A Unscripted Conversation with Katie Wagner, President & CEO of KWSM
Jeremy Rivera: Hello, I’m Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted SEO podcast host. I’m here with Katie Wagner, who’s going to introduce herself, her company, and what makes her an expert in her field.
Katie Wagner: Hi Jeremy, I’m Katie Wagner. I’m the president and CEO of KWSM, a digital marketing agency. We specialize in lead generation.
We’ve been doing it 15 years — I started the agency in 2010. Before that, I was a television anchor. I spent 15 years as a journalist and retired from CNN in 2009 before opening the agency. I think there are a lot of crossover skills, and certainly today with the way SEO is going, brand journalism has never been more important. We really lean into that at the agency.
“Brand journalism is creating deeper stories around the humans in a business — feature interviews, case studies, stats, metrics. It’s really deep content that talks about specific instances of our clients doing whatever they do best.”
“Every brand has to be a content creator and a journalist of their own brand, or else they’re going to get lost in the sea of content out there.”
“Gone are the days when one tactic in a vacuum is going to generate all the business you need.”
How SEO Has Evolved Beyond Reverse Engineering Google
Jeremy Rivera: SEO has moved out of the niche moment where we were Google reverse engineers — that was it. We had AltaVista, Yahoo, MSN, before it became Bing. Google just grew and grew until it sat so fat in the middle and gave so much traffic. Black hat SEO was relatively easy to separate out — if you’re buying a ton of links from spam farms, yeah, that’s bad and you’re going to get slapped. That was super easy.
But then we got rich snippets, and rich snippets have now turned into AI overviews. We got the helpful content update, the posturing around E-E-A-T. Now we have both AI overviews and Gemini, plus these interloper LLM-based channels — ChatGPT, Claude, and the like — that are eating up the top of the funnel.
What good SEOs were always doing — finding link-building opportunities in credentialed places, mentions of a business, somebody writing about an event — those were always in the tool chest. But they got neglected, maybe because it was just easier to talk about guest posts and anchor text ratios. How does the journalistic approach fit into SEO throughout time?
Katie Wagner: It’s never a dull moment, that’s for sure. For me, the journalistic perspective is the bedrock that hasn’t changed — it’s just shifted its place in our content strategy.
Brand journalism is creating deeper stories around the humans in a business. Feature interviews, case studies, stats, metrics — it’s really deep content that talks about specific instances of our clients doing whatever they do best. It’s more about the use case and examples than features and benefits. That content used to be most of what we created, and we could rank it pretty well.
The Two-Tier Content Strategy: AI Overviews + Bottom-Funnel Conversion
Katie Wagner: Now it’s more bottom-of-funnel content, and we have to create a new layer of top-of-funnel content aimed at AI overviews — providing basic information that doesn’t have to be deep. It’s educational, it’s not designed to convert. What we’re trying to do is get mentioned in those overviews.
In my opinion, there’s anecdotal evidence that the more you show up in those overviews, the more your deeper content gets seeded in first-page rankings and you get traffic from the search engine results page.
So we create that top-of-funnel content that’s educational, building credibility, not designed to convert — just designed to educate. Then those brand journalism pieces that are designed to hit people later in the decision funnel — we plant those, they show up on the first page, and we get fewer clicks than we have historically, but most of those clicks convert.
At that point, the reader already got educational information on the SERP itself. They’re clicking through really only to convert. So we see a lot more leads being generated from each click, and I attribute that to the deeper brand journalism content we’re creating and placing lower in the funnel.
Jeremy Rivera: That is the flip side of what I call the alligator mouth disconnect. It’s a shame Google is trying to gaslight us — just acknowledge that yes, you’re eating our lunch. But the traffic that’s coming through is more qualified. If you do happen to get a click-through on your citation from an LLM, that’s a much deeper query.
