[Top Agency Series] Scaling With SEO, Paid Media, and Analytics With Tyler Lane

Tyler Lane is the Founder and CEO of Session Interactive, a Denver-based digital marketing consultancy specializing in SEO, analytics, paid search, and content strategy for mid-market and enterprise brands. With over 13 years of experience in digital marketing, he has successfully created, launched, and evaluated SEO, content marketing, analytics, and social strategies, bringing his expertise to Session Interactive. Tyler leads a team of seasoned professionals who deliver data-driven solutions to help clients achieve measurable growth.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [03:56] Tyler Lane discusses Session Interactive and its data-driven marketing approach
• [05:12] Common mistakes companies make with Google and Adobe Analytics setups
• [07:21] How Session Interactive uses local SEO and paid media to dominate regional search markets
• [10:20] Low-hanging technical SEO opportunities businesses often overlook
• [14:19] The importance of mapping the customer journey in analytics and strategy
• [15:12] How AI is changing SEO and the rise of generative engine optimization
• [22:27] Tyler talks about his career path from IBM to founding a digital marketing agency
• [25:46] Building a strong agency culture and retaining top talent
• [29:12] SEO strategies used to support e-commerce brand growth

In this episode…

Many companies struggle to turn their digital marketing investments into measurable outcomes, often due to blind spots in data tracking, ineffective SEO strategies, or lackluster paid media performance. Businesses waste money and miss growth opportunities without understanding user behavior or proper attribution. So, how can organizations build more intelligent, results-driven marketing systems?

Tyler Lane, an expert in SEO, paid media, and analytics, shares how a deeply analytical approach can transform marketing effectiveness. He emphasizes the importance of a clean analytics setup to ensure accurate attribution and performance tracking. He recommends auditing conversion events and tailoring data dashboards to support strategic decisions without overwhelming teams. By focusing on user intent, leveraging both organic and paid strategies, and staying ahead of AI’s role in search behavior, Tyler provides a framework for sustainable digital success.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Tyler Lane, Founder and CEO of Session Interactive, about building results-focused marketing campaigns. Tyler explores actionable SEO strategies, the power of clean analytics, and the impact of customer journeys on conversion. He also discusses agency culture, the role of AI in search, and his path from IBM to launching his own business.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Tyler Lane on LinkedIn
• Session Interactive
• Built to Convert

Special Mention(s):

• Second Bite Podcast
• Product-Led SEO: The Why Behind Building Your Organic Growth Strategy by Eli Schwartz
• Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire by Dan Martell
• Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life by Bill Perkins

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Growth Through Acquisitions – What is Your KPI and Northstar? With Jason Swenk” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Building a Great Team and More Helpful Insights with Jason Swenk Host of The Smart Agency Master Class Podcast” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Navigating a Merger and Becoming an End-to-End Digital Partner With Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments: 

• “We want to simplify it for our clients. I think there’s a big intimidation gap.”
• “We’re immersed in there providing value and attribution-based insights.”
• “It starts with the conversion values to make sure people are understanding and attributing success.”
• “It’s leading with intentionality. It’s leading with just value.”
• “We want to make sure you’re getting as much value as possible with your strategic relationship.”

Action Steps: 

1. Audit and clean your analytics setup regularly: Ensuring accurate data collection prevents misattribution and enables smarter marketing decisions across channels.
2. Map out your customer journey in detail: Understanding user interactions allows for targeted optimizations that improve conversions and enhance the overall experience.
3. Use customized dashboards for decision-making: Personalized data visualizations help stakeholders access key metrics and make informed decisions quickly.
4. Prioritize local SEO in your strategy: Optimizing for geographic regions boosts visibility among nearby customers and supports regional business growth.
5. Integrate AI tools thoughtfully into marketing workflows: Leveraging automation enhances productivity while preserving human insight ensures effective strategic direction.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:00

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

Doctor Jeremy Weisz here, founder of Inspired Insider where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Tyler Lane of Session Interactive and Tyler, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out, since this is part of the top agency series, I had some cool agency ones. Todd Taskey. Todd Taskey helps pair agencies with private equity. Okay.

He has a Second Bite Podcast because he finds that sometimes when people sell to private equity and then private equity sells again, they make more sometimes in the second bite than they do on the first. And so we talked about the M&A space the agency space, valuation space. Great episode great podcast. He’s become a good friend as well. Jason Swenk we have to mention Jason Swenk.

I mean Tyler and I dominated people in bags. We’re very competitive. And we met it through Jason Swenk and his group. He’s got two episodes. One of them is like how he built his agency up to eight figures and sold it.

