What does the future of SEO look like when AI agents start running the show? In this episode of Room 301, Rob Twells sits down with Jojo Furnival, Marketing Manager at Sitebulb, to talk about:
Packed with insights, hot takes, and... a little ranting, this episode is a must-listen for SEOs, marketers, and anyone wondering how AI will reshape the digital landscape.
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Room 301 is a monthly marketing podcast brought to you by The Digital Maze, a specialist full service digital marketing agency based in Derby. We discuss ongoing marketing themes, topics and news in the digital marketing industry to help marketing managers (and business leaders) stay ahead of the curve.
Rob Twells (00:01)
Jojo, what does the future of SEO look like in your view?
Jojo Furnival (00:06)
what a question. And obviously everyone has a bit of an opinion on it. ⁓ If I look into my crystal ball, I think the idea of an agentic internet is really interesting to me. it's, I mean, it's already cropping up. It's already being tested. ⁓ So where SEOs sit within that, know, the debate is around
Do we optimize websites for users anymore? Or is it purely for bots? Is it for agents? ⁓ And that is a very unpalatable sort of future and concept to think about, but it could well go that way. ⁓ The alternative is that people get fed up of the rise of AI and
and its limitations and actually reach out for more human connections and more user experience. So we could end up going offline completely or people are going to reach more for social media and platforms where they can have those more human interactions and human connections without search engines or search getting in the way.
But I don't know is the answer. What do you think?
Rob Twells (01:36)
Well, I don't think anyone knows do they truly? I think everyone's got their views. ⁓ How do you feel about the whole online versus offline, sorry, on page versus off page SEO debate at the minute? think, you know, the last few years, certainly, agents isn't well, the agents design now have it's been a heavy emphasis on on page content. It's probably easier to do. But I think
Jojo Furnival (01:38)
No.
Rob Twells (02:06)
The way things are going, think there's definitely conversations and things that I'm seeing that suggest that off-page ⁓ activity might be more important moving forward as these sort of AI agents and language models start to look at other things outside of the website to build a picture of the brand and therefore know how to serve up results. So what's your view on that side of things?
Jojo Furnival (02:29)
Yeah, that is really, and you're right, it's been coming up a lot more and you just said the magic word then, which is brand. I mean, think traditionally when we think about off-page SEO, we think link building ⁓ and potentially, sort of digital PR campaigns and that kind of stuff. But I think with the rise of LLMs and answer engines and the fact that it's
It's now leaning more towards citations rather than, you know, it's not about just following links and the quantity and the quality of links. It's about the quality, inverting confidence of your brand, its memorability, who's talking about it, where are they talking about it? You know, you don't need a anymore. people need to be including you in their conversations. ⁓ So I think…
For anybody who is working in off-page SEO, they need to consider how they might pivot in that direction and start considering. mean, ultimately, think something that as SEOs we can get lost in sometimes remembering that the fundamentals have always been there. Like brand, building a strong brand has always been
important. It's always been a worthwhile endeavor. Everybody wants to have a strong brand. Everybody, every business wants to have a strong brand. then, you know, along the way you sort of get, ⁓ the quick fixes and, this is the quick route to appearing in featured snippets or wherever it is. So let's just do that.
Everybody wants the silver bullet solution and everybody wants, you know, a kind of nice little offering to sell to people to, you know, to make money. I mean, that's where, you know, we're in agencies and that's what we do. The SEO industry as a whole, we've got to make money. But really there's nothing new in the fact that brand is getting more more more important now. We just need to take a step back and come back to those sort of
marketing fundamentals really as SEOs and I think perhaps we've been a little bit pigeonholed ⁓ or pigeonholed ourselves when really we need to think of ourselves more as like as search marketers you know that's what that's my view on that anyway have that broader skill set
Rob Twells (05:18)
I agree, I don't disagree with that at all. And finally, before we get on to the usual questions that we ask, anything you guys are thinking about internally at SiteBorp, trade secrets, anything you can share anyway that might help shape the way things are going and moving forward.