I use Claude every day — to generate content, to write my kids’ homeschool curriculum at the co-op I just taught at this morning. Claude helped me come up with the survival guide workbook we’re working through. But when I wanted to actually see how to change raspberry bush into cordage, that’s something you have to see. The type of information you can get out of LLMs is still limited for certain things — you still have to go deeper, get specific sources, firsthand accounts, video.
These tools still need to cite sources. Whether a tool is pulling from live data or training data, it’s still going to refer to things. And businesses that have a real business are in almost the same place. I feel bad for a lot of publishers who’ve suffered — but I don’t feel bad for the celebrity birthday programmatic sites that have died.
Katie Wagner: If we think about the end user — there’s still a place for all that AI content and overview content. It is still building credibility for the brand. I don’t actually care that less traffic is coming back to the website. I care that more of it converts. If you can let go of the ego around lower click-throughs, and instead focus on what percentage is actually turning into customers — this world isn’t as bad as long as you know how to play in it.
Going Deeper Than the Conversion: Revenue, Leads & the Full Sales Funnel
Jeremy Rivera: That focus is interesting — it’s a step further into the ecosystem than a lot of SEOs usually played. I always took extra steps to understand not just the conversion rate, but the secondary conversion rate. Just because you capture somebody’s information doesn’t mean the job is done. A lot of SEOs just called it a day after seeing a fantastic conversion rate on a page.
That didn’t cut it then and it certainly won’t cut it now. If you get half as many clicks and you aren’t paying attention to leads, you don’t know if you’re getting the same number of leads — or how many of those become actual sales.
What are some of the processes you use and the conversations you have with clients about lead quality, topical match, and feedback loops?
Katie Wagner: The answer depends on the type of business. But one of the things we do when we sign a client is vet that process — how do they follow up with leads? What does their sales process look like? What does their nurturing process look like?
A conversion on a website is only half the battle. Getting that all the way to a paying client is a process. I like metrics as much as the next person, but what I really like is revenue. We talk to our clients about: did that sale convert? Was that an ideal client? How much was the value of that client? I can tell you for each of our clients how much revenue we’re generating every month, every year, every five years — not just clicks and conversions. I actually need to know that it translated into money.
We have weekly calls with their sales teams: tell me about the prospects you’ve talked to from our efforts. Are they good? Have you closed them? If not, why not? We’ll go deep on that.
And at the beginning of an engagement, we actually interview our clients’ customers — the happy ones — to talk about: when you were looking for this type of service, how did you begin that search? What appealed to you or didn’t appeal to you? We try to get into their heads about what they need to see in search results. Then we reverse engineer and build programs around that.
The top-of-funnel content is easy — it’s educational, industry-based, general FAQs. But for the deeper brand journalism content, our clients must have case studies, testimonials, stats and metrics about their own business. When I can get somebody to click on one of those pieces from a SERP and go back to the website, they are only going there to convert.
Near-Bound Marketing: Building an Ecosystem Around Real Relationships
Jeremy Rivera: My friend Michael McDougald of Right Thing Agency talks a lot about vector embeddings and relevance score — and one of the best tests of your relevance is did it come from one of your customers?
Matt Brooks of SEOteric mentioned something similar — treating your site not only as a first-look station, but thinking about what you’re offering to bring them back. What are you providing that people are going to return for again and again?
If you’re offering CPR training, yes, have the basics about compressions. But you should also have guides for your students — download the mnemonic, watch the tutorial. These things should loop back to your existing customers, reinforce your brand, arm them, and make things shareable. Have your TikTok embedded so they can share it. If local people who are your clients are engaging, that’s additional stats, additional proof, and fantastic brand building with people already in your orbit.
Katie Wagner: I love so much about that — and I’m going to call that near-bound marketing. We actually put IP detection and heat maps on every client site so we can see them engaging with those resources when they come back. We know what they’ve done, how long they’re spending. That’s a customer journey you can map.
Near-bound marketing is marketing through strategic partners — into new audiences that already have trust with those partners. Sometimes the partner is your existing client. Getting your customer to talk to their audience about how much you’ve helped them, and leveraging that as content — a case study, a testimonial video — you’re getting in front of their audience. They say, “Hey, that’s Jeremy, and he used Katie’s company. I should call Katie’s company because I trust Jeremy.”
