPO podcast. But I just think I just think there’s now’s the time like, because I’ve done a lot of consulting with businesses and startups and people on MVP and prototypes and that sort of stuff now. And, you know, I put a video out a couple of months ago saying if you’ve got a business idea, I would love to help you build it. And I had one person reach out and I had 1000 people watch it, right. So it’s, it’s and I know I’m maybe drifting off here a little bit but
People always say, I wish I was a millionaire. I wish I had a great idea. it’s a change in thinking, right? Like now is your time to make money and to literally build that unicorn startup or work on that website or, you know, get something ranking or, you know, improve your efficiency or something that takes you three hours in a day. It can take you 20 minutes. So you’ve got the time back like.
Andrew Glyntzos (01:03:58.808)
to.
Andrew Glyntzos (01:04:21.345)
I love that thing that you built. I love that website thing you built with all the AI content and the generator. It paid for itself. How many people are doing that? I mean, that’s absolutely fantastic.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (01:04:30.11)
But and I guess to your point, exactly to your point about the articles, it’s what am I doing now that’s going to be able to create value? You you had the link example, you know, how can I use this digital PR to then have value in three, four or five years? Well, I’ve got these tools that are charging me $40 a month. Why aren’t I building a tool if I’m spending $40 on a Hootsuite or a social media scheduler, and I’m not happy with it? Why aren’t I building my own? Why aren’t I putting something out there? And, you know, again, if you’ve got the
want to learn if you’ve got that natural curiosity this is this is like an amazing time to be in this space and it’s nothing like the media is telling us like it’s it’s not just kids are cheating on exams with chat chippy tea it’s like the stories and the like you’re saying the rhetoric with this is just so could not be completely off what’s actually happening in the AI space and what’s able to be done with this amazing tech so
Yeah, look, I’d say for anyone who is working a nine to five, I actually know how hard it is keeping up with this stuff. So if you are watching it, please follow follow both of us. But I’ll be talking a lot more about this stuff as time goes on. I think I think I’ve got this unique background in development in marketing in startups in go to market in creativity, and now there’s AI. And it’s like, okay, holy shit, this is like the the
the most amazing coming together of technology and creativity I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. So yeah, like, again, the tools are there, use it, I get really passionate and excited about this because there’s bloody good reason to so yeah, get amongst it, start using the tools for good.
Andrew Glyntzos (01:06:15.437)
Thank you so much Brian. can they follow you? Your website is sprookdigital.com.au
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (01:06:18.366)
sprook.co, nice and short for everyone. yeah, follow along on LinkedIn, send me a request. I usually accept them all. So yeah, watch out for more content soon.
Andrew Glyntzos (01:06:32.802)
Thanks so much, everyone. Thank you so much, Rye, for your time. it’s been an absolutely fantastic conversation. And feel like we only touched the surface. hopefully we can do another few more in the very near future. Thanks for your time, Rye. Thank you.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (01:06:35.72)
Thanks guys.
Rye Smith – Spruik Digital (01:06:40.412)
and he skimmed it.
Awesome. Thanks, Andrew. Cheers, mate.
