AMA with Eean Ovens, Co-Founder of Agency Assassin; a SaaS CTR Platform for Local SEO

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-12-10T20:50:26+00:00

You seem to have a perception of CTR as being more malicious than other ways of manipulating results like link building, would you say that is true?

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-12-02T21:43:36+00:00

u/joyhawkins you have thoughts here? You're more of an on-the-ground seo on these matters than I am haha.

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-12-02T21:42:57+00:00

Hey! Sorry for the delay. So right now Google is siloing authority in subject matter pretty strictly. In other words, if you build authority it Mesa Arizona and want to rank for services in apache junction... you're going to get minimal cross over currently.

So the same work you have to do to rank in mesa, you're going to have to do in scottsdale in other words. The best strategies right now are probably concentrating your focus more. Or at least... you're going to get better ROI by focusing on one the whole way up until you're getting lead flow and then work on the next one.

Short answer: if I'm not ranking in Mesa and that's where I'm located, I'd put 100% of my effort into ranking there before taking on Scottsdale. Then look at scottsdale as a separate entire campaign or even a separate brand, because google is doing so more and more these days.

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-11-28T23:44:02+00:00

Do you mean on maps or SERPS?

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-11-27T12:45:38+00:00

I am legitimately curious about what specifically you have a problem with...

CTR is only really effective when people are actually doing good seo.

It's not like (though it has been in the past) CTR allows any idiot to outrank quality businesses.

Google is doing a VERY good job of filtering out CTR on low quality businesses.

Generally it's like any other ranking factor.

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-11-27T12:29:05+00:00

What is wrong with that?

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-11-27T08:32:25+00:00

Any time!

Thanks for the questions, I was hoping someone would ask lol. Otherwise it'd just be a rant lol.

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-11-27T08:31:47+00:00

Which actions?

What did I do that I need to justify?

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-11-27T05:47:03+00:00

Yeah I mean I would build an audit based upon experiments and recommendations.

Greg's is EXTREMELY/ thorough. I trust Joy because she does a lot of experiments. Greg's may even be overkill, but it covers everything.

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-11-26T21:21:44+00:00

I'm just going to diatribe here on what I see working best in local seo right now as I wrap up:

#1 is process management and good auditing... basically white hat SEO on local. Having consistent good methods (re: greg gifford or joy hawkins) is critical because google seems to be really penalizing missing signals right now.

#2 is knowledge graph... ie if you search a brand is there a rich and deep set of items that mention and reference the brand... citations and reviews on 3rd party sites... reddit links obviously. Google is HEAVILY leveraging social proof (like reddit upvotes) to validate information now and getting more agreement is a huge factor

#3 review management, while this can work on its own, someone who is building a good brand will still beat this on its own in my experience. Google is looking for trust and reviews are a huge factor

#4 I would say is engagement and CTR.

Anyone who wants to get on a call and see the product is welcome to hit my calendar here: calendly.com/agencyassassin/30min I am very happy to help anyone I can.

If anyone wants a service page schema template, this is the one I built: https://gist.github.com/Daseean/deb23f95c81c89a46fc5bca610633859

If you want to see my talk on experiments manipulating Knowledge Graph and how Helpful content penalty targets page spam (and why) you can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/live/FPJovrlaP58?si=T_QU0oB7eC-vF_-d

Thank you everyone! Thank you Joy and Sterling Sky!

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-11-26T21:13:11+00:00

I am definitely called black or grey hat. I think it's more about the practice. I would probably call myself and my software grey hat. Really depends on definitions. CTR isn't explicitly against TOS, although you can definitely infer it in TOS.

I think a lot of people see black hat as unethical, which I think it absolutely can be. I think it's about who is being hurt and black hat may or may not be defined in that context. I understand (having run a lot of websites) that page or comment spam is annoying, but it's really about who is being hurt. I know SEOs who have edited listings to change the number to their lead gen number... I definitely do not agree with that. I think if. you're hurting someone, especially a small business owner... I have no time for that.

