The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

SEO SaaS Panel: Patrick Stox, Ben Wills, Ben Senescu

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 17:53:19 +0000

Three founders building SEO software sat down for the first Unscripted SEO panel. Patrick Stox (ex-Ahrefs, ex-IBM, now independent), Ben Wills (OppAlerts) and Ben Senescu (OpenSEO) on what actually changed about building tools, and how to get recommended by an LLM before you are anywhere near the training data. Read the full recap here.

The build constraint is gone. Patrick Stox could not have built most of this before and now can, with about a hundred and four free tools live at patrickstox.com. Ben Senescu ships features that work ninety-five percent of the time while running OpenSEO as a team of one. Ben Wills had to run a full database refactor because the LLMs made architectural decisions he had told them not to make.

Taste is the new bottleneck. Ben Wills: "AI can produce stuff, but it doesn't have the taste to decide, do we use a B-tree, or do we use binary search on a sorted list. That curation is your taste." Patrick's version from inside Ahrefs: if they had listened to customers, they would still be a low-cost link tool.

How to get recommended before you are in the training data. Patrick splits it into two surfaces on two clocks. The training data is slow and largely passive. The retrieved pages are workable this week, so get a call-out onto the lists that already rank. Ben Wills adds the GitHub awesome lists and the free-tool directories that AI tools query when they go shopping for data. Both halves are written up on OpenSEO's blog: Two Surfaces, Two Timelines and What Broke the $99 Ceiling.

One tiny word changes the answer. Ben Wills's own test: name a Corolla instead of a BMW when you ask about a trip, and the hotel recommendation changes. ChatGPT memory then carries that context into a completely different chat days later.

What they want SEOs to stop doing. Patrick Stox: "Any tactic that is abused will be shut down... they might hold a grudge for the next 10, 20, 30 years for all the spam that you did in the past." Ben Wills: if you are going to be a sushi chef, the first year you just make rice. Ben Senescu: give Claude Code or Codex a real afternoon before you write it off.

The panelists and their solo episodes: Patrick Stox on building in the GEO era, Ben Wills on one-word prompt testing, and Ben Senescu on open source SEO and the $99 ceiling. More episodes at The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast.

Laura Hoot: SEO Isn't Dying, It's Hitting Another Boom

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 19:27:55 +0000

Everyone on LinkedIn says SEO is dead. Laura Hoot has been doing it for close to twenty years and sees the exact opposite happening: hiring, not mass firings. She joins Jeremy Rivera to argue that the SEO expert just became the Claude expert, the ChatGPT expert and the Gemini expert without needing a new degree, because the foundation transferred intact.

Laura runs SEO for big national multi-location brands at GPO, where the team calls the work "discoverability" - a word she argues was always the accurate one. She started in 2007 writing keyword-dense copy in college, took an SEO-slash-customer-support job at Vrbo when HomeAway was the flagship, and has since worked H-E-B, vet clinics and national retail. Half her career was spent running paid search and organic at the same time, which is why she is blunt about the cost of the silo between them: the algorithms differ, but the intent and the volume data are identical. Jeremy ties it straight back to Lisa Raehsler's episode on Google's AI Max, which now scans a site for its own landing pages instead of requiring purpose-built ones - which is exactly the argument for getting PPC and SEO budget approved in the same meeting.

Her strongest claim is that keyword research matters more now, not less. The historical question data sitting in Search Console, Semrush and Ahrefs is the closest available proxy for how people actually prompt an LLM, and she treats it as the predecessor signal rather than a legacy report. She also flags JavaScript as a re-emerging blocker, since AI crawlers are far less patient with heavy front-ends than Googlebot learned to be, and notes that AI-assisted traffic is still a very small share of GA4 across every client she works on - for now.

Jeremy pushes on the local-versus-national divide, which Laura calls the single biggest strategic differentiator in her career, and tells the story of a counseling client whose article went three to four times up in organic traffic while the client was simultaneously reporting lost rankings - and none of it converted, because a liver-detox page had started surfacing for cod liver oil and colon cleanses. They get into why WordPress tags poisoned a genuinely good idea, why the four-blog-posts-and-four-links-for-5k agency model is gone and never should have existed, and the "it's goog enough" problem AJ Kohn named years ago about trusting third-party search volume.

Laura's advice for the moment: stop optimizing for the surface and start asking where your audience already is. Read the full recap and transcript, and find more interviews at The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast.

AI Max: Now Google Picks Your Landing Page | Lisa Raehsler

Jeremy Rivera — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Google's AI Max does not just pick your keywords anymore - it picks the landing page it sends paid traffic to, off your own site. Lisa Raehsler, founder and principal SEM strategist at Big Click Co, has the spreadsheet of what you can still opt out of and what turns mandatory in February. Her verdict on the rollout: another Tuesday of Google taking control away from advertisers.

Lisa has spent her career in paid search and paid social, contributes to Search Engine Journal, and writes The Paid Media Mix. She came back on Unscripted SEO the same day a batch of AI Max features flipped live in her own accounts, and what she describes is the shift SEO is already living through, arriving on the paid side. Nobody types "project management software" anymore. They type what kind of project management software works with Slack for a small team working internationally. Keywords cannot hold that. Intent can. The full written recap of the conversation is here.

In this episode

Keywords triggering ads gives way to intent triggering ads - and the old ad-group buckets are what breaks first.
AI Max reads the intent, writes the ad, and picks the page on your site to answer the query. That third step is the one nobody budgeted for.
Site quality just became a paid media problem. If Google chooses the page, thin and generic pages spend your ad budget, which is exactly when the paid team and an SEO advisory conversation stop being separate meetings.
It works beautifully for e-commerce, movies and theaters. It falls apart for B2B, for thin sites, and for anyone running priced landing-page variants.
Third-party landing page tools now need an explicit opt-out if you do not want Google routing around them.
The window is shorter than it looks - some features already flipped and can still be opted out of, a bigger batch goes mandatory in February.
Local Service Ads are migrating into Google Ads, and Google Guaranteed still means background checks plus industry-specific licensure.
ChatGPT ads are low converting and only loosely matched, served against the whole topic rather than the actual question.
The automation is really imperfect, which is where humans stay in the loop - the exclusions, the ad copy and the page all still need human-certified, expert-sourced content behind them.

Chapters

(00:00) Keywords stop triggering ads, intent starts
(01:36) The query that broke the keyword bucket
(03:12) What AI Max actually does on your behalf
(04:30) Google's motivation, and the February deadline
(06:24) Another Tuesday of taking control from advertisers
(08:25) When automatic landing pages help, and when they hurt
(10:42) Local Service Ads move into Google Ads
(13:45) What Google Guaranteed vetting actually requires
(15:56) Are ads coming inside AI Overviews?
(18:07) ChatGPT ads: low converting, loosely matched
(19:45) What happens to third-party landing pages
(20:18) Build the six-month plan before February
(24:18) Why SEO and PPC should pool the budget
(25:52) What clients are actually asking about
(28:18) Where to find Lisa

Notable quotes

"I think it's another Tuesday of them making decisions and trying to take control away from advertisers."
— Lisa Raehsler

"They're able to then create an ad to match the intent, and then they're able to locate a landing page on your website to answer the question. That's what the whole AI Max thing is."
— Lisa Raehsler

"You definitely don't want to do nothing."
— Lisa Raehsler

Lisa posts as @lisarocksSEM and takes transition-planning work through Big Click Co.

Unscripted SEO is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Every episode lives at unscriptedseo.com.

Why a 5% Close-Rate Lift Beats 20% More Leads | Alex Radetic, Nuvo Agency

Jeremy Rivera — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 01:59:19 +0000

Alex Radetic has spent a decade marketing waterproofers, sewer companies, plumbers and siding contractors, and he has stopped selling traffic. On this episode he makes the case that a five percent lift in close rate is worth more to a seasonal home services business than twenty percent more leads, and he brings the receipts, including a fifteen-million-dollar client whose organic traffic grew seventy to eighty percent year over year while conversions moved about ten.

Alex is the leader of Nuvo Agency, born and raised in Missouri and building home services and B2B websites on a subscription model, no large upfront fee, with the site build, technical and organic SEO, paid media, integrations and automations rolled into one monthly fee. He started in 2015 doing keyword work and traffic chasing, and now spends as much time on what happens after the form fill as before it.

In this episode

Home services is a new-lead business, not a retention business, a repeat client for the same job you already sold them is usually a bad sign, not a win.
Why paid social beats organic social for trades companies, crews are doing labor, not photography, and a one-to-three-million-dollar company has no budget for a marketing person to chase before-and-afters.
The speed-to-lead flowchart, call queue on day one, second call plus voicemail on day two, then an email every seven days for fifteen days. Worth five to ten points of close rate.
Sixty-seven leads from ChatGPT in an entire year, on an account running three hundred to six hundred leads a month. Alex's read on what AEO and GEO are actually worth right now.
ChatGPT's Yelp licensing deal, and the groans he got when he told a client they now have to fix their Yelp reviews.
Read the SERP before you promise the keyword, “attic insulation” is Owens Corning, Home Depot and Lowe's; “foundation crack repair” is shopping and informational with no businesses on it. No volume column tells you that.
Where your impressions actually go, ten searches a month in the AdWords API versus eleven hundred impressions in Search Console, plus AI Overview citations counting as organic impressions.
Publish the pricing, a padded range, every factor that moves it, localized. Alex calls it the easiest E-E-A-T win in home services, regardless of company size.
Honesty as a sales strategy, six to nine months for a brand-new domain, no guaranteed rankings, and turning down a job because the repair method itself was dishonest.

Notable quotes

“A five percent increase in close rate can actually net you more revenue than a twenty percent increase in leads year over year with the same close rate.”
, Alex Radetic

“I looked at last year, and the entirety of last year they only got sixty-seven leads directly attributable to ChatGPT. And I'm like, okay, well that's worthless.”
, Alex Radetic

“It doesn't matter how small a company you are. If you're willing to publish price range information for specific types of jobs, Google loves that stuff.”
, Alex Radetic

Resources & links

Nuvo Agency, Alex's subscription-model home services and B2B websites
Alex Radetic on LinkedIn, where he does his organic posting
Alex on swaying the LLMs: get branded, get into news stories, get talked about on Reddit. That is a complete guide to link building & authority problem, not a prompt problem.
Turning a job walkthrough with your installation manager into an article is exactly the human-certified, expert-sourced content play.

About the show

Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Full episode archive at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.

One Word Changed Every Answer: Ben Wills on Testing LLMs Directly

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Ben Wills ran the same hotel-recommendation prompt over and over and changed exactly one word in it: the car he was flying to Los Angeles to pick up. Honda Civic, BMW, Ferrari. The hotels moved with the car, and they moved across every ChatGPT model and every level of thinking he tried.

Ben started in SEO in 2001 at KeywordRanking alongside Andy Beal and Garrett French, co-founded the link building company ontolo with Garrett, then disappeared into 13 or 14 years of pure engineering. Large-scale crawlers and scrapers written in C by hand. Embedded firmware for an ESP32 inside high-end audio equipment. He is back in marketing now, building AI search visibility tooling at OppAlerts, and his argument is that LLMs finally hand SEOs the thing search engines never did: a fast, direct, testable feedback loop.

In this episode

The one-word experiment: hold the prompt constant, swap the car, and watch the hotel tier move with it
Why you can test an LLM but never could test a search engine: no waiting for the index, no personalization to strip out
The persona is a ranking factor: 100 industries, 10 personas each, 1,100 personas across the July analysis
Backlinks, ranking strength and LLM visibility: a decent correlation, with a full page of caveats in front of it
How Ben actually uses a correlation: as the anecdotal evidence that tells you which experiment to run
Isolating the model: thinking off, fan-out off, then turn each one up a step at a time
AI slop as an accountability question: producer standards versus consumer appetite, and whether his own reports qualify
Inside OppAlerts: historical PageRank from Common Crawl, news-specific link gap analysis, 20,000+ taxonomy categories
The Yandex source leak: a week in a Slack channel with Mike King and Russ Jones, and what the category vectors showed

Chapters

(00:00) Getting back into the industry after 13 years of engineering
(01:32) AI is taking your tasks, not your job
(02:58) The one-word experiment: Honda Civic, BMW, Ferrari
(05:42) Why you can test an LLM but never could test a search engine
(06:39) Twiddlers, patents and the black box
(08:22) Ann Smarty, fan-out queries and the return of search principles
(10:23) 100 industries and 1,100 personas: the July correlation study
(12:45) Correlation is not causation, and Ben's own asterisks
(14:29) Isolating the model: thinking levels off, fan-out off
(16:25) Engineer brain vs. marketer brain vs. business brain
(20:49) AI slop and where the accountability sits
(25:03) KeywordRanking, ontolo, pure C crawlers and ESP32 firmware
(27:46) news.oppalerts.com and building marketing tools
(29:32) Historical PageRank, contact data and campaign personas
(31:30) News link gap analysis and 20,000 taxonomy categories
(33:36) Vectors, the Yandex leak and CatBoost
(37:01) Homework: go build a search engine
(38:46) Where to find Ben Wills

Notable quotes

"One of the most important things for people to understand about the prompts is how one word can completely change the results, the response that you get back."
- Ben Wills

"The search principles are gonna come right back. You gotta have good quality content. There's gotta be a lot of it distributed across the web. You gotta have backlinks."
- Ben Wills

"Ann Smarty said ... the fastest way to get into the LLM responses is via SEO. And that's the highest leverage piece that you have to get in the responses."
- Ben Wills

"You'll learn more about search in that hour and a half than anything else."
- Ben Wills

Resources & links

OppAlerts: Ben's AI search visibility, link and content platform
news.oppalerts.com: his marketing news aggregator, updating every fifteen minutes
Ben Wills on LinkedIn
Ben cites Ann Smarty's episode on LLM consensus and brand control for the line about SEO being the fastest route into LLM responses
Jeremy's earlier conversation with Malte Landwehr on consensus and query fan-outs, where the PageRank question came up first
If the backlink half of this episode is the part you want to act on, start with the complete guide to link building and authority
The slop conversation is the case for human-certified, expert-sourced content

About the show

Unscripted SEO is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Full episode archive at UnscriptedSEO.com.

SEO Is the Batter to Your AI | Stephanie Long

Jeremy Rivera — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Stephanie Long, founder and CEO of Mrs. SEO, has been doing SEO for almost two decades, and her verdict on AI is blunt: it did not replace the fundamentals, it raised the price of skipping them. "SEO is like the batter to your AI. You have to have it together or you're going to fail."

She joins Jeremy Rivera to explain why she built Junction Jack, a human-vetted SEO marketplace aimed squarely at the gig platforms whose "vetted" section turns out to mean vetted by AI. "None of mine are vetted by AI. It is me, or I know them."

Along the way: the broken links AI cites that were never real, the freelancer-versus-agency shift and why clients now want to talk to the owner, a San Francisco IVF clinic that took a year to earn the machines' trust, link building you can actually explain to a nervous client, and whether Google's Helpful Content Update was ever really about helping readers.

More episodes at Unscripted SEO.

In this episode

Why a $20/mo chatbot is not an SEO strategy, and why owners keep believing it is, because they cannot "see" SEO the way they can see an ad.
Freelancer vs. agency vs. in-house. Stephanie's newest client had never spoken to anyone but an account executive who could not read the reports either.
LLMs have no opinions, and now they lie. Not hallucination. Choosing to lie, unless a second model is set up to watch.
Trust but verify. She clicked every link in one AI answer and every one was broken. Then mine your own 404s for the pages ChatGPT invented and build them.
"SEO is the batter to your AI." The traditional fundamentals are the base layer, and entry-level on its own no longer clears the bar.
Content spinners in 2008, LLMs now. Twenty city pages for a realtor then, hundreds of thousands of pages today. Same move, expanded.
Getting niche enough to earn trust. A San Francisco IVF clinic took over a year to surface in the chat tools, fixed with real success-rate data and hyper-local FAQs.
Link building you can explain in one sentence. Two-way Q&As instead of guest-post begging, roundup quotes turned into graphics, and asking for "attribution" instead of a "link."
New scams to sift through. An agency that bought bad backlinks and, it turned out, bought fake traffic on top of them.
Junction Jack. Fiverr and Upwork's fine print says "vetted by AI." Hers says vetted by a human.

Chapters

(00:00) Meet Stephanie Long, and why SEO is a black hole
(04:10) Why owners still think $20 a month will do their SEO
(05:53) Freelancer, agency, or in-house: who actually talks to the client
(09:18) LLMs have no opinions, and now they lie
(10:51) Trust but verify: broken links and imagineered 404s
(13:52) "SEO is the batter to your AI"
(14:18) Content spinners in 2008, LLMs now
(17:01) Is Google intentionally killing the publisher deal?
(22:42) The IVF clinic: getting niche enough to earn AI's trust
(25:51) You have to actually talk to your client now
(27:35) Why clients are finally interested in SEO
(31:14) Link building you can explain in one sentence
(36:07) Bought backlinks, bought traffic, and who gets hurt
(37:15) Junction Jack: vetted by a human, not by AI

Notable quotes

"SEO is like the batter to your AI. You have to have it together, or you're going to fail."
— Stephanie Long

"SEO is kind of like a black hole. You believe what you believe online unless somebody is good enough to really explain it to you."
— Stephanie Long

"None of mine are vetted by AI. It is me, or I know them."
— Stephanie Long

Resources & links

Junction Jack, Stephanie's human-vetted SEO marketplace (.co, not .com)
Mrs. SEO, her consultancy
Stephanie Long on LinkedIn
Instagram · TikTok
The two-way Q&A and the attribution ask both live in our complete guide to link building & authority
On "it's only as good as the person using it": human-certified, expert-sourced content
Google's Helpful Content Update announcement

Read the full recap

SEO Is the Batter to Your AI: Stephanie Long on Vetting Humans and Verifying Machines

About the show

Unscripted SEO is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Full archive at unscriptedseo.com.

Gert Mellak: Bot Impressions and the SEO ROI Myth

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:03:18 +0000

Gert Mellak has been doing SEO for 20 years from Madrid, and he came on to tell Jeremy that the number at the bottom of every SEO spreadsheet is fiction. Search Console impressions? "Lots of bots produce impressions. All crap." Search volume as a metric on its own? Close to worthless. And the ROI on SEO, he argues, is not measurable unless you stack a hundred and fifty assumptions on top of data that is flawed at every source.

Jeremy brought him a live case - a query showing 10 searches a month in the tools and 1,100 impressions in Search Console - and Gert's answer explains it. It is the same problem Jeremy documented in Google Search Console data is not accurate, arriving from the other direction.

Gert also walks through his Search Everywhere Optimization Pyramid from Search Engine Land, the "do SEO but search engines don't exist" thought experiment behind it, the high-intent metric he uses instead of rankings, and the client who deleted 80% of their content and started ranking again. More of his writing is at gertmellak.com, and his consulting work is at AI SEO consulting.

Read the full recap and transcript on The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast.

Isaac Justesen on Local SEO for Healthcare Clinics

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Isaac Justesen founded PatientPartners to work with one kind of client: physiotherapy, chiropractic, massage and counselling clinics. Coming up on five years in, his blunt read is that the mechanics of ranking a clinic and ranking a plumber are almost the same. What differs is the copywriting and the advertising rules, which change state by state.

Key takeaways

The mechanics travel, the language does not. Map pack, profile, reviews, pages. What changes is what you are legally allowed to claim.
Two opening plays, every time. A profile audit, because categories and services are almost never set correctly, and conversion tracking, because it is almost never set up at all.
The typical clinic budget is around a thousand a month. Much of it currently goes on boosting social posts, which is the pitfall he names.
Nobody answers the phone. The single biggest leak he finds sits behind the marketing, not in it.
Community building is the underrated channel. Slower than ads and the only thing that compounds.
Curation to selection. Search is moving from ten options to one recommendation, which changes what a location page has to do.

Why a clinic ranks like a plumber

The mechanisms of local SEO are relatively similar, whether you’re trying to rank a plumber or you’re trying to rank a chiropractor.
— Isaac Justesen

It is a deliberately deflating opening. Healthcare marketing is sold as a specialism, and the technical work underneath it mostly is not. It is still the profile, still the map pack, still proximity and relevance and prominence.

But for local searches, Google Maps is still the best way for Google to serve up options.
— Isaac Justesen

Which is a useful thing for a clinic owner to hear before paying a premium for healthcare expertise that turns out to be the same checklist with a stethoscope on the invoice.

