Steve Toth

Toth spent six years at an agency early in his career. On the eCom@One podcast he said he managed "all types of clients under the sun," as many as 180 accounts at once. In 2018 he became SEO manager at FreshBooks, the accounting software company, where he says organic traffic grew to 50,000 clicks a day and the site ranked first for searches such as "invoice template."

He is candid about the slow start. "I've been doing SEO for 14 years. For the first seven I was not very good," he told the James Dooley Podcast in 2024. "I was passionate but results were average." He says that changed in 2016 and 2017, when he stopped believing every statement from Google and learned from practitioners such as Kyle Roof and Matt Diggity.

SEO Notebook began while he was still at FreshBooks. "I'm creative but not organised. I had ideas everywhere. Post-it notes. Emails to myself. Slack messages," he told Dooley. He moved everything into Evernote, decided to email one page a week, and has kept going since. "It changed my life and let me become a full-time entrepreneur," he said. He has worked for himself since 2020, and the agency counts more than 300 tactics and 27,000 subscribers across SEO Notebook and AI Notebook.

He traces the habit of giving tactics away to his years in-house, where he set up knowledge-sharing lunches and a ten-minute session before the first meeting of the day. "The Go-Giver reinforced the idea of sharing at scale," he said, referring to the business book. "Not just one-to-one but reaching as many people as possible."

He also calls himself very introverted. "My first talk at FreshBooks was in front of 400 people. Terrifying. But doing it changed everything," he said.

He started SEO IRL because Toronto "has loads of great SEOs and marketers but no event to call our own." The first three editions were evening events, and the 2024 conference grew to a full day headlined by Mike King of iPullRank. The 2026 edition, set for October 6 and 7 at MaRS in downtown Toronto, sold out.

Notebook Agency grew out of his solo consulting. "Eventually good people wanted to work with me. I said yes. It grew naturally from there," he said.

The agency hands strategy and recommendations to clients' own teams. "We never log into clients' websites," Toth told Dooley. He traces the rule to a 2018 project with "broken forms" and "AWOL developers," and to his time at FreshBooks, where he saw that large companies prefer vendors who recommend changes over vendors who need access.

There are no account managers either. "When a client speaks to someone they speak directly to a strategist," he said. In his view, agencies that sell many services end up needing middlemen to translate between sales and the people doing the work.

Toth said on the Masters of Search podcast that demand at his agency now runs about 60 percent toward answer engine optimization, the work of shaping what AI assistants say about a brand, and 40 percent toward classic SEO. He said that work now draws in PR, product, and customer service teams, because it covers how a company's differentiators and product facts show up in large language models. Teaching a course on the subject for CXL led him to focus on the specific deal-breaker questions buyers ask, beyond generic searches like "best project management software."

Notebook packages that work as its Trust Alignment Framework. The team first writes a Truth Notebook, a client-approved record of pricing, integrations, compliance credentials, support, and ideal customers. It then tests what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode say against that record and fixes the owned pages and outside sources that get the facts wrong, so a buyer asking an AI assistant detailed questions gets accurate answers about the client's product.