$32M a Year From Free Traffic: Thomas Phillips on Why SEO Isn't Dead

0:00 · Introduction and who is Thomas Phillips

Jordan:0:00
Welcome back to the [High Ticket AI Systems] Podcast. Everyone, please welcome the winner and only Mr. Thomas Phillips. Thomas, how you doing today, my friend?

Thomas Phillips:0:08
Yeah, great. Thank you, Jordan. Appreciate you having me on. It's been great, great call, Briar. Yeah, I think it's gonna be a lot of fun on this one.

Jordan:0:11
Absolutely.

Jordan:0:17
Oh, we're going to have a, we're going to have a freaking blast, my man. Now, just to give us a little context as to what you do, can you please tell us at a high level, you know, what the company does and who you guys serve?

0:27 · The two companies Thomas runs right now and what they do

Thomas Phillips:0:27
Yeah, absolutely. So right now we've got two main companies. Really my background has been in SEO search engine optimization for like the last 20 or so years. Traditionally, we were just building internal brands. We've sold 17 of them. And it just got to the point where so many people were asking us to do SEO for them, that eventually we started an SEO agency specifically for seven, eight and nine figure e-commerce brands. Like that is our only focus.

So D2C SEO agency is that side of things. And then we also run another brand called feel30.com. It's basically an online TRT clinic. We send a nurse directly to your door to do all your blood work and everything. So it's basically built from a convenience point of view. So it's built for the busy entrepreneur essentially around all of that. So those are the two main companies that we run right now.

1:21 · Why TRT changed everything and what entrepreneurs need to know about it

Jordan:1:21
man. Well, obviously I know that I know the show's high ticket podcast. So we have to talk about marketing, but personally, I am really intrigued on the second business that you mentioned with TRT. and to be candid with the audience and obviously Thomas here, I am on TRT. has changed my F in life. Looking back, I've asked myself, how did I live life before? Like my energy was like depleted. I had zero energy, zero motivation out of like

Thomas Phillips:1:43
Yeah.

Jordan:1:47
use all my willpower to force myself to work. Now it's like, let's get that shit, baby. Another day trying to make some money, let's go. And it's like night and day freaking difference. So yeah.

Thomas Phillips:1:53
you Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. Yeah. As we were saying beforehand, you know, I've been on TRT for seven years as myself and it's just been, I've seen the exact same thing. Absolute day and night difference. If I go a week and I forget to do my injections, then like my wife's like, what's going on with you? Like, why are you off? You know, and I feel it massively. it's, um, it's amazing. Yeah. The difference is just incredible. So really that's, that's a big driving force of things is like.

I've experienced it, I want other dudes to experience it as well. And it all starts, just get your blood work done fast and then you'll know, you know, it's super easy.

Jordan:2:33
100 % and not everybody does need it. I was like, okay, like low force as a 26, 27 now, like 26 year old man, like low force. It's fucking pathetic, dude. I'm like, what the hell is all my D at? Oh, shit. Yeah.

Thomas Phillips:2:37
course.

Thomas Phillips:2:43
Yeah.

Thomas Phillips:2:47
I was at 280. I was super freaking low. Yeah. Seven years ago. It was insane. My doctor was like, bro, you got the same levels as like an 80 year old man right now. How on earth are you running companies? Um, yeah. And for me, it was just like the, after the first injection, like 20 minutes later, I felt like this like veil had been lifted off over my head and I was like, Oh my God, I see you. Like everything's in color. I have so much clarity. can make decisions quicker and everything changed. I was like, Holy shit. So yeah.

Obviously we're big fans. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. As soon as you have it dialed in, it's just like, that's perfect. Yeah. Big fan.

Jordan:3:16
Kinda feel like Superman, huh?

Jordan:3:25
No for sure. Okay cool. Thanks for the chit chat on TRT. For those thinking about it, fucking do that shit man. Like it will change your life. But going back, you said you've worked with 17 companies and those were all acquired? Were those all e-comm companies or did you just dibble and dabble with other verticals and you bought you're a really good SEO? I guess can you, can you go with that?

Thomas Phillips:3:29
Yeah.

3:46 · How Thomas built and sold 17 companies using SEO and reverse engineering demand

Thomas Phillips:3:46
Yeah. Yeah. So basically we've built, we've built way more than 17 brands internally, but 17 successful ones that we've managed to sell, sell onto, you know, PE firms or, or, um, other operators who wanted to purchase them basically. So that has been like a really big mix of e-commerce, um, giant content affiliate websites, uh, service based. was basically like the great thing with SEO is that We have all these different SEO tools and we can basically see, okay, how many people are searching for, buy Instagram shout outs. was by self shout outs was one of my companies, like a 15 years back or whatever it was. So essentially you could be like, okay, how many people are searching for buy Instagram shout outs? All right. It's 10,000 people. Cool. I mean like, Hmm. Well, that looks pretty damn easy to rank for inside of Google based off of all the competition.

All right. Well, let me build a business around that. So it's essentially, it's been like reverse engineering, everything being able to see like, Holy shit. Like there's a ton of people searching for these keywords. Let's work out how to operationally build an online business around it. And then we just rank for that because we know the demand is already there. So we've just reverse engineered it every single time. and then that's just how we've been able to scale all these different brands and, and,

Jordan:5:00
Alright!

