Steve Toth from SEO Notebook Interviewed By James Dooley

James Dooley: When I have an idea I want to share it with the world. We don't have any lock in to our clients’ websites. SEO agencies take on projects they should never touch. Today I'm joined with Steve Toth from SEO Notebook. Good having you Steve.

Steve Toth: Hey James. Good to be here.

James Dooley: I'm going to jump straight into it. I'm not going to go into the FreshBooks story because most people have heard it. I want to talk about your Saigon talk and the Go-Giver. Can you expand on that for anyone who didn’t watch it? And have you always had that personality trait or did a mentor push you towards the idea that the more you give the more you get back?

Steve Toth: I've always been the type who wants to share ideas. Even when I worked at companies I set up knowledge-sharing lunches and things like the 9:55 where we'd share something ten minutes before the first meeting of the day. Sharing has always been natural for me. The Go-Giver reinforced the idea of sharing at scale. Not just one-to-one but reaching as many people as possible. LinkedIn became the first channel for that then the newsletter. Both remain my main platforms. The other side of the Go-Giver idea is giving at scale and then making sure people know how they can help you. For me you can hire me as a consultant, attend my conference or subscribe to the newsletter. Lastly you need to be open to receiving help. Nobody told me to do this. Someone once mentioned that what I was doing felt like the Go-Giver. I read the book and it shaped a lot of my business decisions.

James Dooley: Sounds great. Let’s jump into your conference. SEO IRL. When is the next one and where is it? I assume Toronto. And who’s speaking?

Steve Toth: This will be the fourth event. On 4 October 2024. Our first three were evening events. More low key. Fewer speakers but great for networking. This time it's a full day. Not two days yet but bigger. Mike King is headlining. Fery Kaszoni, Bibi, Shiv Naran, Viv Kakari and a few more soon. We'll also have a panel. Toronto has loads of great SEOs and marketers but no event to call our own. I was in a position to kick-start it and it grew from there.

James Dooley: You mentioned your subscribers. SEO Notebook has exploded. If anyone doesn't know who Steve Toth is I strongly recommend subscribing. Where did the idea come from? And what are your plans for SEO Notebook and SEO IRL? Are you aiming for a two or three day event eventually?

Steve Toth: The idea came from not being organised. I'm creative but not organised. I had ideas everywhere. Post-it notes. Emails to myself. Slack messages. So I decided to dump everything into Evernote. A day later I realised I already had great notes in there so why not send one page per week as an email? That became SEO Notebook in 2019. I've sent an email every week for five years. It changed my life and let me become a full-time entrepreneur. As for plans I want to keep doing what works. As long as I’m doing SEO I’ll have ideas. I prefer giving the content to subscribers rather than publishing all strategies publicly. IRL will keep expanding based on attendance and feedback. SEO Notebook has led to consulting which grew into Notebook Agency. A hybrid between consultancy and agency. That’s where I see things heading.

James Dooley: You haven’t missed a note in years. Where do you find the information and is it still you sourcing every idea?

Steve Toth: It's still me. Full editorial control. All inspiration comes from doing SEO. If I wasn't hands-on I couldn’t write the notes. Being able to spend more time on R&D helps too especially with AI exploding over the last two years. I feature ideas from people I respect including you. I keep a backlog of inspiration but the best notes come from whatever inspired me that week.

James Dooley: Now SEO Notebook led to the agency. You mainly consult rather than doing full fulfilment. You once told me you try never to log into clients’ websites. Why take that approach?

Steve Toth: We never log into clients’ websites. In 2018 I had a dev project go wrong. Broken forms. AWOL developers. It put me off touching client sites forever. At FreshBooks I saw how large companies prefer vendors to give recommendations rather than access their sites. Some enterprise clients won’t even give full access to Search Console. In enterprise you work through internal teams not inside their systems.

James Dooley: And consulting wise is it just SEO or do you cover PPC and social?

Steve Toth: We stick to SEO with light CRO guidance. No account managers. When a client speaks to someone they speak directly to a strategist. If you offer lots of services you need account managers to translate everything. We avoid that. Our strategists speak directly to clients which keeps communication clean.

James Dooley: A lot of your branding is around Enterprise SEO. What’s the difference between enterprise and traditional client SEO?

