Greg Walthour took a search assignment and built a career

Greg Walthour was working in commercial real estate when his boss handed him a problem with a rather long future: get the company’s website to appear higher in search results. It was 1996. The names on the search landscape included Yahoo, Lycos and AltaVista. A broker could understand the value of a good location. Here was another kind of address that needed passing traffic.

Walthour accepted the assignment and started learning. Online courses supplied part of his education; he also sought training from Bruce Clay, Robin Nobles and Terry Plank. The detail is useful because it gives the origin story some texture. His entry into digital marketing involved being a student, asking how something worked, and discovering that the answer interested him enough to change his working life.

He had come from Atlanta and earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration at Georgia Southern University. Real estate was his first professional setting; search became the field in which he built a business. The new work offered a direct attraction: a change to a website could help a company get discovered. For someone interested in helping businesses grow, that was a practical reason to keep investigating.

The assignment sounds modest beside the career that followed. There is no need to improve it with a garage, a prophetic conversation or a cinematic resignation. A boss needed help with a website. Walthour found the work absorbing. An everyday request had opened a door, and he chose to spend more time on the other side.

Darcie joins, and the business gets bigger

SocialSEO’s early growth was built on limited resources. Its own history describes a small budget and expansion without taking on debt. Darcie Walthour, Greg’s wife, joined in 2010 and became president. Any account of the company that treats her as a decorative detail misses a working partnership at the center of its development. Greg founded the business; the subsequent story repeatedly puts the two of them together.

By August 2017, SocialSEO was announcing a place on the Inc. 5000 at No. 2,336. The company reported 60 full-time employees, with search optimization, paid search and social media among its specialties. A ranking can make a company seem to have arrived all at once. The dates tell a less convenient story: the first search assignment had happened more than two decades earlier.

The distance between one person learning search and a staff of 60 is also a change in the job. A founder’s technical curiosity may get the first accounts moving. A growing agency needs people who can learn the work, deliver it and explain it to customers. The 2017 announcement emphasized training and preserving company culture alongside expansion. Growth had become an organizational question as well as a commercial one.

Walthour’s public reputation includes that people side. SocialSEO lists local Best Boss recognition in 2017 and 2021. Those awards belong beside the business milestones because managing employees is part of the achievement being described. The founder who once needed a course in search had become someone responsible for other people’s working days. There is considerably less glamour in that sentence than in an awards announcement, and considerably more work.

When the customers outgrew the name

The next turn involved the limits of a familiar label. SEO remained part of the business, but the service offering broadened from 2016 onward. In January 2023, SocialSEO publicly adopted the Intero Digital name. Walthour was then co-CEO alongside Danny Shepherd. The rebrand gave a wider group of digital marketing specialists a shared identity, with Colorado Springs as its headquarters.

The January announcement described five additional agencies brought together over 26 months and a combined team of more than 350 people across the United States. Those numbers describe that moment in the company’s history. The breadth was the point: search, paid media, social media, Amazon, public relations, content and website work could sit within the same organization. Intero, Italian for “entire,” was an unusually literal choice for a marketing name.

“We did it because our clients asked us to,” Walthour explained at the time. A customer might need several disciplines to work on the same business problem. Bringing them together offered a way to reduce the effort of coordinating separate providers. That is a more revealing explanation of the expansion than the pleasure of owning a larger service menu.

The name change also made an earlier transition visible. Walthour had moved from learning a specialist skill to helping assemble a company of specialists. His ambition at the rebrand was to put that combined expertise to work for businesses of different sizes. The original question still had a place in the business. Around it had gathered many more questions, and people equipped to answer them.

“We did it because our clients asked us to.”

Greg Walthour, on expanding the agency’s services, January 2023

A competitive streak with room for a lesson

The business built by Walthour and his colleagues placed technology, team and training together under a three-part operating idea. During the co-CEO period, Intero described campaigns as work that needed repeated adjustment: begin with the client’s objective, examine the results, change the approach when necessary. That description offers a useful glimpse of the professional environment he helped shape.

A competitive temperament appears in his executive profile, alongside an emphasis on employee and customer satisfaction. These qualities can coexist quite comfortably in an agency. Winning an account is one event; keeping the people who serve it and the customers who pay for it creates a much longer test. The recurring interest in training also makes sense for a founder whose own entry into the trade depended on learning from others.

His writing extends that interest beyond search rankings. In a December 2024 essay about branding, Walthour argued that leaders establish direction while audiences help shape how a brand is understood. He encouraged companies to listen, keep their values consistent and adjust their execution as preferences change. The argument leaves room for customers to influence decisions, much as his explanation of Intero’s broader services had done.

His contributor pages show the range of subjects that occupied him as the business broadened. A December 2022 article addressed the move to Google Analytics 4; an April 2023 piece concerned getting marketing videos discovered through search. Other work explored backlinks, conversion measurement and local search. The subjects keep returning to the connection between attracting attention and making that attention useful to a business.

That range supplies a quieter record of professional life than a company announcement. There are tools to understand, changes to explain and readers who need a workable next step. For Walthour, writing about the trade became another way to participate in it. The former student was now contributing explanations of his own, across several marketing and business publications.

There is an agreeable inconvenience in that view. A company can choose its message with great care, pay for beautiful design and approve every comma, yet the audience still gets an opinion. Walthour’s advice asks leaders to make listening part of the job. Seen beside the rebrand, it suggests a practical continuity between the way he describes marketing and the way he explained the business’s expansion.

Grizzly bears do not approve campaign briefs

Away from the agency, Walthour’s interests include camping, fishing, riding ATVs, travel and coaching football. Photography has a particular place in his biography. His subjects include landscapes, tornadoes, grizzly bears and the northern lights. It is a selection with rather more weather than the average corporate headshot requires, and rather fewer opportunities to ask the subject for one more take.

His personal page links to a Flickr collection, giving the camera a place in his public identity alongside the business. The outdoor interests also give Colorado a role beyond the address on a company profile. Walthour has written about enjoying the state’s lifestyle with his family. Work may involve helping other people appear on screens; his spare-time interests include plenty of reasons to put one down.

It would be tempting to turn the camera into a theory of management, or grizzly bears into a metaphor for clients. The actual detail is more enjoyable on its own. A founder who works in a field of changing systems also likes landscapes and wildlife. The person has interests that extend beyond the company, and they need no business justification to earn their place in the picture.

The assignment keeps its place in the story

Walthour’s place at Intero Digital is now that of co-founder and former co-CEO. The company’s current leadership roster names Marc Blumberg as CEO. The distinction matters when looking back over a career that is still frequently described through older executive biographies. SocialSEO’s founder and Intero’s current chief executive are different positions, and Walthour’s contribution is clear enough without confusing them.

The career is easiest to understand through its sequence of decisions. He learned a skill because someone needed it. He built a company around that work. Darcie joined him, the staff grew, and customers’ broader needs helped push the offering beyond the original specialty. Later, he helped lead a combined agency under a name designed to accommodate that wider job.

What gives the sequence its character is the unceremonious beginning. There was a website that needed attention, and a real-estate broker willing to find out what could be done. Years of work followed that first piece of curiosity. Walthour’s story gives a familiar workplace assignment an unexpected afterlife: sometimes the task on the desk turns out to be the beginning of another career.