What you are allowed to say

The genuine specialism sits in the copy. Advertising rules for clinical services vary more between states and provinces than most marketers expect, and the platforms enforce their own layer on top. Some treatments are a flat refusal in ads regardless of what your local regulator permits.

So the skill is writing something persuasive inside a box that changes shape depending on where the clinic is. Physiotherapy and counselling are comparatively safe ground. Anything speculative is not.

The first two things he fixes

A Google Business Profile audit. Primary category, secondary categories and the services list are wrong on nearly every clinic he sees, and they are free to fix.
Conversion tracking. Not analytics for its own sake. Knowing which enquiries came from where, so the next thousand pounds goes somewhere defensible.

The pitfall he names is the opposite habit: taking a modest budget and pouring it into boosting social posts, which produces engagement metrics and very few patients.

On the website side, the pages that matter most are the ones tied to place, and most location pages are bad in exactly the same ways.

But I like to see AI as sort of additive. I don’t want to replace or automate all of our client work.
— Isaac Justesen

The leak behind the marketing

You would be blown away at how few phone calls get answered.
— Isaac Justesen

This is the part that makes the rest of the budget conversation slightly absurd. A clinic can rank, can advertise, can fill the calendar with enquiries, and then lose most of them to a phone nobody picks up between appointments.

He is interested in AI answering as a fix precisely because the problem is capacity rather than intent. The receptionist is not ignoring the phone. They are with a patient.

His one piece of advice on what to stop doing is more direct.

stop using generic Canva templates on your Instagram. Nobody likes them.
— Isaac Justesen

From curation to selection

So it’s kind of moving from curation to selection, which I thought was a really interesting framework.
— Isaac Justesen

Curation gave you ten options and left the choosing to the searcher. Selection hands back one recommendation. For a clinic that is an enormous difference, because being the fourth good option in town stops being a position that earns anything.

The practical consequence is that the profile carries more weight than the website for discovery, while the website has to do the work of justifying the pick once it has been made.

Community building is his answer to how a single clinic wins that. Slow, unmeasurable in the first quarter, and the only thing a competitor cannot buy.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
PatientPartners	Isaac’s agency, coming up on five years, working only with clinics
Curation to selection	The framing he credits to another podcast: search moving from options to a recommendation
Google Business Profile	Where his audits start, because categories and services are almost never right
Conversion tracking	The second opening play, and the thing almost no clinic has
Boosted social posts	The most common way a clinic wastes its monthly budget

Questions this episode answers

Is local SEO for a healthcare clinic different from any other local business?
What can a clinic legally advertise?
What should a clinic fix first in its marketing?
How much should a clinic spend on marketing each month?
Are boosted Instagram posts worth it for a clinic?
How many enquiry calls do clinics actually miss?
What does curation to selection mean for local search?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

His write-up on local SEO for physiotherapy clinics.
Alex Zweydoff on niching an agency to one industry, which is the same bet placed on property management.
Unscripted SEO, where the rest of the practitioner interviews live.

Find Isaac Justesen

PatientPartners offers a free clinic marketing blueprint and a website, SEO and AI-visibility audit.

Cite this episode

Justesen, Isaac. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Local SEO for Healthcare Clinics.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/isaac-justesen-on-local-seo-for-healthcare-clinics

Ben Senescu on Open Source SEO and the $99 Ceiling

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Ben Senescu is a software engineer who backed into SEO. He wanted to market his own open source projects, found every tool bloated and priced past what a solo builder would pay, and noticed people on r/TechSEO quietly building their own dashboards on top of DataForSEO. He asked whether they wanted an open source starting point, got a yes, and shipped OpenSEO a week later.

Key takeaways

Open source does not mean free. Ten dollars a month, or bring your own data key, because the data genuinely costs money. That is the objection every professional raises first.
The customers are not professional SEOs. They are people who never used the incumbent tools at all, because the price was never reachable.
The old ceiling was time as much as money. SEO used to demand ten to twenty hours a week, so a cheap tool would not have helped anyway.
He declared bankruptcy on sixty open pull requests. Published a roadmap, stopped taking external PRs, and asked for good issues instead.
Horizontal, not deep. Local SEO, AI visibility and prompt tracking before any single feature gets polished.
The defining constraint of the era is choice, not capability. Everything is buildable, which makes deciding the whole job.

A week from Reddit post to product

The origin is unusually honest about validation. Ben did not have a thesis about the SEO tool market. He wanted to market his own projects, hit the price wall, and then noticed other people quietly solving it for themselves in public.

So he asked the subreddit whether an open source starting point would be useful, got a yes, and had a first version out in a week. Five months of real engineering followed, which is the part that separates this from a weekend demo.

Why open source still costs ten dollars

The objection lands immediately when you say open source and then show a price. His answer is the API bill. The rankings and backlink data underneath the product is bought, and that cost does not disappear because the code is public.

So there are two doors. Bring your own key and pay the provider directly, or pay him ten dollars a month and let him handle it. Most people never go past the ten.

Who actually pays

They aren’t comparing against Semrush, because they’ve never used Semrush before — it was totally inaccessible to them at that price point.
— Ben Senescu

This is the strategically interesting part of the episode. He is not taking share from Semrush. He is selling to people who were never in that market at all, which is a different business with different competition and a much larger top of funnel.

So an affordable SEO tool didn’t make any sense before, because you were going to spend so much time doing it anyway.
— Ben Senescu

That line explains why the ninety-nine dollar ceiling held for so long. When the work took ten to twenty hours a week, a cheap tool was pointless for someone who did not have the hours. Compress the hours and the cheap tool suddenly has a customer.

Like, we’ll buy you all these backlinks to increase your domain rating. But is that going to get you any organic traffic?
— Ben Senescu

Declaring bankruptcy on the pull requests

Around fifty open issues and sixty open pull requests is where the community goodwill turned into a second full-time job. He stopped accepting external pull requests, published a roadmap, and asked contributors for well-written issues instead.

I could probably implement every feature in Semrush in three weeks with Claude Code, but they’d all be so slightly broken that it would just be impossible to fix.
— Ben Senescu

That is the most useful warning in the episode for anyone building with agents. Generation is no longer the bottleneck. Maintaining sixty slightly-wrong implementations is.

I can do anything. What is the one thing?

I think that’s the biggest thing in the AI era — figuring out: I can do anything. What’s the one thing I should do?
— Ben Senescu

The roadmap follows from it. Go horizontal first, covering local SEO, AI visibility and prompt tracking, and accept that each is shallower than a specialist tool. Depth is a later problem.

I want OpenSEO to always be the tool that people getting into SEO for the first time use.
— Ben Senescu

Which is a positioning statement rather than a feature list, and probably the more durable of the two.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
OpenSEO	Ben’s open source SEO tool, ten dollars a month or bring your own key
DataForSEO	The API the data comes from, and the reason it is not free
r/TechSEO	Where he validated the idea before writing anything
PR bankruptcy	Closing sixty open pull requests and publishing a roadmap instead
Klaviyo	One of the companies in his engineering background before this

Questions this episode answers

Can an SEO tool actually be open source?
Why does OpenSEO cost money if the code is free?
Who buys a ten dollar SEO tool?
Why did SEO tools cost ninety-nine dollars a month for so long?
How do you manage an open source project that gets too popular?
Is domain rating worth optimising for?
How do you choose what to build when AI makes everything buildable?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

Sonia Urquilla on what a solo operator can actually afford, which is the buyer’s side of this conversation.
Marcus Smith on cutting work customers would not pay for, the same discipline applied to a consultancy.
Unscripted SEO, for the rest of the interviews.

Find Ben Senescu

He is on LinkedIn and X, and the project has a Discord. Good issues are more welcome than pull requests.

Cite this episode

Senescu, Ben. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Open Source SEO and the $99 Ceiling.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/ben-senescu-on-open-source-seo-and-the-99-ceiling

Ann Smarty on LLM Consensus, Reddit and Brand Search

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Ann Smarty has been doing SEO for over twenty years and has stopped getting the request that used to define the job. Nobody asks to rank on Google any more. They ask to show up in ChatGPT. Her answer starts somewhere uncomfortable: the query set that matters most is your own brand name, and it is the one you control least.

Key takeaways

Growth is what costs you control of your name. The moment people search for you, other people’s pages start ranking for you.
LLMs run a branded search before they recommend you. Whatever that search surfaces is what ends up in the answer.
LLM consensus means every source saying a consistent thing. She is candid that her own twenty-year footprint fails this test.
Reddit takes about six months and punishes promotion. She has watched accounts nearly a decade old get suspended for turning promotional.
Citations are not the win condition. Being inside the answer is. Citations mostly do not get clicked.

Losing control of your own brand name

Being a brand is great, but no one talks about how it actually you lose control over it because stuff starts ranking for your name and that is the most important search query, that’s your brand name, variations, brand name reviews and all of that.
— Ann Smarty

Which sets her sequencing: establish the organic footprint first, then go outbound. Outbound manufactures branded search, and branded search you have not prepared for is branded search someone else answers.

Everyone is searching for brand names, including LLMs. Before they recommend a brand in an AI answer, they will do the branded search, they will find stuff about you that your customers may not want to know.
— Ann Smarty

That is the retrieval path, stated plainly. It is the mechanism behind the advice, heard elsewhere on this show, to go and fix the product.

What an LLM consensus audit actually is

You have to have I refer to that as LLM consensus. This is when LLMs are able to find a lot of different sources about you and they are very consistent in their messaging. Don’t be like me. My footprint is a mess.
— Ann Smarty

The self-indictment is the useful part. Twenty years of bylines and dead project references produce an inconsistent record, and cleaning it is not a project with an end date.

Don’t dismiss directory submissions that easily these days. They are being very well used by LLMs, which is like they made a very good comeback from I don’t know, twenty years ago.
— Ann Smarty

The work here is claiming profiles and keeping the details identical, not acquiring links. Yelp, Trustpilot and whatever is category-standard in your niche.

Six months on Reddit, and how to lose the account

Our average is six months when the community starts really picking up and that subreddit starts ranking in Google, starts showing up in LLM citations... Once you start trying to do sneaky stuff, you can lose accounts.
— Ann Smarty

Her agency runs clients’ official presence, which rules out the fast route entirely. The risk is not a slap. It is the loss of an account with a decade of history attached to a real brand.

Just because your thread is being cited in LLMs doesn’t mean you will be necessarily part of the answer... it can be citation, but who cares about citations? They don’t they are not even clicked. The goal is for the brand to be in the answer.
— Ann Smarty

A correction worth pinning to any dashboard that counts citations as the outcome.

The blocker is internal, not tactical

You would not believe how much of reputation problem is caused by discommunication between what the website says, what sales people promise, and that causes so much problem on Reddit.
— Ann Smarty

She says she loses that argument roughly half the time. When she does, the strategy shifts to building authority elsewhere instead of fixing the thing, which is a worse plan and she says so.

We really cannot look at LLMs and figure out what people are even prompting. We don’t have that data. But if we look at search keywords, we may assume the prompts behind them in a much more educational way... SEO is still the most predictable path into LLMs. Not the only one.
— Ann Smarty

Roughly 30% overlap on her estimate. Still better than any alternative, because organic is the only channel with first-party data behind it.

Chapters

Time	What happens
00:31	Twenty years in SEO, and why audits and GEO stopped being separate
01:47	What Reddit work actually looks like, and the six-month curve
03:14	The fastest way to crash and burn on Reddit
05:25	Your homepage is no longer your whole entity
06:24	LLM consensus, and her own messy footprint
08:30	The entity home, and the about page nobody writes
10:39	Directory submissions are back
12:26	Losing control of your brand the moment you grow
16:50	Website, sales and support saying three different things
21:43	How AI actually gets used in her agency
33:26	How much SEO and LLM work really overlap
39:12	Citations versus being in the answer

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
Smarty Marketing	Her agency: SEO and GEO audits, plus long-term branded Reddit presence
Ann Smarty	Twenty-plus years across SEO, journalism and community management
LLM consensus audit	Her named process: find every source describing you, make them consistent, then extend presence
Reddit	Central to the episode. Roughly six months to a subreddit that ranks and gets cited
Directory submissions	Back in use because LLMs read them, and the job is consistency rather than links
Grant Simmons	Raised by the host on entity homes and about pages

Questions this episode answers

Why does ChatGPT say something wrong or outdated about my brand?
What is an LLM consensus audit and how do I run one?
Do directory submissions still matter?
How long does it take to build a real Reddit presence for a brand?
What gets a brand account suspended on Reddit?
Is being cited by an LLM the same as being recommended?
Why do reputation problems start inside the company?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

the product-side version of the same fix, where Patrick Stox argues the shortest route to a better AI answer runs through the thing customers are complaining about.
what consensus looks like from inside a measurement tool, including the fan-out method for getting your name onto the pages that already list your competitors.
every quote from this episode, attributed, as plain text, so a model reading it cannot confuse the host with the guest.

Watch the interview

Find Ann Smarty

smarty.marketing, plus her newsletter and weekly live stream at AnnSmarty.com.

Cite this episode

Smarty, Ann. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “LLM Consensus, Reddit and Losing Control of Your Own Brand Name.” The Unscripted SEO Podcast, 12 August 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/ann-smarty-llm-consensus-reddit-brand-control/

You Rank Consensus, Not Pages: Malte Landwehr on LLMs

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:06:17 +0000

Your pricing page is not what the model is reading. Malte Landwehr of Peec AI wrote his bachelor thesis on PageRank, ran in-house SEO at Europe’s largest price comparison site, and now measures brand visibility inside answer engines for a living. His argument: LLMs resolve to consensus, so five stale Reddit threads and an old G2 profile will happily overrule the price you changed last week.

Key takeaways

One canonical page cannot create consensus. The same fact has to be findable in enough places that agreeing with you is the cheapest option.
He is against a separate .md URL and for serving markdown by user agent. Same URL, different response. He also calls it cloaking, out loud, and says he would not do it to Google.
Fan-out queries are a placement map, not a keyword list. Target the cited pages that already name several of your competitors.
Watch the words the model adds that you never prompted. The pattern rotates; the method is to keep watching, not to memorise this month’s word.
Two live manipulation surfaces, both already measurable. Hallucinated domains inside fan-outs, and paid advertorials being treated as grounding sources.

Why consensus beats your canonical page

If you only talk about your pricing on your pricing website and then you change your pricing and then there are five Reddit threads and two reviews on random blogs that still talk about your old pricing, ChatGPT will answer with your old pricing if a user asks about it.
— Malte Landwehr

The remedy is distribution of a single fact rather than optimisation of a single page. G2, Yelp, your own footer, social profiles, press release boilerplate, the help centre, the product docs. The goal is to make agreeing with you cheap to verify.

LLMs are looking for fresh content. So refreshing content, updating it, and then also making sure there’s a machine readable last updated date.
— Malte Landwehr

Against a second URL, for serving by user agent

I would not do that. As an SEO, I don’t want the same content on two different URLs. It wastes crawl resources. If humans land on the .md version, there are no links to click. There’s nothing for them to do. It’s a horrible experience. What can make sense is that my server makes a decision. When a human comes, I serve them the HTML version. And when a LLM crawler comes, I serve them the markdown file under the same URL.
— Malte Landwehr

He does not pretend this is clean. He names it as a form of cloaking and says he would run it for LLM crawlers and not for Google. He also supplies the fix for the two-URL version if you insist on it: set the canonical in the HTTP header, because a text file has no HTML head to put one in.

They also inject ads specifically for the LLM. And that is again going very much in direction of cloaking.
— Malte Landwehr

Fan-outs as a placement map

I would look at the sources both on the URL and on the domain level and see for these existing URLs, can I get my brand mentioned there if I’m not mentioned yet? And the trick is often to look for the ones that have multiple of your competitors already mentioned because then it’s often reasonable to contact and say, hey, can I also be added?
— Malte Landwehr

The corollary saves you a quarter of wasted outreach: a page that is an interview with a competitor’s chief executive is unwinnable, so do not spend anything on it. Sort the cited sources by how many rivals they already list, and work down.

The terms you did not prompt

Especially terms that the LLMs are adding that were not part of the prompt... A few days ago, ChatGPT started adding the term official to a lot of fan out queries. So right now I recommend everybody to put the word official in the footer of their website.
— Malte Landwehr

Cheap, testable, and explicitly time-bound. He is clear these patterns rotate, which is the actual instruction: watch the added terms, do not enshrine one of them.

Manipulation surfaces and AI-content guardrails

There are some prompts I’m tracking where it’s in the range of 2 or 3 % of the prompts have a hallucinated domain. In these cases, the domain is just parked. But if I was an evil person, I would now register this domain or buy it and put up some completely negative content about the brand that supposedly owns it.
— Malte Landwehr

He raises a second surface alongside it: in an insurance prompt set he monitors, roughly 2% of the sources an LLM leans on are paid advertorials. Humans skip advertorials. Models quote them.

When AI content is worth publishing

If you can create it with a prompt, why would ChatGPT or OpenAI or Google crawl index and rank it and use it? They could just use that prompt on their own.
— Malte Landwehr

His acceptable cases are all data-backed: summarising real reviews on a product page, or writing up structured data nobody else holds. And if you want to know whether your own output is detectable, he names the four measures to run over it.

Perplexity... compression rate... jacquard and the other is cosine [similarity]. And if you use these four measures you will often find that there are many, many very easy to detect footprints in AI written content.
— Malte Landwehr

Benchmark all four on a corpus of your human-written text, run them again on the AI-written batch, and compare. He notes you can have Claude write the Python and that you do not need the maths to read the result.

Chapters

Time	What happens
00:00	Twenty years of SEO, and a PageRank thesis
01:48	Is PageRank still running inside Google?
03:37	Bot crawling is not the reasonable surfer
05:57	Serving markdown to LLM crawlers, and why a parallel .md URL is not the way
08:57	Time magazine, and ads only the model sees
12:55	Hallucinated domains in ChatGPT fan-outs
14:23	Advertorials used as grounding sources
16:55	Consensus: stale threads beat your pricing page
19:43	The five-step query fan-out method
24:21	Cannibalisation loosens up
29:34	Perplexity, compression rate, Jaccard and cosine
38:02	MCP turns systems of record into databases

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
Peec AI	Software for measuring and improving visibility inside LLM answer engines
Malte Landwehr	Twenty-plus years in SEO. Agency co-founder, product lead at Searchmetrics, five years in-house at Europe's largest price comparison site
Query fan-out	The expansion of one prompt into many underlying searches, including terms the user never typed
Time Magazine	Cited as serving markdown site-wide and injecting ads into the model-facing version
Perplexity, compression rate, Jaccard, cosine similarity	The four measures he recommends for finding AI-content footprints in your own writing
Hallucinated domains	Parked domains appearing inside fan-out site: queries, and an open manipulation surface

Questions this episode answers

Should I publish a .md version of every page for LLMs?
How do I set a canonical on a markdown file that has no HTML head?
Why does ChatGPT give an outdated fact about my company?
What do I actually do with a list of query fan-outs?
How can I tell whether my AI-written content is detectable?
Are advertorials being used as grounding sources by LLMs?
Is cannibalisation still a problem in the era of AI search?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

the markdown argument he is answering here, made by an operator who publishes the second URL on purpose and reports his crawl telemetry for it.
a sceptic on the same question, arguing from enterprise scale, where the cost is not authoring the file but owning it across a million pages.
a text-only copy of this episode built for pasting into a model, with each claim tied to the speaker who made it.

Watch the interview

Find Malte Landwehr

peec.ai, and he is most responsive on LinkedIn.

Cite this episode

Landwehr, Malte. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Consensus, Query Fan-Outs and AI Content Guardrails.” The Unscripted SEO Podcast, 10 August 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/episode-recap-malte-landwehr-of-peec-ai-on-consensus-query-fan-outs-and-ai-content-guardrails/

Chris Green: Patents, Bots & the Cannibalization Reversal

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Fifteen years of SEO theory was built on Google’s patent literature. Chris Green of Torque Partnership takes the two load-bearing ones, PageRank and Reasonable Surfer, and asks what survives a web where most of the traffic hitting your pages was never a person. He is also the sceptic on markdown companion files, and the sceptic is the useful voice in that argument.

