From High School Teacher to SEO Powerhouse: Frank Olivo of Saga Pixel on Niching, Video Content & Scaling Success

Hey everyone, welcome to Hack to the Future with Kyle Roof. I am Kyle Roof, and today we have Frank Olivo, the CEO of Saga Pixel. Frank, thanks for being here.

Hey Kyle, thanks for having me. It's really an honor to talk with you. I've been following your stuff for a few years now.

Oh, I appreciate it. The pleasure is all mine, to be honest. The audience doesn't know this, but it turns out we get to chat a little bit before the episode, and I also met you a little while ago, and each time it's been a really fun talk. I've really enjoyed chatting with you. Hopefully the podcast comes out as well. This day turns out to be like we were just like laughing and cutting it up and then we get on this and it's the worst show of all time. It'll be good. It'll be good. I promise. One thing I wanted to start with Saga Pixel, it's not a usual name. When you started the agency, I don't even know if there's a usual name for an agency, but it's something that every time I see the word it sticks with me, which I think is probably pretty good marketing, actually. But, how did you settle on that name? What does it mean?

So when I started the company, it was really just to do an LLC for one for my freelancing. And I named the company 12 kilohertz. I was a musician. I was into audio recording. It was the high end of the audio spectrum, like the treble knob, basically in your, on your stereo. And I thought I was clever. But the problem was when it turned into a company, no one could say it, no one could remember it. We had clients saying, I, one of our clients butt dialed me and I heard the recorder say, yeah I called Frank at 12 megawatts and I'm like, I got to change the name of the company. I think this isn't working. So we went into, I wanted to start off with, because we were very focused at, I still believe very much that whole story brand approach to marketing. I want to tell the story, but and then we were saying that well, I'm doing the marketing We're working with pixels when we're doing the websites. It's a pixel So pixel but story pixels just sounded very small and I'm a more dramatic type of person Like, bit when you're running a business, you're not telling stories. Honestly, it's a saga for all of us so that was where it came from I put the saga and the pixel together and I liked what it evoked when I What, like the mental associations, what it sounded like, and that was what we settled on when I had to rebrand, which was not fun, by the way.

Oh , it's not fun to change the colors on a website. A rebrand's gotta be more fun. You, now you have niched into being a digital marketing agency for healthcare providers. And there's the expression that niches make reaches. But How did you settle on healthcare? Like how did you get in okay, this is the one we need to jump in on. Did you get a bunch of clients in it and it just made sense or did you have like experience there or like how did that go?

So in the early days, like everybody, it was like, will you pay me? Okay, I'll work for you. And we got, and I got all kinds of stuff, and doing a lot of local SEO, there were a lot of lawyers in there. In the early days, I was focused on attorney digital marketing. Problem is that space, you can't throw a stone without hitting five companies that specialize in that. It was too saturated. I didn't see there being a problem needing yet another Good SEO agency in that space, so I looked at who else are we working with? And it turned out that we were getting, we just happened to be getting a lot of med spas. It was actually the second client that I ever got when I went out was a med spa here in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. And from there, my wife's a physician. I found that a lot of the stuff that we were doing for the lawyers worked for, actually pretty much everything worked for, healthcare, and it was nowhere nearly as competitive. Like if you can rank a personal injury lawyer in a certain market without a 10, 000 budget, you can win anything. It was easy to step in and help the home care agencies and the plastic surgeons, the med spas, the dermatologists, and so forth.

I think if somebody's going to make the decision to niche down a concern that they have is limiting themselves. As you're saying, I think we all do this. If you've got money and you'll pay me, I'll take you. And then you decide to niche into healthcare. What happens when that law firm shows up and said, Hey, my buddy runs that that med spa, you're crushing it for him. Can you take my law from, do you still take those and you just don't really advertise for it or do you actually push them away?

So we, if we can help them, we'll, and I think they're going to be a good client. We'll take them. But What I found is that really is a lot less, it's a lot less common than it used to be. Though at the same time, in the last month, we had a coin collecting place locally that called us. I honestly am just not interested in working with that type of business. I didn't even meet with the guy. And like another sort of random type of business. Sometimes I don't even think they read the copy on the website. But, when, we do have a solar panel company, we have a gaming PC's company. When they came to us, I knew that we could help them, so I was like, alright, let's go for it.

