In this forward-thinking episode, Wes Towers,Founder of Uplift 360, shares how to adapt lead generation when traditional channels dry up. If you struggle with inconsistent leads and outdated online tactics in stage 3, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What value-first content builds trust and attracts clients faster
– Why search engines alone no longer deliver reliable leads at scale
– How to implement “search everywhere optimization” across multiple channels
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the Start scale and succeed podcast, the only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey. As a founder, I’m your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and today I want to talk to the founder out there who’s listening. Yes, just that one of you. No, I’m kidding, those founders who are listening, who find that it’s getting harder and harder to get new leads in the door. Something has changed, especially online, over the last year or so, and it’s not good if you’re wondering what that thing is, why it’s affecting you, and what you can do to move it from the threat column to becoming an unfair advantage, you are absolutely in the right place, because joining us, literally from the other side of the world today is the one and only Wes Towers. Who helps founders and marketing leaders turn attention into trust and revenue. As founder of uplift 360 in Australia, he builds simple, repeatable systems that make brands easy to find, trust and choose. His search everywhere optimization process blends sharp positioning, conversion focused websites and an AI assisted content engine that teams can run without being burnt out. Wes also coaches marketing managers in construction related companies to scale faster online with clear messaging, smarter content and clean measurement. He works with the construction and trade businesses, as well as B to B firms that went that want practical wins over just theory. And he’s here with us today. Wes Welcome to the show. I want to talk about what’s probably one of my least favorite buzzwords, and that is SEO. So just so that we can clear the air here, tell us what SEO is as it’s traditionally understood, and why that traditional understanding is causing so many business owners to get less new leads, especially recently.
Wes Towers
Yeah, I get it. SEO is almost a dirty one. It isn’t it. It’s been around a long time now, and there’s been a lot of rogues playing in that space. I totally understand where you’re coming from. And firstly, it’s a great privilege to speak to you in person. I’ve been listening to a lot of your material, and to speak in person is a real privilege. But SEO is search engine optimization. It was attempt and an attempt, and it still is an attempt, to show up in Google and the other search engines as high as you could, so you’d have keywords so a phrase someone might search for. And historically, it was pretty archaic. It was service location, so plumber Melbourne, for example. But now we understand people are searching in full sentences, because we know Google and large language models understand the context of full sentences, and everyone’s producing content at scale rapidly because they understand all of these tools are looking for content to answer people’s needs. So it’s a noisy space out there, and there’s ways to cut through the noise. There’s ways to do it well, in ways that can go horribly wrong and get you blacklisted and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Scott Ritzheimer
So as I understand it, to some extent, SEO is dead, long live SEO. And so we’re at a we’re at a really critical point here. And one of the things that you talk a lot about is is not search engine optimization, but search everywhere optimization. What’s the difference between the two? And why does it matter?
Wes Towers
Yeah, so back in the day, and just, you know, a couple of years ago, even before AI really took a hold of what it’s doing. If you needed a service, you would typically jump on Google and search for it. But then we had the rise of social media, so all of a sudden, people were looking for companies and recommendations and referrals on social media. Now we’re talking to our phones, our chat, GBT to discuss our specific needs and requirements. And so it’s it really is everywhere, YouTube and so on. There’s just so many platforms that we’re using now to find a business. If we’re looking to do some sort of transaction, we’re looking to purchase something, we’ve got a need that needs to be fulfilled, and we’re looking at it in a whole bunch of other ways. So the techniques and strategies have have to evolve, because information is at people’s fingertips, and you’ve got to be there when they’re looking for it.
Scott Ritzheimer
So one of the things that that feels hard about that Wes is that the idea of being everywhere all the time, even if it’s digital, and it sounds exhausting with you know, if I’m a plumber and I’m good at plumbing, I don’t want to be sitting at my computer being everywhere all the time, and it feels complicated. It feels overwhelming. It’s like, Hey, I didn’t sign up for this. Tell us a little bit. You’ve written a you’ve written the book on this, literally. But how can, how can small business owners, in particular, service professionals like the ones that you serve every day, again, like we talked about in the intro, move it from the threat column to the advantage column?
