Exploring Search Engine Visibility with Chris Dickey, the CEO & Founder of Visably
with Shane Barker
Chris Dickey joins Shane Barker to explore how brands can improve their search presence through third-party visibility. Rather than fighting for top SEO spots, Chris shares how leveraging PR, earned media, and strategic outreach can help brands appear in search results where it counts most. Learn how the Visably platform is changing the game for digital marketers looking to dominate competitive search landscapes in new, efficient ways.
Today's guest...
Chris Dickey
Chris Dickey is the Founder and CEO of Visably, a search engine visibility (SEV) platform that helps brands measure and amplify their presence across all segments of the search results. By integrating best practices from PR, SEO, and brand marketing, Chris empowers companies to claim more real estate on the SERP and capture high-intent consumers.
Prior to launching Visably, Chris spent over a decade as the founder of Purple Orange Brand Communications, an award-winning agency recognized for innovative campaign strategies and authentic brand storytelling. During that time, he helped numerous outdoor and lifestyle brands thrive, delivering measurable results through smart, integrated marketing. As a frequent contributor to industry publications, Chris shares actionable insights on aligning diverse marketing channels for maximum impact.
His forward-thinking approach underscores the importance of cohesive brand visibility in an evolving digital landscape. Chris continues to champion pioneering solutions that equip companies with a competitive edge in search-driven ecosystems.
Episode Show Notes
In this episode of “The Marketing Growth Podcast,” Shane Barker chats with Chris Dickey, Founder and CEO of Visably, a first-of-its-kind SaaS platform focused on search engine visibility (SEV). Chris introduces the concept of SEV, which goes beyond traditional SEO or SEM by identifying all the ways a brand can appear in search results—particularly through earned media and PR strategies.
Chris explains how his background in public relations helped him realize that many of the most valuable placements in search don’t come from a brand’s own website but from third-party reviews, blogs, and media features. He shares how PR professionals can take a strategic approach by targeting the publications and writers that already dominate key SERPs. This creates opportunities for “barnacle SEO,” where brands benefit from the authority and visibility of external sites.
Together, Shane and Chris explore how brands can become more discoverable without trying to outrank giants like Google or Zillow. If you’ve ever struggled with gaining traction on competitive keywords, this episode offers a smarter, more creative approach to showing up where your audience is already searching.
Books mentioned
Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout
Brands mentioned
Visably
REI
Forbes
Google
Zillow
Welcome to the Marketing Growth podcast. I’m your host, Shane Barker, and my guest today is Chris Dickey, founder and CEO of Visibly.
This is a new and first-to-market SaaS platform that focuses on the intersection of SEO and PR. In today’s episode, I’m going to talk about his platform and the concept of search engine visibility, which it is based on.
So cool. So cool. You guys, hey, we’re excited today—we got Chris Dickey on the podcast. I’m super excited about having him on. We’re going to talk about his company. He’s built a few different companies, but we’re going to talk about one in particular that really kind of caught my eye in regards to what we call SEV, which is search engine visibility.
So Chris, why don’t we talk a little bit about where you grew up? I always like to give a little backstory on individuals. Not everybody was born and bred in Silicon Valley, right? So I want to figure out what your background is and hear that unique story. So where did you grow up? You’re currently in Montana, correct?
Chris Dickey
I’m in Wyoming. I’m in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. But I grew up in the Midwest. I’m a Midwestern kid—corn fed, large family of six. We were always the six-top at the restaurant, and there was always a table in the back that could accommodate us.
Mostly Wisconsin and Ohio is where I spent my youth. After that, I decided I wanted to be closer to mountains.
Yeah, I hear you. It’s funny—and we’ll touch on this a little later—but I was saying right before the podcast started how I’m a little envious of your Instagram. It looks like a place I need to be. I think I was thinking Montana, because Montana is a place that I’ve been looking at…
Chris Dickey
I was in Montana for the last couple of years, so it’s entirely possible. My sister-in-law has some old family homes in Glacier National Park. It’s pretty insane.
Can’t go wrong with that.
Chris Dickey
We just kind of hunkered down in Glacier, did a lot of hiking and rafting, and picked a lot of huckleberries.
So it’s a hard life. You’ve been—so that’s rough. Glacier? I mean, who wants to go to Glacier and lose internet? Yeah, that’s exactly it. It’s funny, when I go away—this is a funny story—my wife, whenever I bring my… She’ll say, “Hey, you gonna bring your girlfriend?” And my girlfriend is my laptop, right? That’s always been the ongoing joke. Anyone around is like, “What do you mean? You guys are a family and you’re bringing a girlfriend?” And I’m like, “No, it’s my laptop.”
There were times a few years ago where I’d always say, “God, I have to have internet.” And recently, I’ve been thinking, “You know what? I need to go somewhere without it.” I’ve been trying to make a valid effort to not have as much internet because we get enough of that. But I know you run an agency and you’ve got stuff going on, so it’s hard to fully disconnect. Nobody understands that better than myself, my friend. When you run a company and an agency, you’re not going to get away with no internet. And when you do? Then what happens?