I think maybe another concern that people have in niching down is What is the concern that was in there? What is it? Oh it's the you have two locations in the same, or two types of, say, two med spas in the same location. Can you service them both? Do you have any concerns? Are there ethical concerns? Are there practical concerns? Can you do it or do you try to not do that?

Yeah, that's a good question. I, what we end up doing usually is, I have to tell the first one and I'll make sure that I have completely different teams working on those accounts and I'll also make it where one team can't access the others. So like the Google, any sort of shared accounts don't have any of each other's data, like Google search console or Google ads or anything like that will create child accounts in Google ads, for example. But it's very, it's honestly because we have we work with clients pretty much worldwide at this point. It doesn't happen very often. I did, however, recently pass on a local. On a med spa, actually it was a franchise of a national med spa in Charlotte because we already had a client, I don't know, in Charlottesville, because we already had a client in Charlottesville and I just, I didn't want to, I didn't see how we were going to make it work because they had an employee that went from one place, went to the other. This is a little bit too close for comfort.

So those are maybe some of the potential pitfalls. Obviously, there are advantages in that you have familiarity with. with the industry, the lingo, probably a lot of the roadblocks or speed bumps, et cetera. Is there anything that really stands out though to you like in niching down, this became so much easier, we could handle this better, or maybe like your productivity or your efficiency was better, those sorts of things.

Yeah, so there's a few that come to mind. We were working with a plastic surgeon in London. that was spending a decent amount of money on Google ads. And he does all body plastic surgery. And one of the keywords that we were bidding on was BBL surgery. We were also bidding on BBL surgeon. BBL surgery just did not convert. Honestly, it was spending 80 percent of his budget and like driving zero conversions. We eventually came to the conclusion that for most searchers, that was largely an informational search. It was people that wanted to know what it was, or what was involved with it, but weren't necessarily in the market. That's not the case for, as you probably know, rhinoplasty. I know your surgery your rhinoplasty Plano case.

I am an expert in rhinoplasty.

And it's also not the case with facelift surgery. queries, but specifically for BBL, people don't exactly know what it is, and you need to know that, honestly, going into that, if you're running a PPC campaign, and you only earn, you only get those insights by doing it, not by, or by hearing somebody else tell you hey, by the way, you're bidding on this keyword. I think that's one thing. Other thing, another thing is we also work with a lot of home care agencies. Last year, maybe 2023, maybe in 2023, we started combining all of our Google ads search term supports from all of our accounts, and it started giving us insights that you didn't really see when you looked at individual accounts specifically. And I remember one of them was that there was a lot of people that out of maybe out of nowhere, or maybe for the first time we noticed we're looking for overnight care. So basically, this is somebody that comes to watch your Grandma, when during the day most home care, almost no home care agencies really optimize their websites and search for overnight care, which is basically I need to sleep so that I can get to work the next morning. I need somebody to watch my dad, overnight. And we were able to go back to the SEO teams and tell them like, Hey guys, we need to optimize for this because I'll tell you, even like a brand new website can rank for a keyword when no one has a page that's optimized for it. You're back to 2008 SEO now. You can only get that sort of stuff when you have very spec, when you're niched down, when you're really focused on specific industries and verticals.

Very cool.

And then you get on the sales poll and you tell the next prospect this sort of stuff and they're like, yeah, I'm not even considering, the big name company that doesn't have the industry expertise.

Something when people are starting an agency and they come to me and talk about what should I do when starting an agency, something that I talk about is you need your point of view, you need your voice, you need your perspective. Like, why would people come to you? What makes it stand out so that it's something that's recognizable and they're like, oh, this is the agency that does this, or this is the agency that has this philosophy, or this is how they're going to approach it. And so by having that exactly what you're saying, that's how you can compete against huge, and huge when you're not huge, and huge just yet. Because you're like, hey, yeah you're talking to other agencies, you're talking to agencies with a lot of experience, but you know what? We're specialized in this. This is all we do. And I think. That kind of give probably presents opportunities that I know it like when we did our approach on like a scientific approach, like we test we got clients, we didn't deserve just by standing out in that way and having very specialized knowledge that we knew that the other agency they were talking to didn't have. So that makes a ton of sense to me. I guess it would just be a tricky thing on how quickly to niche. Especially when you're in that initial growth, we just need to take anything that walks through the door phase to okay, we're niching into this. Is there a balance you could think of as you went through it yourself, where you slowly but surely get a little more choosy in the niche, if you will?