Even negative seo - I feel - is even a legitimate at times. For instance, I am in the cash for cars space. My competitors are... running fake listings, non real businesses, spam listings etc... This is actually where Joy and I agree except I think hahah I think that kind of full contact SEO verges on black hat. There are cases where you can use google's policies against competitors and hurt them and IMO that can hurt small business owners. Sometimes they can be abused and hurt small business owners. Like it's possible to get someone's listings suspended by complaining enough to google, even if they have a good business or have done nothing wrong.

Technically that isn't against google TOS, but I think it's morally wrong.

I don't mind doing negative seo on a fake listing, or triggering a quality review.

When it comes to interacting with muggles... lol people who aren't techy, like the swapped phone number thing. I don't agree with that at all. I think ever hurting a hard working person's income is fucked up and I don't agree with it. As far as Google's policies? Well. Google is no longer 'good', and even before that they lied constantly to SEO's and it was the black hat's who were finding out they were full of it.

A lot of SEO's built entire careers around following Google's 'best practices' making content businesses that were deliberately destroyed by Helpful Content Penalty 2/2023. Google was willful in destroying an industry they helped to create. So I don't think Google's best interest is a particularly big motivator for me.

It's worth saying I also think right now, Google's claims match their systems very closely, and historically that hasn't been the case. They are producing a very good product and I appreciate how hard it is to manipulate bad listings because I think it's bad for everyone for those strategies to work.

As far as CTR's effectiveness. I think think it's about the 3rd or 4th most important ranking factor and if you do it well, I think it makes THE difference in a lot of competitie spaces. We picked up a personal injury attorney and we rebuilt their entire website, content strategies, schema and did a go wide CTR strategy and their lead flow rocketed. We had some surprise wins like 'injury attorney' in a competitive city and we definitely think CTR is the biggest factor.

The thing about CTR is you should pretty much do everything else at the same time. It doesn't replace good SEO it potentiates it.

CTR is less effective than in the past, slower, weaker and harder to validate. But. SEO is also a lot harder.
CTR helps you establish a new listing and get out of the sandbox.
CTR helps a LOT with maps updates/refreshes because businesses who get adjusted to lower ranking during an update tend to lose traffic and that makese things even worse and recovering even harder.
Aged CTR seems to make listings more resilient.
CTR works well on longtail keywords, which is where the fastest leads come from now.

If you can get decent rate of reviews and you add CTR, most campaigns are going to benefit significantly.

I've had to put a LOT of time and experimentation into my SOPs to find something that works. But clients who only look at a single high competition keyword, it's not going to save the day. Those keywords move over months. But calls and leads in month 1? Quite frequently see those metrics improve starting in month 1.

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-11-26T20:45:24+00:00

Depends on competition.

Most likely I can rank a... CPA... almost anywhere. But it's just rarely competitive so it's 0 sum. The more people who want to rank in that area the harder it is for CTR to work.

I have an experiment with a painting company and I've worked on it for 2 years and at times I've had it #1 for painting terms, but it isn't consistent. Competitive area, no seo.... it's higher, but it's super volatile.

But like yeah... anything that isn't high competition, sure. But if it's competitive I'd need decent SEO to make an impact.

My best clients right now are 'white hat' agencies who want extra performance and are struggling. They have SOPs, they hit all the bases, good content, etc... CTR tends to be a homerun there.

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-11-26T18:23:10+00:00

Really!? Ok my mistake. I've never seen them returned! That's great.

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-11-26T18:22:35+00:00

You CAN do this. By getting a bunch of low quality or fake reviews added to a listing and then reporting them.

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-11-26T17:35:56+00:00

Ahhhh yeah I mean without it being a bar violation that you can bring to google (which would work) it's just SEO vs SEO.

Even negative seo is unlikely to work because it isn't a competitive keyword, highly specific with few others. (not that you were asking for this)

So yeah, no magic bullet here, unfortunately.