You turn into the crazy guy—and you can’t see this because we’re on a podcast—but I’m holding my phone in the air and I can’t get it high enough. I’m running around, and my wife’s like, “Why did we have kids together?” I’m out there trying to find signal, thinking it’s close. Or I’ve got to drive somewhere just to get reception for a meeting. The struggle is real. So we’ll figure that out.
In regards to growing up, got any fun or interesting facts? Other than being corn fed and taking the six-top from other families? Anything else fun?
Chris Dickey
You know, I’ll say that I’m a big Green Bay Packers fan. In Wisconsin, the Packers are like religion. They’ll change church service so it doesn’t overlap with the Packers game. A fun fact about the Packers: they’re owned by the people of Wisconsin. There’s no singular owner. You can buy stock in the Packers, and it never goes up or down—it’s really just a donation to the team so they can buy a new stadium or something.
Green Bay is an incredibly small venue town. You’d never hear of it aside from the fact that they have a professional football team. I love it. It’ll never move. The people own it. We’re all stakeholders.
So they can’t move either. God, that’s incredible. I did not know that. I’m a 49ers fan, so we’ve always had a good little rivalry.
Chris Dickey
I was at that game last year. It was horrible.
Well, finally, every time it comes to playing you guys, I’m like—there’s not much hair left up top—and I’m just pulling at it, thinking, “Oh God.” But I mean, Aaron Rodgers… he actually grew up in Chico, California, where I used to own a bar. He used to go there, so that’s a whole other conversation. Solid guy. Can you get anybody better?
But anyway, I know you’ve got a new quarterback. We’ll talk about that some other time. But there was one time—I used to do a lot of traveling before this whole COVID thing—and I was going through an airport. I can’t remember which one it was, but it was a Sunday. It wasn’t in Green Bay, but it was close enough. I honestly thought they were hosting a football game at the airport. Everyone was wearing Green Bay Packers gear. Thank God I didn’t have any Niner stuff on, or I don’t know if I would’ve made it through. It was savage. I thought they were handing out free jerseys or something—it was Sunday and that was it. I’ve seen plenty of sports events where people go all in, but I’d never seen it at an airport, and not even in Wisconsin!
Chris Dickey
It’s the way sports should be. It’s not about the profit—the profit gets reinvested into the team. There’s actually a shareholders meeting every year, and the people who are shareholders get to show up and vote on what happens with the team. They don’t make player decisions, but they do hire and fire the general manager, and they approve capital projects and things like that.
That’s insane. That’s beautiful, because then you get stability, right? You get your chance, hey, you don’t…
Chris Dickey
Never. They’ve never not sold out a game in like 50 years. Season tickets are impossible to get. They’re passed down from generation to generation.
That’s incredible. It’s like having a house in Glacier or something. Who knew? So where did you go to college?
Chris Dickey
A little place in Ohio called Denison University. I was studying environmental stuff and economics. I got interested in industrial organizational psychology and didn’t really know what I wanted to do after, except I thought marketing seemed like a fun profession. I loved being outside, so I started working for companies in the outdoor industry.
Yeah, nice transition. Was that your first job out of college? You went from being environmentally conscious…
Chris Dickey
Well, my first job out of college was a really classic first job. I was teaching environmental education on an island in the San Juan Islands. I think a lot of college grads find something summery or campy when they don’t want to jump into the workforce too fast. That was just for a few months, but it was super fun.
Then I moved down to Seattle, got more involved in the outdoor industry there, and eventually found my way to Jackson Hole, where I worked for a magazine called Alpinist, which is a climbing magazine. I was their circulation marketing director, and from there I went into agency work. I’ve been working in agencies for the last 15 years.
For the last 10 years, I’ve been running my own PR agency called Purple Orange. We specialize in outdoor and active lifestyle consumer brands—stuff you’d find at REI. We handle national communications for those companies, and out of that we started doing some interesting things with search. That’s what led to Visibly.
Well, let’s talk about Visibly. I do a lot of these interviews, a lot of SaaS companies and stuff. When I first heard SEV, I had to look it up for a second—“What is SEV? How do I not know this marketing term?”
Chris Dickey
I kind of tried to coin it. I don’t think it really existed.
I like it though. That’s when things get interesting—when you coin a term and become the founder of that term.
Chris Dickey
Yeah. It’s not SEO and it’s not SEM. As a PR person, I think anyone who understands PR will appreciate this—what we do is leverage other people’s audiences for our clients’ benefit. Publishers have amazing audiences. We show up as PR people and do what’s called earned media. If you can’t buy it, we’ll talk someone into taking a look at our client’s stuff, maybe writing a review if they like it. That’s a fantastic brand strategy—it’s tried and true, done over and over again.
We started realizing the most valuable PR hits weren’t the big awards or major New York publication pieces. They were the articles and reviews showing up at the top of search results for really valuable keywords. Sometimes it was a mid-level blog that wasn’t even on our radar. We’d give them a sleeping bag, they’d do a review, and suddenly it’s the top organic result for “Best Sleeping Bags 2020.”