I don't know, Kyle. That's a really good question. I don't know the answer to that. I think that really the big worry that everybody has is that if I, once I niche down, I'm going to get people, I would have gotten business, I would have gotten businesses that I would have, that can afford to pay me, that are going to land on my website and say, Oh, they don't work with businesses like mine. But what they don't consider is the fact that there were a lot of Businesses coming to your website that you're actually extremely qualified to work with that don't realize it because you're not really communicating it through the website. It's in our case it was six of one, half a dozen of another. What I do think is that you can make your total addressable market a little bit too small by niching down too much. For example, I've mentioned home care several times. The largest, other than the organizations that have gone after franchises and closed like the home, like the corporate offices of the franchise companies, other than them, the ones that specialize in home care, SEO and PPC and whatever, they are really small. I think that the biggest one may have 10 or 15 employees, and I think that in those cases, and that's probably about as big as they can possibly get in that space. And I would forewarn businesses, any agency owners that are looking to niche down about that. If your aspiration is to have a 10 million a year company, you're probably not going to accomplish that by specializing in. I don't know, home care agencies, for example.

Sure. That makes perfect sense. Now, a fun part of your origin story is that you were a high school teacher for 13 years. And I believe you taught Italian and Spanish. Is that has my research team done the research correctly?

That's been years.

Thank you for your service.

Yeah, I feel like I should be there are, there were days when I felt I should be getting like free coffee some days at Wawa, I don't know.

So as a teacher of Italian, I assume that you are well versed in Italian culture, which takes us to the point in our show where we're going to play the game, pasta or bacteria. I'm going to give you a word and you're going to tell me if this is a pasta, an Italian pasta or a bacteria. Do you understand the rules of the game?

Very much.

Okay, here we go. Number one. Spirilla.

That is a bacteria.

Correct! I got that wrong. Correct. Next one. Cavatappi.

Cavatappi is a pasta.

Correct. Bacilli.

That is a bacteria.

Very good. Camellia.

What was that?

Gamilla.

I think that's probably a bacterium as well.

That one's a pasta.

Really?

Maybe I said it wrong. I'm sorry. And then

Wait, is it gemelli?

Oh, there you go. You got me.

Like G E M E L L I?

I speak approximately zero Italian.

Oh, okay. Yeah.

We'll give you half credit on that.

Half a point. I'll take it.

And then last but not least I've got Ditalini.

That is a pasta.

You nailed it. We'll call it five for five. We'll give you that, great work.

I get to keep my teaching certification.

Yeah. They will not take the MBA away or the teaching certificate.

The state of New Jersey's not gonna call, but you're not using this anyway, so we're taking it away.

Actually I was thinking about it a bit. The amount of like preparation you have to do for a class, the public speaking, the energy that you have to keep up being quick on your feet, personable, working with admin and the and then also the consumer. That's what we do every day. I think actually, those 13 years were probably an excellent crash course in how to run a service based industry. Where at the end of the day, there's nothing you can hold in your hands. At the end of the day, you're imparting knowledge.

And I think that teachers are particularly well equipped for management too. Think about it. You are in a job where you can't fire, you can't hire, you can't fire anybody and you need to motivate, a lot of the time, you're motivating kids to do something that they don't want to do. And you, and all that you're giving them is this abstract letter on a piece of paper. And the school I taught in two schools. One of them had very high performing, involved parents. And then the other one was a mix of everybody. So I had to, and that was where I spent most of my career, and I had to learn how to do that. And I was often successful, not, I wouldn't say always. It felt like more times than not I was successful. It's a hard gig, man.

I get it. Do you ever get carried out of the classroom like on everyone's shoulders, like in Dead Poets Society? Any Dead Poets Society days?

No, but I did have some years with some classes. There was this one group of boys that I taught that graduated like maybe a year or two before I stopped. At the end of the year, they did this thing that was very nice where they would give a rose to all of the kids and they were just to bring it over to one of the teachers that had really meant a lot to them. And here I have a bunch of 18 year old boys bringing me a rose. It was nice. It, it made you realize, and actually that same boys bought me a plaque when they graduated too, that I still have. It's in my home office. That's lovely. Changing lives. Honestly, for an 18 year old boy to do that, it, it tells you sometimes, again, sometimes I was successful.

That's awesome. That's excellent. One of your successes, there's a, that's in the industry what we call a transition. One of your successes, and actually something that's led to I think a lot of the growth that your clients have had is in your approach on video to blog. Your video to blog approach. Can you give us a 30 second elevator on what that is?