And it was a really interesting episode again, just like some of the growth things that he did and some of his recommendations, which was great. There was another one, Tyler, Kevin Hourigan, he’s been had an agency since 1995. So it was really interesting to hear the landscape of the internet and agency and everything in between with the .com bust and how that affected him. And so he’s a good guy and just really experienced. That was a great episode, so check me out on inspiredinsider.com.

This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect to your dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that in two ways. One, we help companies launch and run a podcast or an easy button for a company to do that.

We do the strategy, accountability and the full execution and production. And number two, we’re an easy button for companies gifting. So we make gifting and staying top of mind to your clients and partners and prospects easy and even staff. Tyler. So like people will send us their address list.

We will curate the gifts, we’ll put their branding on the box, we’ll send it to them in a campaign over sometimes years. So we call ourselves kind of the magic elves that run in the background to make it easy for a company to build amazing relationships. You know? Because for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. And I found no better way over the past decade to profile the people I admire and the companies on the podcast and send them sweet treats in the mail.

So, Tyler, I don’t know if you’ve gotten any, but you probably will.

Tyler Lane: 03:05

So yeah, but I’m looking forward to it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:06

Okay, cool. I’m excited to introduce Tyler Lane. He’s the founder and CEO of Session Interactive. Session Interactive is a results-driven digital marketing agency which transforms how brands grow online. And he has over 15 years of success in SEO marketing automation.

I mean, you name it. When I look at his website and what he’s done, he helps companies do this, and he builds really a data-driven campaign to outperform the industry benchmarks. He’s all about data, right? And so we’re going to get into that. Tyler, thanks for joining me.

Tyler Lane: 03:43

Thanks, Jeremy. Good to see you. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:45

Yeah. So just start off and talk about Session Interactive and what you do. And while you do that I’m going to pull up the website. We’re going to poke around.

Tyler Lane: 03:56

Let’s do it. Yeah. So Session is a search-forward agency fixating on three main departments, primarily SEO, which is a broad acronym. It’s changing rapidly in the space with AI and a number of other things getting into generative engine optimization, technical optimization, off-page work, content marketing, you name it. Then we have our paid media department, which is primarily paid search, paid social with a bit of programmatic.

And then lastly, which is definitely our core differentiator amongst our experience, but is around analytics. That’s primarily web analytics, immersion across Google, Google products, Adobe products, you name it. We’re immersed in there providing value and attribution-based insights.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:48

Talk about the analytics for a second. I know that you geek out on analytics and everything goes back to really. Analytics. And when we talk about truly running data-driven campaigns, it’s all about the analytics. What have you seen?

Because you look under the hood right. You go in there, you look under the hood. What are the mistakes people are making within the analytics realm?

Tyler Lane: 05:12

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think, you know, I’ll just start off first is we recognize that as just a massive differentiator in the space where there’s a lot of paid media agencies and SEO, but their competency around analytics was pretty limited, and it wasn’t really coming full circle at all. So, you know, to really answer your question around some of the mistakes that we see, clients, every single instance of analytics, Google Analytics or Adobe that we’ve encountered has massive gaps, massive discrepancies of has issues in terms of cleanliness, attribution problems, you name it. I think there’s probably maybe a handful that have been in like a really good place, but still has opportunities. And, you know, it really is around trust.

It starts with the conversion values to make sure people are understanding and attributing success to their campaigns correctly. And oftentimes some of those elements are maybe configured correctly, but they’re really not understanding the full funnel as people walk through and digest content and go through specific items within the website. So making sure events are configured correctly so you can kind of understand people’s user behavior and make strategic business decisions around how you allocate money across channels. And we want to simplify it for our clients. I think there’s a big intimidation gap to people are not in the platforms as much.

So we really want to utilize data lakes and backup things and then pipe everything into custom data visualization platforms so they don’t have to go into analytics necessarily. They can see what they need to make the decisions that they need to. Within a real-time dashboard.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:56

You can customize the dashboard for them so they can just see it.

Tyler Lane: 06:59

Yeah.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:01

Well, maybe we’ll talk about an example. And I was looking at your website and I found Canvas Credit Union and multiplies conversion traffic five times. Can you walk us through what happened there? Because I’m sure everyone’s like, I want to multiply my conversion traffic.

Tyler Lane: 07:21

Yeah. The credit union space has just been. It’s been thrilling, to be honest, I, I I’ll say this, I said this on a podcast a number of months ago about just the passion that these individuals have. It’s unmatched in terms of their, their particular.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:37

Why do you think? Because it’s more community-based, or?

Tyler Lane: 07:39

Yeah, it’s community-based. It’s really it’s you’re impacting people at these pivotal decisions in their lives right around, you know, buying their first vehicle or buying their first home or buying their second home or vacation properties, you name it. And they’re trying to really establish great relationships. They’re trying to, of course, give them the best rates that they can possible and make sure they have this, this fluid, transparent integration with their financial institution and which is awesome. And you can see the passion with these individuals is really, really impressive to see.