Anytime you can leverage those additional people in your ecosystem, that’s the warmest lead you can get.
Jeremy Rivera: Larry H. Parker got me $3.5 million — those ad campaigns in the ’90s based off of client quotes were powerful whether it’s a law office or a commercial real estate agent. There’s proof in that pudding.
And as a service business owner, you should create referral relationships within your community. If you’re a precast concrete wall installer, you may subcontract out to others, but you may also get a pitch that doesn’t right-size for you — you can make a referral, and it’s a two-way street. It doesn’t have to always be extractive.
What I love about that is it connects marketing to understanding profit margin and pricing. A lot of SEOs and digital marketers are maybe too afraid to get into that. But knowing what the profit margins are for a product line, understanding the economies of scale — sometimes deriving more leads to a site can be a bad thing. If they’re not prepared and get over their skis, they’re going to have reputation problems.
Katie Wagner: Marketing in general has changed so much. I don’t actually think I can do as good a job in lead generation if I don’t understand all the profit margins and the different margins on the services. All of that is fundamental to creating a strategy these days. I’m nervous about people who are scared to ask those questions because I can’t do my job without knowing them.
And it goes beyond that — when we don’t win a prospect ourselves, we can still build trust with them. What’s to say that prospect won’t remember you for one of their friends that needs what you do? Gone are the days when one tactic in a vacuum is going to generate all the business you need.
Brand Journalism in Action: The Frylow Case Study
Jeremy Rivera: One brand I worked with — Save Fry Oil — has an industrial product that makes fry oil cleaner. But you literally could not search their brand name. When you searched “Save Fry Oil,” it would come up as a generic phrase, not their brand. They’d existed online for a year, had real products, were international, had done paid ads and social media — but Google didn’t understand their brand.
They didn’t even have an about page. Half the homepage was fuzzed out because things were still in development. They never actually said their brand name anywhere on the page in text — just in an image.
So we created the Restaurant Talks by Save Fry Oil podcast — chefs interviewing chefs about the challenges of running a cost-efficient kitchen. One of those things was Frylow, but the whole show was targeted towards restaurateurs. We got popular chefs with Instagram followings interviewing other popular chefs, got the cross-channel flow going, and started getting inquiries. We finally got Google to recognize them as a brand.
Organic traffic is now up 248% over the last six months. It’s that combination of doing real-world stuff and having real conversations. They also put out “Nine Reasons to Clean Your Fry Oil” — educational content — plus comparative content: Frylow versus the competition. You’ve got to do it all. Connect, have a downloadable lead magnet that captures an email, have a drip campaign, have follow-up on your leads.
Katie Wagner: That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You have to have that entire ecosystem and infrastructure created — and it is good for consumers. There’s so much educational information out there that we can go pretty deep before ever being sold to.
That’s a brand that became brand journalists — put out their own media, their own content that had value in and of itself beyond promoting the product. Can you put out really engaging, valuable content that doesn’t necessarily directly promote your product, but welcomes consumers into that ecosystem, educates them, nurtures them, and gets them to ask the right questions that then may lead back to your product eventually?
PR, Journalism Relationships & Content Multiplication
Jeremy Rivera: Let’s talk about PR, press releases, and making connections with existing journalists and publications. That’s a poorly understood area of digital marketing. Having come from that world, I assume you’re still using some of those tactics and connections. What should agencies or SEOs be aware of — opportunities, pitfalls, the basics?
Katie Wagner: Yes, we use a lot of PR — but remember the days when you put out a press release just for the link? Those days are over. That’s not why we do it anymore.
These days, we’re leveraging journalists to reach an audience that already trusts them and have them talk about our brand. We send out a “press digest” — if there are topical news stories of the day, we pitch journalists: here’s how our client’s company relates to that, here’s how they can comment on it.