Wes Towers
Yeah, I know it sounds everywhere. Is a lot of places. It’s overwhelming, for sure, and but the good news is you don’t need to do it all yourself, obviously, but you’ve, you’ve got to be the one, if you’re the founder of the company, or the leader of the company setting the tone, you’ve got to be the one with. A core, distinct and compelling message. There’s you can’t be generic and bland anymore, because everybody else can produce that kind of content. But once you’re unique and specific, you can be the known expert in the field in which you play. And you’ve got to have that core message that’s really succinct and people can grasp it, so you can have team publish on your behalf. Once you’ve got a core message that’s unique, it can be syndicated far and wide pretty fast. So it’s not it’s not too much of a concern to publish the information far and wide with the right tools. I mean, there’s lots of tools that will publish to social media on your behalf. We use public most, mostly because it publishes to Google as well, and Google like anything that’s Google on your business profile. So that’s really helpful. But there’s bunch of other tools as well. There’s tools to publish reels and so on. You know, the AI driven tools, which will take a long form video and repurpose it into a whole bunch of other formats, so you can have it published lots of places. And all the tools, because it’s so so much more sophisticated than they ever were. They’re gleaning information for far and wide and they’re collating a set of ideas and thoughts around who you are as a business, as a brand, and that’s hopefully getting mentioned when people are looking for you.
Scott Ritzheimer
I love that you work, especially in the professional services, especially in the trades, because it’s that group that I would imagine would say, What the heck do you mean by a core message? I just want to fix pipes. So what’s that look like in the real world, Wes?
Wes Towers
Yeah, well, that’s you’re touching on something really important that you’ve got to tailor your message to the audience. Now I’m speaking. Obviously I appreciate there’s probably a lot of consultants and coaches listening in. So it’s a different, different language that I’m using today for you guys, as opposed to what I might be speaking to, you know, a plumber who’s on the tools and not really dialed into marketing or anything like that. So just matching your message to the target audience is a whole big part of what you what you do. And as you say, We’re quite niched into the trades construction industry, because there is such a need, because they’re not, in my view, not served very well. And part of it is because of that mismatch of how, how a digital agency like ours might communicate to these people, and you never want to alienate people with large, you know, language and acronyms and all this stuff. What they want is leads. They want sales. They want the phone calling. They typically will just say, Hey, we’re not getting enough phone calls. That’s typically how they might communicate their need. So it’s about us communicating, Hey, these are the things. These are the levers we might pull to get that phone ringing. So, yeah, I think knowing your message, knowing your target audience, communicating directly to them, is where it’s all at.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, in your book, you lay out your your snap framework. I’m wondering if you could introduce that to us. Know, we have a relatively short format here, but just kind of give us an idea of of why that snap framework is so important for understanding how to move forward in situations like this.
Wes Towers
Yeah, and the curious thing was, the book was written before AI, but it’s since that has occurred. It’s even more important, in my view. So snap standpoint, non non conformist approach, position. So the first two are more the way you think about your business and the messaging and so on. And the latter two are more practical. But standpoint, you’ve really got to have, as I said before, something that you believe in solidly and and stick by it. So your standpoint non conformist, it really is helpful if you’ve got something distinct that you believe, that nobody else believes in your industry, or a process or a way in which you frame the work in which you do, which is completely different to the others. There might be only a couple of little key points, but those key points and other things that you should be sharing because they really do set you apart. It might repel some people, and other people will be drawn to you, but that’s perfectly fine. If it’s repelling the wrong people, it’s sort of filtering them through, so the right people are approaching you, standpoint, non conformist approach. So how you go about getting this message out there? We speak about everywhere is a lot of places, but it might be some platforms that are better suited to your business and brand than others. So focusing your attention on those things, this is your approach of getting your message to the market and and looking at the other tools syndicate your message to them, yes, but don’t spend too much time on the areas which are probably not your core audience, for example, if you’re dealing with an older audience, maybe Tik Tok isn’t your thing, you know, or if it’s a B to B, maybe LinkedIn is more appropriate. These sorts of things, making decisions to tailor your content around the priority platforms and then just syndicate it to the others, because it’s it’s quick and easy. Don’t tailor it too much for them, because it’s a waste, right? Yeah, and, and the position, yeah. So getting it all, getting it all aligned. So they kind of, I kind of, talked about position as well there. So just getting it all aligned, so you’ve got you stand out in the marketplace. Because, man, it is noisy out there. We’re seeing content produced, and we don’t even know if anyone’s ever read it. You know, people are using tools that just publish content after content to try and attract Google’s attention to large language models, you know. And videos, we’ve seen videos that look super realistic like it looks like the it’s kind of cool, because you see videos of long past people, and it’s fun, but that’s scary too, because what, as marketers, we realize, hey, well, you can’t believe what you see. You can’t believe what you read. You’ve got to find a way to cut through that noise and be build trust and authority in the space that you’re working in.