Yes, so I think in most cases we should not be writing content for our clients when it comes to their blog content. And asking them to write it is too time consuming. So what we've started doing is the entire SEO driven content marketing process. We're creating a blog, and when it gets to the point of writing the article, put them on camera. We use Squadcast, similar to the software we're using to record this call. And and we'll walk them through the outline, in a Q& A format. Edit ourselves out of the out of the call. Edit it, upload it to YouTube, take the subtitle slash transcript and turn that into a search optimized article. Maybe even add in some little sections here and there if we need, but a lot faster a lot easier, a lot less likely for you to get something factually incorrect than you ever will not being a subject matter expert writing for somebody. And you can also now get them ranked on YouTube.

I can see that instantly overcoming the objection that you have when you're in a technical field like law or medical where they will like, how could you write about this because you don't have my, law degree, you don't have my, my my medical experience and the medical degree that I have. It's coming right from them, so that's immediately gonna overcome that objection. But the instant objection that I think about is, I don't want to go on camera. How do you overcome that one?

We've had very few of those, surprisingly few of them. Those, you just can't do it, honestly. It's just, they're not, they're they would be considered for me, the type of client that's just not a fit at this point.

Okay. So then when you're bringing clients on or when you're in your pitch deck, is this something that you talk about? At the pitch of, by the way, we have this unique way of how we get a lot of content out of you quickly. It's factual. You don't have to worry about it because it's coming straight from you and here's the technique.

Yep. That's like a discovery call thing. We bring it up right out of the gate. If content marketing is going to be part of the marketing mix, part of the SEO plan. I would add that it even goes a step beyond even what you brought up. Where it also allows the client because even if we're able to factually get everything what we think is factually correct, it also allows to add their perspective, which, first of all, creates less headaches that we had a client a couple years ago that actually there's still a client that does HRT and in that space, there's been some back and forth with whether hormone replacement therapy in menopausal women can increase their risk for breast cancer. It doesn't seem like there's any real clinical evidence of this and to the contrary, but if you research the topic online, there's a lot of talk about that, which our client who is a doctor, a very prominent doctor. Very strongly disagrees with if we sat down and write her and wrote her content, which we have actually in the past, I actually hired a doctor to write that content and she brought up this stuff and our client was very was adamantly in disagreement with the stuff we had come up with.

Sure.

So it allows for that perspective to come through. Sorry, Kyle, there was another part to your question.

Oh, I don't know.

All right. Yeah.

I have questions.

It was a two part really good question, and then I lost track of the second part.

We were really, we were talking about getting them on the on the call and then them being a good fit during a pitch that you bring it up on the pitch.

If someone's not willing to do this there's somebody, there's going to be another company out there that's. Better for them. Like I have writers. I just don't want to go through again another process of I send over a blog and we mentioned that HRT has been thought to possibly increase the risk of breast cancer and the doctor head exploding.

Yeah, so something that I really like about that just as I think about it is when you write repeatedly, say, in the same niche. If you were just doing all the writing yourself, it would become a facsimile of the work you've already done. But by getting it directly from the doctor, you're getting their personal opinion on it. You're getting their professional opinion on it. And just by nature of that, it's going to be different.

Oh, that was the second half of what I wanted to mention. Information gain.

We brought it back.

Yeah anyone that's listening to this and does SEO for a living has heard in the last couple years about information gain and how it's likely a part, an important part of, Google's algorithms. It makes sense. In particular, moving forward as everybody's regurgitating the same stuff with chat GPT on the topic that Google is going to want to spend less time crawling the 75th version of the article on somebody's website because it costs them money and resources. And also they want to be able to surface something unique for people. So this approach also adds that into the mix.

From a, just a practical sense on how this works, are you doing one long video with them at the beginning and that kind of handles most of your content for the length of however long your contract is? Or do you have these scheduled at certain times where you're going to bring them on and then talk about this now and then we talk about that three months from now? How does that go?

Yeah. So it's a regular content calendar like you would use for blogs instead of Handing the outline to someone and having them write it, we're doing like a Q& A format. We'll direct them with things like, alright, I need you to like question then answer. Some of the, I think Shannon here should have that, have a sign that she holds a question then answer. Because we'll say things like like for example, Does HRT increase risk of breast cancer? Question then answer. And then the doctor will say it, and then she'll give her answer.