Key takeaways

Patents are principles to reason from, not rules to obey. Simulating link equity is a fine way to picture a change. Betting a rollout on the simulation is the risk.
Agent traffic is polluting the analytics your budget rests on. Worst when the agent rides a real user’s browser, session and device, where the usual bot tells are absent.
Markdown companions are near-free on a small site and a governance problem on a big one. The cost is not authoring. It is who owns the drift.
Nothing on the internet will tell you your markdown is wrong. Search Console flags broken HTML. No equivalent exists for a companion file.
An isolated client test found three to four selectable links to be a citation sweet spot. He labels it as isolated and does not oversell it.

Patents as principles, not blueprints

We know when the patent comes in, we know when it’s established. We don’t often have a consistent concrete understanding of for how long that mechanism is at work or what other systems intertwine with it... learn them, be aware of them, be conscious of them.
— Chris Green

The distinction he is drawing is between using a patent to picture a system and using one to justify a decision. You can move PageRank around a site convincingly in a simulation and change visibility by nothing at all.

If you know how to test it and you know how to be skeptical then it’s still valuable, still highly valuable.
— Chris Green

What agent traffic does to your data

User behavior collapses, like things like dwell time, click frustration points, call to actions, everything like that is turned on its head... it pollutes all of my other data, which then ruins decision making, which then eventually potentially ruins my budget and my remit.
— Chris Green

This is the part of the agentic shift that arrives before any of the interesting parts. Agents do not pogo-stick, do not hesitate, and do not read. Every behavioural metric you use to argue for investment quietly stops describing humans, and nothing in the dashboard tells you when that happened.

The hardest case is not a declared crawler. It is an agent operating inside a real person’s browser, on their session and their device, where the ordinary detection signals simply are not present.

The sceptic’s case on markdown companions

A relatively small static site... like a WordPress or something that’s fairly simple... it’s almost a non task, you can kind of do it automatically, never think about it again. And I think if that’s you and you can do it now, I can think of no reason why you wouldn’t... for a 50,000, 100,000, million page website that’s made with duct tape and sticky tape, it’s just not going to fly.
— Chris Green

Note that this is not a no. It is a scale-dependent yes, which is the answer most of the argument has been missing. His actual worry is drift: what happens when the markdown and the HTML disagree, and which team is accountable when they do.

We end up at a route where a markdown file is serving different data. No one’s gonna tell you at the moment, there isn’t a single bot or service out there that will say, hey, your markdown files are wrong.
— Chris Green

That is the missing feedback loop, and it is a real one. Every other publishing surface you own has something watching it.

The cannibalisation reversal, and access logs

If you had three to four links that were selectable, you were much more likely to get included in the citation than if you had under three or interestingly over that four or five mark.
— Chris Green

One relatively isolated client test, presented as such. The operational consequence is heresy by the old rules: keep the subdomain page, add the main-domain page, and link them, rather than consolidating one into the other.

There is a possibility that we as an industry may have got a little oversensitive to cannibalization in a very kind of strict kind of way. There’s always the potential that it maybe wasn’t the biggest issue.
— Chris Green

The evidence nobody is bringing

One of the other treasure troves of information is access logs. So if we can say these AI bots are visiting on these days, here’s your average count for the amount of times that a user driven bot has appeared versus a training bot versus a search bot... very few people are bringing that kind of value.
— Chris Green

The split that matters is user-triggered against training crawler, because the first is a proxy for a real person being shown your page. He also warns to check the IP range before you trust the user agent, since a spoofed ChatGPT hit will happily contaminate the whole analysis.

Chapters

Time	What happens
00:00	Fifteen years, and the seats Chris has sat in
01:18	Do Google's old patents still describe live systems?
04:50	Test it and stay sceptical, the SEO's actual core skill
05:10	Reasonable Surfer when most of the web is bots
07:19	Polluted analytics, ruined decisions, ruined budgets
08:17	Markdown companion files and Google's position on them
11:01	The trust problem and the enterprise maintenance overhead
14:28	Bots with wallets, and which standard to hedge
20:13	Why the RAG layer is riper for gaming than training data
22:57	The tactic that has always worked: be explicit
25:07	The cannibalisation reversal and the link sweet spot
33:56	Access logs as the measurement layer nobody sells

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
Chris Green	Fifteen-plus years across technical SEO, content, team leadership and data analytics
Torque Partnership	His consultancy: technical SEO, CDN work and global programmes for large brands
Reasonable Surfer	The Google patent on valuing link placement, used here as a lens on agent behaviour
Bill Slawski	Named as the person whose patent analysis anchored the industry
Access logs	His preferred evidence base, split by user-triggered against training crawler
Splunk, BigQuery, Data Studio	The stack he suggests once log analysis outgrows a spreadsheet

Questions this episode answers

Do Google's old patents still apply to how search works today?
Does the reasonable surfer patent apply to bots and agents?
Should I publish markdown versions of my pages?
How is agent traffic distorting my analytics?
How many links should a page have to maximise its chance of being cited?
Was the SEO industry too strict about keyword cannibalisation?
How do I tell a real ChatGPT crawler from a spoofed one?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

the case for the companion file, argued from the opposite side, where Dan Kurtz treats bots as an audience with a format preference and calls the downside bounded.
a third position, serving markdown by user agent at one URL, which sidesteps the duplicate-URL objection and introduces a cloaking one instead.
the speaker-labelled text edition of this conversation, written so a model can read it without guessing who said what.
a step-by-step routine for reading AI bot hits in a raw log, if the access-log section left you wanting the actual procedure.

Watch the interview

Find Chris Green

chris-green.net, his working notes on Substack, and LinkedIn.

Cite this episode

Green, Chris. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Do Google’s Patents Still Hold Up in an Agentic Web?” The Unscripted SEO Podcast, 6 August 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/chris-green-do-googles-patents-still-hold-up-in-an-agentic-web/

Bots Are Just Another Customer - Dan Kurtz, Miss Pepper AI

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Traditional Googlebot crawling is falling while AI retrieval bots climb. Dan Kurtz of Miss Pepper AI reads it off his own server logs, and his conclusion is not that SEO is over. It is that we have done this before. We have been multi-purposing content into infographics, reels and press releases for twenty years because humans have preferred content types. Bots have one too.

Key takeaways

Bots are a customer segment, not a technical problem. They have a format preference, and serving it is ordinary multi-purposing.
The downside of publishing a machine-readable companion is bounded. Worst case, the crawler ignores it.
Linking to the file is the mechanism. A companion file nobody links to is a file nobody fetches.
Deliverable-count retainers are a symptom. Hitting a monthly quota is not the same as paying attention.
An SSL certificate reissue may force AI recrawls. Offered as an untested hypothesis, with the caveat attached.

The argument: bots as a customer segment

As SEOs and content marketers, we’ve been doing that for decades. We call it multi-purposing. Bots have a preferred content type. Technically, they’re just an additional customer.
— Dan Kurtz, 37:42

The practical version is a plain-text or markdown file sitting alongside the HTML page. Dan’s case for doing it is that the risk is asymmetric:

I would absolutely spend the time to go ahead and do that and invest in it, because the worst thing that can happen is they pass it. They fly over it.
— Dan Kurtz, 37:42

Then the step almost everyone skips. “That’s just a matter of directing them to it next time they come to the website and saying, hey, this file exists.” We took that literally and published machine-readable companions across twelve episodes, linked from every post. One thing we found by accident: our own flagship site had been returning 429 to GPTBot on every page.

Not everyone agrees. Malte Landwehr makes the opposite case, that a second URL carrying the same content is not cost-free, and would serve markdown by user agent at the same URL instead. Two practitioners, two defensible positions, which is usually the sign that the question is open rather than solved.

What the crawl data actually shows

Traditional Google bots down, I think something like sixty percent crawling sites, but AI bots are up eighty percent for doing the crawling and retrieval. It’s just looking at server logs and stuff like that, you know, got my own sites that I can see those kinds of tests on.
— Dan Kurtz, 6:59

He frames it as his own telemetry rather than an industry benchmark, and that distinction matters. The independently verified figure is Cloudflare’s: automated traffic overtook human traffic on the web in June 2026.

None of this appears in Search Console. Bot requests are not impressions. If you want to know which crawlers actually reached you and what they got, the answer is in your access logs, and we wrote up the log-analysis method for auditing AI bot traffic as a standing SOP.

The SSL trick, with its caveat

If you go ahead on your hosting provider and you go ahead and you reissue a new SSL certificate, it will force all of the AI bots to recrawl your stuff all over again... I don’t know what the cadence is, I don’t know what the frequency is.
— Dan Kurtz, 38:09

Treat that as a hypothesis worth testing rather than a tactic. He says so himself.

The agentic flywheel

Everything we do for SEO, I’ve got a dashboard that’s got an API. The thought leadership platform for the exec, that’s got an API. The call and appointment setting platform, that’s got an API. So now all of these all talk to each other and they’re all passing baton data between each other.
— Dan Kurtz, 26:18

Sales talks to SEO talks to marketing talks to appointment setting. He expects to publish results on what that does to a business around Q1 2027.

One component is an A/B loop that hands Microsoft Clarity and SEO Gets data to Claude and lets it rewrite the page. Worth a warning before you build the same thing: Clarity’s regex filters silently return nothing, and Search Console and GA4 run a third engine again. Our pattern compatibility checker tells you which of the three will actually accept a given filter, and the regex library has the patterns themselves organised by the question they answer.

Why he refuses deliverable-based retainers

Deliverables in SEO means that you’re not paying attention. It’s you’re focused on making sure you hit that quota every month.
— Dan Kurtz, 13:25

His alternative is an enablement layer: AI first, humans working on top of it, and no scope creep pushed down onto whoever is doing the work.

Chapters

Time	What happens
0:14	Miss Pepper AI’s origin, and the 2012 Google penalty that killed the first version
2:15	Seth Godin’s Linchpin, then Black Hat World
6:59	Googlebot down 60%, AI bots up 80%, read off his own server logs
13:25	“Deliverables in SEO means that you’re not paying attention”
26:18	The agentic flywheel: an API between every function
37:42	Bots as a customer segment with a format preference
38:09	Linking to the file, and the SSL reissue trick

People, tools and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
Miss Pepper AI	Dan’s agency and product, built on an AI enablement layer beneath human work
Data for LLMs	His approach to publishing structured data straight to the models
Microsoft Clarity	Behaviour analytics feeding his A/B rewrite loop
SEO Gets	Search Console data layer in the same loop
Cloudflare bot report	The independent source for the crossover claim
Seth Godin, Linchpin	Named as the turning point early in his career

Questions this episode answers

Are AI crawlers actually replacing Googlebot, and how would I know?
Should I publish a markdown or plain-text version of my pages for LLMs?
What is the downside if AI crawlers ignore a companion file?
How do I get AI crawlers to re-crawl a site?
Why does bot traffic never show up in Search Console?
What should an SEO retainer be measured on, if not deliverables?
How do you wire SEO, paid, and appointment setting together?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These three are the ones not already mentioned in the conversation above.

Everything we have written on Search Console data, including why its numbers disagree with every other tool you own, and why bot traffic never appears in it at all.
Malte Landwehr arguing the opposite side of the markdown question: a second URL carrying the same content is not cost-free, and he would serve it by user agent instead.
The full write-up of this conversation, with a plain-text companion written for AI assistants. Practising what the episode preaches.

Watch the interview

Find Dan Kurtz

LinkedIn · misspepper.ai

Cite this episode

Kurtz, Dan. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Bots Are Just Another Customer.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 3 August 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/dan-kurtz-bots-as-a-customer-segment-markdown-agentic-flywheel/

The Tail Can't Wag the Dog: Tom Malesic on Agency Culture

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Tom Malesic started EZMarketing thirty-five seconds after quitting a boss who refused a client he disagreed with. He has spent the twenty-nine years since building the opposite kind of company. This is his second turn on the show, and it is the one about culture.

Key takeaways

Core values are the culture. Not a poster. The hire who said “I gotta cover my ass” is the story that proved it.
The tail cannot wag the dog. The book is deliberately a large volume of small customers, so the top five could all leave tomorrow without a single redundancy.
The customer who makes your team cry has to go. He coaches customers the way he coaches staff, and fires the ones who will not be coached.
One toxic employee wrecks a culture and your public reviews with it. The cost is not the salary.
Fully remote on an operating cadence. Three countries, and an eleven-thousand square foot office holding four people.
One trained AI agent per client. Across roughly seventy models, so the machine knows the client’s voice better than any single team member.

Thirty-five seconds

The 1996 origin story is short. His boss refused a client Tom thought was worth taking. Tom quit, and by his own account had his first customer thirty-five seconds later, because it was the client his boss had just turned away.

Nearly three decades on, the whole company reads as an argument with that boss.

Core values are the culture

His position is that a company does not have a culture separate from what it actually rewards and tolerates. Values written on a wall and contradicted in a meeting are not values, they are decoration.

The example he gives is a hire who said, out loud, that his priority was covering himself. It is a small sentence and it tells you everything about how that person will behave when a project goes wrong.

The tail cannot wag the dog

This is the structural decision underneath everything else. EZMarketing deliberately runs a large number of small customers rather than a handful of large ones. It is less efficient and it is the reason the company survives losing anybody.

His test is blunt: if the top five clients all left tomorrow, would anyone lose their job? For most agencies the honest answer is yes, which means those five clients are quietly running the company.

Firing the customer

A customer once made an employee cry. That customer is no longer a customer, and Tom is clear that the maths on this is not close. The revenue is replaceable and the employee is not.

He treats it as coaching first. Customers get told when their behaviour is a problem, the same as staff do, and most of them adjust. The ones who do not get to go and be someone else’s emergency.

The mirror of that is the toxic employee, who costs more than a difficult client because they damage the people around them and then show up in your public reviews for years.

Remote, on a cadence

The team is fully remote across three countries, run on an EOS cadence. Weekly rhythm, clear numbers, and accountability that does not require anyone to be watched.

The detail that makes the point is the office. Eleven thousand square feet with four people in it, kept because it exists, not because the work needs it.

One agent per client, and the demand letters

The operational move is one trained agent per client, built on Hats.ai across roughly seventy models. The point is not speed. It is that the agent holds the client’s voice and history more completely than any individual account manager, and does not leave.

The thing landing in inboxes right now

He also flags the compliance demand letters currently arriving at small businesses over session-recording and accessibility law. Most owners have never heard of either statute and the letters are not going away.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
EZMarketing	Founded 1996, deliberately built on many small clients
EOS	The operating system giving a fully remote team its cadence
Hats.ai	Where the per-client agents are trained
The tail cannot wag the dog	His name for refusing client concentration
CIPA and ADA demand letters	The compliance threat now reaching small-business inboxes

Questions this episode answers

How do you actually build a company culture?
How much client concentration is too much?
Should you ever fire a customer?
What does one toxic employee cost you?
Can a marketing agency run fully remote?
How would you use an AI agent per client?
What are the compliance demand letters small businesses are getting?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

The full written recap of this conversation.
Tom’s first interview, on the website as the centre of everything.
The audio of that first conversation, on local SEO and small business marketing.

Find Tom Malesic

EZMarketing is in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and offers free website audits.

Cite this episode

Malesic, Tom. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “The Tail Can’t Wag the Dog.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/the-tail-cant-wag-the-dog-tom-malesic-on-agency-culture

The Content Ladder: How to Get Found at Every Rung of the Buyer's Question

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 18:31:48 +0000

Alyssa Evans started school as an art major and finished with a science degree — and that creative-plus-analytical split is exactly how she runs Grow Your Strategy. In this episode she makes the case that the funnel is the wrong mental model entirely, and that what replaces it is a content ladder.

Alyssa is a growth strategist working mostly with fintech, real estate tech, and SaaS companies — including investors raising money for syndications and adjacent plays like storage units and ATM investing. Her first month with any client is spent auditing rather than executing, because until you know a founder's archetype and comfort level, you're guessing. She's blunt about what's failing right now: the last eight months of her work have included cleaning up websites wrecked by auto-generated content.

In this episode

Why the first month of any engagement should be auditing, not acting — and how client archetypes change the plan
The content ladder — showing up at the most basic question in your niche and every rung of complexity above it
Auto-blogging is a liability: what Alyssa is seeing as she repairs AI-content damage
Why LLMs favor content updated in the last three months — and what that means for your archive
Cross-team collaboration as a speed advantage — what product and sales know that marketing doesn't
Building feedback loops that don't backfire — where Slack and Reddit communities burn brands, and what works instead
Community as its own marketing channel — word of mouth 2.0, and "growing in public"
Why link building is becoming networking — non-competitor partnerships, cross-promotion, and podcasts as an authority engine

Chapters

[MM:SS] — Meet Alyssa Evans: continuous improvement as a operating principle
[MM:SS] — From art major to growth strategist
[MM:SS] — The power of cross-team collaboration
[MM:SS] — First-month friction: auditing before acting
[MM:SS] — Finding the niche: fintech, real estate tech & SaaS
[MM:SS] — SaaS's moving target: the release/marketing/satisfaction cycle
[MM:SS] — Customer feedback loops that actually work
[MM:SS] — Community as a marketing channel
[MM:SS] — AI, GEO, and the content ladder
[MM:SS] — Top of funnel is dead; go deeper
[MM:SS] — Link building in the age of AI
[MM:SS] — Where to find Alyssa

Notable quotes

"You need to make sure that you're found at that base level and working their way up — think of it as a content ladder."
— Alyssa Evans"If you really start to talk to your customer like they're building the product with you, you will just be much more successful."
— Alyssa Evans"Everyone will have an opinion, and they are valid in their world — but you have to stand your ground, and then the data will come later."
— Alyssa Evans

Resources & links

Grow Your Strategy — Alyssa's strategy and content company
Alyssa Evans on LinkedIn · @growyourstrategy on Instagram
On repairing AI-generated content damage — human-certified, expert-sourced content
On earning authority off-site — the complete guide to link building & authority
On using interviews as an authority channel — podcast-powered link building
Further reading — the evolution from traditional SEO to multi-channel marketing

About the show

Unscripted SEO is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Full episode archive at unscriptedseo.com.

Property Management SEO Done Right: Owners, Doors & AI Search (Alex Zweydoff)

Jeremy Rivera — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 18:57:40 +0000

Alex Zweydoff came up inside the property management industry before founding ClearLead Digital. The agency niched down from day one and measures success in doors added, not rankings. Fourteen months in, he has a specific complaint about how everyone else markets property managers.

Key takeaways

Doors added is the metric. A door is a new managed property. It is the only number the client’s bank account agrees with.
Target owners, not tenants. Property managers do not need tenants. Chasing tenant keywords produces traffic that can never buy anything.
Three owner buying stages. Self-managing and struggling, currently managed and unhappy, or brand new to owning. Each needs different copy.
Hyperlocal beats city-level. Owners search the sub-community, not the metro area.
Speed to lead is measured in minutes. His threshold is under three, and the industry data on follow-up is dismal.
Twelve to twenty-four months is the window he gives. Property managers who ignore AI search now may simply stop being found.

Doors, not vanity metrics

we measure success on them adding a door to their portfolio
— Alex Zweydoff

A door is one more property under management. It is recurring revenue, it is the unit the whole industry counts in, and it is unambiguously attributable in a way a ranking is not.

The agency is fourteen months old and niched from day one, which several people told him was a mistake. Coming out of the industry meant a lot of the first clients were people he already knew, so the trust that usually takes six months was there on day one.

Owners, not tenants

property manager companies don’t need tenants. They can throw a rock and they can hit ten at the same time
— Alex Zweydoff

This is the mistake he sees most often, and it is an easy one to make because tenant keywords have all the volume. They also have none of the value. The listing sites already saturate that demand and the property manager was never short of applicants anyway.

Owner-intent phrases are lower volume, harder to find and are the entire business. An agency reporting on total organic sessions will look better doing the wrong one.

The three owner buying stages

Then you have the people who are with a current property manager and they’re hating it and they’re looking to switch to another property manager.
— Alex Zweydoff

The owner managing it themselves who has just had the call at two in the morning.
The owner already with a manager who is unhappy and shopping.
The brand new owner who does not yet know what any of this involves.

Each of those arrives with a different question, and a single generic services page answers none of them well.

Speed to lead

His response threshold is under three minutes, and he is not being theoretical about it. The industry numbers on lead follow-up are grim: most businesses never respond within a day, a tiny minority respond within five minutes, and the overwhelming majority follow up exactly once and then stop.