Jojo Furnival (05:33)
⁓
⁓ Well, mean, what I can tell you is that we've been, I mean, speaking of fundamentals, we've been going through a process. ⁓ I mean, we're kind of at the end of the process right now of like revisiting ⁓ our infrastructure and rebuilding it for growth and scale, because obviously we don't just have the desktop product, we have the cloud product as well.
which requires a certain level of infrastructure in order to service like enterprise clients, for example. ⁓ And once that is completely done and dusted, which we're close to finishing now, it will be an exciting time because we'll be able to get stuck back into sort of sexy features that people want. ⁓
You know, we haven't really been able to do that for a little bit because we've been like cleaning house and shoring up, like I say, our foundations. But I think, you know, one thing that we are working on ⁓ right now is, I think it would be foolish to ignore AI and its capabilities. ⁓ But it's about, certainly from the SiteBold perspective, it's about, we don't just want a whizzy
bell and whistle that's kind of a gimmick, kind of pointless. Like how can we actually integrate AI so that it's adding value? So watch this space.
Rob Twells (07:19)
Well, look, I look forward to that and I'm sure the team do as well. Well, let's jump into our typical questions. So for anybody that hasn't listened, hopefully you have, we do tend to ask our guests three questions. One of those is what's in your toolbox? The second one is around a failure, bonus points if it's funny. And the last one is obviously what our podcast is all about, which…
Jojo Furnival (07:40)
you
Rob Twells (07:44)
What are we gonna put in room three, I want, so what really annoys you about marketing? What do you wanna see banished, never to be seen again? So question one, Jojo is what's in your toolbox? And actually, just before we start recording, we were talking about you and the team and the team being you. So I imagine your toolbox is quite broad to allow you to do your job and probably do the job of more than one person. So yeah, really interested to hear.
what's in your toolbox, what helps you stay on top of your workload, what helps you get the job done efficiently etc. The is yours.
Jojo Furnival (08:16)
Yeah,
well, so there's different tools for different, yeah, the different hats that I wear. ⁓ So as the sort of the marketing manager, I'm also the social media manager. So, you know, the first thing I open every day is LinkedIn, more or less. ⁓ We really wanted to take advantage of LinkedIn's kind of capabilities when I came on board.
And so that is our main sort of community building platform. And I'm very drawn to the idea of ⁓ community marketing. It's very on brand for Sitebulb. We don't want to sell to you really. We want to provide you with useful information that helps you do your job as an SEO. So a lot of my…
role is content and content marketing. in my toolbox, I've got what we do webinars. We do a webinar every month. So for that, our webinar platform is Air Meet. I don't know if you've come across that one. it's got a pretty good user experience. Yeah, I'm pretty happy with Air Meet. And then after that,
I go into, because we download for all of our webinars and they go onto YouTube and we, use a video ask for getting video ⁓ testimonials from our customers, which we also get to share on social media. And then for kind of clipping things up and making them, ⁓ adding captions, editing videos together, I use a tool called Opus Clip, ⁓ which
I highly recommend, I don't think I could do my job, I wouldn't be able to get the output in terms of video without Opus Clip. Definitely not. I'm also the email marketing manager and automation, so we use MailChimp for our sins. ⁓ The jury's out on, sometimes I love it, sometimes I love it less.
⁓ But I am able to…
Rob Twells (10:41)
We also
use the LGM, nothing wrong with that.
Jojo Furnival (10:43)
Do
you? Do you? Okay. Well, I don't want any, we are friends with, we're friends with Melchump. So again, like it's, it's worked, it's working really well for us and no tool is perfect, right? I can say that isn't because I work for a tool. So I also using ChachiBT a lot because as you've pointed out, I am sort of a one woman. ⁓
marketing team and chat GBT is a perfect little assistant for me. You know, when you're spending so much time strategizing and thinking and being creative constantly, like there's no downtime. when we're humans, we're not robots. And sometimes I need to bounce some ideas or get some suggestions from, from someone, from something. And.