Steve Toth: With enterprise you’re part of a bigger team. You don't build the whole strategy yourself. There are separate specialists for strategy technical SEO links and multiple vendors. You work with SEO managers at the company who already understand SEO. It’s collaborative. You're not educating someone who has no background and questioning you all the time. Breaking into enterprise isn’t easy. You need pedigree and results. But the working relationship is far better.

James Dooley: What’s wrong with the traditional client SEO model?

Steve Toth: Account managers are often middlemen with low SEO knowledge. Many agencies take on projects they should reject because the client will never be competitive. They do it because they need revenue. That creates a catch-22. You want someone busy enough to reject bad clients but not too busy to serve you. The model breaks when you have a salesperson selling something an account manager doesn't understand and the backend SEO might be poor quality. We structured the agency to avoid all of that.

James Dooley: Moving on. We spoke earlier about the DISC personality model. You’ve used it heavily. How has it shaped your team?

Steve Toth: DISC is a personality framework based on communication preferences. D is direct. I is influential. S is supportive. C is conscientious. I'm a CD. You’re probably a DI. Knowing your own profile and your team’s profiles helps you put people in the right roles. A salesperson should be a DS or SI not a C. It also lets the team know how to communicate with each other. At FreshBooks we had nine weeks of DISC training. I deepened that through masterminds and it’s become essential for hiring and management.

James Dooley: Another community question. How did you go from solopreneur to agency owner?

Steve Toth: It wasn’t conscious. I did well solo with freelancers supporting me. But it isn’t sustainable long term. Eventually good people wanted to work with me. I said yes. It grew naturally from there.

James Dooley: How do you leverage automation or AI within the agency?

Steve Toth: Endless ways. One favourite is automated title tag optimisation. We scrape the top 100 results count word frequency in their title tags then ask AI to write variations using only those words plus unique value. It produces far better titles than telling ChatGPT to write one. We automate many things with Python and run them through shared servers. Long tasks run overnight. It's fast cheap and flexible.

James Dooley: Another question. What do you focus on and what do you avoid to make the agency great?

Steve Toth: We avoid touching websites. We avoid clients who obsess over tiny content details before anything ranks. We educate them that speed to publish matters more. Fine-tuning comes later. We avoid low-probability projects entirely.

James Dooley: Why do you think Notebook Agency is better than the competition?

Steve Toth: You're only as good as your strategy team. We’ve built an elite team. Former engineers. Former computer scientists. People with 20 years of intense practice not just dabbling. Most agencies can't attract this calibre. We also get to cherry-pick clients. We perform full audits before taking anyone on. If we can’t make a big difference we say no. That naturally raises our success rate.

James Dooley: Name something about your business mindset you’ve never said publicly.

Steve Toth: I’m very introverted and thought it would hold me back especially in sales. At some point you must be comfortable being uncomfortable. My first talk at FreshBooks was in front of 400 people. Terrifying. But doing it changed everything. Whatever scares you just do it. You have nothing to lose.

James Dooley: Name one thing people don’t know about you.

Steve Toth: I've been doing SEO for 14 years. For the first seven I was not very good. I was passionate but results were average. I consumed everything from Moz to Matt Cutts. I believed every Google statement. It wasn’t until 2016–17 when I learned from people like Kyle Roof and Matt Diggity that I actually became effective. Before that I’d have struggled to run a full campaign well.

James Dooley: If you could ask a Google engineer one question what would it be and why?

Steve Toth: How do I rank without links? What are the most important non-link signals? What’s the baseline of links needed for huge sites? How can I start a mega authority site cost-effectively?

James Dooley: If you inherited Google tomorrow and could change one thing in the algorithm what would you change?

Steve Toth: I would give smaller sites more visibility. And stop forcing Reddit into every SERP. If users want Reddit they can type it. Smaller publishers who care about content deserve visibility. I don’t want a future where 1,000 sites get 95 percent of the traffic.

James Dooley: It’s been a pleasure. Where can people follow you?

Steve Toth: seonotebook.com. LinkedIn under Steve Toth. And SEOIRL.com for the conference.

James Dooley: Great having you. See you in Chiang Mai.

Steve Toth: Definitely. See you there.