Which makes speed to lead the cheapest competitive advantage on the list, and the one that requires no budget at all.

Baldwin Park, not Orlando

they’re not looking for Orlando. They’re looking for Baldwin Park
— Alex Zweydoff

The hyperlocal play is city pages plus sub-community pages. An owner with a rental in a specific neighbourhood is searching for that neighbourhood, because that is what they think about and it is what they are worried about.

The pages have to be genuinely different from one another to work, which is the same discipline the local SEO for property managers write-up sets out.

The twelve to twenty-four month window

if you’re not leveraging for AI now in twelve to twenty four months you’re gonna not gonna be found
— Alex Zweydoff

It is a strong claim and he is at least consistent about it, having written up what AI overviews and ChatGPT mean for property management specifically.

The last piece is presentation, and it is the most human note in the episode.

If you’re not a suit and tie guy, don’t wear a suit and tie in your headshot.
— Alex Zweydoff

Chapters

Time	What happens
00:28	Niching ClearLead Digital to property management from day one
01:54	Fourteen months in, and measuring success in doors added
03:35	Three owner buying stages, and the tenant-keyword mistake
06:30	Speed to lead and who handles the enquiry when it arrives
11:22	Custom client dashboards and the how-did-you-hear-about-us field
15:42	Tag Manager, Analytics, Search Console and Clarity as one stack
18:23	Triangulating the dark clicks hidden in Search Console
22:59	Why GA4 feels deliberately obtuse
26:21	The hyperlocal play: city pages plus sub-community pages
41:20	Technical foundations and the PM SEO Opportunity Report

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
ClearLead Digital	Alex’s property-management-only agency, fourteen months old at recording
A door	One property added to a management portfolio, and the metric he reports on
Owner-intent keywords	The low volume, high value phrases the industry mostly ignores
Speed to lead	His under-three-minute response threshold
PM SEO Opportunity Report	His thirty-two page industry report
Dark clicks	Traffic Search Console does not attribute, triangulated from other sources

Questions this episode answers

What metric should a property management agency report on?
Should property managers target tenant keywords?
What are the three buying stages for a rental property owner?
How fast do you need to respond to a new lead?
Should I build city pages or neighbourhood pages?
Will property managers really vanish from search without AI optimisation?
What should a property manager put in their headshot?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

The free SEO SOP library, for the step-by-step versions of the tracking work discussed here.
Isaac Justesen on niching an agency to healthcare clinics, the same strategy in a different vertical.
Cameron Tope, a property manager, from the client side of this conversation.

Find Alex Zweydoff

ClearLead Digital is the agency. More interviews at Unscripted SEO.

Cite this episode

Zweydoff, Alex. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Property Management SEO Done Right.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/property-management-seo-done-right-owners-doors-ai-search-alex-zweydoff

Search Everywhere Optimization With David Wilson of Zozimus

Jeremy Rivera — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 19:59:43 +0000

David Wilson has been doing this since AltaVista. The Zozimus executive vice president argues that search engine optimisation has become search everywhere optimisation: findability wherever a customer looks, rather than rankings for their own sake.

Key takeaways

Findability, not rankings. Social, models and Google are all places a decision gets made, and only one of them has a rank tracker pointed at it.
The expected-CTR model turns Search Console into a gap list. Compare what a position should earn against what it does earn, and the shortfall is the work.
Internal linking still works after a decade. The least fashionable tactic in the field remains one of the most reliable.
Digital PR and brand are the new link building. Unbranded search is eroding, so being known has to carry more of the load.
A competitor teardown method that uses several models. Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude feeding NotebookLM, so no single model’s blind spots go unnoticed.
The About page is now an AI asset. It is where a model learns who you are and whether to trust you.

Search everywhere optimisation

The reframe is not a rebrand. David’s point is that customers dream, search and decide across several surfaces, and optimising only the one with a rank tracker attached means you are measuring the part you can see rather than the part that matters.

Coming from the AltaVista era gives him a useful immunity to panic. He has watched the interface change several times already, and the underlying job of being findable and credible has not.

The expected-CTR model

This is the most immediately usable thing in the episode. Take raw Google Search Console data, model what click-through rate a given position ought to produce, then compare it to what the page is actually getting.

The gap is the answer. It converts a report nobody reads into a ranked list of pages leaving traffic on the table, which is a conversation a client can act on.

The organic CTR table is the version of that lookup you can pick up and use.

Internal linking and digital PR

David’s point about internal linking is that it has been quietly effective for ten years while the field chased other things. It costs nothing, it is entirely within your control, and most sites do it badly.

On external links his position has shifted with the market. As unbranded search erodes, digital PR stops being a link tactic and starts being the way a brand becomes something a model has heard of.

The multi-model competitor teardown

His method for finding a competitor’s weak points runs several models against the same question and then collects the output in NotebookLM to compare.

Ask the same structured questions of Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude separately.
Collect all three answers into NotebookLM as source material.
Look for where they disagree. Disagreement usually marks a thin spot in the public record about that competitor.
Turn the thin spots into the content plan.

The reason to use three is not thoroughness for its own sake. Each model has its own gaps, and running one alone means inheriting them silently.

Moats, faces and the About page

Two related questions close the conversation. Whether a faceless brand can still work, and what actually constitutes a defensible position now that content is cheap to produce.

His answer to both runs through identity. Put a face forward and you get a thing competitors cannot copy. Neglect the About page and you leave the single clearest statement of who you are to be inferred by a machine from fragments.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
Zozimus	The agency where David is executive vice president
Search everywhere optimisation	Findability across social, models and search rather than rankings alone
Expected CTR model	Comparing modelled click-through rate at a position against actual performance
NotebookLM	Where he collects multi-model output for comparison
AltaVista	Where his career in search began
The About page	Reframed as the asset a model reads to learn who you are

Questions this episode answers

What is search everywhere optimisation?
How do I use expected CTR to find missed traffic in Search Console?
Does internal linking still work?
Is digital PR replacing link building?
How do I use several AI models to analyse a competitor?
Can a faceless brand still compete?
Why does the About page matter for AI visibility?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

David Wilson on LinkedIn.
Federico Fancinelli on entity coherence, which is the research behind the About page argument.
The Search Console regex guide, if you want to slice the data before you model the gaps.

Find David Wilson

He is at Zozimus. More interviews at Unscripted SEO.

Cite this episode

Wilson, David. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Search Everywhere Optimization.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/search-everywhere-optimization-with-david-wilson-of-zozimus

Optimize Your Brand, Not Just Your Website — Sonia Urquilla (SEO by Sonia)

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 18:27:03 +0000

Sonia Urquilla watched her father’s local shop close because nobody could find it. No profile listing, no website. She now runs SEO by Sonia and teaches female founders and service providers a framework she calls brand optimisation: get found and mentioned everywhere your audience looks, rather than ranking one page.

Key takeaways

Brand optimisation is wider than SEO and narrower than marketing. It pulls in PR, Reddit, podcasts, citations and local events, all pointed at being mentioned.
One client went from about a hundred attendees to more than a thousand. A press release, ads, email and Reddit working together, not one channel doing it alone.
Online service providers ignore the local goldmine. Sponsoring local charities and events earns links, trust and leads at the same time.
Roughly eighty per cent of local businesses never reply to a message. The cheapest growth available is answering the enquiries you already get.
Vet an SEO by asking whether they do their own SEO. It is the fastest question there is and it disqualifies a lot of people.
AI levelled the field, and fear is keeping small businesses off it. The scaremongering costs more than the tools.

What brand optimisation means

Sonia’s framing starts from a practical observation. Her clients are coaches and consultants whose customers do not begin with a search box. They ask a friend, they read a thread, they hear a name on a podcast, and only then do they search.

So the target is mentions rather than positions. Press, Reddit, podcast appearances, directory citations and local event presence all count, and all of them feed the search that eventually happens.

It is personal for her. Her father’s shop closed while being invisible online, and the specifics of that absence, no listing and no site, are what she now fixes first.

The masterclass that went from a hundred to a thousand

The case study she gives is a client masterclass that had been drawing around a hundred people. The rebuild was not clever. It was four ordinary channels run at the same time and pointed at one date.

A press release, which produced the citations.
Paid ads, which produced the volume.
Email, which produced the people who were always going to come.
Reddit, which produced the people who had never heard of her.

Attendance went past a thousand. The lesson is not that any one of those is powerful. It is that none of them was working alone.

The local goldmine online providers ignore

The businesses she works with sell online and therefore assume local marketing is not for them. Sonia disagrees, and her argument is about the by-products rather than the customers.

Sponsoring a local charity or event gets you a link from an organisation nobody can accuse of selling links, a mention in local press, and a room full of people who now recognise the name. She points to directories such as Zip Local as part of the same citation layer.

The follow-up gap

Her most damning number is about replies. Roughly eight in ten local businesses never respond to a message they receive. That is not a marketing problem, it is a spending problem, because every unanswered enquiry was already paid for.

The fix is unglamorous. Decide who owns the inbox, decide the response window, and check it. There is no campaign with a better return than answering the phone.

How to vet an SEO

One question. Do they do their own SEO? A practitioner who cannot be found for their own service is either too busy to care or unable to do it, and both answers matter to you.

On tooling, the conversation turns to what a small operator can actually afford. The open source option discussed is OpenSEO, which pulls Search Console and backlink data for roughly ten to twenty pounds a month.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
SEO by Sonia	Sonia Urquilla’s practice, where the free video website audit lives
Brand optimisation	Her framework for being mentioned everywhere rather than ranking one page
Zip Local	Directory and citation surface referenced in the local section
OpenSEO	The open source SEO tool discussed as the affordable option
The follow-up gap	Roughly 80 per cent of local businesses never reply to a message

Questions this episode answers

What is brand optimisation and how is it different from SEO?
How do I get mentioned in AI answers and on Reddit?
Should an online-only business bother with local marketing?
Does sponsoring local events actually help SEO?
How many local businesses ignore their enquiries?
How do I check whether an SEO is any good?
What is a realistic SEO tool budget for a solo business?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

The video version of this interview.
Ben Senescu on why the $99 tool price was always the real barrier, which is the builder’s side of the tooling point.
SEO Arcade, for the keyword research tool and the free SOP library.

Watch the interview

Find Sonia Urquilla

Her site is SEO by Sonia, where there is a free video website audit. She is on LinkedIn, and on TikTok and Instagram as @seobysonia. More interviews at unscriptedseo.com.

Cite this episode

Urquilla, Sonia. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Optimize Your Brand, Not Just Your Website.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/optimize-your-brand-not-just-your-website-sonia-urquilla-seo-by-sonia

Benjamin Behrooz on Empathy, Blue-Collar Marketing & the AI Silver Lining

Jeremy Rivera — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 22:37:55 +0000

Unlock the secrets of effective branding with Benjamin Behrooz! In this episode, we dive deep into the importance of empathy in business and how it can transform your client relationships. Discover how to scale your business while maintaining authenticity and learn about innovative marketing strategies that work in today's competitive landscape. Key takeaways:

The role of empathy in understanding customer pain points.
How to balance scale and authenticity in marketing.
Strategies for home service businesses to thrive in a saturated market.
The impact of AI on marketing and customer engagement.
Tips for leveraging community involvement to enhance brand visibility.

Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 00:16 Meet Benjamin Behrooz 00:58 The importance of empathy in business 01:28 Solving client pain points 03:16 Balancing scale and authenticity 05:39 Common pitfalls in business planning 08:09 Marketing strategies for home services 10:22 The future of blue-collar work 12:10 The impact of AI on marketing 15:45 Unique implementations of AI 19:45 The silver lining of AI adoption 24:20 Community involvement and brand visibility 31:22 The biggest mistake brands make 32:13 How to connect with Benjamin What's your biggest challenge with branding? Drop it in the comments! Subscribe for more insights on effective marketing strategies and branding tips!

Link Building for SaaS: The Strategies That Still Work in the AI Era | Kristiyan Yankov

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 19:26:02 +0000

Most SEOs treat link building like a chore. Kristiyan Yankov built a whole agency on it. He’s the founder of Above Apex, a link-building agency niched hard on SaaS — and in this conversation with host Jeremy Rivera he lays out one of the sharpest, most practical models we’ve heard for building links (and brand mentions) in the AI era.

Kristiyan freelanced since high school, went through “generalist hell,” and niched down after Alex Hormozi’s “one avatar, one ICP, one service” clicked. Now he runs SaaS link campaigns full-time — and he’s refreshingly blunt about what actually works.

In this episode

Why SaaS is a richer link-building field than local — 5–10 viable strategies vs. a narrow local playbook
The real bottleneck isn’t knowledge, it’s bandwidth — why teams need a dedicated partner they don’t have to micromanage
Two pricing models: per-link vs. fixed, month-to-month (and why no lock-in drives lifetime value)
How to actually evaluate a link opportunity — 5–10 metrics, not just DR: “if it makes sense to me, it makes sense to Google”
The two best SaaS strategies: listicles/roundups (40%+ carry traffic and feed AI Overviews) and reverse expert-quote outreach (they’ve earned BBC links this way)
Anchor velocity, Penguin, and why spammy links get disregarded, not penalized (his read of the Google leak)
Timeline to impact (~30–60 days for well-run sites), the SMB sandbox, and the best DIY strategy for bootstrapped founders: three listicle “buckets”
The big-picture take: AI search is an extension of the fundamentals, not a replacement — and more than half of AI citations trace back to UGC platforms

Chapters

(00:00) Meet Kristiyan Yankov — from “generalist hell” to SaaS link building
(02:56) Why SaaS is a richer link-building field than local
(07:07) The #1 hurdle: bandwidth (and the case for a dedicated partner)
(08:37) Pricing — per-link vs. fixed, month-to-month, no lock-in
(12:34) Has AI/LLM demand made link-building budgets an easier sell?
(17:03) How to evaluate a link: “Google isn’t more stupid than me”
(19:59) Is Bing / alternate-engine link behavior worth chasing?
(22:31) The top two SaaS strategies: listicles & expert quotes
(27:03) Anchor velocity, Penguin & spam devaluation
(30:54) Timeline — when link building shows measurable impact
(32:12) Advice for SMBs & the sandbox effect
(35:15) The best DIY strategy: three listicle buckets
(37:08) Where to find Kristiyan

Notable quotes

“You shouldn’t trust anyone. You should verify — especially in our industry.” — Kristiyan Yankov“If I look at a link building opportunity and it makes sense to me, it would be the same for Google — because Google is definitely not more stupid than me.” — Kristiyan Yankov“The fundamentals aren’t going to disappear. When the hype is over, my team can still provide everything we do today.” — Kristiyan Yankov

Resources & links

Above Apex — Kristiyan’s SaaS link-building agency (he’s active on LinkedIn 5–6 days a week)
Go deeper on the mechanics in SEO Arcade’s complete guide to link building & authority
Kristiyan & Jeremy both count guesting as link fuel — that’s the idea behind podcast-powered link building
The local counterpart to SaaS outreach: local link building through community cleanup events
On his “expert-quote outreach” play — the same logic behind human-certified, expert-sourced content
For heads of SEO weighing where link building fits: SEO advisory

About the show: Unscripted SEO is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. For more link-building interviews, explore the show’s guest archive at unscriptedseo.com.

The Two Types of SEO Left: Zak Ali on Surfaces, Digital PR & Terminal-Native Workflows

Jeremy Rivera — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 23:10:01 +0000

Most SEOs are defending a job that no longer exists. Zak Ali () — General Manager of Finder US ( and one of the rare practitioners who took SEO from the terminal to the executive suite — argues the discipline didn't shrink, it got absorbed. In this episode he and host Jeremy Rivera () get into "search everywhere optimization," why he dissolved Finder's dedicated SEO team, and why retention — not rankings — should be every SEO's core KPI.

Zak started in search in 2015, co-founding the news blog Rant and growing it to ~100,000 readers before joining Finder in 2018 as a publisher, then head of growth, and now GM of the U.S. business — owning organic, paid, email, CRM, and sales.

In this episode:
- Why LLMs turned search engine optimization into search everywhere optimization (a nod to AJ Kohn's "surface optimization" (https://www.infinitevisibilitygroup.com/posts/surface-optimization/))
- The two types of SEOs left: technical SEOs, and SEOs who haven't realized their job is now digital PR and branding
- Why Zak killed the SEO team and rebuilt it as a generalist growth org
- Retention as an SEO KPI — "the traffic you have today is as cheap as it's going to be"
- How AI is putting the customer first again (and why "slop" predates LLMs)
- YMYL trust signals, editorial independence, and the regulatory "back door" to search
- Google News (be first) vs. Google Discover (entity optimization, and ephemeral traffic)
- The terminal-native stack: Ahrefs MCP, Claude Code (https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code), DataForSEO (https://dataforseo.com), building your own LLM tracker, and a "second brain" in Obsidian (https://obsidian.md)
- Information gain and anecdotes — why LLMs can't have experiences (with the obligatory Darmok and Jalad reference)

Chapters:
- (00:00) Meet Zak Ali — Rant, Finder, and Finder Rewards
- (02:55) SEO within LLMs: search everywhere / surface optimization
- (05:26) Selling SEO's value to the executive suite
- (08:02) How AI puts the customer first again
- (09:17) Which pre-LLM SEO strategies survived
- (10:50) "AI is the steroids SEOs needed" & the Helpful Content Update as a correction
- (13:13) Is AI traffic its own channel — or a piece of the puzzle?
- (14:51) Regulated/YMYL industries and trust signals
- (18:21) Google News vs. Google Discover
- (22:06) Retention as the real KPI — and killing the SEO team
- (24:27) Paid vs. organic, and systems thinking
- (26:45) Tools he loves right now
- (28:29) Open-source SEO, MCP, and living in the Claude Code terminal
- (29:27) Second brains, "publisher" agents, and AI org charts
- (34:49) The question for the next guest: is the faceless brand dead?
- (40:44) Rebranding SEO → "search everywhere optimization"

Notable quotes:

▎ "There are two types of SEOs that exist today. There are the technical SEOs, and there are SEOs who haven't realized yet that their job is digital PR and branding." — Zak Ali

▎ "The traffic you have today is as cheap as it's going to be. It's only going to get more expensive. Retention should be a core KPI of every SEO." — Zak Ali

▎ "What AI is doing is actually allowing us to put the customer first again." — Zak Ali

Why Ranking #1 Isn't Enough Anymore — Christopher Gimmer (Snappa & GoodMetrics)

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 19:38:29 +0000

Snappa has held number one rankings for ten years, and Christopher Gimmer says that is no longer the same thing as getting the click. On a commercial query with four paid links stacked above it, the top organic result is the fifth thing on the page. He is rebuilding the product around that, and building a second one, a cookieless answer to GA4.

Key takeaways

Distribution came before the product. A viral post ranking for free stock photos, then a stock photo site, then Snappa launched into an audience that already existed.
Ranking first is not placing first. Four paid links push the top organic result to fifth. Rank three lands around eighth.
He calls top of funnel more or less dead and has moved the new product’s content to docs, landing pages and tools instead.
Tools earn the links that posts no longer do. Cold outreach is drowned, so the asset has to be worth linking to on sight.
Agent traffic is an unsolved category. When your own agent reads a site on your behalf, analytics has no honest answer for what that was.

The audience that existed before the product

Before Snappa there was a post about where to find free stock photos, written during the early Creative Commons wave. It went viral on StumbleUpon, then ranked first in Google for a very large term, and then became its own stock photo site.

Ninety-five percent of our signups were just coming from that one blog post and our free stock photo site.
— Christopher Gimmer

He is unusually honest that this was luck rather than method. It is still the most instructive thing in the episode, because it inverts the usual order. The distribution existed, and the product was launched into it.

Number one is the fifth link

Even if you're ranking number one for that organic keyword, your link is actually the fifth one on the page. And if you're ranking number three, you're now like eight links down.
— Christopher Gimmer

Two things are eating the same channel at once and it is worth keeping them apart. AI Overviews answer the informational query outright. Paid placement takes the commercial one, four ads deep, before the first organic result appears.

Snappa survives it on a decade of domain authority and posts that have held position for ten years. He is clear that a new site does not get that cushion, and that he is running into it himself with the second product.

I think the top of the funnel is more or less dead.
— Christopher Gimmer

What still counts as a visitor

GoodMetrics exists because GA4 annoyed him and, when he asked around, everyone else too. One vocabulary rather than three: everything is an event, with an optional value or property, so one click outbound link event carries the URL as a property instead of spawning a thousand events.

