E-Coffee with Experts

Emma Robinett, Chief Strategy Officer at Relevance, joins our host Ranmay Rath on E-Coffee with Experts to talk about what sustainable growth looks like when SEO, AI visibility, content, and digital PR work together. Emma shares how Relevance evolved from a small PR and backlinking firm into a growth marketing agency, and why modern marketing strategies need to connect activity to revenue, retenti...

Kevin Daisey, Founder & Director of Business Development at Array, has spent more than 20 years building digital agencies and now runs specialized businesses serving law firms and home service companies. In this episode of E-Coffee with Experts, Kevin explains why niching can create stronger expertise, clearer messaging, and better client fit instead of limiting growth. He also breaks down how Arr...

Amanda Schomaker, Head of Growth at 1905 New Media, joins Michael Barber to talk about growing an agency while adopting AI and protecting the client experience. Amanda shares lessons from running her own boutique agency, why poor scoping can damage profitability, and how acquisitions should add capabilities without creating a disjointed business. She explains how 1905 uses its in-house tool Kirk t...

Danny Lima, Senior Paid Media Manager at Kanbar Digital, joins Michael Barber to unpack how modern performance marketers should think about paid media, channel expansion, and growth. With more than 15 years across Google, YouTube, Amazon, and Meta, Danny explains what organic search taught him about patience, customer language, and the full search journey. They discuss how to decide whether a new...

Monique Rice, VP of Sales and Marketing at Effective Web Solutions, explains what it takes for local businesses to turn search visibility into real revenue. In today's episode with our host Michael Barber, she shares how local SEO has evolved from Yellow Pages to Google Maps and AI-driven discovery, while the fundamentals of being found, trusted, and easy to contact have stayed the same. You’ll he...

Roger Cooney, Co-founder at MoonSauce Agency, joins E-Coffee with Experts to discuss how paid search teams can improve Google Ads performance by connecting campaign optimization to real business outcomes. Roger shares lessons from more than a decade in digital marketing, including the differences between white-label agency work and working directly with businesses, why an overarching strategy matt...

What does it really take for a brand to become visible in AI-generated answers? In this episode of E-Coffee with Experts, Sam Gibb, Head of Digital Marketing at ICAAL, shares how SEO fundamentals continue to shape visibility across Google, ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI platforms. Sam explains why useful content, strong brand signals, reviews, case studies and unique insights still matter—and how br...

Davis Bauman, Director of Digital Experience at Noble Studios, joins E-Coffee with Experts to talk about what websites need to do as AI tools take on more of the early research. When visitors arrive with basic questions already answered, Davis says the site has to make the brand’s purpose, point of difference, and “why” easy to understand. It also needs to give people a useful next step. Davis exp...

Devon Vocke, Co-Founder at Evoke Strategy, joins E-Coffee with Experts to talk about full-funnel digital PR, SEO, and how brands are discovered through AI search. Drawing on Evoke’s AI visibility research, Devon explains why a brand’s presence can change with the model, wording, buyer intent, geography, and context. He shares four factors behind durable visibility: clarity, consistency, credibilit...

Adam Smartschan, Chief Strategy Officer at Altitude Marketing, joins Michael Barber on E-Coffee with Experts to discuss how B2B buyers are finding and evaluating technical providers as AI becomes part of their research. Drawing on Altitude’s work across technology, life sciences, and manufacturing, Adam explains why niche companies need to be clear about the problems they solve, the applications t...

Bernie Clark, Founder at Majux, brings more than 20 years of marketing and business development experience from inside the legal industry to this conversation about digital marketing for law firms. He explains why a useful legal SEO strategy has to account for both practice area and geography, from the different research needs of workers’ compensation and criminal defense to the role of local page...

Brad Casper, CEO of Heart & Soul Marketing, joins E-Coffee with Experts to discuss what it takes to build sustainable growth across consumer brands, agencies, and private-equity-backed businesses. Drawing on more than three decades of leadership experience with companies including Procter & Gamble, Church & Dwight, the Dial Corporation, and the Phoenix Suns, Brad explains why leaders should focus...

