Charlie Sells brings 15 years of experience in brand messaging and positioning to discuss how small businesses can cut through complexity and build authentic brands that show up in search.

Service Business Branding Charlie explains why service-based businesses should "stay hyper local" rather than trying to compete regionally. His advice for finding your competitive advantage? "Don't try to be bigger. Don't try to be flashier. Don't try to be anything other than who you are."

Working with a Florida event staffing company, Charlie discovered their retention rate was in the 80-90% range. "They're the most trusted name in conference and event staff"—that became their differentiator, not trying to be the biggest.

The Two-Part Brand Audit Framework Charlie always looks for two things: "Are we being really consistent? Every touchpoint of our brand—does it look the same, does it sound the same, does it feel the same on a sales call, social media, website, emails, in-person interactions?"

Second: "Are you really leaning into your unique competitive advantage?"

Branded vs. Non-Branded Search From his time at Dave Ramsey's Ramsey Solutions, Charlie learned a crucial lesson: "If they will get their branded terms right, then you can focus on the non-branded terms." He warns that "shiny object syndrome is rampant amongst entrepreneurs" who chase non-branded traffic while neglecting the basics.

His blunt take: "Search engines are the yellow pages today. You want to make it easy for somebody to just find you like that."

The Website Problem Charlie's most surprising piece of advice for clients: "If the weight of your business lands on your website, you have a problem."

Why? Your website is just one piece of your ecosystem. "If everything in your ecosystem is speaking the same language, then it's going to work." But when there's "no cohesive experience, no ecosystem," that's when brands struggle.

Technical SEO Still Matters Charlie shares a story about his staffing client who had keywords "in the graphic at the top of our page. In a designed graphic that can't be crawled, that had no alt text. I'm like, 'Nobody cares about that and Google's not recognizing it.'"

The lesson? "You have to plant a flag in the ground and say, here I am, and make it easy for people to find you."

Is SEO Dead? Charlie's take on the AI/LLM disruption: "I don't think traditional SEO is dead still. I think it still matters." While LLMs are changing search, "somebody is still looking for what you have" and "it still matters that you match intent more than anything else."

His strategy for the AI era? "I'm pushing folks to go way more grassroots and find ways to get on podcasts with niche audiences that are actually in their ICP."

Charlie's Two Essential Switches When onboarding clients, Charlie always starts with:

1. Mindset of Curiosity: "You've got to have a mindset of curiosity. If you are certain, if you are dead set, if you are rigid in your thinking about your brand, then this is not going to go well." His favorite question: "What is it like to be on the receiving end of your brand?"
2. Hold It With an Open Hand: "We've got to zoom out and not just think end of the month, end of the quarter. We've got to think about if where we want to be a year from now is our goal. What has to be true between now and then?"

Redirecting Good Ideas One of Charlie's most valuable skills is helping clients understand placement: "Just because it doesn't belong here doesn't mean it doesn't belong somewhere." A direct-to-camera video might be perfect for an email sequence but wrong for the homepage.

Wyatt Bonicelli of Evolve Agency shares practical local SEO tactics for home service businesses—from Google Business Profile optimization and location page strategy to creative link building through local sponsorships and a clever gift card referral system that turns every customer into a lead generator.

In this episode, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Wyatt Bonicelli, founder of Evolve Agency in Edmond, Oklahoma, to discuss the unique challenges and opportunities in marketing home service contractors. An engineer turned marketer, Wyatt has carved out a niche helping window cleaners, roofers, and other service professionals transition from relying solely on word-of-mouth to building a sustainable online presence that generates leads on autopilot.

The conversation covers the full spectrum of local SEO—from the critical importance of Google Business Profile verification to the age-old question of "how many location pages are too many?" Wyatt shares his approach to building local authority through sponsorship link building, Chamber of Commerce memberships, and creative tactics like using ChatGPT to find partnership opportunities.

Perhaps most valuable are the practical, low-cost marketing wins Wyatt recommends: car magnets, A-frame signs, door hangers with neighbor referrals, and a brilliant gift card system that creates a built-in affiliate program for service businesses. He also drops a Google Maps "driving directions hack" that sends trust signals to Google daily.

