Tom Malesic on Small Business Marketing, Local SEO & the AI Frontier
Unscripted SEO Podcast · Full Transcript
Tom Malesic, Founder & President, EZMarketing · Host: Jeremy Rivera · Unscripted SEO Podcast
BEST QUOTES
“The goal of that home page copy is for the reader to say, finally, these people get me. This is who I want to reach out to.” — Tom Malesic
“Business owners don’t understand the compound effect of marketing — they try to Mickey Mouse it and make it cheaper.” — Tom Malesic
“ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are going to start to represent, as a group, the Pepsi version of Coke and Pepsi.” — Tom Malesic
Introduction
JEREMY RIVERA
Hello, I’m Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted SEO Podcast host. I’m here with Tom, who’s going to introduce himself, his business, and tell us why we should trust him.
TOM MALESIC — EZMARKETING
I’m Tom Malesic, I’m the founder and president of EZMarketing. We started in 1997 as a website development company and we’ve moved into full-service digital marketing. I even spun off an IT support business in the process, because people thought if I could build your website, I could fix your computer. We’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve got a team of about 27 people and we focus on small businesses.
The Small Business Passion
JEREMY RIVERA
What is it about the small business niche that attracts you?
TOM MALESIC
I just love small businesses. I love when you can take a company and watch their sales grow and watch them expand and hire more employees and really propel the local economy. I just love making small business owner dreams come true.
JEREMY RIVERA
What is it about small businesses and their small budgets that makes that game harder to play?
TOM MALESIC
It is harder, but it has so much more value to them. We’ve really been able to tailor our services so that the price point fits a small business versus a public trading company. You just have to look at — there’s so much marketing that you could do, but what’s the marketing that you should do? What are the foundational pieces that that small business needs?
The Website as Foundation
JEREMY RIVERA
What are some of your foundational low-hanging fruit that you go after first?
TOM MALESIC
I look at it that the website is the center of all your marketing. If that piece is bad, it doesn’t really matter what else you do — everything else suffers too. I kind of liken it to when you first started dating. Wherever you went — let’s say you went to the local bar or dance club to meet people — you probably didn’t wear the jeans and T-shirt you just mowed the lawn in with dirt all over you. If you’re the smelly, stinky guy at the bar, she’s just not going to want to talk to you. That’s what so many small business owners do with their website design. They outsource it to a high school kid, or they try to do it themselves on Wix or however they’re trying to do it, and it just looks horrible. You get there and there’s no trust whatsoever.
Because as much as mom used to say don’t judge a book by its cover — marketing is the cover that we judge your business by. And even if the design looks great but the copy is terrible, it’s kind of like you look great at the bar and then you open your mouth and you’re an idiot. We have to have the words on the page match how great a business you are.
Focus first on building an amazing website for that small business owner. It doesn’t have to be a hundred pages, but it has to clearly speak to who their customer is and why they should buy from you.
Authenticity & Original Imagery
JEREMY RIVERA
Matt Brooks of SEOteric says that there’s a measure of pretense in marketing — you have to put forward a certain projection of image, value, and unique selling proposition, but at the same time, if it’s too fake, people will sniff it out.
The conversation I just had in the previous interview was about the fakeness of those default stock images — those terrible Getty photos of two people shaking hands. The SEO joke is: I need to add alt text to this image — do I put the alt text as “random white guy shaking hands”? Why is this image even here?
He said he’d much rather have a not-great iPhone picture of an actual person — say, an Atlanta lawyer with a client on an Atlanta street, or next to their sign. It might be cheesy, but if that image communicates that you are actually in that community, that’s authenticity.
TOM MALESIC
It’s part of looking great — and looking like you. So many people try to look like a business that they’re not. But how does that help you? The more original photos you have — and heck, in today’s world I can take three pictures off your Facebook page and place you into any environment I want through AI — getting those photos is much easier today than it was ten years ago when you really had to rely on terrible stock photo sites.
It’s about being authentic to who you are, so that when the customer comes to your site and reads what you do and says, “these people can really help me” — the goal of that home page copy is for them to read the storyline and say, “finally, these people get me. This is who I want to reach out to.”
Extracting the Client’s Voice
JEREMY RIVERA
What’s the process you’ve found most effective for getting that intel out of your client so you can put it on the site?