Dennis Lazard, Founder of ESA Digital, joins E-Coffee with Experts to unpack how search is changing as brands compete for visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. Dennis traces his path from building an early AI project for Google Ads to growing an agency that works with funded and established SaaS, AI apps, and technology brands. He shares what he learned from starting ESA...

What happens after someone finds your product through search? Olabinjo Adeniran, a London-based Product and Growth Marketing Consultant focused on fintech, joins E-Coffee with Experts to discuss how SEO, onboarding, and retention connect. Drawing on his work with crypto and payments products, Olabinjo explains how search strategy changes with product maturity, why first-time buyers need trust and...

Brian McLeod, AI SEO Director of Level Agency, joins us to break down what’s working across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity. Brian shares his unexpected path from theater to enterprise SEO, along with lessons from major projects, including a migration that drove 150% click growth, a 40% search performance lift for TCS Education, and work that tripled a financial services client’s AI v...

Andrew Mazzonna, SEO Director of VEA Technologies, joins E-Coffee with Experts to share how he got into SEO in a pretty unexpected way, discovering Black Hat World during a rough freshman year of college. What started with teaching himself WordPress and experimenting through trial and error eventually turned into a career spanning self-storage, e-commerce, and enterprise agency work. In this episo...

Ben Kalkman, CEO of Rocket Media, started his agency as a side hustle while working as a handyman. 23 years later, it has become a leading home services marketing agency, and he has intentionally kept the team capped at 50 people. In this episode with our host Dawood Bukhari, Ben shares how one repeat customer taught him the difference between selling a quick fix and building real trust, why he na...

What happens when you stop looking at SEO through the lens of keywords and start looking at it through the lens of people? Carl Poxon, SEO Director Reflect Digital, joins E-Coffee with Experts to explore exactly that. Carl takes us through his unusual journey into SEO, from biomolecular science to hosting, media, and agency life, and shares how Google’s Panda and Penguin updates helped push the in...

SEO is changing fast. With AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity becoming part of how people discover information, is traditional SEO still enough? In this episode of E-Coffee with Experts, Ranmay chats with Alistair Knight, Founder and CEO of Zionova, about what’s really changing in search, and how SEOs and agencies can adapt. Alistair shares the unconventional path that led him into SEO, from ru...

Dan Lauer, Director of SEO and GEO at Walker Sands, joins E-Coffee with Experts to talk about what it really takes to succeed in both traditional search and AI-driven search. Dan shares his unconventional journey from studying meteorology to building a career in SEO — and why he likes to say that “SEO chose me,” not the other way around. He also breaks down the strategy behind his award-winning Ho...

What does technical SEO actually look like when you're dealing with millions of URLs, multiple languages, and a whole engineering team? Samantha Torres, Senior Manager of Technical SEO at Pipedrive, better known as the SEO Mermaid, joins the show to share what she’s learned from more than a decade in SEO, both agency-side and in-house. She’s worked on some seriously complex migrations, including a...

Rafael Andrade, Head of Business Development & Strategic Partnerships at illumin, joins E-Coffee with Experts to talk about what it really takes to scale programmatic advertising partnerships without compromising on quality. Drawing from his experience in affiliate marketing, ad exchanges, and now leading partnerships at illumin, Rafael shares why trust, transparency, and genuine relationships sti...

What happens to SEO when people stop searching the way they used to? In this episode with our host Dawood Bukhari, Benj Arriola, Sr. SEO Director at 85Sixty, shares what he’s seeing firsthand as AI Overviews, GEO, and AEO change how people discover and evaluate information online. He talks about how his SEO team once contributed 70% of the company’s revenue, the technical challenges of working wit...

Richard Hill, CEO at eComOne, joins E-Coffee with Experts to break down how SEO is evolving in the age of AI search. Richard started selling computer components online 25 years ago, grew that business to over 12 million pounds a year, then built eComOne into a 30-person agency focused on mid-market ecommerce brands. In this episode, Richard shares the systems and frameworks (like his agency's "Cat...

What happens when an aerospace engineer brings systems engineering into the world of SEO? That’s the story of Jerry Chen. Before entering SEO more than 20 years ago, Jerry worked on major aerospace programs, including the Boeing 787, C-17, and X-37 space plane. Today, he leads ECF Marketing and ThrustIQ, using data, automation, and AI to help businesses build more effective growth systems. In this...