The episode wraps with a candid discussion about lead follow-up—why 90% of service calls go unanswered and how the Harvard study showing 400% better conversion within five minutes should change how contractors approach their phones.

• Why home service contractors struggle to invest in marketing (and how to meet them where they are)
• Google Business Profile optimization for service-area businesses without a physical address
• The location page debate: How many is too many in 2024?
• Hub-and-spoke internal linking strategy for multi-location businesses
• Creative link building through local sponsorships and advanced Google queries
• The noindex mistake that cost one client years of branded search visibility
• Steve Hunziker's gift card referral system explained
• Why LLMs haven't disrupted local SEO (yet)
• Combining Meta ads with SEO for short-term and long-term growth
• The $10/day Meta ad strategy that pre-sells door-to-door visits
• Lead follow-up statistics that should terrify every service business owner
• Low-hanging fruit: Car magnets, A-frames, and door hangers
• The Chamber of Commerce SEO bump
• Google Maps driving directions hack for daily trust signals

"Any page on your website that doesn't have a link internally, externally, it's probably not going to get indexed."

"You're 400% more likely to convert if you call within the first five minutes."

"Let's turn one lead into more. Let's try to get three or four out of every one. And that pyramid will just continue to grow."

"We're kind of in a bubble a lot of times and think that everybody else is using the tools the same way that we are."

"If they don't have any web presence at all, no online reviews or a website talking about what they do and where—it's a little harder to trust them with a big check."

Wyatt Bonicelli is the founder of Evolve Agency, a digital marketing firm based in Edmond, Oklahoma specializing in web development and SEO for home service contractors. With a background in engineering, Wyatt brings a systematic, results-driven approach to helping small businesses—particularly window cleaners, roofers, and renovation contractors—build their online presence and generate leads without relying solely on wor...

In this deep-dive conversation, Alejandro Meyerhans shares his journey from Spanish waiter to CEO of a successful link building agency, revealing the mathematical foundations and strategic frameworks that make link building work. We explore the science behind PageRank, the evolving role of links in LLM optimization, Google's HCU updates, and the hard truths about operating within platform ecosystems.

Alejandro Meyerhans is the CEO of GetMeLinks, a strategic link building agency serving agencies and CMOs. Since 2016, Alejandro has built his SEO expertise from the ground up—starting with affiliate sites, becoming a forensic SEO auditor, and eventually leading one of the industry's most respected link building operations. He's known for his data-driven approach, combining mathematics, game theory, and rigorous testing to demystify what actually works in modern link building.

Connect with Alejandro:

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alejandro-meyerhans
• YouTube: Alejandro Meyerhans SEO
• Company: GetMeLinks.com

• How Alejandro discovered SEO in 2016 while trying to escape waiting tables in Spain
• Working with Dominic Wells at Onfolio (now NASDAQ-listed)
• The transition from building affiliate sites to becoming a forensic SEO auditor
• How he became CEO of GetMeLinks after being a client first
• The intersection of math, statistics, game theory, and SEO

• Why link building has intentional opacity and FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt)
• Key influencers: Charles Floate, Matt Diggity, and the TEDSEO testing community
• Understanding what's working versus understanding why it works
• The importance of analyzing competitive backlink profiles
• How to read the link graph and replicate winning strategies

• PageRank: The foundational "link juice" model and how it divides authority
• Anchor text ratios: Why exact match anchors no longer work (0% in most winning profiles)
• Reasonable Surfer: Link placement matters—body links above the fold carry more weight
• Passage rank: Surrounding text relevance amplifies or diminishes link value
• Link velocity: Must be proportional to traffic, brand search volume, and referral sources
• Container authority: The power of both the linking page AND the linking domain
• Sequential timing: Why you can't start a new site with 100 digital PR links

Related Resource: How to Start a Link Building Campaign

• Understanding Google's seed list: .gov, .edu, and tier one authorities
• How topical authority spreads from hub sites in each vertical
• Why locksmith SEO is different from e-commerce which is different from YMYL
• The completion game: You only need to match top 3 competitors plus a bit more
• SEO as a jigsaw puzzle—technical foundation, content, user signals, brand signals
• The logarithmic nature of PageRank (getting from DR 80 to 90 costs exponentially more)

Related Resource: Link Building for New Websites