TOM MALESIC
They can answer the questions, but they generally can’t create it themselves. Most people are really terrible writers — if you think of the last time most people wrote something, it was in 11th or 12th grade. Maybe you wrote some papers in college. Most of my tests were Scantron, so they didn’t really teach you to be a sales copywriter.
But business owners know what they do, they know who they help, and they know the problem they solve. So we just have to ask them: Why you? What’s different about you? When people come to you, what do they complain about with the competitors? Then we take what they complain about — the customer says, “well, they don’t complain about me because I do X, Y, and Z” — and we just keep walking them through. Get them talking, and our copywriters take it from there. They can definitely tell you the problem they solve.
Competitor Analysis & Content Strategy
JEREMY RIVERA
You said the c-word. What’s the proper way to leverage competitor analysis so that you don’t just become the same voice in a crowded room while cherry-picking their biggest successes?
TOM MALESIC
For small business owners, their competitors are generally small business owners, and most small business owners’ marketing is terrible. So I worry less about sounding like the competitor and more about creating the voice that sounds like the business I’m representing. That’s never been a problem. The competitor analysis in the small business world is very minimal.
JEREMY RIVERA
I’ve run into it quite a bit on the keyword research side — SEOs trying to cherry-pick the top ten competitors’ most competitive pages. But from a keyword gap analysis, they forget that the gap often isn’t just what they’re ranking for versus what you’re ranking for. It’s the gap of what neither of you are ranking for — where there’s a market opportunity to explore. Not to say you shouldn’t address things competitors do, just do it better.
There can be a danger in using that as the primary driver of your content strategy. If the next ten articles you’re creating have already been done somewhere else, you’re dooming yourself to automatically competing with somebody who’s already succeeding on that keyword focus.
TOM MALESIC
It so much depends on the spin you put on that article or service page — and also how are you competing, locally or nationally? When we compete nationally, it’s so much harder. But in the local market, let’s build 50 local service pages, keyword-load those, and make them unique. That’s been really effective for us. Building that domain authority overall is key, because most small businesses have virtually no domain authority.
Local vs. National Expansion
JEREMY RIVERA
I had a client challenge where they went from being the precast concrete wall company of Florida, and now they want to serve nationally. The VP wanted to scrub all references to Florida from all titles, descriptions, and pages. How would you approach that conundrum — you’ve got success with the state, but now you want to purge that success because you want to target everywhere?
TOM MALESIC
Do you cannibalize all the success you had because you’re trying to go national? Or do you say, let’s add the states near Florida instead of doing it all at once? It so much depends on your budget. Driving traffic in Florida is very different from trying to drive it nationally. Most small businesses don’t have the budget to pull that off. Setting those expectations is part of our job — what’s going to make sense within what you want to spend?
JEREMY RIVERA
There’s always that challenge of setting geographic expectations. I’ve had conversations where I ask, “Who is your target?” and they say, “I’ll sell to anybody, anywhere, any time.” Sure, yes — but do you want to drive four hours to do your remodeling work? Do you have a crew four hours away? Or are you saying you could serve a wider space when you really can’t deliver service that far?
TOM MALESIC
It’s about asking the right questions. When I ask a general question, I get a general answer: “We serve everybody.” Well, let’s narrow that down. How far do you want to drive? We could do that, but do you really want it that far? What if we started with a close radius and expanded out from there? Anything’s possible — but what’s the time frame and budget it’s going to take?
Local SEO Tactics
JEREMY RIVERA
Would you agree that out of the things that have changed in SEO, local SEO has changed the least?
TOM MALESIC
SEO in general has evolved and changed, but local SEO feels like it’s actually changed more because of the focus on local service pages and the Google Map Pack. I think it’s become more important and more dominant as a strategy.
JEREMY RIVERA
Is there any particular tactic within that suite where you’ve hit a real sweet spot?
TOM MALESIC
For local businesses, I take whatever the core keyword is and build out local town pages for it. Then I take their next keyword and build out those same pages. If it’s somebody with a tight radius — say an hour around their business — I look for towns with maybe 2,000 or fewer people, so I get lots of towns within that smaller radius. If they serve further out, I can use bigger-population towns. I really view it as quantity within the realistic service area.