Thomas Phillips:5:09
and companies like we've never used paid traffic. It's only the last few years that we've got into paid traffic. And yeah, it's just been all SEO basically.

Jordan:5:18
Hats off to fucking you bro. I know Alex I'll expect her talks about this like literally supply and demand right if you're gonna start a business like Find where the fuck the demand is first. Don't follow your passion Don't make it a side project like go with a fucking a man is and you did that like you reverse engineered Okay, where what are people looking up on the interwebs, right? What are people looking up on Google? We're looking up X now Let's just give the people what they want. They clearly obviously are this shit. That is so so smart

Thomas Phillips:5:21
Yeah

Thomas Phillips:5:29
Yeah.

Thomas Phillips:5:45
yeah.

Jordan:5:48
But I guess later on, why econ? Why did you get into the econ space, not any other space?

5:53 · Why he chose to only work with e-commerce brands and what makes attribution so hard

Thomas Phillips:5:53
Great, great question. Yeah. So, so from an e-commerce side of things, um, from an e-commerce side of things with clients, the attribution is where it gets, it gets very, very messy when it's not e-com. So we never had this issue before because it was literally like 95 % of our traffic was coming from organic search. So we didn't need any other attribution because it was like, this is our only traffic source and we know where everything's coming from. We're not, we're not running anything paid.

So when we started to then get into the agency side of things, we were just taking on any and every client, you know, we were just like, yeah, great. We'll rank your site. Easy peasy. Um, but then the issue is, is let's, let's say like a local roofer as an example, one might be using high level. Another might be using another CRM and others using something else. And one's using like phone tracking. The other's not. And it's just like almost impossible to actually work out the attribution. Like, like. where are all the sales actually coming from? So we found that it was just increasingly more difficult to retain clients because they were like, all right, well, we can clearly see we're getting more traffic and the keywords are going up, but like we have no idea, you know, where everything else is coming from. Cause we are increasing our lead source here and this one's dropped off and this one's gone up and it's just like, it gets very fricking messy. So we basically were just like, okay, we know econ really, really well. we can clearly see the keywords and the product match. And on top of that, we were then like, well, let's partner with triple whale, right? Which is obviously one of the biggest third-party attribution software is that DTC brands use. Let's partner with them and build a full SEO dashboard around that. So we spent four and a half months with their co-founders, basically building out a full attribution system. because they essentially had the data in the backend. They just didn't have a way of visualizing it based off of what we actually wanted to see. So then we basically built a whole dashboard that has all the different KPIs on it. And now we're able to see like, hey, look, you have a $5 CPA to acquire a customer versus like 75 bucks from paid. Great. So.

Jordan:8:05
Right.

8:07 · How Thomas partnered with Triple Whale to build a full SEO attribution dashboard

Thomas Phillips:8:07
Yeah. So that was really the main reason why, why we went into that. And now we're able to show attribution and the retention of customers of clients, uh, went up significantly because now we can clearly show like, well, look, you have a big increase, look at 90 days versus previous 90 days. So yeah.

Jordan:8:25
No, that's awesome. let alone like put agencies aside for a second. Let's just talk about business. Attribution is so vitally important. How the F can you scale the channel if you don't even know what channel is working? If you don't even know where sales are coming from or if sales are hypothetically coming from Google or Facebook, the attribution from these billion dollar tech companies is dog shit. How?

Thomas Phillips:8:40
Yeah.

Jordan:8:51
You're a billion dollar tech company. Get your attribution data fucking locked in, you know? It's so funny. But you, I'm sure, I'm sure you're aware of this, but recently I heard that Shopify partnered with Triple Whale because it just kind of goes hand in hand, you know? Have you, you know about that? Really?

Thomas Phillips:8:56
Yeah.

Thomas Phillips:9:12
I have not heard that. No, not, not with triple well directly. I know that they've partnered with, copilot, chat, chibi T everything around that. And that, that is something like the agentic storefront Shopify catalog optimization is mouthful is, is I've literally just made a YouTube video on it last week because it's like, Holy shit. We can now, really optimize the products in the feed that now chat chibi T and copilot and Claude and everything else.

Jordan:9:18
Thank you.

Thomas Phillips:9:40
connects directly to. So we've seen like some of our clients, like 97 % of them weren't even coming up at all because they weren't in the right category. They didn't have the right meta fields. They didn't have any information in there. So it's like a weird way we've basically worked out. have to create hidden AI fields, optimize those fields so that they then appear. Cause otherwise some people, someone's going to have like yeti flask, you know, carabiner. bottle or some shit, right? Maybe not even any keywords in it. It's just like the brand name and the model, but no, like chat, you PT can't necessarily pick up on that. If I'm like, want a blue bottle, there's two liters in size and it has like a black top. That information is just not there unless you put it in and optimize that feed. So again, it's like another thing that now we're adding in to really just try and stay on top of, of everything that's coming through.

10:37 · What it actually takes for Triple Whale to take you seriously as an agency partner

Jordan:10:37
No, for sure. I would love to get into the strategies that you're mentioning, but my fucking curiosity is killing me right now. How many clients, how many clients did you have to have in order for Triple Whale, the co-founders, to say, Thomas, your company is balling right now, let's actually sit down and take you seriously. Like how the fuck did that even transpire?