Essentially we're taking a combination of an anonymized IP address and their user-agent info and creating an anonymized visitor signature.
— Christopher Gimmer

No cookie, therefore no consent banner, which is most of the pitch in Europe. The more interesting problem is the one he has not solved.

Let's say I'm using Claude Code and I'm telling my agent, hey, go read all the articles on the site, do a bunch of research and come back to me. Should that be excluded? Is that a bot?
— Christopher Gimmer

Traditional analytics filtered bots out. If a person sends an agent to read your site on their behalf, that filter is now deleting demand.

Why a tool earns the link a post cannot

I think people are more willing and likely to link out to a really good tool that actually solves a problem versus yet another blog post with a wall of text.
— Christopher Gimmer

His reasoning is about the inbox rather than the algorithm. Everyone’s outreach is buried, so the only thing that still travels is an asset somebody wants to hand to a colleague.

It seems that anyone who’s had a legitimate product within a specific space tends to be doing much better than just a pure content site.
— Christopher Gimmer

Jeremy pushes the same idea further with distance to seed, the notion that a long-standing product site may itself be a trusted origin in its niche. Gimmer’s affiliate example is the test: a pure review site cannot recommend the ten genuinely best backpacks if it earns nothing on them, and a real brand can.

He also asks the closing question every bootstrapper is currently sitting on, which is what to do when the tried and true organic channel stops being enough. Jeremy’s answer includes the SEOgets ambassador list and one of the names on it, Kevin Indig, who has his own episode in this archive.

Chapters

Time	What happens
00:00	Introductions and the finance-to-founder background
02:31	The pain point Snappa was built for
04:07	The stock photo post that supplied the first users
06:46	Rebuilding Snappa as an AI-first editor
10:19	Organic traffic, AI Overviews and paid placements
12:53	GoodMetrics as an alternative to Google Analytics
15:52	Events, properties and cookieless tracking
18:35	Counting agent traffic and bot visitors
22:50	A content strategy built on docs and landing pages
28:42	Distance to seed, and how link building changed
34:19	His question for the next guest: beyond organic
38:25	Where to find Christopher and both products

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
Snappa	His graphic design tool for non-designers, launched 2015 and now being rebuilt AI-first
GoodMetrics	A cookieless, privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics, with an API and an MCP server
StockSnap	The free stock photo site the viral post spawned, later sold
Anonymised visitor signature	Recognising a returning visitor from IP plus user agent, with no cookie involved
Distance to seed	The authority model Jeremy raises, in which a real product may itself act as a seed site
Agent traffic	His name for the unresolved grey area between a bot and a visitor

Questions this episode answers

Is ranking number one still worth what it used to be?
How much traffic do AI Overviews and paid ads actually take?
What is a cookieless analytics tool and why would I want one?
Should agent traffic count as a website visitor?
How do you get links now that cold outreach is saturated?
Why do content-only sites lose to sites with a real product?
What channels work for a bootstrapped SaaS beyond organic search?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

Mike Montague, the previous guest he is answering on agent traffic, on where agent-to-agent selling is already happening.
Nick Eubanks on affiliates as the channel Jeremy offers back, for the bootstrapper looking past organic.
Ben Senescu on pricing a bootstrapped tool under an incumbent, which is the other half of this same problem.

Watch the interview

Find Christopher Gimmer

He is CGimmer on X and Christopher Gimmer on LinkedIn. Both products are linked in the table above, and he asked for feedback from anyone working on AI design.

Cite this episode

Gimmer, Christopher. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Why Ranking #1 Isn’t Enough Anymore.” Unscripted SEO, 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/christopher-gimmer-bootstrapped-saas-ai-overviews/

GEO Research Google Doesn't Want You to See: Entities, Coherence & Prompt Poisoning

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:37:58 +0000

You do not rank pages any more. You rank entities. Federico Fancinelli founded GeoSonar after two years running a GEO research lab, and that single shift is why AI search quietly favours established brands over the small players everyone assumed it would lift.

Key takeaways

Bigger companies are entities by definition. Which is the uncomfortable finding: generative search is harder for small brands, not easier.
Three layers, one signal. Infrastructure, narrative and authority, held together by coherence across every channel you own.
Say different things in different places and you pay for it. A discrepancy between your site, your profile and your reviews is itself a signal.
Prompt depth decides which sources get fetched. Generic prompts answer from the training cache. Deep ones reach into live retrieval.
Sixteen million prompts analysed, and the advice is to watch about ten. Strategic categories beat volume.
Prompt poisoning is real and narrow. Nudging a brand new site’s grounding works only before that brand is recognised.

Ranking entities, not pages

It’s not ranking blue links, it’s not ranking pages, it’s ranking entities. And bigger companies are entities by definition.
— Federico Fancinelli

That second sentence is the whole problem. A large company already exists as a well-defined thing in the training data, with a Wikipedia entry, press coverage and a consistent name. A small company has to become one.

Federico has been in search since 2012 and built GeoSonar out of a research lab rather than a product idea, which is why the framing is structural rather than tactical.

Coherence across the nodes

The three layers are infrastructure, narrative and authority. Infrastructure is what a machine can read. Narrative is what you say about yourself. Authority is what everyone else says. The mechanic that binds them is coherence.

So if you are coherent among all of these nodes, then you have a higher chance of appearing as a suggested brand on the AI search results.
— Federico Fancinelli

Which makes the most common enterprise failure an organisational one. The website, the profile listing and the social accounts are owned by three different teams with three different descriptions of the company, and the discrepancy is the thing being measured.

Even the small can compete if everything is done right. So consistency is the key.
— Federico Fancinelli

Prompt depth and source tiers

Not every prompt triggers the same behaviour, which is why visibility tracking is so unreliable. A generic question gets answered from what the model already absorbed. A specific one sends it looking.

Generic prompts answer out of the training cache, so recent work has no effect on them.
Deeper prompts reach live retrieval, where the tier of source matters.
Tier A is the very large and very trusted: encyclopaedic references, big forums, major publishers.
Tier B is niche and local repositories, which is the layer a small brand can realistically enter.

His volume claim is sixteen million prompts analysed over roughly three months, and his advice from it is to stop tracking a thousand near-identical prompts and monitor around ten strategic ones instead.

The accidental discovery

Prompt poisoning turned up while building a bot-behaviour tracker. Repeatedly prompting models about a brand new website accelerated how quickly a grounding formed around it, which they watched happen server side with their own pixel.

The important caveat is that it only works before a brand is recognised. Once a model has a settled view of you, nudging it does nothing. It is a narrow window on new entities, not a lever on established ones.

Why Google publishes advice at all

Why would people trust what Google says about how to rank on Google? It doesn’t make any sense to me.
— Federico Fancinelli

So they are much more incentivized right now in controlling the narrative because who controls the narrative controls the behavior.
— Federico Fancinelli

He is not alleging deception so much as pointing at incentives. Guidance from a party with a commercial interest in your behaviour is a communications product, and should be read as one.

Speaking the machines’ language

So if you’re able to communicate with an agent in their own same language, they are more likely to choose you, not just because your products are better, but even before that.
— Federico Fancinelli

The practical version is structured, machine-legible information about what you sell, and he expects a formal integration protocol to become mandatory for software companies rather than optional.

SEO, in his framing, is not dead. It lives inside GEO, doing the same job it always did: making it possible for something else to find and understand you.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
GeoSonar	Federico’s AI-search visibility platform, built out of a two-year research lab
Coherence	Consistency across site, profile, social and reviews, treated as a ranking signal
Infrastructure, narrative, authority	The three layers of entity strength
Prompt poisoning	Accelerating a brand new entity’s grounding by how you prompt
Tier A and Tier B sources	Large trusted references versus niche and local repositories
Strategic prompt categories	Around ten meaningful prompts instead of a thousand duplicates

Questions this episode answers

Why does AI search favour big brands?
What does it mean to rank an entity rather than a page?
What is coherence and how do I check mine?
Do all LLMs work the same way?
How many prompts should I actually track?
What is prompt poisoning and does it work?
Should I trust Google's own advice about ranking on Google?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

The full written recap of this conversation.
The SEO Tactic Library, for the executable versions of the plays here.
Federico Fancinelli on LinkedIn.

Find Federico Fancinelli

GeoSonar is the platform, and the research lab publishes separately.

Cite this episode

Fancinelli, Federico. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Entities, Coherence and Prompt Poisoning.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/geo-research-google-doesnt-want-you-to-see-entities-coherence-prompt-poisoning

Use AI to Kill the SEO agency Pre-Work, Not the Thinking | Erika Braeger, Tenspeed

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 20:15:39 +0000

Erika Braeger is not trying to automate the analysis. She manages organic growth strategy at Tenspeed, a B2B SaaS content agency, and the automation she builds is aimed squarely at the pre-work: pulling numbers out of four systems and lining them up in a spreadsheet before anybody is allowed to think.

Key takeaways

Automate the pre-work, protect the thinking. The distinction is the whole interview, and it is a better rule than most published AI policies.
Her management job is confidence, not answers. A strategist who arrives for a gut check usually already knows, and she coaxes rather than signs off.
The brief is where the quality is decided. Subject matter expertise, product research and ideal customer profile go in before a word is written, whoever writes it.
Write for humans first, then make it machine readable. In that order, and for a reason she states plainly.
Never rush a website migration. Her one red line, and her first question is always what business goal the migration is for.

Kill the pre-work, keep the thinking

I don’t want to take away the thinking part. I want to allow the strategist to arrive at the thinking part with more ease, without burning energy, on grabbing data, organizing it out of multiple systems, organizing it in the spreadsheet.
— Erika Braeger

It is a narrow claim and a much more defensible one than most agencies are making. The analysis, the narrative, the relationship and the decision all stay with the person. What gets automated is the hour of assembly that happens before any of that can start.

It’s the pre-work that can burn a lot of time, a lot of energy.
— Erika Braeger

Her example of a skill in use is deliberately mundane: gathering conversations scattered across several systems and summarising them, instead of a strategist opening four tabs to reconstruct where an account is.

Coaching a team out of the gut check

A big part of my role is helping people grow, helping them build confidence and trust their instincts.
— Erika Braeger

She was a teacher before this, and the method transfers directly. A strategist comes to her because a client is overhauling their navigation and they want a second opinion. They are plugged into the client and the industry. They usually already know.

I don’t just sign off on the gut check. I keep asking curious questions to coax the answer out of them.
— Erika Braeger

The point is not the navigation. It is that the same person will not need to ask next time. She is honest that some of her own early gut checks were impostor syndrome rather than genuine uncertainty.

Where the quality is actually decided

Some clients get finished content, some get briefs, some take the brief and run an AI-assisted process themselves. She is relaxed about which, because in every case the leverage sits in the same place: the brief, and the expert review at the end.

You need to write content for humans first. However, you need to keep in mind that in order to get the content in front of humans, it needs to be machine readable so that the bots that parsed the content can present it to the correct humans at the correct time.
— Erika Braeger

The ordering is the argument. Machine readability is a distribution requirement, not an audience.

The friend test

If I were to show this to a friend, would they understand?
— Erika Braeger

Her check against the occupational hazard of B2B SaaS writing, which is learning a product so thoroughly that you stop noticing how technical you have become.

Never rush a website migration

Don’t rush a website migration, I will say. Never rush a website migration.
— Erika Braeger

Asked for a red line, that is the only one she offers, and her follow-up is a better filter than any checklist. Before anything else she asks what business goal the migration is serving, which is often enough to reveal that somebody simply prefers a different platform.

She has no preferred content management system and says so, which is a rarer answer than it should be. Knowing how each one behaves is what lets you make a sensible recommendation. The thing she is still working on is centralising visibility across Reddit, G2 and YouTube, which is the same pre-work problem in a new place.

Chapters

Time	What happens
00:00	Host intro and Erika’s background
01:30	Coaching the strategy team’s confidence
03:58	Pre-work eats the agency’s analysis time
05:06	What AI should not be handed
05:45	How the scope of SEO expanded after ChatGPT
09:48	Human input into client strategy
14:16	Building skills as the biggest win of the year
16:44	Learning SEO on the family food blog
18:32	Writing technical SaaS content for real humans
22:13	Never rush a website migration
25:52	Centralising visibility across Reddit, G2 and YouTube
27:36	Tenspeed’s first research report

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
Tenspeed	B2B SaaS content agency covering organic, AEO, digital PR and design
Pre-work	Pulling and organising data before the analysis can begin, the part she automates
ICP	Ideal customer profile, the thing every brief is built around
Ethnic Spoon	Her family’s food blog, where she learned SEO by executing somebody else’s audit
Our longer write-up of this conversation	On SEO Arcade, with the strategy points expanded
The first research report	Tenspeed’s study of what AI actually cites for B2B evaluation-stage prompts

Questions this episode answers

What should an SEO agency automate and what should it protect?
How do you build confidence in a junior strategy team?
Does a content brief still matter if AI writes the draft?
Should I write for humans or for AI crawlers?
What is the biggest mistake in a website migration?
Which CMS is best for SEO?
How do I track brand visibility across Reddit, G2 and YouTube?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

the superintelligence question she is answering, and the guest who asked it, from the episode recorded before hers.
the Topaz sales conversation Jeremy carries into this one, on what a transcript cannot tell you about a call.
the faceless client era, written up separately, following the same thread past the end of the interview.

Watch the interview

Find Erika Braeger

tenspeed.io, where the agency’s first research report is published. She is on LinkedIn under her own name.

Cite this episode

Braeger, Erika. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Use AI to Kill the Pre-Work, Not the Thinking.” Unscripted SEO, 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/erika-braeger-tenspeed-unscripted-seo/

Robert Spinrad on why good SEO is good AI visibility

Jeremy Rivera — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:57:00 +0000

Most agencies are still deciding what to say about AI. Robert Spinrad of SEOM Interactive already has an answer, and it is not the one being sold. He joined the Philadelphia agency straight out of Temple in 2015, when it was fifteen people, and now runs the SEO function across a team of about forty.

Key takeaways

Do not optimise for the platforms. Improve the site so the platforms have a reason to trust it. Same work, completely different instruction.
Be wary of anyone calling themselves an AI expert. The whole thing is new and everyone is learning, including him.
Humble experts. His phrase for the honest posture: know what you know, admit what you do not.
Keep AI traffic in proportion. Twenty to thirty thousand visits against two hundred thousand from Google organic.
Report on data, focus on the money. The analytics are context. Leads and revenue are the conversation.
Their PR requires a real owner quote. No AI-generated response is accepted, on principle and for the outcome.

Do not optimise for the platforms

So don’t optimize for the platforms, but improve your site in a way that these platforms will actually trust you and use you in their results.
— Robert Spinrad

This is the internal argument SEOM keeps having, and it resolves a lot of the noise. The instruction to optimise for a model invites gaming, invites shortcuts, and invites a strategy that expires when the model updates.

The instruction to be genuinely worth citing produces the same technical work and does not expire.

The fear of going backwards

I’m a little scared that we’re going to go backwards now.
— Robert Spinrad

The worry is reputational. SEO spent fifteen years living down its own spam era, and a flood of cheap generated content is the fastest available route back to being the thing marketers apologise for.

The conversation includes Jeremy’s own confession from that era, which is the point. The people who lived through it are the ones most alert to the pattern repeating.

Humble experts

I think we encourage clients to be wary of people saying they are AI experts because this whole thing is brand new. We’re all learning.
— Robert Spinrad

I think a good term I want to use is we’re humble experts. We know what we know, but we also know we don’t know, and that’s OK.
— Robert Spinrad

It is a good phrase because it survives contact with a sales meeting. It is not false modesty, it is a claim about method, and a client can check whether you behave that way.

It also comes with a specific instruction to clients: do not take SEO advice from a chatbot.

Report the data, focus on the money

So we report on data, but we focus on the money, the big ticket items at the end of the day.
— Robert Spinrad

Their positioning has said the same thing since before any of this: it is not about clicks, it is about results. The analytics go in the report because a client should be able to see them. The meeting is about leads and revenue.

That is also how he keeps model traffic in proportion. Twenty to thirty thousand visits is real and worth understanding. It is not the two hundred thousand from Google organic, and pretending otherwise misallocates the budget.

Digital PR with an actual human in it

And you give a quote from the owner, no AI response accepted.
— Robert Spinrad

The rule is enforced internally. Mention and link opportunities require a genuine owner-written quote, which is slower and produces the one thing a generated paragraph cannot: something only that person could have said.

The local checklist he actually gives

A fully built out profile listing, not a half-completed one.
Profile posts used for promotions and events with real start and end dates, not recycled social content.
Reviews earned naturally and consistently, because the citation sources models pull from are the ones people already trust.
Genuine community involvement, which is where the defensible links come from.

Show off your expertise, build your trust with your potential clients and focus on reviews in a natural and authentic way.
— Robert Spinrad

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
SEOM Interactive	Philadelphia-area agency, in business since 2008, around forty people
Humble experts	Robert’s phrase for knowing what you know and admitting what you do not
Owner-quote rule	Their PR team will not accept an AI-written quote
Temple University	Where he studied before joining the agency in 2015
Google Business Profile posts	Repurposed for promotions and events with real dates

Questions this episode answers

Should I optimise my site for AI platforms?
How do I tell a real AI expert from a fake one?
How much traffic is actually coming from LLMs?
What should an SEO report focus on?
Does digital PR still work?
Why insist on a human-written quote for PR?
What should a local business do first?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

Find Robert Spinrad

He is Associate Director of SEO at SEOM Interactive, and writes about not trusting AI for SEO advice.

Cite this episode

Spinrad, Robert. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Why Good SEO Is Good AI Visibility.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/robert-spinrad-on-ai-seo-proper-targetting

How AI Turns SEOs Into the Orchestrators of Digital Marketing | Adrian Nikolov, Haide Digital

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 16:33:13 +0000

Adrian Nikolov has eighteen years in SEO and started a new agency six months before this recording. Haide means let’s go in Bulgarian, and he founded it on an inversion of the usual fear. Rather than wait to find out whether AI takes the work, he decided to make it do the work better.

Key takeaways

Authority is the new PageRank. His framing for what the trust layer now does, and why he is sceptical of the tools being sold around it.
The unlock was becoming the developer. Building his own tools removed the dependency that had shaped his entire career.
Topical authority is not a blog. His systems build a voice profile from everything a brand has published and everything said about it, then cover every funnel stage and feed the results back in.
Prompt tracking is directional at best. He says so plainly about a service some of his peers are selling.
SEO is the orchestrator. Not a channel beside the others. The layer every other channel now runs through.

Becoming the developer

Asked what AI unlocked for him personally, he does not say content or speed.

Building my own tools, literally removing the developer issue and me becoming the actual developer.
— Adrian Nikolov

For anyone who spent a decade filing tickets and waiting, that is the whole answer. The manual labour he lists as gone is oddly specific and instantly recognisable: ticking boxes in Yoast, hand-adding schema, pushing internal links one page at a time.

He is careful to say the workload did not shrink. It grew, because the work became interesting.

I used to be a gamer back in the days, and I compare what I’m living through right now with my addiction to StarCraft 10 years ago.
— Adrian Nikolov

How the topical authority system is built

The pipeline is described in more detail than most agency owners will give you. An automated diagnostic running through MCP connections, a Screaming Frog crawl, keyword data pulled by API, and from that a profile of the brand. Then a voice profile built from everything the brand has published and everything said about it in public.

Only then does content start, across top, middle and bottom of funnel, with a dashboard tracking every page so the system can be corrected by data rather than opinion.

It means “let’s go.” It means break stuff. It means publish stuff.
— Adrian Nikolov

Signal interception

His news-jacking flow. Relevant signals come in, get filtered against the brand voice and the topical map, and go out as platform-specific pieces: a LinkedIn carousel, a short, a long-form post. He still hires editors, but only ones who use AI daily.

Ducks, funnels, and the pages worth fixing

Jeremy’s framing is that the old strategy was to feed the ducks and hope, and that what is missing is a duck-catching system. Adrian’s response is the sharpest line in the middle of the episode.

Yeah, you just described the difference between an SEO and a great SEO.
— Adrian Nikolov

He is not against top of funnel. He wants impressions, especially for a new brand, on the theory that repeated exposure converts later as a direct search or a recommendation. What he objects to is a page with nowhere to go next.