JEREMY RIVERA
I’ve found a pretty good amount of success in making it a habit of regularly uploading photos and videos for local service providers — sometimes on a near-daily basis — and using Google Posts to help with indexation of new pages. When we add a new deck page, I already have 14 photos of decks stockpiled, so I schedule a Google Post: “Thinking about replacing that deck? We’ve got you covered.” The learn-more link goes to that new page. I find if I get at least one external link and a Google Post pointing to a new page, I don’t have to struggle with indexation.
TOM MALESIC
I would totally agree with that.
Link Building & LLM Visibility
JEREMY RIVERA
When it comes to link building, visibility, mentions, and authority — LLM tools aren’t using links the same way Google is, but they’re leveraging citations and mentions in a much more aggressive, easier-to-win way. Has that made it easier to justify a link-building budget? Can you just say “hey, we need to get you mentioned in other places” — and by the way, while I’m doing that, I’m getting links?
TOM MALESIC
We talk about it as a hybrid. But I do want to build as many high-quality backlinks as I can. And do we want them listed on their Chamber of Commerce or Manufacturers Association website — all those mentiony things? Absolutely.
JEREMY RIVERA
What are some fertile, unique areas that small business owners ignore that can yield either great content or great links?
TOM MALESIC
We take care of writing all the content for our clients, because they hate writing. With AI, it makes our lives a ton easier writing more and better content. But the more business owners do on their own — the more they talk on their social channels and are active in their local community — the better it becomes overall. You sponsor that charity golf tournament or whatever it is — the more activity, the better.
Looking Forward: LLMs as Traffic Channels
JEREMY RIVERA
What are you looking forward to in the next six months of SEO and marketing?
TOM MALESIC
I’m looking forward to more advancements in the large language models. We’re having a lot of success in driving traffic from ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude — and seeing it not just from a traffic standpoint but from a lead conversion standpoint. That’s just been really fun. And I think it’s only going to become more prevalent. We’re already having small business owners say, “How do I get ChatGPT to talk about my business?”
For the longest time, we didn’t have Coke and Pepsi — we just had Coke. We had Google, which is Coca-Cola, and then maybe RC Cola for the other search engines. But I think ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are going to start to represent, as a group, the Pepsi version of Coke and Pepsi — and that’s going to start to level the playing field a little bit.
JEREMY RIVERA
You preempted the question from my previous guest — Mike Ginley literally asked: what’s your new strategy when it comes to LLMs and visibility? So — as a distribution channel, not just a productivity tool on the backend — how are you thinking about and approaching that visibility side?
TOM MALESIC
It’s been really fascinating — not just “we use it,” but how do we rank on it? And it’s so much about content, content, content. It’s questions and answers, because people go to those places and ask more detailed questions than what they’d ask Google. So if we have lots of FAQs embedded within service pages or product pages, we’re getting a lot more exposure within ChatGPT.
JEREMY RIVERA
So the tactical advice is: think about adding FAQs not to a single FAQ page — the old go-to — but to each specific service page. What are the FAQs for your Atlanta lawyer page, your Cookeville construction page? The specific things for that specific location and service.
TOM MALESIC
Yes — and it’s not just having a little FAQ section on that page. It’s taking the H2s and H3s and making them questions, where normally you might have had just sales copy. Now you convert that heading to a question and let the paragraph below answer it. Because every section of the page is technically answering a question — you just have to figure out what question the visitor is asking that you’re answering.
Long-Form Content & Different Reader Types
TOM MALESIC
Small business owners don’t always like long pages. They say, “nobody’s going to read this — it’s too long.” And I always respond: you’re right, because a business owner tends to be a Cliff Notes kind of person. We’re moving fast, we’re not going to read everything. But my wife’s going to read every word on the page because she’s very detail-oriented. She wants all the information. I’m going to scan the H2s and move on.
So for long pages, you’re trying to hit my wife — who reads it all — but also Tom the scanner, and Google who wants to know everything. And the more copy you have, the better it is for ChatGPT too.
JEREMY RIVERA
Mark Williams-Cook, who I interviewed, said you need to consider the psychological profile of different people addressing the same problem. When we were looking for a home, my A-type wife looked for very different things than I did. She wanted the statistics — price ranges, neighboring home values, zoning, restrictions, when was the basement refurbished. I just wanted to know: am I going to be staring into somebody else’s back window, or is there a field out there I can enjoy?