Thomas Phillips:10:56
Well, they were super interested from the point of like, we didn't know that anyone was actually using this from an organic standpoint. so it was really a case of like, didn't, we didn't actually realize this was a thing. Like no one is using this for SEO. and I'm like, well, our clients already pay for triple whale for the most part. You already have all the data. I can see it inside the organic thing, but it's just hidden.

Jordan:11:13
Right.

Thomas Phillips:11:23
So that's why we then went in with them to extract it and deep dive in. And of course we had to pay for them, pay them for it as well as, and we still pay them for it. But anyway, it's fantastic for us because now we're able to actually see data correctly. Cause like GA4 is incredibly inaccurate. Anyone who says it's accurate, load up the last 30 days of your Shopify sales, load up the last 30 days of Google analytics and you'll see there's a massive discrepancy. So yeah.

Jordan:11:51
I have a few, I don't own an e-comm store, but I have a few clients that I help and they own e-comm agencies, different services, Google, YouTube, TikTok, whatever. They also do the same thing about GA4. Like attribution is fucking with dog shit, know? But getting back to a strategy, please, you're, know, SEO agency, AISCO agency, you maybe want to fucking e-comm business. If I wanted to rank for protein bars, right.

How would you help me get on the first page? I guess what is step one to step Z on getting me a first page for this?

12:26 · The full step by step SEO strategy Thomas uses to rank e-commerce brands on page one

Thomas Phillips:12:26
Great question. Yeah. So the first thing that we do is like a massive deep dive strategy into the website. We build a one year strategy essentially. And what we're looking at is how much power does the current site have? Is it like just totally new or has it been around for five years? If it's been around for a few years, fantastic. That's the tick in the box for us. We don't work with brand new brands because of how long

Jordan:12:51
Very nice.

Thomas Phillips:12:53
it takes unless they're like, yeah, okay. I'm willing to invest for a year, before I start to see a return. So let's say, for example, business has been going for a good few years. They might have a, an underlying amount of digital PR, meaning they've been in different, publications because they have a great product. Great. Another tick in the box. And we're essentially looking at what is the power and authority of the site right now. on top of that, we're looking at how many pages does the site have overall?

Is it a very, very small, just paid centric site where they just have a ton of landing pages? All right. We got our work cut out. If they have a well developed front end website with proper collection pages and proper products and, everything is kind of set up correctly. Big tick in the box for us. Cool. We can get results a lot quicker. and then from there, what we're doing is a super, super deep dive into keyword research. We're looking at.

This is why we essentially interview people on the discovery call to really work out what products you have right now. What is your unique selling point? What are the use cases of the products? Is there any new products that's coming out? Because that's always a massive potential. And we're essentially looking at all the products that they have, which ones the client actually wants to rank for. And then we're analyzing it from a keyword perspective. So what is the opportunity here? Is it 1,000 searches per month?

Or is it a hundred thousand searches per month? Okay, sweet. Then we're basically looking at out of all those keywords we want to go after, they may or may not be ranking for right now. What is the competition level? Like are they on the same, like DR domain rating, also known as DA domain authority. Are they a similar, power to that site or are all the competitors at like. Dr 70 and they're down here at dr 20. Okay. There's a. giant gap we need to fill. This is going to take a lot longer. But if the competition is low and they're essentially at the same power already, or there's not much of a gap, awesome. Massive tick in the box for us. We can get results very quickly. And then we're basically looking at the entire architecture of the site. So we're then matching up the keywords with the pages. Now either those pages exist already and they need to be re-optimized, or they don't exist and they need to be created.

Thomas Phillips:15:18
From a collection page perspective, that's where we have a lot of potential because usually collection pages can go after a little bit broader keywords. And then we can build out other collection pages that have the same products in, which is excellent. So there's no like massive amount of extra work. It's just a case of the client creating that new collection page, us going in and fully optimizing it, internally linking it to the rest of the site, link building directly to it. creating other blog content that then links to it as well to build up the authority, and then essentially going from there. So it's a compounding each month, basically. So that is the overall plan. And then obviously we feed in digital PR. We want to get in as many big publications and placements as possible, because those are like rocket fuel for the website. Google's like big, big thumbs up. And then at the same time, obviously from an agentic storefront, chat GVT connection point of view. Again, another big area that we can optimize and connect, but a huge part of like GEO right now that a lot of people don't talk about is the backlinks, right? So if we can then, yeah, if we can then get on, again, larger publications, we can get inside the listicles, we can create our own listicles via like guest posts and different things like that. So we can be very, very creative with how we do things and...

Jordan:16:27
Talk to-

16:44 · How to use GEO and AI search to get your products showing up inside ChatGPT

Thomas Phillips:16:44
Ultimately from that initial full interview with the client, we're able to work out the use cases and unique selling points of the brand and the products overall. Then we're able to work out, okay, which, search queries, or phrases rather, do we actually want to track inside of the likes of chat GPT? Like which ones actually make a difference? Cause a new DTC brand trying to go after like best protein bar.

You know, it's not going to work, but if yours is like a super low carb, super high protein keto bar with bananas in or some shit, right? You know, yeah, then, okay. Yeah. We definitely stand a chance of, of ranking for that use case that that brand is linked up to. So that's pretty much the whole playbook. and then we have entire teams to implement each part of it that they specialize in.