I mean, chat-tubety is also useless at lot of things. Well, I found this out the other day. Maths, terrible at maths. Literally, put it, it was like 10 plus five plus five plus 10 and it came out with 35. And I was like, are you sure that's right? Oh no, no, it's not right. So yeah, I think chat-tubety is great for brainstorming, pretty decent at…
content repurposing as a sort of first draft, but don't give it any sums to do. And then of course I use SiteBulb for auditing the website from ⁓ an SEO perspective. Like we've just done a bit of ⁓ migration, well upgrading from a previous version of RCMS to a new version and there's a little bit of migration involved and so.
obviously auditing via site bar before and after was part of our process. Canva, that's one. That's one I use constantly for ⁓ mainly social media graphics and ⁓ videos. And that's, mean, it's, I'm not a designer. And so without Canva, you know, I mean, there's no way I'd be able to use Adobe or.
What's it Photoshop? That's the other one. I could try thinking of more tools. gosh, we've just started using TikTok.
Rob Twells (13:11)
interesting so
chat gbt have you ⁓ you've just started using tiptoe
Jojo Furnival (13:19)
Yeah,
yeah, yes, and that was a very reluctant ⁓ move on my part, but I kind of don't really want to admit this, especially not publicly, but I think I might be sort of enjoying it now.
Rob Twells (13:40)
Hey Tip Top, I'm a doom scroller on Tip Top. I can spend hours at a time. Most of the diss may have my wife actually.
Jojo Furnival (13:44)
Are you?
Yeah, that, yeah. Well, I only, so I'm only sort of, you know, I think it's more the video creation that I'm enjoying. ⁓ I would not, I would not enjoy the doom scrolling. I've got enough of that on LinkedIn.
Rob Twells (14:03)
Yeah.
And and chat GPT so have you managed to get any agents working for you any clever tricks you've got with chat GPT
Jojo Furnival (14:21)
You know what, we were talking about this this morning on SEO office hours and I and then I was just about to load up Chatchabuti and I was going and it came up with the message to start the agent and I ⁓ haven't tried it yet. So I can't give you any tips or insights there unfortunately, not yet. But we are working on in collaboration with a partner. This is
I won't be able to go into too much detail, but we're working on a GPT, which could be quite cool resource for people. So keep your eyes peeled for that coming up.
Rob Twells (15:06)
nice. And the second part of our podcast is all about failures. Obviously we caught up just before we started recording JoJo and obviously your experience is quite deep. You've done in-house, you've done charity, you've done freelance, now you're a cyborg. So I'm assuming with all of that and the success…
been some failures, been some down points which has helped you and enabled you to get to where you are today working for a well-renowned tool obviously running your own function effectively so any failures that stick out to you and there are some bonus points if it's funny
Jojo Furnival (15:50)
You know, I sort of struggle with this question a little bit because ⁓ certainly my career has been varied and a lot of it very experimental. So there's certainly some funny moments that stand out. For example, where I ⁓ had a client who the Austrian National Tourism Office right at start of my career and I
had to wear a dirndl and go out and walk the streets of, where it must have been Camden I think, handing out leaflets. I wouldn't say that was a highlight, but one thing that it does teach you is I think it's an important lesson to never be afraid to get your hands dirty and get stuck in. like there is no… ⁓
unimportant role or job in marketing. Like it all plays a part. But actually I did think of probably the time that I consider a real failure was, again, I was in my early twenties and my colleague at the last minute, was unwell.
And I, so I had to take over this ⁓ meeting. It was a client stakeholder meeting, which I hadn't been, I'd been working kind of on the client, but this, the stakeholder was brand new and I certainly wasn't prepared for the meeting. The stakeholder happened to be a dragon, which was terrifying and I was absolutely grilled.
by this dragon and certainly in my head I thought the meeting was an abject failure. ⁓ I think I must have cried afterwards, but my client actually thought it went really well. So, and I can laugh about it now, but I mean, I did think it was awful, but I suppose, ⁓ I mean, that was ⁓ an important experience for me in terms of being put on the spot and
being okay to not be completely prepared and having to wing it and, you know, not having everything under control because I do like to feel very prepared and feel very in control. And, but also I think another important message which I had around the same time in my career was I remember one of my, she was in a different team so she wasn't a direct colleague, but I think she said to me after I was,
in tears over something or another and she said, it's only PR. It's only marketing. and that is, it's a good thing for us to remember. And I know the stakes can be high sometimes, you know, if you're talking big bucks, namely, but no one's going to die. We're only people. make mistakes. We're not expected to be perfect.
and the world will keep turning and there are more important things in life to remember.