His complaint about agencies is more pointed. They land an established brand and immediately start rewriting blog posts, because blogs are what they know how to sell.

Just optimize the bottom-funnel pages. Give them more content, or remove content. Analyze, study the engagement rate.
— Adrian Nikolov

Authority is the new PageRank

I’m a true believer that authority is the new PageRank, and the trust the brand builds is very important.
— Adrian Nikolov

From there he is openly critical of agencies selling prompt tracking as a product without being able to say what is being tracked. His alternative is to interview the client properly, build a prompt list that reflects what buyers actually ask, and then read who gets cited alongside you and why.

Nowadays, to get cited in AI, you don’t even need links.
— Adrian Nikolov

The measurement problem is the one both of them keep circling. Jeremy’s position is that the only honest count is referral traffic and what it did next, which is why he is glad the analytics platforms finally added a channel for it. If you are trying to read that data yourself, our complete Search Console resource guide covers the reporting side of it.

I do believe SEO is the orchestrator of everything else right now.
— Adrian Nikolov

Chapters

Time	What happens
00:00	Jeremy introduces Adrian Nikolov and Haide Digital
00:24	Eighteen years in SEO, and founding Haide
04:59	The biggest unlock: building your own tools
12:06	Owning an audience instead of renting Google
14:23	Diagnostics, voice profiles, topical authority systems
20:27	Rethinking top, middle and bottom of funnel
29:06	Microsoft Clarity and watching real behaviour
31:21	Why prompt tracking is only ever directional
35:23	Sentiment analysis and brand authority
40:25	Explaining SEO’s new value to a client
48:13	SEO as the orchestrator of digital marketing
49:43	Where to find Adrian and Haide Digital

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
Haide Digital	His agency, six months old at recording, working with SaaS, e-commerce and fintech
Organic growth engineering	Haide’s name for SEO, GEO and AI automation run as one discipline
Search Engineered	His LinkedIn newsletter, named for treating SEO as an engineering problem
Topical authority system	A brand voice profile, full-funnel content, and a dashboard that feeds results back in
Signal interception	His news-jacking flow, turning one relevant signal into platform-specific pieces
Microsoft Clarity	The behaviour tool both of them recommend for seeing what users actually do

Questions this episode answers

What does an AI-first SEO agency actually build?
Is prompt tracking worth paying for?
How do I build topical authority beyond publishing blog posts?
Should I optimise top of funnel or bottom of funnel first?
How do I get cited in AI answers without links?
What can Microsoft Clarity show me that analytics cannot?
How do I explain the value of SEO to a client who thinks AI replaced it?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

Paul Baterina on the hundred thousand AI visitors that would not convert, the story Jeremy tells him about measurement.
Jason Wade on what AI visibility actually means, a second read on the same reporting problem.
Paul Pape, the guest whose wild west line Jeremy borrows here, on getting owners to engage with their own numbers.

Watch the interview

Find Adrian Nikolov

haide.digital, which carries the tools his team built, and Adrian Nikolov on LinkedIn, where the newsletter runs.

Cite this episode

Nikolov, Adrian. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “How AI Turns SEOs Into the Orchestrators of Digital Marketing.” Unscripted SEO, 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/adrian-nikolov-organic-growth-engineering/

Lloyd Thompson: Get Out of the Day-to-Day Without Blowing Up Your Team

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 01:35:11 +0000

Most founders become the bottleneck in their own business. Lloyd Thompson founded Virtual DOO after running global engineering teams and then real-time trading systems for banks. He now places fractional operators between busy owners and their teams, which is a less glamorous job than it sounds and a more valuable one.

Key takeaways

Fractional is a fancy word for part time. He says so himself, which is a good sign about the rest of the conversation.
The operator sits between the founder and the team. Not above them, not beside them. In the gap where decisions currently queue.
Operations has to be measurable or it will be cut. The question owners ask is fair and most operations people cannot answer it.
Businesses measure nothing or everything. Both produce the same result, which is nobody acting on anything.
Death by tools. His diagnosis of the AI era. The problem is noise, not capability, so the fix is subtraction.
Measure the wrong thing and you incentivise the wrong thing. Which is worse than not measuring.

What a fractional operator actually does

A fractional retainer, it’s basically an exotic word for part-time, right?
— Lloyd Thompson

the operator is that person who sits between the founder and the team.
— Lloyd Thompson

The distinction he draws is between an operator and an integrator, and it is mostly about company size. A team of five or six needs someone to unblock the daily queue. A team of twenty-five needs someone running the system.

The entry product is a one-off assessment completed inside a month, with the output ranked by effort against impact. That is a deliberately small commitment for a service that is otherwise hard to buy on trust.

Virtual DOO is about four and a half years old and grew entirely by referral, with operators each carrying between one and three clients. Three was his own ceiling before he started hiring.

The return-to-office counter-take

He is not a remote absolutist. His position is that face to face genuinely helps with onboarding and with building shared standards, and that an office is an expensive thing to keep for a feeling.

So the test is whether the building is doing work. If it is there because it has always been there, that is a cost with no return attached to it.

Proving operations pays

If I’m paying for operations, how can I tangibly measure the ROI?
— Lloyd Thompson

He asks the question on the owner’s behalf because most operations people cannot answer it, which is why the function gets cut first when things get tight.

His answers are concrete. Leads leaking out of the pipeline between marketing and sales. Business cards from an event that never reach the system. A checkout that takes seven minutes when it should take one. All of those are operations problems with a currency attached.

Death by tools

I see, we go into businesses quite a lot and they’re either measuring nothing or measuring everything.
— Lloyd Thompson

It might be, it’s death by tools.
— Lloyd Thompson

His read on AI adoption is unfashionably flat: he has not yet seen it change a client business in a way that shows up in the numbers. What he has seen is more dashboards, more add-ons and more places for a decision to get lost.

Because if you measure the wrong thing, you can incentivize the wrong thing.
— Lloyd Thompson

The prescription is subtraction. Fewer channels, fewer tools, fewer measurements that anybody actually acts on.

Operations at ecommerce scale

For larger operations he describes a cut-down agile approach: campaign templates, short feedback loops, and treating influencer and affiliate relationships as a pipeline in the customer system rather than a spreadsheet somebody owns.

None of it is exotic. It is the same argument as the rest of the episode, which is that most businesses do not need a new capability. They need the one they have to stop leaking.

Chapters

Time	What happens
0:00	From corporate engineering to Virtual DOO
8:06	What a fractional operator actually does
12:47	The return-to-office counter-take
16:41	Operations ROI, and what agencies miss
23:51	The AI tool trap: simplify the noise
29:20	Ecommerce operations at scale
33:01	Where to find Lloyd

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
Virtual DOO	Lloyd’s fractional operations firm, about four and a half years old
Operator vs integrator	The distinction that turns on team size, roughly five people against twenty-five
The one-month assessment	His entry product, output ranked by effort against impact
Death by tools	His name for the real AI-era problem
Nine Ways to Leave the Day-to-Day Operations	His book

Questions this episode answers

What does a fractional Director of Operations actually do?
When does a business need an operator?
How do I measure the return on operations spending?
Is returning to the office worth the cost?
Why has AI not changed my business yet?
How many tools should a small team run?
What breaks first when an ecommerce operation scales?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

Unscripted Small Business, where more of these conversations live.
Jared Harman on where AI actually adds value, which is operations rather than creative.
Hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Produced alongside Human Certified Content and The SEO Advisory.

Find Lloyd Thompson

Virtual DOO is at virtualdoo.com, where the book and the free assessment both live. He is on LinkedIn.

Cite this episode

Thompson, Lloyd. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Get Out of the Day-to-Day Without Blowing Up Your Team.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/lloyd-jeremy-magic-episode-nov-03-2025

Mike Montague: Use AI Like Iron Man, Not the Terminator

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 20:57:47 +0000

There are two ways to point AI at a market, and Mike Montague only likes one of them. The Terminator approach builds agents that go out and hunt your leads. The Iron Man approach wraps a human in the technology and sends the human. Avenue9 is built entirely on the second one, and this conversation is mostly an argument for why the first one loses.

Mentioned in this episode: oxygen monitoring manufacturer PureAire — Jeremy’s worked example for marketing an industrial product nobody searches for by name.

Key takeaways

AI reliably earns a C plus. Genuinely useful, and not the part you were ever paid for. The hard twenty per cent is still human work.
Bad strategy plus AI is faster failure. It amplifies whatever you were already doing, in both directions.
Your online reputation should mirror your real work exactly. Not an outsized rank. The rank you can evidence.
He turns down volume work. His argument is a question: why would a model cite a version of an answer it can already write?
Degenerative engineering. His name for using AI to distil what a business already is, instead of generating more of what it is not.

The C plus problem

A C plus is a really good grade. The problem is that other 20% is the hard part. That’s what we needed humans always to do.
— Mike Montague

His explanation for why smart clients get fooled is the sharpest thing in the episode. If you ask a model about a subject you would fail an exam in, it looks like a genius. The grade has not changed. Your ability to mark it has.

Which is what he sells: not the output, but the person who can tell a C plus from an A. He is candid that the C plus is worth having. It is a good afternoon’s work. It is not a strategy.

If you have bad SEO strategy or bad marketing strategy, it’s going to allow you to do it faster, which is just gonna get you to fail faster.
— Mike Montague

Jeremy contributes a name for the failure mode on the client side: Claude hopping, where a client arrives with twenty documents of forty pages each and the announcement that they have solved it.

A reputation that mirrors real life

I think the goal should be that your online reputation exactly 100% mirrors your in real life work.
— Mike Montague

This is a quiet rebuke of most of the industry. He thinks SEO has spent two decades trying to win a rank the business had not earned, and that the machinery on the other side is now far too good for that to keep working.

The practical instruction is unglamorous and much harder than it sounds. Document every job. Capture real quotes from real customers. One representative case study used to be enough and no longer is, because a single example is now a drop in an ocean.

It will give you the rating that you deserve.
— Mike Montague

Degenerative engineering

I call it degenerative engineering. How can I take AI and use it to distill down what I’m really about?
— Mike Montague

His metaphor is concentrated orange juice. Take everything already happening around the business, the interviews, the jobs, the founder’s actual opinions, and reduce it rather than inflate it. He thinks most people are working the wrong end of the problem entirely.

Which is also his answer to a client who insists on publishing at volume. He does not talk them out of it. He declines the work, and then explains why.

Why would it cite your version if it can already write one that doesn’t need to be cited?
— Mike Montague

He is not against a thousand posts. He is against a thousand posts that add nothing a model does not already hold, which is a different and much harder brief.

Old school, on purpose

Both of them land in the same place: the tactics that got drowned out are now the ones with room. Jeremy’s example is ten handwritten letters sent from Raven Tools that earned ten links. Mike’s is printing ten copies of your own book and mailing one to a prospect with a sticky note pointing at chapter three.

Nobody gets a printed book in the mail, nobody gets a handwritten note, and nobody understands their business well enough.
— Mike Montague

The same instinct drives the cross-pollination section: seminars, trash cleanups, sponsoring the thing in the park, and then making sure any of it is visible online. PureAire Monitoring comes up as Jeremy’s worked example, an oxygen-monitor manufacturer whose customers span a dozen industries that would each happily be amplified.

Chapters

Time	What happens
00:00	The Batman opener and the Iron Man analogy
01:28	Avenue9, and the small business AI problem
03:35	Why AI only ever earns a C plus
05:52	Publishing at scale versus offshore writers
07:15	Making a boring niche like garage doors interesting
10:28	Traffic losses and AI Overview click-through
13:10	Reviews, case studies and documenting every job
16:37	In-real-life marketing and cross-pollination
23:49	Degenerative engineering instead of more slop
26:41	Direct mail and handwritten letters that earn links
35:26	Superintelligence, science fiction and automation
44:31	What Avenue9 actually sells

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
Avenue9	His company: AI strategy, systems, and what he calls scalable stories
Iron Man versus Terminator	Augmenting a human with AI against automating the human out of the loop
Degenerative engineering	Using AI to distil an existing story rather than generate new volume
Claude hopping	Jeremy’s coinage for the client who arrives with twenty AI documents and a solved problem
PureAire Monitoring	The oxygen-monitor manufacturer behind Jeremy’s B2B cross-pollination example, linked above
Kalicube	Jason Barnard’s entity-first practice, one of the names Jeremy reels off in the entity riff
Human First AI Marketing	His own podcast, past a hundred episodes and a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube

Questions this episode answers

Should I use AI to automate marketing or to augment my own team?
How good is AI-generated marketing content, really?
Why would an AI model cite my article instead of writing its own answer?
How do I make a boring niche interesting?
What should a small business document online to earn a better reputation?
Does direct mail still work as a link building and outreach channel?
Is publishing AI content at scale a viable SEO strategy?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

Patrick Stox on fixing the thing people are actually complaining about, the conversation Jeremy quotes back at him mid-episode.
Grant Simmons on the entity work Jeremy invokes by name, from someone who has been at it for decades.
the tactic library where plays like these get written down, if you would rather have the checklist than the argument.

Watch the interview

Find Mike Montague

avenue9.com, or Mike Montague on LinkedIn, which he says is where he actually talks to people.

Cite this episode

Montague, Mike. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Use AI Like Iron Man, Not the Terminator.” Unscripted SEO, 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/mike-montague-ai-iron-man-not-terminator/

Rob Bonham on SEO in the Agentic Age

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 21:19:29 +0000

About the guest

Rob Bonham is an SEO with about two decades of experience spanning local, e-commerce, SaaS, and home-services clients. Today he advises several startups on SEO and works as a fractional SEO manager and director for a handful of agencies. You can reach him on LinkedIn.

What we cover

Why the “agentic age” feels like the pre-Panda/Penguin wild west — and what that means for strategy
Why publishing AI content at volume backfires on user signals, rankings, and client trust
Measuring SEO in a post-attribution world where GSC and LLM data are unreliable
Link building reborn: unlinked mentions, third-party visibility, and partner links
Going independent: contracts, pricing, and filtering out tire-kickers

Episode highlights

Rob's throughline is that SEOs are now “stewards of the AI.” On the Unscripted SEO Podcast, he and Jeremy Rivera trace how AI has automated the low-level work — title tags, meta descriptions, on-page fixes — so the real job shifts to strategy and judgment. The freedom is real; so is the responsibility.

Which is why volume is not a strategy. Just because you can publish 100 city-specific pages for a concrete contractor doesn't mean you should. When the user signals aren't there, Google devalues the content — a reality Jeremy underscores with his own post on why Google Search Console data isn't reliable. Look like a hero for a few months, then watch the site dive.

In a post-attribution world, Rob argues you win by telling the right story with the data you do have — branded-search lift, conversion correlation, the “game of sums.” And he makes the case that link building is an easier sell than ever when reframed as footprint: unlinked mentions, third-party visibility, and legitimate partner and supplier links.

The back half gets practical. Rob and Jeremy Rivera dig into going independent — setting expectations to avoid scope creep, pricing with conviction (a higher price can itself signal quality), filtering tire-kickers with a small paid audit, and surviving enterprise red tape and net-60 terms.

Connect with Rob Bonham

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/robbonham

(Rob points people to LinkedIn — he's “tied at the hip” with it — rather than a website.)

About the show

The Unscripted SEO Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera and features candid, unscripted conversations with SEO practitioners, agency owners, and marketing leaders. New episodes drop weekly at unscriptedseo.com.

Unscripted SEO with Patrick Stox

Jeremy Rivera — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 17:15:03 +0000

Patrick Stox spent six and a half years inside Ahrefs before going independent, and his position on GEO is not the one the acronym wars want. SEO is a subset of it, not a synonym for it, because the fastest way to change what a machine says about your company is to fix the thing people are complaining about. The rest of the conversation is what an operator does once that is true.

Key takeaways

Influencing AI answers is a product problem first. If the internet is complaining, the model repeats the complaint.
Retrieved and cited are two separate contests. Being pulled into the candidate set is table stakes; getting quoted is a second bar you have to clear.
The frontier past AI content at scale is information gain. His method is to interview the experts already on your payroll, two or three times a week.
Do not run a programmatic project without unique data. A derived metric nobody else has computed, not a bigger pile of the same rows.
AI search systems have not decided to forgive anything yet. Google chose to forgive link spam. That was policy, not physics, and nobody has made that call for the answer engines.

Why SEO is a subset of GEO

If you’ve got a problem with your product, the easiest way to get the LLM or the AI search system to say something different? Go fix that. Because if people are complaining on the internet, that’s what it’s gonna say. So it’s business, it’s branding, it’s so much more.
— Patrick Stox

The claim is not that on-page work stopped mattering. It is that the ceiling on it is lower than the industry admits, because the systems are summarising a reputation you do not own. Stox draws a scale line through the middle of that: a local business can put an SEO on sentiment and move it. A large company cannot staff its way to changing the opinion of the internet.

Which makes GEO a business, brand and product remit that happens to include search work, rather than a rebrand of the search work.

The forgiveness nobody has granted yet

SEOs got lucky with Google. We got Penguin, and for a few years that was really painful — and then they’re like, yeah, we forgive all your bad links. These AI search systems may make a different decision. How long will they hold a grudge against you?
— Patrick Stox

Google decided, around 2016, to stop holding historic link spam against sites. That decision could have gone the other way and stayed that way for another decade. Nobody at OpenAI, Anthropic or Perplexity has made the equivalent call, publicly or otherwise.

The practical reading: tactics that work today carry an unpriced liability. That is not an argument against moving fast. It is an argument for knowing which of your tactics you would be embarrassed to have logged.

Retrieved is not cited

You get a bunch of pages, might be 90 pages retrieved, and then 13 of them get cited... Well, why were some retrieved but not cited? That’s a really good question to look into. And it’s usually like, you were relevant enough, but you didn’t quite say the right thing, or in the right way.
— Patrick Stox

The sharpest operational idea in the episode, and the one most reporting misses entirely. A page that gets retrieved and dropped is already close enough to win. Stox calls that gap the low-hanging fruit of the AI era, because you are not fighting for relevance any more, you are fighting over phrasing and specificity.

How Google finds things at all

Most people will tell you sitemaps, or crawling. Well, there’s more. RSS feeds are a thing. Pinging the sites — the WebSub, PubSubHubbub, whatever... Submissions in GSC, the indexing API.
— Patrick Stox

Worth keeping when you are diagnosing a discovery problem, because most audits check exactly two of those inputs and stop.

Information gain, and the experts you already employ

Anyone can put out any number of pages. But if you’re just using it for content — just the content — you’re not providing resources, you’re not sourcing where you got something. So anyone can do it, but it’s a matter of: can you do it well?
— Patrick Stox

His alternative is unglamorous and almost nobody runs it. Message five genuine experts inside your own company, two or three times a week, over Slack or email or an AI-run interview, and build from what they say. The raw material is already on the payroll.

Generally I wouldn’t even recommend a programmatic project unless you’ve got something unique, different... Everyone’s got reviews, but what if you did scoring? What if you did a market analysis? What’s the sentiment? What is the brand search volume for each of these companies?
— Patrick Stox

And on the Helpful Content Update, he is blunt that prose is not the moat:

I don’t think writing will get you but so far. Part of the thing they mentioned with that update was images — images and videos that show you’ve got hands-on with the product you’re talking about... Not you pulled the stock photo offline from the manufacturer and then wrote a bunch of stuff.
— Patrick Stox

Chapters

Time	What happens
00:00	Introduction and guest background
00:49	From developer to SEO, and six years inside Ahrefs
02:27	Dream tools and infrastructure projects
09:30	Tech SEO Connect, and what a conference is actually for
11:21	Content at scale, and what comes after it
14:01	Leveraging unique data instead of volume
15:00	The hot take: SEO is part of GEO
17:48	Past algorithm changes, and the risk nobody has priced
29:00	Backlinks, and their changing role under AI
33:05	Google's infrastructure, data sources and internal systems
35:00	Retrieval, ranking and citation
36:36	Expertise and content-quality cues

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
Patrick Stox	Independent SEO consultant. Six and a half years at Ahrefs, four at IBM, started as a developer
Tech SEO Connect	The technical SEO conference he co-runs, in Durham, North Carolina
Ahrefs	Where he worked on Page Inspect, site structure, Site Audit and the v2 to v3 infrastructure change
Helpful Content Update	The Google update discussed at length, including the added Experience in E-E-A-T
Cats.com	His standard for hands-on expertise: a site that sends pet food out for laboratory testing
Information gain	The through-line: content that adds something the corpus does not already contain

Questions this episode answers

Is GEO just SEO with a new name?
Why do some pages get retrieved by an AI search system but never cited?
Will AI search systems forgive spam the way Google forgave link spam?
What comes after publishing AI-generated content at scale?
When is a programmatic SEO project actually justified?
How does Google discover content beyond sitemaps and crawling?
What did the Helpful Content Update actually reward?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

the consensus machinery underneath that retrieval gap, where Malte Landwehr shows how answer engines resolve a question before they pick who to quote.
how a complaint reaches the answer before you do, which is Ann Smarty tracing the retrieval path Stox is telling you to cut off at the source.
this episode as a plain-text file for AI assistants, carrying the full cleaned transcript with a speaker label on every turn. Paste it into ChatGPT or Claude and interrogate it directly.