Jordan:17:23
Exactly,

Jordan:17:42
Sorry, thank you.

Jordan:17:51
No exam.

Thomas Phillips:17:51
exactly the same now with my throat so I totally get it.

Jordan:17:56
Thank you so much for all the context there. So let's imagine for a second that everyone, you're on an interview with The Prospect, they take all five or 10 boxes. How long do they typically work with you? You mentioned 12 month plan. Is it typically a 12 month service that you guys like to encourage clients working with you?

18:17 · How long clients typically stay and why some have been with Thomas for over three years

Thomas Phillips:18:17
Yeah. Great question. Yeah. Usually we start off with like a six month initial commitment because within the first six months, like you are absolutely going to see results. so we don't like to do month to month because after like the first month, yeah, you, you might not see a whole lot of progress. Same thing. Like if you're just starting out on ads, great. You might see a couple of sales and be freaking raw as it's going to be awful. and then in terms of how long people stay for, like, we still have our original, first client with us, which was almost three years ago. And they just left us a fantastic trust pilot review just yesterday. So very, happy about that. yeah, basically we've done this for so many years at this point that we know exactly what we're doing. So it's just easy for us to roll out. And all we do is SEO. We don't do any paid, we don't do YouTube, we don't do anything else. We don't want to be a jack of all trades. We specialize in this and that's what we stick in.

19:15 · Why full service agencies almost always fail and what to do instead

Jordan:19:15
Thank you so much for saying that, man. No offense to full service agencies, like real talk, y'all fucking suck. Okay. Not at all your services, not all your services suck, but like 99 % do. Okay. Understand what you are good at. Go all in on the theme that you're actually competent at. And you know, for a fact, you can drive results for your clients. There are so much F in market share just for this one service you provide that you would still have a heyday in revenue. All right.

And I'm sure obviously you can say it first hand. Yeah. Okay. Another question. So back to the cliff bar or protein bar. Cool. When you say publications help, I logically know, but how exactly do you help with that? Are you paying? Cause I've actually done that in the past. I will, I will spill the beans. have paid to be featured in publications and bet your fucking ass it works. Are you guys out there doing that similar thing or

Thomas Phillips:19:44
Totally agree.

Jordan:20:12
Do you reach out to journalists, other publications, journalists to try to get earned media?

20:21 · How Thomas gets earned media placements in major publications without paying for them

Thomas Phillips:20:21
Yeah. Great question. Yeah. 99 % of the time it's earned media. Um, unless yeah. Oh yeah. Unless a client is like, I want to be in this specific site. Okay. Let's reach out to them. How much is it? All right. They want six grand for a placement. We don't think that's a good ROI, but if you really want to be in it, you can. Um, but yes, it's earned media and that's really like, that's why it's so difficult to get and why Google rates it so much.

Jordan:20:26
Really?

Thomas Phillips:20:50
because like these big, big websites, unless you're paying Forbes, you know, was having a look at Forbes brand kit the other day. It's like $80,000 for, for a placement in like Forbes Kazakhstan. And it was like 300 grand for Forbes, Italy. And I was like, U S is not even on this. I don't even know how much U S is, but, it was just, just ridiculous. Cause one of our clients was like, we have to be in Forbes. So we just went down a rabbit hole and, yeah.

I was like, okay, this is going to be pretty fricking difficult to get in. Um, but we've had organic, um, uh, placements in there from, from our outreach directly to journalists. So, and I'll see your question, Jordan. Yeah. We, we do PR in a few different ways. Um, we do gift guides, which is essentially like, um, Hey, someone, you know, mother's day is coming up. Great. We look at all of our clients products app. This one would be perfect. Let's reach out to them. hey, we want to get a placement. We might have to send the product to them. They get it. They review it. They add it on. Fantastic. Another way is that we basically build stories around certain brands. So we might have to do a ton of different research, bring in a data scientist, craft a story around certain angles. And then we pitch that to journalists that have published very similar things in the past.

That takes a shitload of work and is very, very hit and miss. the last way is inbound. So basically we're linked in with different networks, where they're saying, Hey, we need an expert. Let's say it's like a, need a TRT health doctor to comment on this very specific thing. Great. We have a network of experts who work with our, our clients brands, basically to answer that from an expert point of view.

Jordan:22:22
Yes.

Thomas Phillips:22:48
We then pitch that to the journalist and then we get the placement, we get the link. Everybody's happy.

Jordan:22:54
That makes so okay. Well, first off, life is a lot easier when you already have these connections to make your. But what you said topic number two was crafting the story, getting the data scientists doing all this fucking tedious fucking work. It's like, my gosh, it is a nightmare to try to earn to get placed in earned media. That was my impression. I'm like, fuck that dude. I got time for that shit. But if you have it down to a science, not no pun intended, but you have a strategy, a system.

Thomas Phillips:22:59
Yeah.

Thomas Phillips:23:15
Yeah.

Jordan:23:24
to get to earn earned media, to get featured in earned media. That makes a whole lot of sense. Now, with that being said, kind of want to change a course, not course, sure, change topics briefly. Talk to us about AISCO and GEO. From my experience, I am currently right now trying to get featured for my company on LLMs. And it, Claude basically said, create pages that are not even visible.

Thomas Phillips:23:29
Yeah.