Rob Twells (19:23)
I agree. think I'm also a person that likes to at least feel like I'm on top of everything and I've got everything figured out. But I think actually there's a skill in itself, especially when you reach quite a high level that actually with that workload to have peaks and troughs and it's also, you've been able to manage the peaks just as well as the troughs. And yeah, it might not be managed quite as well, but actually there's a bit of a skill in doing just enough to push something through.
and progress it enough to the point that it can be progressed by somebody else or dedicated to somebody else or maybe there's a meeting, there's a skill in just adding enough value to get you through that meeting. All the successful people I know and have met, so many times where I can see them winging it on the spot, but they're still adding value. They're still getting through the meeting. They're still getting a good set of follow-ups from it. It might not be as thorough as if their workload was slightly lower.
Jojo Furnival (20:03)
Totally.
Yeah.
Rob Twells (20:21)
but it's definitely enough to get you through that moment in time and possibly the next week you're a little bit more free to sit down and think about it and work out the next step. So there's definitely something in that. There's definitely a skill set there, being able to do that without crumbling or falling under the pressure.
Jojo Furnival (20:30)
Hmm.
But in
Yeah, and I think that comes with lot at the time that comes with age and experience, doesn't it? Right. Because, you know, you are more able to just make decisions. Like you've seen the same sort of scenarios or you've been in this sort of position before, you know, half the time, the most important thing, like, as you say, is just making a decision so that something can progress rather than being held back.
Rob Twells (20:45)
Hmm.
Jojo Furnival (21:05)
by perfectionism or the need to get your head buried in research or whatever it is. You just need to start, you just need to do enough and then as you say, you can delegate or you can come back to it.
Rob Twells (21:26)
That's it. That's it. And last but not least, for anyone that doesn't know, the reason we called our podcast Room 301 is because for anybody in SEO who know that a 301 redirect is something that you direct somewhere else effectively and intentionally as well. ⁓ So we've made a make-believe room called Room 301 and we're gonna stick everything in marketing that we don't like ⁓ in there and redirect it somewhere else so we don't have to deal with it anymore.
So what are you putting in room 301, Jojo? What grinds your gears about marketing?
Jojo Furnival (22:00)
Yeah. So I had to have a real think about this one. And I was sort of thinking, mean, attribution, you know, there's various things that are a pain in the ass in marketing, but then I realized that the thing that, but they're kind of necessary, they're kind of necessary evils that you've got to do it. So I'm not going to like, I'm not going to put something that is necessary into room 101, room 301, my apologies.
But what I am going to put in because like you said it really grinds my gears and that is the concept of a personal brand. ⁓ I just don't even really know where to start with this. It upsets me so much. It is so unnecessary. People are people. Brands are brands. People have personalities. They don't have brand traits.
They're authentically themselves. They have parts of their character. Like we invented brands based on the concept of like individuality that exists in human nature. And now we've decided to turn it around and put the concept of brand on top of human nature. No, that's ridiculous.
You are who you are, fine. If you don't want to share all of the parts of you that is, you know, at work or in a work context, that's fine. You don't have to. No one's saying that you, you know, that you have to, but calling it a personal brand is, I don't know if I'm allowed to swear. Am I allowed to swear? I'm going to go, I'll try not to. It's okay. It is wanky.
Rob Twells (23:53)
We'll beep it. We'll beep it.