Scott Ritzheimer
I want to drill in on the non conformist one, because there’s something that I see a lot of my clients really, really pride themselves on the quality of their work, right? They don’t cut corners. And if I were to say, Hey, what’s your nonconformist approach? Many of them would say, well, like we’re committed to quality. And when they say that, they’re thinking of all the horror stories of the other people who do what they do. But I think what fails to translate sometimes is that everyone says that they have quality, and so you’re not actually being non conformist in in the eyes of the people who are listening. So how do you get a message like that to break through when you really are offering next level quality or something like that? But everyone says that they are.
Wes Towers
Yeah, they’re the generic things that we all believe. We all believe we created, we do quality work, and we really care for our clients, and we really care for our customers, and all these things that are kind of generic and bland, the way I like to draw it out of the founder is to have a bitching session. I don’t know if we can say that on this, but a session, a venting session, is maybe a better way of looking at it, where they put on the table everything that’s their frustrations in the industry, what everybody else is doing wrong. This is a behind closed doors conversation. It would be never public, because that’s not the way you want to frame your business. But they find it far easier to have that venting discussion, because, you know, they know what’s what the other competitors are doing wrong, and then it’s our job to think about all those negative things, and what’s the inverse opposite of that? That’s probably going to reveal what’s unique and really distinctive. It’s hard for us to see in our own businesses what those key distinctions are, because we’re so close to it. Could someone be drawn out of us if we have those discussions? Yeah, I love that.
Scott Ritzheimer
I love that for two reasons. One, I could not agree more. There’s a lot of things that you know better than anybody else inside your business, but knowing how to communicate about your business by yourself in isolation is not one of them. That’s a really hard thing to figure out by yourself. But two, I really like this idea of tapping into what we’re angry about. I think a lot of folks overlook that. Anger is kind of a bad thing. You don’t want to be angry, but it’s actually really, really helpful in identifying our values and what’s really important to us. So I love that kind of flip it on its head approach, and I think it’s really powerful. Wes there’s a question that I have for you. It’s the same question I ask all my guests. I’m very interested to see what you’d have to say, but the question is this? What is the biggest secret you wish wasn’t a secret at all. What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching and listening today knew?
Wes Towers
Yeah, well, it ties into what we’re just speaking about. You haven’t got to be loved by everybody. You know we market as if we have to appeal to everybody. You don’t. You only need to appeal to your ideal clients. And so it just becomes a more simple message once, once you figure that out.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, that’s so good, so good. It’s but it’s scary, right? Like, the idea that we would push someone away is something that that’s really a challenge to get past, but it is powerful. And I think to your point, it’s harder and harder to be seen if you’re not willing to do that. There’s just too much noise out there. Today Wes you’ve got a book out. I’d love to give us the 32nd bit on the book, where folks can find it, and also, where can they connect with you and find out more about the work you do.
Wes Towers
Yeah, the book, I can hold it up for the video. Watches their Simple Manifesto. So that’s physical book and digital on all the all the places you would typically find, curiously enough, it sold mostly the ebook the digital version for many years. It’s been around around a while now, but lately it’s been more the physical book. So there’s something going on in the world where people like the tactile thing. I think something’s going on anyway, but that’s the book to find me. Uplift360dotcom.au, you can book a strategy call with me there.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic. Well, Wes thanks for being on the show. It was a real privilege. It was a real privilege having you here with us today. I love this idea of search everywhere. Optimization. I think it’s powerful. I think you’re onto something, and I know it was helpful for some folks listening. For those of you who are watching and listening, I hope you know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Wes Towers
Wes Towers helps founders and marketing leaders turn attention into trust and revenue. As founder of Uplift 360 in Australia, he builds simple, repeatable systems that make brands easy to find, trust, and choose. His Search Everywhere Optimisation process blends sharp positioning, conversion-focused websites, and an AI-assisted content engine that teams can run without burning out. Wes also coaches marketing managers in construction-related companies to scale faster online with clear messaging, smarter content, and clean measurement. He works with construction and trade businesses, as well as B2B firms that want practical wins over theory.
Want to learn more about Wes Towers work at Uplift 360? Check out his website at https://uplift360.com.au/
Connect with Wes Towers through his LinkedIN at https://www.linkedin.com/in/westowers/
Grab a copy of his book “The Simple Manifesto: Marketing principles to save you time, increase profit and create your dream business in a SNAP!” at https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Manifesto-Marketing-principles-increase/dp/0994367600