Jordan:23:54
to fucking person on your website, but the pages need to be visible for LLMs. And I'm like, okay, what the fuck does that even mean? It's like, has to be written a certain way. It has to be written in like LLM code so the LLM can look at it and like figure out what the fuck you're talking about. I'm obviously a novice, but can you explain to me and the people how that shit works?

24:15 · The truth about hidden AI pages and what you should actually be doing instead

Thomas Phillips:24:15
Yeah, that's a great question. We're more on the side of that just isn't necessarily required. And what I mean by that is you can create, you can have that, that content published on the site and just have the schema inside of that content that the LLM can essentially read quicker than trawling through a bunch of HTML and JavaScript. So I would encourage to publish that content on the site at the same time.

You know, there's no harm in that. And you might get additional traffic coming in from the likes of Google or, um, you know, other search engines with things. So that is my recommendation. Publish it on, on, uh, yeah, publish it on the site. There's no reason to hide something and just show it to LLMs. Yeah.

25:01 · The secret to retaining clients for years and what most agencies get completely wrong

Jordan:25:01
Okay, thanks for the feedback there. I'll definitely look into that more. Now, like you said, you've had clients stay with you since you guys founded the company, three plus years. Talk to us about client retention, I mean, everyone wants to talk about new customer acquisition, but everyone forgets that it's so much fucking easier to keep a customer than to get a stranger as a customer. All right? Now, how do you manage to keep somebody for three years? What's the secret?

Thomas Phillips:25:23
Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. Great question. Yeah. So originally this one, was how did they originally come in? It was like, went to an event that a friend owned. was basically raising capital and he just randomly introduced me to this dude. And he was like, Hey, Thomas is an absolute SEO expert. You guys basically run your entire business off of SEO, but you're not doing a great job. You two should chat. I was like, all right, great. And then we got on like a house on fire.

So was great. You know, we've gotten really, really well. and we've just basically, built that relationship and just kept, kept the relationship going. I think that's really one of the biggest, the, the biggest parts of it is like, Hey, this is going great. This is not working so well. Here's our plan to fix it. Awesome. internally we've just fired our own, paid ads agency and CRO agency that were like,

Jordan:26:21
fired?

Thomas Phillips:26:21
in one thing. Yeah, literally just fired them last week because of, of shit like this, where it was, it felt like 20 minutes before the call, they'd come on, they'd quickly look at the ad account. This is for our other brand. nothing to do with our agency. They, they look at the thing, they get on the call and they're like, yeah, this kind of just hasn't worked a week. And this is like what we're going to do to fix it. I'm like, bro, if we're spending thousands a day on Google ads and we haven't made a sale in seven days.

Jordan:26:24
jeez.

Thomas Phillips:26:49
Why you just now coming to me and now saying we're going to make this change? I'm like, if it hits fucking day two and we haven't made any sales, you need to be on it. So I think this is another huge part is so many agencies seem to be spread so thin. And then they just bring in shitty talent and everything just goes to shit. so yeah, that, that has been a, a really big focus of ours internally, like Olivia, My co-founder and actually my wife, she pretty much runs the whole business. Absolutely fricking expert at it. She is like relentless on client retention relationships and making sure that everyone has everything that they need going forward with things. So that has been a massive thing. think like people who are trying to scale agencies, like having someone who is like an expert or operations is just absolutely critical and not, getting too greedy and spreading yourself too thin. You know, have a cap with that.

Jordan:27:52
Let's, yeah, go for it. Let's, let's actually discuss that. So what you're describing when you're spending a few thousand dollars per day, you haven't made zero sales and the agency did not reach out to you. That is reactive leadership. I think what separates good from the great, from the best is having proactive client success teams where I look in the ad account after two fucking days and I realized my client hasn't made a sale. I should reach out to them. Hey Thomas, you know,

Thomas Phillips:28:06
Mm.

Thomas Phillips:28:12
yes.

Jordan:28:20
Ad accounts looking pretty bad right now. You know, you just spent four grand and we have zero sales. Here is ABC steps that we're going to take to fix that. I know you're pissed, but don't worry. We're going to make it right. Oppose, hopping on that Saturday call, that Friday night call with your team. And you're like, dude, what the fuck are you guys doing? Like, why are you only getting, like having a plan of action 30 minutes before? Like the shit was fucked the last seven days. What are you doing? You know? Secondly, I think

Thomas Phillips:28:46
Yeah.

Jordan:28:48
We, like you said, put a hard cap on it. We should not have our client success team or a client success manager take on 30 accounts when they can only realistically take on 10, 15, max. know, if you are truly taking a proactive leadership stand as a CSM or a client success person, whatever, you have to be in constant, not constant, but in communication.

Thomas Phillips:29:01
Yeah. Yeah.

Jordan:29:15
with your team, with your clients, right? They wanna know what's going on with their account, whether it's good, normal, or bad. You need to constantly fill them in. They want to feel heard, respected, act as if like, I'm here paying you dollars every freaking month. show me some attention, support, love, whatever the case is, right? And I'm sure you can expand.

Thomas Phillips:29:22
Yes.

Thomas Phillips:29:37
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's exactly why we've just fired our, our agency, you know, it's like 12 and a half grand a month retainer. You know, we were, we, we were paying. Yeah. Yeah. Because, you know, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, and like, yeah, I, I hate to like shit on other agency, but it's, it's needed to, well, like yesterday I saw an ad.