Watch the interview

Find Patrick Stox

patrickstox.com, and Tech SEO Connect at techseoconnect.com.

Cite this episode

Stox, Patrick. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Patrick Stox on Building in the GEO Era.” The Unscripted SEO Podcast, 26 June 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/patrick-stox-on-building-in-the-geo-era/

Unlocking the Power of Relevance in SEO and Link Building with Bradley Benner

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 21:07:10 +0000

Semantic Links with Bradley Benner

Watch: https://youtu.be/AUf1U_klNCM

Previous interview: https://unscriptedseo.com/building-relevent-links-agencies-with-bradley-benner/

Unlocking the Power of Relevance in SEO and Link Building with Bradley Benner

Discover how relevance outranks traditional metrics in modern SEO strategies, especially in the era of AI and large language models (LLMs). Bradley Benner shares deep insights into relevance-driven link building, AI-driven process automation, and the evolving landscape of search engine optimization.In this episode:

The importance of relevance over metrics like Domain Authority (DA) and Trust Flow in link building
How AI models interpret links and mentions for search visibility
Strategies for creating strong entity associations through contextual links
The role of structured and unstructured citations in AI search algorithms
The impact of AI tools on SEO workflows and systems development
Best practices for optimizing on-page elements for both algorithms and human visitors
The shift from spammy SEO tactics to more sustainable, human-focused copywriting

Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction to Bradley Benner and his background in local SEO and AI applications 00:30 - Bradley’s evolution from contractor to SEO entrepreneur 01:01 - The growth of Semantic Mastery and Semantic Links 01:31 - The significance of relevance in link building and SEO 02:51 - How AI models interpret links and mentions 03:37 - Automating processes with AI and the importance of well-defined workflows 04:58 - The role of relevance in today's link-building strategies 06:28 - Using transcripts and AI for process mapping and SOP development 07:55 - Flexing AI to optimize workflows instead of rigid processes 09:28 - The shift in local SEO and the importance of relevance over traditional metrics 10:23 - The changing landscape of AI dominance in search and its implications 11:14 - Relevance as the cornerstone of off-page SEO in AI-driven search engines 12:07 - Moving beyond thousands of backlink metrics to focus on relevance 13:40 - Ethical considerations and outdated SEO practices 14:42 - The importance of creating and reinforcing entity associations 15:54 - Optimizing page elements using semantic triples for better relevance 17:33 - The significance of contextual relevance in link placement 18:32 - The three layers of relevance in backlink profiles 19:24 - How large language models leverage mentions and relevance over traditional link equity 20:48 - Using citations and mentions as signals for search algorithms 22:02 - The influence of high authority and localized mentions for AI visibility 23:16 - The future of link building and relevance in the AI era 24:21 - The positive impact of LLMs on justify investments in link building 25:08 - Traditional marketing techniques meet AI-driven SEO 26:03 - Practical tips for human-centered optimization and content structureResources & Links:

Connect with Bradley Benner:

Why Human Judgment Still Scales: Joel Miller on AI, SEO, and Owned Audiences

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 17:08:47 +0000

Joel Miller is the co-founder of The SkyFloor, a digital agency he has run alongside his identical twin brother since 2008. The SkyFloor works across industries — churches, retail, education, and service organizations — with a philosophy centered on long-term partnerships and outcome-driven strategy rather than one-off deliverables. Joel writes regularly on digital strategy and business growth at theskyfloor.com/ideas.

What We Cover

Why the highest-value work any agency or consultant does is enabling clients to become who they want to be — and why AI can't replicate that
A real-world custom GPT case study: how 30–40 hours of human listening made AI call analysis actually work
What AI Overviews are doing to organic click-through rates, ad keyword availability, and SERP composition
Why owned audience channels — especially email — are now the most durable marketing asset in a Google-disrupted world
The AI slop problem and why authentic human presence is becoming the scarcest commodity online

Episode Highlights

Joel opens by reframing what The SkyFloor actually sells: not services, but outcomes. He describes their team as problem solvers who work backward from what a client wants to become — whether that's a more efficient church, a retail brand competing online, or an education company ready to grow beyond referrals. That outcome-first philosophy maps onto what Jeremy calls the pyramid of value: executing a tactic at the base, saving time in the middle, and enabling the client to become who they want to be at the top. As Joel puts it, the human ingenuity required to genuinely partner with a client is still a distinctly human task — one AI cannot replicate at the top of that pyramid.

The conversation gets practical fast with Joel's sales call analysis case study. A client had lead conversion problems, and rather than feeding transcripts into a model, Joel listened to 30–40 hours of incoming calls himself — catching tone, the weight of a specific pause, the difference between enthusiasm and polite deflection. Once he'd mapped those human-observed patterns, he built a custom GPT framework and connected it to CallRail for automatic call scoring. The human defines the problem; AI scales the execution. Joel was equally candid about LLM limitations: ask an LLM for an answer and you've already biased the output. It is an answer engine, not an objective analyst — and the good prompt engineers know how to work around that tendency.

"An audience can't just be taken away if it's your audience, no matter what Google does next."

Joel is watching AI Overview impact in real time across his client accounts: impressions holding or growing, clicks down ~40%, and SERP layouts restructured so that for many queries, organic results appear nowhere above the fold. The composition is now AI Overview, then local pack, then sponsored results — organic is buried or absent. On the paid side, keyword categories that used to reliably trigger ad placements have been absorbed by overview content. His adaptation: heavier investment in high-intent near-me queries that still trigger standard ad slots, and a shift away from treating search volume as the primary planning input toward full SERP composition audits.

The most durable advice from the episode is Joel's audience ownership argument. He's actively steering clients toward email lists and direct subscriber relationships — assets that travel with them regardless of what Google decides to change next. The catch he acknowledges freely: building that owned audience requires personality. LinkedIn personal pages outperform business pages by roughly 8x on reach. His team at The SkyFloor is doing the quiet coaching work of helping reluctant clients become more personally visible. He closes with an observation that stuck with me: even as AI democratizes production, the question marketing has always had to answer — why does anyone care, and who is behind this — remains the only one that truly matters.

Connect with Joel Miller

Website: theskyfloor.com

Blog: theskyfloor.com/ideas

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/joelelliottmiller

About the Show

Holly Homer on Affiliate Marketing, AI Slop, and Being Replaced by Your Own Words

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Holly Homer runs organic and AI visibility at Digistore24, the affiliate network and marketplace. She also accidentally started one of the first mom blogs twenty-odd years ago, and still runs kidsactivities.com. Both facts matter to this conversation.

She tells Jeremy Rivera she has roughly 13,000 blog posts and four books behind her, and that the simplicity that made her site useful is exactly what made it easy to scrape.

“I was literally replaced by my own words in the search results and the AI results.” — Holly Homer

In this episode

Comment sections were the first social network. Holly would get 300 readers and 150 comments. Her argument: WordPress never solved comment spam, and that unsolved problem is part of why the conversation moved to social platforms.
The pajama jeans masterclass. She bought a pair off an infomercial so she could write it off, wrote an honest and unflattering review, and ranked number one just as the company launched a national radio campaign. Traffic went from a few thousand a week to 100,000. The brand could never outrank her.
Why affiliate is a real channel. Pay-for-performance means the brand carries no risk, and the affiliate has every reason to keep the page current.
Being scraped, then using the tool anyway. Holly was bitter for a while. She now runs a content system trained on her own writing and her own recorded voice.
Feedback loops beat first drafts. Her favourite move is asking the model what feedback she is about to give it, so it critiques itself first. She once fed it a real spreadsheet and got back invented numbers it had quietly “estimated”.

The full written recap, with the four-conversation content strategy and the keyword map she built at Digistore24, is here: Holly Homer on affiliate marketing, AI slop, and being replaced by your own words.

“I sold a boatload of pajama jeans for them in a way that they had no risk.” — Holly Homer

“It's our own damn fault if we don't let people know what we do.” — Holly Homer

Related episodes

Holly's Digistore24 colleague Nick Eubanks on distribution as the only remaining moat is the natural companion to this one. Ameera Virani on habits, visibility and wealth came through the same door. And for the other side of Holly's argument about people, Joel Miller on why human judgment still scales.

More interviews at Unscripted SEO.

Matt Slaymaker: Surprising Reason Why Small Businesses Often Fail with Ads

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:40:42 +0000

This episode features Jeremy Rivera and digital marketing expert Matthew Slaymaker discussing actionable strategies for small businesses, the evolving landscape of digital ads, and leveraging AI tools for marketing efficiency. Whether you're running ads, optimizing your website, or navigating new platforms, this conversation offers practical insights to boost your marketing ROI.

Key Topics:

The importance of website conversion rates before launching paid advertising
How organic and paid traffic interact and influence each other
The shift towards zero-click searches and its impact on organic CTR
Latest trends in AI-driven advertising, including ChatGPT integrations and platforms like AppLeaven
How creative quality influences ad success, especially on Facebook and Google
Targeting strategies on different platforms, emphasizing broad vs. niche targeting
Tracking calls and conversions effectively using tools like Call Rail and What Converts
The significance of genuine brand storytelling and demonstrating values through content
Managing social media presence without feeling forced—focusing on authentic channels like LinkedIn
Agency growth through referrals, strategic partnerships, and overcoming inbound marketing challenges

Mentioned in this episode: PureAire Monitoring — the oxygen & gas monitoring company behind Jeremy’s “boring industrial product” example.

Timestamps:

00:01 - Introduction and guest credibility
01:24 - Common mistakes small businesses make with ads
02:12 - The importance of website optimization before ad spend
03:07 - Impact of AI on SEO and website optimization
04:30 - The evolution of AI tools like ChatGPT for advertising
06:08 - New features in Google ads enabling direct checkout
07:13 - Access and limitations of ChatGPT for advertisers
12:05 - Using Google My Business and local signals for ranking
14:05 - Tracking call conversions with tools like Call Rail
19:41 - The role of engagement metrics in ad platform algorithms
21:17 - Creative as a primary driver in ad success
23:54 - Creative testing and diversity on Meta
26:25 - Marketing interesting, even boring, products through storytelling
29:30 - The pressure on SMBs to create video content for TikTok
36:37 - Leveraging AI for agentic marketing and workflow automation
41:44 - Agency growth challenges and inbound lead generation
45:35 - Repurposing podcast content for SEO and lead nurturing
47:22 - The irreplaceable value of human conversation and experience

Resources & Links:

Connect with Matt Slaymaker:

Drew Dorenfest: How a Hollywood Video Editor Built an SEO Business from Scratch

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:41:46 +0000

Drew Dorenfest cut trailers in Hollywood for Netflix, Apple and Warner Brothers before he touched SEO. The transferable skill turned out to be compression: taking something unwieldy and reducing it to three sentences a scanning human will actually finish. His central claim is smaller and sharper than the usual citation advice. Cite your sources, and the crawler gets something to check you against.

Key takeaways

Citing sources is the mechanism for being cited. Outbound links to verifiable authorities give a crawler a way to confirm you, which is not the same thing as link equity.
Specific depth beats national authority on narrow queries. A Los Angeles tax firm above IRS.gov, HR Block and TurboTax inside two weeks.
Conversions are the only metric an owner can feel. Nobody experiences a traffic increase. They experience the phone ringing.
The about page is the entity home. Without one, you are a topic rather than a known thing.
Regulated content needs a human reviewer, not a disclaimer. Every post for the tax firm is reviewed by its own professionals before publication.

Cite your sources to earn citations

The key to all of this, especially to get cited, is to cite your sources. To point to Google, this is where I got this information. Then when those crawlers come and they check against your information, they see the source, they can verify it. Then they go, okay, this is legit.
— Drew Dorenfest

In practice that means linking to IRS.gov and to the underlying research instead of asserting the number and moving on. The mechanism is verifiability, not authority flow, which is why the advice survives regardless of what any particular system does with links this year.

Depth beats authority on narrow queries

The student loan interest deduction post ranked above IRS.gov, above HR Block, above TurboTax within two weeks. A small tax firm in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, above national brands, because that content depth at that level of specificity simply is not there on those bigger sites.
— Drew Dorenfest

The part people skip when they copy this is the part that makes it work. The content was reviewed by the firm’s own tax professionals before it went live, and he holds the same line on health claims.

Every piece of content I create for them is reviewed by the firm’s tax professionals before it goes live. I will not publish something that is wrong.
— Drew Dorenfest

The only metric an owner can feel

Conversions are the only metric I care about. Traffic is nice, but conversions, more sales is something that the business owner can feel. They can’t feel when they get more traffic. They can feel when they make more sales, they get more emails, more calls.
— Drew Dorenfest

That is a reporting principle before it is a strategy one. If a piece of work cannot be traced to something the owner experiences inside the business, it does not belong in the update.

Businesses get really in the weeds assuming visitors will read every paragraph. They treat the website like something behind glass, a beautiful artifact someone helped them design ten years ago. A website should be an ever-evolving tool.
— Drew Dorenfest

The trailer-editor lens again. People scan for thirty seconds, so the job is compression rather than completeness.

The about page, and not rebranding to escape

Have an about page. Make it good. That is my number one piece of advice for any business.
— Drew Dorenfest

Without one, both Google and the models treat the brand as a topic or a query rather than a known entity. The host’s savefryoil.com example is the failure case, a name that reads as a generic search string.

Fewer people are searching your brand name than you think, and the ones who do know the difference. Do not rename a brand with existing equity just to seem more unique.
— Drew Dorenfest

His client was fixated on a similarly named Florida competitor selling a different product. The real competition was everyone else in the category, and a rebrand would have cost the equity while solving nothing.

Chapters

Time	What happens
00:00	From Hollywood trailers into SEO
02:28	How video editing shapes his approach to a page
04:17	Starting and scaling Client Magnet CRM
05:45	Local service SEO and technical audits
09:06	Homepage CTAs and micro-conversions
10:28	Brand and branded search
12:55	Citing sources and building rankable authority
14:41	Connecting in-person community work to online authority
17:27	Retention and re-engagement through email
21:36	Rebranding pitfalls and brand equity
28:14	Regulated industries and compliance
30:45	How to connect with Drew

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
Client Magnet CRM	His business: SEO, email marketing and review generation for small businesses
Drew Dorenfest	Trailer and promo editor for Netflix, Apple and Warner Brothers before moving into SEO
GoHighLevel	The automation stack behind his post-service review requests and abandoned-cart sequences
YMYL	Your Money or Your Life, the category his tax and health clients fall into
savefryoil.com	The host's example of a brand name that reads as a generic query rather than an entity

Questions this episode answers

How do I get my content cited by ChatGPT and other LLMs?
Does linking out to sources help or hurt my SEO?
Can a small business outrank national brands on specific queries?
What metric should I report to a small business owner?
Why does my business need an about page?
Should I rebrand if Google does not recognise my business?
What changes when I write content in a regulated industry?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

why your about page is an entity problem rather than a copy problem, and what happens to a brand name once other people start ranking for it.
the case for depth over volume, from the other end of the industry, where information gain replaces publishing at scale.
a plain-text edition of this interview, built for language models, with each claim carrying the name of whoever made it.

Find Drew Dorenfest

clientmagnetcrm.com.

Cite this episode

Dorenfest, Drew. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “On Getting Verified By Crawlers.” The Unscripted SEO Podcast, 7 August 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/drew-dorenfest-on-getting-verified-by-crawlers/

Grant Simmons: Entity Optimization, the LLM petri dish & more

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:48:35 +0000

Episode Highlights:

Grant Simmons shares his unconventional journey from 1980s programming to becoming a top SEO strategist, emphasizing the importance of foundational practices.
Recent SEO trends like entity SEO, entity maps, and Google's evolving understanding layers—comparing Google’s approach to Large Language Models (LLMs)—are discussed.
The significance of schema markup: its role in grounding search results, its impact on AI and LLMs, and best practices for implementation.
How SEO tools leverage data like Google Search Console and Log File Analysis to refine strategies; discussion on tools like Market Brew, SEO Crawl, and the importance of first-party data.
The challenges and opportunities in SEO attribution, reporting, and measuring real impact amidst evolving algorithms and AI influences.
The industry’s salivation over new tech like AR, Self-driving cars, and the “beta testing culture” where poor launches are accepted as part of innovation.
Grant reflects on his experience at Homes.com, algorithm penalties, and recovery strategies—highlighting the importance of aggressive, foundational SEO efforts.
The industry’s shift from “golden age of easy wins” to embracing complexity, with an emphasis on outcome-based SEO and understanding user engagement.
How SEOs should adapt budgets for emerging AI and LLM-related services, integrating them as an extension rather than a replacement for traditional SEO.
The importance of continuous testing, validation, and building innovative tools to better interpret data, including future focuses like Log File Analysis and tracking user paths for actionable insights.
Grant’s current work at Fiat Growth and his openness to collaboration and beta testing new SEO tools and strategies.
Article Recap on Waikay by Grant
Watch the interview

Why You Should Listen:

This episode brings a seasoned SEO veteran's perspective—highlighting the evolving landscape of search engines, LLMs, and strategic priorities for modern SEOs. Whether you're interested in technical strategies, industry trends, or innovative tools, Grant's insights contribute a practical, experience-backed viewpoint.

Main Topics:

Entity SEO and Knowledge Graphs
Schema Markup & Semantic Optimization
SEO Data, Tools, and Log File Analysis
AI, LLMs, and Their Impact on Search
Industry Evolution & Future Trends

Timestamps:

00:00 - Welcome and episode overview
02:13 - Recent SEO shifts and unique site issues
03:23 - Entity SEO and the new standard: Entity Map
05:50 - Google’s grounding strategies and LLMs
07:35 - Schema markup: value and best practices
09:45 - The role of entity graphs in fighting hallucinations
11:20 - Comparing Google’s knowledge layer and LLMs
13:30 - Schema’s influence on AI and search categorization
15:25 - The importance of knowledge layers and disambiguation
16:55 - Future of AI and entity-based understanding in search
19:00 - Industry challenges with beta software testing culture
21:17 - Recovery stories: Homes.com Panda penalty case
23:00 - The evolving complexity of SEO tools and strategies
26:00 - Data-driven decision making and user engagement metrics
30:30 - The importance of strategic budgets for AI and LLMs
33:00 - Future developments: Log file analysis & user path tracking
37:00 - Grant’s current projects and contact info

Connect with Grant:

Upcoming Events:

SMX Boston, SEO panel with industry leaders
Digital Summit Denver
SEO in San Diego, September

Stay ahead of SEO's next frontier—embrace innovation, validated data strategies, and continuous testing to stay competitive in evolving search landscapes.

Joe Zeplin Went From Corpo To Youtuber & So Can You

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 28 May 2026 23:25:52 +0000

Join Jeremy Rivera as he chats with Joe Zeppelin, a former corporate leader turned full-time YouTuber, about navigating career transitions, leveraging AI tools, and building successful digital brands. Discover actionable insights on automation, content creation, and monetization strategies tailored for small business owners and aspiring creators.