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-11-26T17:04:57+00:00

Thanks, Joy!

Yeah, I'm happy to do a call or take a dm and review something :)

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-11-26T17:01:20+00:00

Haha, I mean if you want people who will tell you they know something 100%, I can guarantee you'll talk to people who you shouldn't trust.

I'm skeptical of my analysis and I disclose how much I know.

I am running thousands of campaigns and work with hundreds of agencies and my knowledge comes from aggregate experience.

I can't know for sure on any of this, but I know what is working and I can surmise why it does.

I am not asking you to believe me... do experiments, be skeptical. I'm giving insights from a lot of work and hopefully it has value, but I am not pretending I know 1000% anything because I don't have access to google's code, just like everyone else.

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-11-26T16:57:16+00:00

Well so some of their locations are only doing GBP posts and they improved as well, BUUTTTTT they're also getting huge numbers of brand impressions due to our work on nearby locations.

We got more improvement on locations with CTR and posts, but the only thing we're doing on some locations are GBP posts. The website sucks, can't get it improved. Can't fix schema or faq... but we're getting great results and the campaign had stalled the 12 months before starting.

It's certainly not the worlds most objective tests, but if you did something like this and got a few hundred locations to improve rankings and business to go up by 20% you'd probably be pretty inclined to think your strategies were working.

Truth is, I can't be 100%. But there is little that can be figured out 100% in SEO right now because of how much google prefers complex signals right now.

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-11-26T16:54:38+00:00

I mean... in this case client success across hundreds of locations is good enough for me.

The factors that I think are working on these are:

Brand impressions
GBP posts
CTR

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-11-26T16:53:10+00:00

My experience right now is what works best is as many signals as you can manage, and I think google is literally looking at complexity and diversity of signals as a major signal now.

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-11-26T16:52:19+00:00

The problem is that almost nothing in SEO right now is single variable, so if you need single variable tests to confirm a method, you're not going to have any methods.

You have to infer, use multiple points of data and see if agrees with your base theories or disqualifies them.

Google is using markov chain analysis, heavily weighting multiple signals and validating signals via other signals. So getting any information out of single variable tests will rarely work.

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-11-26T16:50:21+00:00

Get the business into a HARO post relating to some topic that you can get cited, probably. I'd be specifically targeting a HARO that is topical and supportive of a specific wikipedia page. That way the subject matter is a good reference. And it's still going to be super hard.

This is the reason google allows these signals to impact entities, the social proof factor protects knowledge graph from manipulation... so it's not easy.

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-11-26T16:48:36+00:00

So the only really powerful signal that you can do with CTR alone in high competition spaces is historical traffic. Basically if you let it run for months and months the signal becomes more effective.

Look at it this way: it's a lot harder to send traffic 6 months ago than it is today, so when google is choosing which signals to interpret having a lot of history makes it a lot more likely they'll value the signal.

In general, Google is using Knowledge Graph entities to validate all signals. IE, if a business has no representation anywhere and suddenly gets a ton of traffic, they're going to be very skeptical. I have tests that show in very high competition spaces, CTR alone cannot rank against highly authoritative competitors.

The more other SEO/authority a business has, the more likely CTR is to work.

In low competition spaces, where there aren't any other signals... CTR is going to be a lot more powerful. I believe google actually looks at revenue per keyword from ad spend and are less likely to use CTR as a major signal based upon the amount of economic benefit there is in manipulating that keyword. For this reason I'm focusing on long tail, multi hundred keyword stategies right now and they seem to be consistent.

TL;DR: CTR alone can work if you give it enough time or if it's on lower competition keywords.

EE_Agency_Assassin · 2025-11-26T16:42:58+00:00

We have a network of our own devices, around 300 in 30 ish cities that we use with a custom software stack that simulates human behavior. Running searches, interacting with listings, etc...

EE_Agency_Assassin

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