Jordan:29:46
Twitter.

This is for the health business, right? Okay.

Jordan:30:02
They they suck,

Thomas Phillips:30:07
that had been posted and it was like the first clip of many clips that was meant to be edited together. And I immediately sent it to them. was like, guys, what the fuck is going on here? Why have you put like a nine, seven second clip or whatever, whatever it was when this is meant to be like a 30, 40 second video. And then the co-founder replied like, this was an error. I'm like, yeah, no shit was an error. He's like, will QA I'll be personally QAing, you know, going forward.

I'm like, bro, this is like ad account 101. Like I would be able to do better than this and I don't know ads.

Jordan:30:45
So, side note, what is the intention for the health company? Are you looking just to help other men eventually sell it, use it as like supplement income? Truly, is the goal with that? Let me ask you.

Thomas Phillips:30:46
That's what it is.

30:59 · The plan to exit Feel30 and why every TRT clinic Thomas tested was terrible

Thomas Phillips:30:59
Exit for sure. Big old exit. yeah. Absolutely. yeah.

Jordan:31:01
Yeah, for sure. Do you think it's possible? Because these big companies will definitely, definitely more than happy to purchase your company if it's obviously doing something right. You know what I mean?

Thomas Phillips:31:15
Yeah. I mean, we're, we're looking to acquire another TRT brand, you know, Hey, if there's anyone else, yeah. yeah. We want as many customers as possible. Let's go. We want to provide the absolute best service because like I've tested out so many different TRT clinics after living here in the States. And I'm like, they're all absolute shit. Like, God, there's so, there's so many reasons why, why I wanted to build this. And ultimately now we've built a whole system around exactly what I wanted. Like I don't have a whole lot of time. Yes. I want a nurse come.

Jordan:31:18
Boo?

Thomas Phillips:31:44
directly to my door, do my blood work, takes less than five minutes. Great. You know, I can then like book my doctor consultation on my time, not on someone else's time. We have next day doctor consultations versus the other ones I was testing was like seven days out all in one pricing. So actually, you know, the price is the price. You don't end up paying extra on shipment, extra on blood work every other month, extra on a doctor consultations, know,

Jordan:32:00
Yes.

Thomas Phillips:32:13
And then you look at the bill at the end of the month, you're like, how the fuck have I paid 450 bucks of TRT when, you know, and we're charging 229 monthly or 149 if you pay annually. it's, um, yeah, big, big difference with things, but yeah.

32:29 · What Feel30 costs and why it is built specifically for the busy entrepreneur

Jordan:32:29
Go ahead and do some promotion right now. I've tried two other companies. They same thing, bro. They add on the nickel and dime. You got to wait. You have to drive to the fucking clinic to get your blood work done. But what you're describing is fucking convenient. That's people pay extra money for. I can have a nurse in my house the next day in an hour, however quick five minutes in thing. God, I can talk to the doctor tomorrow if I wanted to. Like people will pay extra for that, especially if you're a busy entrepreneur.

Thomas Phillips:32:40
Yeah.

Thomas Phillips:32:49
Yep.

Thomas Phillips:32:55
Mm-hmm.

Jordan:32:59
So obviously I know price is very, but if you can ballpark that, cause I think I might be a customer right now, bro, to be honest with you. Wait, let me ask this. Do you guys help Utah? Do you guys serve Utah?

Thomas Phillips:33:05
Yeah.

Thomas Phillips:33:12
Uh, yeah. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. I, I'm 99 % sure we can do full TRT in Utah. I'll double check straight after this. Oh, uh, I'll speak to my team, but yeah, but yeah, we basically charge all in one price, 229 bucks a month for everything included. And as I said, if you, if you pay a year upfront, it equals 149 a month. Obviously you pay, you know, 1700 for, for a year upfront, but

Jordan:33:13
I know you're just kinda weird, but if can, fuck you.

Jordan:33:22
Yeah, yeah, we'll talk, we'll talk for sure.

Thomas Phillips:33:42
A lot of people do that and they save a shitload of cash. So yeah, that's great.

Jordan:33:45
Yeah, if you know you're gonna be on it and you know, like, the benefits, fuck yeah, I pay for the food you're up front every time. You kidding me?

Thomas Phillips:33:49
Yeah?

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, we're cheaper than a lot of TRT clinics, especially local ones. And we provide a much better service. So it's like, winner winner. Yeah.

Jordan:34:03
much better. No, absolutely. Okay, cool. Back to marketing. Now for your own in-house client acquisition, because you guys are ballers at SEO, does most of your traffic just come from SEO and AISCO and geo or are you running any outbound campaigns, any inbound advertising channels? What does that look like?

34:21 · How Thomas acquires clients for his own agency across SEO, referrals and paid traffic

Thomas Phillips:34:21
Yeah. Fantastic question. Yeah. It's really a mix of so many different things. Cause like with, from like an agency point of view, we're like, we do not want to be reliant on one channel only. So it, so it seems to be that it's like a trickle from multiple things. Like sometimes I, my sales guy, Patrick's like, Hey, when someone come in from chat, GBT, all right, great. What did they search? they searched this. Great. We had someone come in from SEO. Awesome. we also run, meta, ad traffic, coming in.