TOM MALESIC
Exactly right. We’ve got to hit everybody from a content standpoint. From a messaging standpoint, we need to hit the core customer — but the content has to speak to both types.
Hot Take: Marketing Budgets
JEREMY RIVERA
Let me give you a soapbox. If you could get into the brains of small business owners and yell at them for one minute — what’s your hottest take? What are they doing that they shouldn’t be?
TOM MALESIC
What they’re doing that they shouldn’t be is not spending enough money on their marketing budget — and viewing it too much as an expense. The more you add — even an extra thousand or two thousand dollars a month — the more it magnifies everything else. Business owners tend to say, “I’m doing one thing great,” but if you did two things, it would make that one thing even better. If you did three things, it compounds exponentially. Business owners don’t understand the compound effect of marketing, and then they try to Mickey Mouse it and make it cheaper.
AI & the Agency Evolution
JEREMY RIVERA
As an agency owner, what’s your own biggest pain point right now?
TOM MALESIC
A year ago I would have said: AI. AI is radically changing how agencies function, and most people hate change. We’re asking our team to shift from being creators — where the designer handcrafted everything, the copywriter wrote everything from scratch — to becoming editors. Claude is writing the copy based on your instruction, but we had to be the creators of training the agent to speak in that company’s voice. And then we’re the editor of the output.
We’ve definitely seen evolution in content. In the next 12 months I think we’re going to see a complete evolution in design too. You can create images with AI, create video clips — most of the videos on our YouTube page are an AI clone of me. My marketing manager does all that for me. I think we’re going to see the same thing happen in website development with vibe coding. We’re in the wild west of AI websites — and five years from now we’re going to look back and say, “that wasn’t too bad.” It’s going to be a radical change, just like when we went from writing straight code — which is how we started, before WordPress even existed — to WordPress. I moved into that world kicking and screaming, and then I thought it was the best thing ever. The same thing is going to happen with AI.
Question for the Next Guest
JEREMY RIVERA
If you could gain one piece of knowledge — something you’d ask the next SEO guest — what would it be? I’ll let you know when they answer it.
TOM MALESIC
My question is around AI code — how they’re using it and making it secure and easy for the end customer to edit. Customers still want to make some of their own updates, which is why they love WordPress. How are other agencies leveraging AI-generated website code? Have they integrated that into WordPress, or is it more of a standalone thing using Cursor or similar tools?
Where to Find Tom
JEREMY RIVERA
Give a shout-out — where can people find EZMarketing? There’s an AI clone of you out in the world; where can they absorb your marketing team’s information through your avatar?
TOM MALESIC
Just go to EZMarketing.com and visit our site. We have our social channels there, including LinkedIn. Or go to YouTube and search for “Easy Marketing” and you can find us there. We do a lot of free website audits, just to give some advice to small business owners — whether they use us or not, we’re going to give them great professional advice. Marketing shouldn’t be hard.
JEREMY RIVERA
Well, that was easy. I appreciate it — thanks so much for your time.
TOM MALESIC
You bet. Thanks, Jeremy.
Key Takeaways
- Your website is the center of all your marketing — if it looks untrustworthy or speaks to the wrong audience, every other channel underperforms. Invest in making it look great, read great, and close with a clear call to action.
- The best copy comes from making clients talk: ask why customers don’t complain about you, what competitors get wrong, and what specific problem you solve. Our copywriters can build from that raw material.
- Local SEO is about quantity of relevance — build out local service pages for each keyword and each town in your realistic service radius, layer in frequent Google Business photos and Posts, and combine with at least one external link to trigger indexation.
- LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are emerging as a genuine traffic and lead-conversion channel. The winning tactic: reframe your H2s and H3s as specific questions and let the body text answer them — every page section is already answering a question whether you frame it that way or not.
- Marketing spend compounds. Adding one extra channel doesn’t just add — it multiplies the effectiveness of everything else. Small business owners who treat marketing purely as a cost to minimize will always underperform competitors who treat it as a compounding investment.
- Agencies must shift from being creators to being editors and trainers. The AI writes; your job is to train the voice, set the context, and refine the output — a skill set that requires just as much expertise, organized differently.