What I know from being a journalist for many years: if you make it easier for them, that is a welcome thing. They have to create a lot of content every day. If we say “hey, there’s this topical thing, you’re going to do a story on it anyway, here’s an angle where you can interview my client about this specific thing” — they will likely pick that up.
We get our clients placed — quoted in articles, TV spots, radio interviews, podcasts. Yes, there’s a link back to their website, but more than that, we’re planting their expertise in front of an audience that already has trust built there. Just by appearing in that space, we’re transferring trust and credibility. That makes warmer leads. If you hear somebody on a podcast and then go check out their website, you’re going with the intent to go deeper.
And then every media appearance gives us the opportunity to cut it up into reels, create a blog post, put it in the newsletter. You and I were talking offline about taking a piece of content and iterating it into many different types on different platforms — we do that with every opportunity. A minute-and-a-half TV spot becomes three different reels, a blog post, and newsletter content — constantly repurposed as top-of-funnel, bottom-of-funnel, and nurturing content depending on the platform.
Podcasting as Deep Keyword Research & Relationship Building
Jeremy Rivera: Ross Simmons probably trademarked this, but: create once and distribute forever. A half-hour podcast is 30,000 to 40,000 words. And it’s first person. It is the ultimate expression of keyword research when you have two subject matter experts hashing it out — because in order to have that depth of conversation over that amount of time, you cut deeper and deeper.
These things wouldn’t come up in Semrush or Ahrefs. If you’re having your client go onto podcasts, or creating a podcast between two subject matter experts, you’re generating really deep keyword research in a better way. It’s fantastic for sales research too. If you’re B2B and targeting a particular type of customer, try to get those people as guests — ask them what their pain points are, how they’re choosing the service your business provides, and create great content in the meantime.
It’s a fantastic way to do industry research as much as it is to generate content.
Katie Wagner: Absolutely — and it plays into thought leadership. Putting your voice out there, having that piece of content that positions you as somebody with high expertise — that’s the kind of content that comes up in those deeper funnel places and can help convert.
Every brand has to be a content creator and a journalist of their own brand — putting out their own stuff — or else they’re going to get lost in the sea of content, either from brands already doing it or from people using AI to create sheer volume. You have to leverage your real expertise and your real ability to create content that only you or your brand can create.
Where to Connect with Katie Wagner
Jeremy Rivera: Let the people know where they can connect with you. Do you have a book, a webinar, content they should be reading? A preferred social media platform?
Katie Wagner: Absolutely. My website is kwsmdigital.com — there’s a resources tab where you can find industry expert webinars, articles, and podcasts we’ve done. A lot of good digital marketing and lead gen content there.
The social media I’m on the most is LinkedIn — just search Katie Wagner. I’m wearing a red dress in the picture, and I would love to connect and continue conversations.
Jeremy Rivera: Thank you so much for your time. I’ll make sure that gets linked in the show notes and I’ll see you on LinkedIn.
Katie Wagner: That sounds great. Thanks, Jeremy.
Key Takeaways
- Top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel content now serve completely different masters. Educational, informational content wins AI overview mentions and builds credibility, while deep brand journalism — case studies, client stories, specific use cases — is what actually converts. Treating them as one strategy leaves money on the table.
- Revenue, not traffic, is the real KPI. Fewer clicks from a more qualified audience means your conversion metrics improve, but only if you have the sales follow-up and nurturing infrastructure to capitalize on it. SEOs who stop at the website conversion are missing most of the picture.
- Near-bound marketing — leveraging clients, partners, and journalists as distribution channels — is now a core SEO strategy. Trust is transferred when your brand appears in trusted spaces, whether that’s a news outlet, a partner’s podcast, or a customer testimonial that reaches their own audience.
- Podcasting is the most underrated form of keyword research and relationship building available to B2B brands. Two subject matter experts having a deep conversation generate content depth and topical relevance that no keyword tool can replicate — and each episode is a content multiplication asset across every platform.