That is just extremely fucking expensive for us. So if anyone has any tips on how to make it better, please let me know because our cost of acquire customer is absolutely ridiculous. So that's a big pain in the ass. And it just seems to be like up and down. Yeah, which is annoying.

Jordan:34:55
Do it.

Jordan:35:11
Meta ads are extremely, I'm going to jump in really quick. have to. Meta ads are extremely fucking volatile. They're extremely expensive because everyone with a few hundred bucks wants to just fucking pretend they own an ad agency and just they don't know what the fuck they're doing. So I put everyone else up. Thirdly is I'm not sure if you're taking any of the best practices for Andromeda in your ad accounts, but you just need like 10 times more creatives than how you did last year. And if you don't, then the CPA cost, you know, cost for acquisition is going to be

Thomas Phillips:35:37
Yeah.

Jordan:35:41
through the roof. So you guys do that in house or that outsourced?

Thomas Phillips:35:43
Hmm.

Thomas Phillips:35:48
In-house, yeah, we have a media buyer as well, but then it's like me making the content. So then I'm like, fuck, I need to make so much content just to keep the flywheel going. And then the other one is obviously referrals. We love referrals so much. It's absolutely fantastic.

Jordan:35:53
Yeah.

Jordan:35:59
Yeah, arc.

Jordan:36:07
Serious question though, how did your sales rep know that traffic or that specific appointment came from JadGBT? And how do they know what the user said in order to get taken to your website?

Thomas Phillips:36:22
We do a like advanced way of doing things. We just ask them on the call. We're basically like, how did you find us? Chachi Puthi, what did you search? I searched this. All right, great. Thank you. I'll note that down. So.

Jordan:36:28
That's a great one.

Jordan:36:38
Dude, yeah, that shit right over my head, dude. Okay, cool. I thought you could use like some J4 or like some data, but no, ask him to... Right, yeah.

Thomas Phillips:36:45
I wish that, that, that'd be fantastic. I mean, the great thing is, is that we, we actively track all LLM traffic and sales because on top of the triple well dashboard we made for, from an SEO point of view, we duplicated that whole thing. and then just applied it to, LLMs and everything else around that. So now we're able to see actual revenue attributed to the likes of chat GPT. As an example, we're able to see which product sold. which landing pages they had, what the CPA is, what the revenue is, everything overall. So exactly the same thing that we can track with SEO.

Jordan:37:24
How the fuck are you doing that?

Thomas Phillips:37:27
We're tapped in on Triple Whale. So we've we've managed to build all of this out, which has been great. So, yeah.

Jordan:37:31
guys Okay. For sure. Serious question though, in regards to, like if I own an e-commerce, right? How important would you say it is for me to start taking SEO and LLMs seriously? And is it subjective upon what I actually sell?

37:55 · When SEO is not the right move and how to know before you invest

Thomas Phillips:37:55
Yeah. Yeah. SEO is definitely not for everyone, which is really why we have to build out that full deep dive strategy first, because there might be stuff on the surface where you think, this is actually not going to work. But then when we really spend a good few hours in on it, we're like, holy shit, there's a massive gold mine here, but the original brand owner just hasn't thought about it or hasn't optimized the site around that. So of course it's not going to be ranking for any keywords right now. so that's a really, really big part of it, but A lot of people that we see, I see a ton of ads on like Instagram. It's like SEO is dead. AI search is the new thing. Oh my God, you need to be on this. And I'm like, we look at the data of all our clients in the backend and we're looking at everything. We're like, all right, one of our clients, they do well over a hundred mil a year revenue. do 32 mil a year from organic search. They do $19,000 from the likes of ChatGPT and all the other ones combined.

And they have by far the most number of citations across all of our clients. And one of the highest that I've just seen inside of a trefs, one of our SEO tools as well. So there's, yeah, I think there's just this massive hype around it. And obviously a lot of people, you know, use it to find products, but at the end of the day, you're still like going across to, to Google and then searching for something or, know, I find myself doing this as well as I'm like, Straddling between the two I'm like, you know, give me some information about this. All right, it's mentioned this this and this Let me go over and search here. The price was totally fucking wrong. Okay, I'm just gonna use Google and just go through and buy something Yeah, so I think there's a lot of people that are super super bullish on this and they're like I only want to invest in geo I'm like, yeah. All right. Great. The return is gonna be shit You also need SEO look at the freaking numbers, you know

39:35 · Why AI search is massively overhyped and what the real data actually shows

Jordan:39:35
sure.

Thomas Phillips:39:49
We're still pulling in giant numbers and it's increasing still. So it's a, it's really interesting. The mindset, um, shift, I think that the, the, people have seen like AI is so amazing. It's going to save the world. And you know, we need to fire our whole team because AI is just here to save us. I'm like, it's not like we spent so much time going in on it and like, yeah, okay. Yeah. It might help with some automations and assist your workflow and stuff. awesome. But like to replace entire teams, think is just, yeah, something we're not, certainly not investing in our end. Yeah.

Jordan:40:24
Nonsense.