So when we first got in with canvas, it was evident that they had no real core SEO strategy. They had no real.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:24

What were they coming to you with? Like what was the issue? Were they saying, I just want more clients or customers?

Tyler Lane: 08:29

They had recognized that they needed SEO help. They realized they didn’t have a comprehensive strategy. They realized they didn’t really have a pulse on their organic search program. And organic search with these brands is should be dominant, right? It should be a really top channel.

And it was, but they weren’t fully optimizing it, no pun intended there. But they really weren’t harnessing the true power of a content strategy of a technical infrastructure that adheres to users first. So those are things that we you know, we started off with an audit and really sound strategy from there and a comprehensive roadmap. They’ve been a long, long-standing client of ours. And it’s been an awesome fruitful relationship.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:16

What kind of seems like SEO. Is there anything else you do with them?

Tyler Lane: 09:21

Yeah. So they’re a multi-service client. They initially started with SEO fixating on local SEO. So building those local platforms and making sure individuals in a local designated marketing area can find a location. Right.

And then we help supplement organic growth with paid media and primarily paid search, which is perform incredibly well, all for, again, their local designated market area, which is all of Colorado. There are about 30-plus locations now and really need to differentiate themselves and make sure that, you know, they’re a they’re the go to brands when people are looking for a financial institution.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:58

When you go into a company like that or any company, what’s you know, when you say technical infrastructure, I imagine there’s a lot of stuff maybe they’re not doing on the page. What’s the one example of like a low-hanging fruit opportunity that people should maybe go check because maybe they’re not doing it and it’s so obvious to you, but not to others?

Tyler Lane: 10:20

Yeah, I think, you know, it’s kind of a good question. It’s a loaded question too, because I think we want to ensure there’s a custom strategy. I think oftentimes CEOs will go into a website and judge things very quickly to say like, oh, XYZ needs to be fixed and we don’t understand the history. You don’t understand why that hasn’t been fixed. Maybe it was an oversight, or maybe it has been planned as a release, but there’s been some limitations.

So it takes, you know, it takes a thoughtful response to tread lightly. There’s people that have been building website infrastructure or a custom CMS, certain things like that. So you need to, you know, you try to tread lightly there. I will say, you know, certain things around usability, speed to a certain extent, making sure that, you know, those core aspects are tenets within your strategy. Back to the analytics.

Really quick outside of SEO. Well, it integrates with SEO, but is really around conversion tracking correctly and making sure that’s set up and integrated. When we had first onboarded canvas and a number of clients like them to they their attribution from an application, that’s really what their goal right is to ensure.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:36

They want someone coming on. They want to apply for a loan or something like that.

Tyler Lane: 11:41

Yep. Yeah. And they want to then nurture those individuals, get them in to establish a rapport. And the attribution was not set up at the channel level. So they would just they were getting click data like someone clicked on this button.

Right. They weren’t getting full funnel. Okay. They converted on this particular application. And they ultimately came through and became a customer.

And it was attributed to XYZ channel or a group, a group of those channels. So that’s what we really helped do for them to make sure that was streamlined and reallocate marketing funds to more efficient channels and more efficient multi-channel activities.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:18

I’m curious, what’s an example of something you changed based on what you saw with analytics or something else? With, I mean, it could be with them or anyone because I’m thinking, well, oh yeah, maybe through the analytics you saw this is in the wrong place. Like people are looking over here. I don’t know what are some of the things you had to change to help them optimize?

Tyler Lane: 12:45

Yeah, I love that. I think that that’s applicable to pretty much every client we work with. I mentioned that word intimidation. Google analytics has gone through a variety of changes. The most recent change or update is Google Analytics four.

And it’s become you know, it’s very people are very frustrated in the community because it got away from the old instance, which is a lot more simplistic, a lot more user-friendly. And so now with analytics, we are experiencing, again, people are becoming a lot more intimidated by going into the infrastructure. It’s not as intuitive. So we’re really wanting to educate clients in how to utilize the data more effectively. We want to make ensure it’s simplistic and we want to help them analyze.

And ultimately it’s the questions that we ask them like how is, you know, what’s going to be beneficial to your day-to-day in your particular job. These are individual questions. And how can we make it easier for you to make those decisions faster. And that’s how we want to customize the instance. So we get away from some of that fluff that is just, you know, you can pull the same report a few different times or a few different ways.

Excuse me. And it gets incredibly confusing. So one team member is doing the same thing perceivably as another, but they’re pulling different things. So it gets immensely confusing. So a little bit of governance, a little bit of strategic planning and making sure they’re able to assess and analyze data correctly on the reports that make the most sense for them.

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