Jojo Furnival (23:57)
corporate bullshit that shouldn't be allowed to exist. It's total nonsense. And the fact that it's like I thought, to be honest, was, you know, it was, was knocking around 10, 10, at least 10 years ago. It came up then I remember it, you know, I remember it back then at the start of my career. But now like, why are we talking about it again? We should be coming out of this era of, of manufactured
self, we should be coming into an era of more authenticity because being human is what makes us so remarkable, especially today as AI is threatening jobs, threatening, goodness knows, like threatening livelihoods, threatening roles, like, I don't know, will my job exist in 10 years time?
So let's just forget about personal brands and let's just be ourselves.
Rob Twells (25:04)
So do you feel that ⁓ having an individual at the helm of…
the marketing so to speak, or being the driving force behind marketing, or playing a big role in the marketing campaigns in lead generation as an individual is a good tactic these days.
Jojo Furnival (25:23)
Yeah, I do, for sure. ⁓ 100%. Especially, you know, on LinkedIn, we're seeing that, ⁓ like, pages, corporate pages are getting ⁓ less and less kind of visibility in our time. And it is all about people. mean, people, people buy people. We've been saying that since the start of my career. And it's absolutely true. Like, that's why, you know, at Sitebulb, ⁓
Rob Twells (25:41)
Yeah.
Jojo Furnival (25:51)
our, the co-founder and CEO, Patrick, he still writes the release notes. They're his thing. He swears in them. He rants in them. We've kind of renamed them release rants because that's what they are. And because release notes historically are boring. He, his personality, not his personal brand, his personality has made them
interesting and made them famous. I mean, there's a lot of very influential SEOs who love his, who love these release brands. So I guess, yes, having a, you know, having a person, a real person with a real character and a real personality, creating that trust, it all helps with that trust, doesn't it? Like who are the people behind this tool that I'm using behind this brand that I'm buying products from?
⁓ I can see that only getting more important to be honest. I mean, it's this concept of like micro influencer, I guess, which again cropped up years ago and it does seem to be the direction that we're moving in. I don't think TikTok would exist without, you know, were that not the case.
Rob Twells (27:10)
No, I agree. I agree. Well look Jojo, I'm very grateful for your time today. Thank you for joining me. I'd love you to tell the listeners more about yourself, more about sitebob before we head off.
Jojo Furnival (27:20)
Thank you.
Okay, well, I'm Jojo. I'm the marketing manager at Sitebulb. ⁓ Sitebulb is a website auditing tool, otherwise known as a website crawler. So we have a desktop tool and we also have cloud version of the tool, which means and we're the only website crawler on the market that offers a desktop product and a cloud product. And that means
that we can help any SEO, whether you're a little freelancer or you're a massive global agency or you're a huge enterprise business, there's a site bulb to suit. And so, yeah, as part of my role, something that I'm really passionate about and interested in is creating this community of SEOs, of site bulbers, and…
In order to do that, we put out a lot of helpful SEO content in the form of articles and webinars and tips and that kind of thing. We haven't got a podcast yet. Maybe we will one day. Who knows? I love to collaborate with other SEOs. If you want to make a name for yourself or you have a unique insight to share, please do get in touch with me.
And yeah, maybe we can work together.
Rob Twells (28:59)
Excellent. Well look Jojo, thank you and thank you for anybody that has listened to this. We will drop Jojo's information down in the show notes and we'll drop some information on site.
I if you are listening to this you probably know a whole lot about sitebob anyway but we will still drop information on sitebob in the show notes. Thank you again, thank you all for listening and we'll see you again next time.
Jojo Furnival (29:24)
Thank you.
Originally the Founder of leading Digital Agency in Derby, Frogspark (with Liam Nelson) and now the leader of The Digital Maze – our WordPress/Woocommerce & Performance Marketing business created off the back of acquisitions of Boom Online & Evolve Trader. Rob specialises in leading creative teams, high-level strategy relating to eCommerce, SEO, PPC, CRO, digital strategy and Web Design. With over 14+ years in the Digital Agency leadership, Rob has been involved with hundreds of marketing projects and campaigns with some of the best known brands.
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