Jordan:40:30
No, for sure. I clearly agree that efficiencies, agentic workflows, like that's awesome, right? Definitely helps my business as it helps a lot of other businesses. But like you said, there needs to be some human element behind those agentic workflows, behind growing and scaling the business. Does it help? Absolutely. But like humans at the end of the day are going to be, they need to operate the fucking business, you know? I, for personal experience, I think that Depending on who your customer type is, is where you should probably invest into SEO or AISCO. Let me just explain it this way. If I sell to businesses, right, businesses like you and I, we probably look up more questions inside LLMs opposed instead of Google. I don't know about you. That's what I, I, right. Now, if you are an e-com company and you sell direct to consumer, keyword fucking consumer, not a business.

Thomas Phillips:41:18
Yo, yeah.

Jordan:41:28
They probably utilize Google to look up shit, right? So definitely double down, triple down on SEO while simultaneously kind of working out AISCO and geo on the backend. know, Google will always dominate the space. They're fucking Google. Like they're not going anywhere. So to think that Google is dead and AISCO is dead, like you're a fucking ignorant. You know what I mean?

Thomas Phillips:41:47
Yeah. Yeah. yeah. It is crazy. And the great thing now is like the fundamentals of SEO also feed geo or AI search, whatever you want to end up calling it, which is fricking epic for us because it's like, great. We can create a piece of super well optimized blog content that not only ranks inside of Google, but now it also appears inside of the likes of chat. Gbt. Epic. Fantastic. Super happy about that.

Yeah. And I think a lot of, lot of ads that I see they're like promoting like, right first inside of LLMs. I'm like, okay, let's go in and explore this. And what they're actually saying is like you're ranking inside of it for like a question query, which is very, very easy to rank for. But as we know from blog content, as well as that does not convert. If I'm searching, is a blue bottle, the coolest. bottle to have who the fuck cares that is not going to result in a sale. Right. But if it's like, what is the best blue, flask that has like really thick inside the in Texas heat, you know, my water stays cold. All right. Fantastic. If that use case and that unique selling point is mentioned on your website and in external third party websites, chat GPT puts two and two together and goes, great, this is the perfect website and the perfect product for you.

And that's it. so creating just a ton of shitty blog content, like AI slop is the absolute worst way to go. and you will absolutely get penalized by Google for it. You know, like why would it ever rank AI slop over something that is like super well researched and well written by someone who is an expert in that space? You know? So yeah, I think people are just trying to cut corners though. And it's some, you're just going to get shot in the foot, you know,

43:46 · Why publishing AI slop content will destroy your Google rankings

Jordan:43:46
There's no, can't. Well, you can't. I mean, this this goes to all life principles, brother, personal business life marriage. Like you can't cut corners. If you cut corners, you make it, you know, that's just that's universal laws. You know, I do. I do want to end on this one question here. Thomas, obviously you had an amazing career, you know, sold 17 companies. You own two companies right now.

Thomas Phillips:43:46
or just never even starts ranking.

Thomas Phillips:43:53
Yeah.

Thomas Phillips:43:58
No.

Thomas Phillips:44:03
Absolutely.

44:12 · The one thing Thomas would tell his younger self to get to success faster

Jordan:44:12
You know, looking back, what is one thing you can tell your 20 year old self about how to get to where you are faster?

Thomas Phillips:44:23
Where I am faster.

That is a great question.

I would say, all right, yeah. So, so if I was to tell my 20 year old self something in order to get here faster, I would say, don't split your focus. Don't go after the shiny object syndrome. You know, I was at like, I made that mistake so many times. Um, basically something was successful. was like, great. If we create 40 more of these websites, we'll be even more successful. No.

It just took the focus away from the main thing, the golden goose, and try to feed all the little ducklings that didn't end up working because we were spread so thin, didn't have the right, like operational team in place, didn't have the right, company structure and set up of, of team in general. And everything just, you know, fizzles out pretty fast. So I'd say that's a really big thing. I've had so many calls with different mentors where they've just been like, you need to just reckon kill all this shit. and just work on the like one, maybe two things. And now that's why I'm like, I have two things. That's it. Like I'm selling all my UK property portfolio, selling all of my investment cars and everything like that. Everything's just going into easy stocks and like S and P and treasury bills. That's it. Cause I've realized that like my investment portfolio outside of online,

Thomas Phillips:45:56
It's just like, gets so messy and murky like, sort this mortgage out. we sell this property. there's a problem with this tenant. know, all this stuff just takes up so much, so much time. B don't necessarily think about it or realize it at the start. So I've tried to just recently simplify as much stuff as possible so that I can put as much focus on the two businesses that we're running. and like, that's it. I'm capping out there. No, I'm not buying any more properties. I don't want to manage anything else. It's just simplification. So yeah, I wish I had done that sooner and realized that as opposed to being like, Ooh, this looks like a great opportunity. Jump into that.

Jordan:46:39
think that's great advice and that is probably the exact same thing I tell my younger self as well. Do not split attention, motherfucker. Focus, dude. Double down, triple down on this one thing. No, Thomas, I had a blast. I was cracking jokes, smiling, laughing the whole time. You have awesome energy, brother. I would love to have you back for the next nine to 12 months to see how things are and to make another awesome episode.

Thomas Phillips:46:44
Nice.

Thomas Phillips:46:52
Likewise.

Thomas Phillips:47:01
Yeah, I appreciate that Jordan. Thank you so much for your time. It's been been a lot of fun.

Jordan:47:06
course, audience, we love you guys. We'll talk y'all soon.