That kind of visibility gave way to this recognition that PR professionals have a huge opportunity to use our toolset to influence what shows up in search—especially when it comes to commercial consideration or informational intent. If we targeted the right publications and the right writers, we could dominate a SERP. That’s the whole point of SEO.
The problem with SEO is that while it’s fantastic—we do it as an agency and for Visibly—it’s hard. Winning a first-page placement for a valuable keyword is tough. You need backlinks, domain authority, alignment with what Google wants to see, and even then you’re still probably behind 10 or 20 other sites.
What I recognized is that many of the top-ranking pages for competitive keywords come from publishers, e-commerce, and other non-brand sources. So the PR strategy becomes: how do we leverage these other audiences? How do we get onto their landing pages, or be recommended by third parties? Through that process, I thought: this is visibility. How do we improve every possible touchpoint for a brand in search?
And I think that’s the key. It’s funny—we do something similar helping SaaS companies get PR. The hard part is, most people think, “Oh, I want to be in Forbes.” And I write for Forbes—shoutout to Forbes and everyone involved—but I can tell you, if I put you in Forbes or interview you for Forbes, you’re not going to get as much traction as you think.
You’d be surprised. The initial instinct is that Forbes or Inc. must be the big players. And sometimes you do get traction, but from a real SEO standpoint, it’s usually not the best result. Forbes is great for a short push—a few days—but it’s not going to rank for valuable keywords. The better long-term value often comes from those niche blogs with good authority. You get an article on there, a review, and suddenly that sleeping bag review is pulling in thousands of searches per month. That’s what I think is awesome.
Chris Dickey
Totally. You hit the nail on the head. As a PR person, I realized we’re always trying to get in front of a qualified audience or customer. And search is really the only platform that delivers the perfect customer over and over again. If someone’s searching for a specific keyword, they’re your customer—they just don’t know you exist yet.
So how do you promote discovery within that SERP? That should be the ultimate goal for every marketer. SEO’s a huge part of that. So is SEM, so is advertising. But PR, e-commerce, and maximizing every opportunity for a customer to discover your brand should be part of the playbook. And I feel like it’s not right now, and we’re trying to do something about it.
Yeah, you have to be crafty. What people don’t realize—I talk about this a lot—is, like, take a real estate agent who says, “Hey, I want to be number one for this term.” And I’m like, you’ve got Zillow pushing you out of the way. You’ve got Trulia, all these other sites. You’re not going to beat them. I mean, you’ve got a better chance of seeing God than being number one for that, right? So what I love about what you guys are doing is getting crafty.
There are different ways to potentially get on that first page without needing to index your own article. Exactly. It’s about how you go about doing that. That’s where it gets interesting—figuring out how we can be creative and still get our clients visibility, generate traffic, whether it’s being number one in the SERP or working with the people who are already number one, or getting reviews or placements like that. It’s just getting harder.
Chris Dickey
Anyone who’s done keyword research knows what you’re talking about. You start looking for valuable keywords with low competition, and you just write off all the really competitive ones. But when you’re thinking about a SEV strategy—a search engine visibility strategy—you actually go after the most competitive keywords. The ones you really want to show up for. And SEOs do have a name for this: it’s called barnacle SEO. The idea is that you leverage someone else—you latch onto a page that’s already ranking. It’s like being a barnacle or a parasite. I don’t love that analogy, but it exists. SEOs are familiar with it, but it’s not a commonly pursued strategy.
We started doing this as an agency, and it was really just a slight pivot. We’re still doing PR, but now we’re changing how we build our lists. We’re building them based on what Google is already elevating in search. And the way I look at it, Google is telling you what the most relevant content is for any given subject.
Yeah, it’s like, why reinvent the wheel, right? Go see what’s working, go see where the people are—and figure out how you can be a parasite.
Chris Dickey
Exactly. All the writers, all the outlets—Google is literally telling you who the most important people are to talk to. You can mine that information, build a list, do your outreach, and start winning top-of-page placements.
Yeah, not a bad deal. Thanks, Chris. Today’s conversation was truly enriching. I’m super excited to dive deeper into search engine visibility and what Visibly does. We’ll go into more detail in the next episode of Shane Barker’s Marketing Growth podcast. Stay tuned.
A key takeaway from today’s conversation was how important it is for your business to boost your online visibility. If you want to grow your business and are looking for an expert to help you build a successful strategy, you can reach out to me at ShaneBarker.com. As a digital marketing consultant, I’ll help you increase your online presence and grow your revenue with a customizable plan.
00:11
Introduction with Chris Dickey
00:41
Setting the Stage for Today's Talk
01:14
Chris Dickey on Life in Wyoming
03:10
Shane and Chris on Remote Work
06:45
Marketing Challenges in 2025
12:30
Chris on the Future of PR and Marketing
Download the transcript
View on Google DocsDownload as PDFDownload the episode
Download as MP3Download as WAVThis Isn’t a Sales Funnel, It’s a Partnership
Apply For a Strategy Call With Our Team
We only accept a limited number of clients per month, apply below.
Let's get started