I see.

We will do one session, usually an hour session, where we'll try to get out as many as we can. We'll usually get anywhere from, I would say, three, three to six of these, depending on how in depth the article is, and how comfortable the doctor is with the format, but you can get out of that, you can get a month, one blog a week, let's say, and one YouTube video a week. Out of one session.

And then you're using this on YouTube, obviously, and then you're taking the transcript and that becomes the blog post. Do you also embed the video into the blog post on the site as well? And then have the links back and forth.

Absolutely links back and forth. And also we make sure that we include a an in video call to action You normally to get people over to related videos and playlists. So like the goal is that somebody Google something like Does HRT increase the risk of breast cancer? They land on our client's website. I don't want them to read one article and never see them again. I want to get them over to a YouTube channel or an Instagram account where we're gonna say, Hey, I have this other video. I'm, this video is not about this topic, but I'm gonna link in the description or in the comments to a video that does and then we want to get the person over to that other thing so that they spend 45 minutes watching stuff and possibly subscribe.

Very cool. Would you say that when you've got the outline done, that outline is pretty SEO'd in the sense of it has a title and then like subsections, if you will, and then the doctor's kind of filling that in so that you know that it will be like SEO'd properly and you don't really have to worry about it?

Hell yeah. Exactly. That's exactly what we're doing. And that I think is the biggest potential pitfall when somebody does this, where they're just going to do it off the cuff. I saw, I read a thing. I don't know if it was an article or post or whatever, but Tim Solo from Ahrefs did something talking about trying to take one of their podcasts and turn it into an article and just how like they failed. And that's the reason why there's no direction, there's no organization to the podcast. When you sit down and you're the, and the entire article is being dictated by or the call is being dictated by what's in an outline. It forces you to, as you put it, SEO it.

That's excellent. That makes perfect sense to me. I can just see clients being a little grumpy about it, but if you got it in the pitch, then they know it's coming, so they can't be too grumpy.

: It's happened once. We had one client, we had one client that's a large private equity firm that had this, that we got on a call, and it was very acrimonious 60 seconds. And I happened to be on it because I was training somebody and at that point, I'm the CEO, like I can say basically what I want. And I told him like, look, if you don't want to look, I'm here to help your organization. I want to get you customers. If you don't want to do this, we can get off the call, but I'm here to help you. And we're writing blogs for them. We're not doing any more video calls.

I know. That was the end of the video.

Yeah. We have literally like three clients that we're doing. We're still writing art.

We didn't turn that one around.

They're also, so this private equity firm we're doing work for other. Parts of the business. This is like an add on and I didn't want to lose I didn't want to have them go elsewhere Because then they go establish a relationship with another agency when you have a bad month It makes it a lot more likely for them to switch over. So that was a strategic decision Normally, I would have said I'm not wasting my time with these people anymore.

Sure makes sense Just off the top of your head and I don't want to put you on the spot but is there any time that you've done this for a particular client and it's just Yeah.

So we've had clients, there's one in particular that I'm thinking of that's gotten that, I think he shot it with his iPad in his consultation room. But one of our plastic surgeons has a video that is, it's on the tens of thousands, if not the hundreds of thousands of views at this point. For one of his topics for one of the main procedures that he performs. That's the first that comes to mind There's another that I that we're starting with soon that this was not us, but he's done this whole process Focused specifically on YouTube and I think he shared that about a third or a quarter of his patients are local to Where he's located everyone else are guys flying from other parts of the country to see him And this isn't going from the U. S. Turkey. This is in the he's in Texas and people are flying all over Because they've spent so much time with him on YouTube that they feel like they know him This is the person that they trust. This is the person that they want to go see and he's probably charging a premium.

That's fantastic. There it is.

You can only really do it with video. Honestly, the greatest blog in the world, unless you are a gifted writer, it's really hard to come across in any way that people feel like they know you.

Sure. Oh, that's fantastic. Frank, this has been awesome. I really appreciate your time. If people want to get in touch with you, how can they do that?

LinkedIn is probably the best way. I've been more and more active on there and I probably scroll on it two or three times a day. So if you want to connect there I'll see your stuff and you'll see mine.

Perfect. That sounds great. Thanks so much for being on. Thanks everyone for listening to Hack to the Future and we'll talk to you next time. Thanks so much, Frank.

Thanks, Kyle.