In this episode:

Joe shares his background in industrial engineering and corporate leadership, including how AI automates project management and sales processes
Practical steps to transition from corporate work to independent content creation
Exploring AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT for business automation and content production
Building a personal brand through YouTube, social media, and SEO—tips for creators and small business owners
Monetization options on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and through affiliate marketing and sponsorships
The importance of repurposing content into blogs, PDFs, and slide decks for SEO and lead generation
Understanding AI limitations, hallucinations, and how to mitigate risks when using tools for decision-making and content creation
Tips for niche content engagement, from karate to board games, emphasizing passion-driven branding

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction: From corporate job to full-time YouTuber
00:20 - Joe's journey from CEO roles to digital entrepreneurship
01:00 - The corporate world and frustrations leading to the career leap
02:00 - Using AI for business automation and content creation
03:00 - Building a personal brand through YouTube and social media
04:00 - Monetization paths: AdSense, sponsorships, and affiliate marketing
05:00 - Repurposing video content into blogs, PDFs, and lead magnets
06:00 - Managing AI hallucinations and reliability issues
07:00 - Strategies for niche content success (karate, board games, fishing)
08:00 - Creating a content marketing funnel and engagement strategies
09:00 - The impact of AI on knowledge sharing and creator empowerment
10:00 - Final thoughts: continuous learning and passion pursuit

Resources & Links:

Claude AI (Official platform)
ChatGPT (Official platform)
Meta AI (Facebook AI model)
VidIQ (YouTube SEO tool)
Keyword Surfer (Keyword research browser extension)
Metrical (Social media scheduler)
Obsidian (Note-taking & knowledge management software)
Uproot HQ (Memory layer app for long-term knowledge storage, upcoming release)
Joe Zeppelin - LinkedIn | Twitter | Website
Jeremy Rivera

Connect with Joe Zeppelin:

LinkedIn - Joe Zeppelin
Twitter - @JoZeppelin
Website - jozeppelin.com

Note:

This episode provides a comprehensive look into leveraging AI tools for small businesses and content creators, emphasizing passion-driven branding, operational automation, and strategic content repurposing.

Greg Digneo on Why Visibility Is the New SEO (And What That Means for Your Agency)

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 27 May 2026 16:38:36 +0000

Visibility Is the New SEO: Greg Digneo on Flipping the Budget

Jeremy Rivera talks with Greg Digneo, founder of Content Guppy, about why brand visibility now does the work SEO used to do, and why most agencies have the budget backwards. Greg previously led SEO at Time Doctor and builds content from interviews rather than keyword research.

In this episode:

Why branded query volume is the indicator of visibility work, not the goal
Revenue as the only real metric, and what to do when analytics was never installed
Where AI genuinely helps, and why it cannot replace the outreach and relationship layer
The interview-first content model: SME, sales and customer sessions before any writing
The $60K question: traditional SEO spend versus influencer and podcast budget
Links versus mentions, and where that argument actually lands
The Nexus Document, a framework for collaborative marketing and audience leverage

Full write-up and takeaways: Visibility Is the New SEO on Unscripted SEO.

Timestamps:

0:00 – Intro: why Greg almost rebranded Content Guppy
1:09 – What Content Guppy actually does: brand visibility for B2B SaaS
1:34 – Visibility is the new SEO: the case against the old playbook
4:22 – Revenue as the only real metric
8:42 – Why AI can’t replace the outreach and relationship layer
11:57 – The interview-first content model
20:44 – The $60K question: SEO spend vs. influencer and podcast budget
26:13 – Gmail and LLMs: the Garrett Sussman personalization study
31:19 – Links vs. mentions: where the argument lands
38:32 – The Nexus Document and collaborative marketing
44:59 – The agentic layer: what Greg wants to see next

Referenced in this episode:

Garrett Sussman’s Google Personal Intelligence experiment at iPullRank

Connect with Greg Digneo:

Why Most Freelancers Fail at Scaling

Jeremy Rivera — Tue, 05 May 2026 18:52:11 +0000

Explore practical frameworks and insights for agency owners and freelancers to scale sustainably, improve systems, and align their mindset with success. Colby Wegter shares actionable strategies from his experience helping six-figure agencies reach seven figures while working fewer hours.

Key topics:

The importance of self-scale and personal boundaries for agency growth
Using calendar curation and visual tools to increase productivity
The "Automate, Delegate, Eliminate" approach for task management
Shifting from hourly pricing to value-based models
Leverage scalable, effective content marketing (like through podcasts)
Communication strategies that manage client expectations effectively
The role of identity, energy, and trust in long-term client relationships
Navigating SEO complexities through people-first systems
Building a long-term agency mindset beyond technical skills

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction and Colby Wegter's background in digital marketing
00:35 - The challenges of running an agency and initial problem areas
01:05 - Framework: Starting with personal time and self-scale
01:42 - The dangers of overworking and mental health stories
02:20 - Creating systems for founders to foster work-life balance
02:56 - Identifying core fears driving unhealthy behaviors
03:44 - Calendar curation and visual management for productivity
04:28 - Reducing low-leverage activities using color-coded calendars
05:13 - Applying simple systems: automation, elimination, delegation
05:52 - The importance of data and opportunity filtering in agency work
06:46 - The mindset shift toward prioritizing joy and results in tasks
07:08 - Porting concepts from agency to freelancing and solopreneurship
07:58 - How SEOs can apply systematized processes effectively
08:48 - The 20% rule: investing in experimentation and efficiency
09:39 - Differentiating local SEO services in a competitive landscape
10:03 - Systems for managing overwhelmed solo entrepreneurs
10:53 - Warren Buffett’s advice on saying 'no' to focus on key opportunities
11:17 - Reducing feast-and-famine cycles in small agencies
11:50 - Declaring focus by narrowing service offerings and expertise
12:20 - The power of opportunity filtering and boundaries on service scope
13:12 - Moving away from hourly billing and towards productized, value-based pricing
13:47 - Communication of value: results over hours or tactics
14:35 - Selling transformation, not just deliverables
15:10 - Packaging multi-channel marketing plans at premium prices
16:01 - The importance of perpetual value in SEO projects
17:19 - Managing client expectations around long-term SEO results
18:46 - Content timelines, content efforts, and realistic SEO benchmarks
20:08 - Recognizing the inherent unpredictability and algorithm changes
21:09 - The importance of transparency, trust, and client education
22:44 - Building long-term client relationships through honesty about SEO’s nature
24:08 - The significance of ongoing communication, dashboards, and managing expectations
25:53 - The pyramid approach: levels from money, time, energy to identity
36:10 - Understanding client priorities and aligning your services accordingly
37:40 - Selling the identity and leadership transformation, not just SEO
39:16 - The power of empathy and client-centric messaging in growth
42:52 - Genuine client care as a foundation for long-term success
43:41 - Colby Wegter’s resources and how to connect with him

Resources & Links:

Brittany Trafis: AI Search as a New Channel Beyond SEO

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 04 May 2026 20:10:56 +0000

The line Brittany Trafis keeps coming back to is that AI search is not SEO 2.0. She built Soarion Digital as an AI-native agency rather than an agency with AI bolted onto the side, and she has a test for whether yours has done the same. Ask three questions past the pitch and see what is underneath.

Key takeaways

Treat it as a channel, not a version number. Her analogy is running Facebook ads exactly like Google ads and wondering why nothing works.
Schema matters again, for a different reason. Not validation for its own sake, but what the markup tells a model that is in a hurry.
Monitoring tools are a signal, not a measurement. Her one hard data point is referral traffic that actually landed on the site.
AI search is the first channel in years where a small business genuinely starts level. She has clients with a quarter of a competitor’s budget showing up more often.
Rebuild the workflow, do not retrofit it. Steps that ran to twenty-five now run to about four, because she started from what it should be.

A new channel, not a new version

The number one piece I say is AI search is not SEO 2.0.
— Brittany Trafis

She is not dismissing the foundation. Keywords, technical health and links still underpin the whole thing, and she says so first. The objection is to treating the new surface as an extension of the old one and then measuring it with the old scoreboard.

It would almost be like when Facebook ads came out, if you were to say, I’m just going to run it like Google ads. Well, that wouldn’t work.
— Brittany Trafis

Her diagnostic for buyers is the useful part. If your agency says it has AI search covered, ask three more questions. She thinks the answers will reveal an SEO programme with a new label on the invoice.

What schema is for now

The most practical stretch of the interview is about markup, and it inverts twenty years of habit. Google trained the industry to satisfy a rigid specification. A model is reading for meaning and moving fast.

What the LLM cares about is what is that schema telling me?
— Brittany Trafis

An FAQ block is the example she keeps returning to, because a question and its answer are exactly the shape of the thing being looked for. Adjusting schema, she says, can move citation rates quickly, which is not something anyone has been able to say about markup for years.

Now, if your schema is not set up correctly and it’s timing out, then it’s gonna move on and it’s going to ignore you.
— Brittany Trafis

The other observation worth taking away is about speed. She watches agents crawl client pages within hours of publication, while Google is still weeks behind on recognising the same change.

Monitoring is a signal, not a measurement

It is the wild wild west right now. And we are watching this channel be born.
— Brittany Trafis

The channel does not have an agreed name yet, and it certainly does not have reporting. She is careful about the distinction between monitoring tools, which prompt the models and record what comes back, and data, which nobody is being given.

Her caveat is the responsible one and worth repeating to any client staring at a visibility score: results are personalised, two people asking the same question get different answers, and the number is directional.

Look at your web analytics as your final source.
— Brittany Trafis

That’s the soundest data point that you can get at this point.
— Brittany Trafis

If you want to check what the models are currently repeating about a brand rather than what a dashboard says, the audit routine for reading model consensus is the manual version.

Why small businesses are actually in this race

I love AI Search for small businesses because it is a new channel. It put us all at the starting line together.
— Brittany Trafis

This is the part small business owners should hear. The usual answer to I cannot outrank the big competitor is a polite version of no. Here her answer is that she has clients on a quarter of a competitor’s paid budget who are showing up more often, because they moved faster and had a strategy.

Just because you’re small, don’t put yourself out of the race. You’re actually already in the race and could be ahead of these larger guys.
— Brittany Trafis

Her content prescription for a boring category is structural rather than creative. Definitions, comparisons, pros and cons, then a point of view, laid out cleanly enough that a model can lift the answer whole. The person putting a cement wall in their garden does not find it boring.

Chapters

Time	What happens
00:01	Jeremy introduces Brittany Trafis of Soarion Digital
00:43	Her path from restaurants into marketing
05:48	AI search is not SEO 2.0
07:15	Schema for models versus Google’s rigid rules
11:29	Building an AI-native agency with shorter workflows
17:35	Turning repeated prompts into reusable skills
20:49	Monitoring tools give signal, not real data
25:08	ChatGPT ads and the missing metrics
28:08	Why AI search levels the field for small businesses
30:18	Structuring content so a model can pull an answer
33:37	Where humans stay in the workflow
35:05	Where to find Brittany, and her open question

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
Soarion Digital	Her AI-native marketing agency, built AI-first rather than retrofitted
AEO, GEO, AIO	The competing names the industry is still arguing over for the same channel
Monitoring tools	Third-party prompt trackers, which she treats as directional signal rather than data
Definitions, comparisons, pros and cons, point of view	Her four structural components for content a model can lift an answer from
Her own recap of this episode	Published on the Soarion Digital blog
Brittany Trafis on LinkedIn	Where she posts most, and where she takes questions

Questions this episode answers

Is AI search just SEO with a new name?
Does schema markup still matter for AI search?
How fast do AI crawlers pick up new content compared to Google?
Can I trust AI visibility monitoring tools?
What is the most reliable way to measure AI search results?
Can a small business compete in AI search against a larger competitor?
How should I structure content so an AI can use it as an answer?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

Jason Barnard on the training set and the retrieval layer, the framework Jeremy puts to her and she agrees with.
Jason Wade calling AI search table stakes, quoted back at her mid-episode.
Nick Eubanks on putting AI at the brief stage rather than the writing stage, the workflow question she answers at the end.

Find Brittany Trafis

soariondigital.com, and she is a regular on the marketing AI conference circuit, including the one in her own city.

Cite this episode

Trafis, Brittany. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “AI Search as a New Channel Beyond SEO.” Unscripted SEO, 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/brittany-trafis-ai-search-is-not-seo-2-0-unscripted-seo-podcast/

Distribution Is the Only Remaining Moat When Execution Becomes Infinite — Nick Eubanks on What Survives the AI Era

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 04 May 2026 13:56:31 +0000

In this episode of the Unscripted Small Business Podcast, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Nick Eubanks — a 2007-vintage SEO who sold Traffic Think Tank to SEMrush, spent three years building their media program into an eight-figure-a-year operation, and is now Global CMO at Digistore24, the world's largest affiliate network with 950,000 vendors and 5 million users.

This is a veteran-to-veteran conversation about what's actually changed in SEO, what hasn't, and where the defensible opportunities still live in a world where AI has commoditized execution.

In This Episode

Why Nick came out of retirement — the real story, and what buying two agencies in one week taught him about paying for experience
Why this is the fifth time SEO has "died" — and why this one might actually stick
The golden age of organic traffic (2010–2020) and why it's definitively over
What the Helpful Content Update actually changed — entity graphs, distance-to-seed, brand signals in Search Console, and whether HCU was prep for AI Overviews
Why podcasting is Jeremy's one-word answer for link building — and the strategy behind the SEO Arcade white-label podcast service
How Digistore24's seller-of-record model handles VAT across 38 EU countries and tax nexus across all U.S. states so vendors can focus on selling
Why affiliates are having a renaissance in the LLM era — and which social channels suddenly matter that didn't before
The AI content workflow most agencies have completely backwards — and what the right order actually is (human brief → AI draft → human edit)
Nick's "brand brain" concept — a layered AI pipeline: always-on brand entity → regional compliance → channel → persona, producing high-volume non-slop content at scale
Why the pretense that agencies were doing high-quality content before AI is "a bit rich"
"Distribution is the only remaining moat when execution becomes infinite" — and why expertise still creates some defensibility. Related: SEO Forecasting 101
The Will Smith spaghetti litmus test for AI video quality, and what weekly improvement looks like inside a Gen.AI video agency
Nick's GLP-1 muscle protection app — built and deployed to the App Store in 12 hours on a Sunday
Why the barrier to building has essentially collapsed — and the new class of makers coming because of it
The SEO Arcade origin story — Jeremy's $500 Rand Fishkin pixel fighter wizard, and how the same idea can now be done in minutes with AI

Key Quotes

"Distribution is the only remaining moat when execution becomes infinite."— Nick Eubanks"The fast-forward button is very real. I'm so happy now to just pay for experience — things that I wish my younger version of my ego would have let me do."— Nick Eubanks"I think this is the fifth time SEO has died in my career. I do think this is actually the nail in the coffin for what SEO was originally conceived as."— Nick Eubanks

Connect with Nick

Digistore24 — the world's largest affiliate marketplace
Nick Eubanks on Twitter/X
Digistore24 on Twitter/X
agencygrowthengine.org — free agency training resources

Resources Mentioned

Related Episodes

About the Show

The Unscripted Small Business Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera and features unfiltered conversations with entrepreneurs, marketers, and operators about what's actually working in business today. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Going International on SEO with Christina Spaulding

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:44:22 +0000

Discover practical insights for expanding your business globally through international SEO, translation strategies, and regional localization, guided by expert Christina Spalding. Main topics:

Christina's international experience and expertise in multilingual SEO
The evolution of SEO strategies from 2009 to today, including AI influence
Language models (LLMs) in foreign languages: accuracy, hallucinations, and verification
Practical approaches for multilingual content, hreflang, and regional signals
Localized links, country-specific domains, and user intent in global ranking strategies
Market opportunities in Spanish and other language-specific regions
Navigation of international platform nuances—server location, TLDs, and SEO efforts

Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction to Christina Spalding and her international SEO background
02:12 - Evolution of SEO from 2009 to current AI-driven changes
03:36 - Impact of AI and low-quality content resurgence in SEO strategies
04:52 - How language models generate answers and their accuracy across languages
06:07 - Content volume differences across languages and implications for LLMs
07:23 - Tools like DeepL for deterministic translation and grammar refinement
08:45 - Handling context issues and verifying AI-generated content
09:36 - Using probabilistic vs. deterministic LLMs for international content
10:20 - Challenges and opportunities of SEO for exported products like handrails
11:32 - Market potentials for multilingual SEO in the US and beyond
12:58 - Keyword targeting and content creation in multiple languages
13:52 - Local demographics and visual cues for language localization
15:07 - Incorporating regional language and cultural nuances into SEO strategies
16:21 - Leveraging translation tools and native review for multilingual content
17:49 - The role and best practices for hreflang and regional signals
20:33 - Setting up hreflang, region tags, and backend configurations
22:43 - Impact of user language preference and translation accuracy on conversions
25:02 - Role of top-level domains (.de, .fr, etc.) and server location in international SEO
27:35 - Strategies for ranking in country-specific search engines like Baidu in China
30:56 - Cultural and legal considerations in international marketing and sales
33:17 - Opportunities in tourism and localized content for expat communities
36:47 - Conducting language audits and utilizing employee multilingual skills
38:33 - Connecting with Christina Spalding and further resources Resources & Links:

Connect with Christina Spalding:

Small Business Marketing, Local SEO & the AI Frontier

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 18:49:09 +0000

Tom Malesic founded EZ Marketing in 1996 and has spent nearly three decades selling marketing to businesses that cannot afford to guess. This is his first turn on the show, and it is the practical one: what a small business website has to do, what local SEO actually involves, and which parts of the job AI has genuinely taken over.

Key takeaways

The website is the trust test. Not a brochure. The place a sceptical stranger decides whether you are real.
Real photos beat stock, every time. Stock imagery says nothing about you and everyone recognises it.
Copy the competitor and you inherit their ceiling. Tom pushes owners towards the voice only they have.
Local service pages and the map pack are the mechanics. Unglamorous, and where the phone calls come from.
Fresh photos and video keep local rankings moving. The profile is not a set-and-forget asset.
Link building has quietly become mention building. Citations and being named count for more than they used to.

The website as the trust test

Tom’s first point is the one owners most often skip past. Before anything else happens, a stranger who has never heard of you arrives and decides in a few seconds whether this is a real business. Everything downstream depends on passing that.

Which means speed, clarity and evidence come before cleverness. A fast page with real proof on it outperforms a beautiful one that loads slowly and says nothing checkable.

Real photos, real voice

He is firm about stock photography. Everyone has seen the same smiling team in the same office, and using it tells a visitor precisely nothing about you. Photographs of the actual premises, the actual van, the actual staff do work that no amount of copy can.

The same applies to the words. Owners often ask for a site that sounds like the biggest competitor in town, which guarantees they will never be preferred to that competitor. The voice that wins is the one only that business has.

The local mechanics

The parts that pay

Local service pages, one per service per area you genuinely serve.
A profile listing that is complete, accurate and actually maintained.
Questions answered in plain language, in the form people ask them out loud.
New photos and video going up regularly rather than once at launch.

He is also clear on where the limits are. A business with a small budget covering a wide radius will lose to a business with the same budget covering a tight one.

What AI actually changed

Tom is neither breathless nor dismissive. The tools have genuinely compressed content production, video generation and a good deal of website build work. That is real, and it lowers the cost of things small businesses used to skip.

What it has not done is remove the need to be worth recommending. A generated page about a business with nothing distinctive to say produces a generated impression.

For the longer version of his thinking on culture and agency building, he came back for a second conversation.

Scaling geography to budget

The most useful operational point in the episode is about matching ambition to money. Pick the smallest area that can sustain the business, win it properly, then expand outward. Spreading a modest budget across a metropolitan area produces motion and no results.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
EZ Marketing	The agency Tom founded in 1996
Map pack	The local results block that produces the phone calls
Local service pages	One page per service per area actually served
Mentions and citations	What link building has largely become for local businesses
Stock photography	The credibility leak Tom keeps arguing owners out of

Questions this episode answers

What does a small business website actually need to do?
Do real photos matter more than stock images?
How do I rank in the local map pack?
How many location pages should a local business have?
Has AI changed small business marketing yet?
How wide an area should I target on a small budget?
Is link building still the priority for a local business?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

Tom’s second interview, on agency culture and firing toxic clients.
EZ Marketing’s own write-up of this appearance.
The SOP for proving a local booking came from search, which is the measurement half Tom leaves as an exercise.

Find Tom Malesic

EZ Marketing is in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. More interviews at Unscripted SEO.

Cite this episode

Malesic, Tom. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Small Business Marketing, Local SEO and the AI Frontier.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/small-business-marketing-local-seo-the-ai-frontier

Mike Ginley on Fundamentals, Trust & the Multi-Channel Reality of Modern SEO

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0000

The best tool in your stack is still the computer between your ears. Mike Ginley has ten years across agency, in-house and freelance work, from local shops to the Fortune 500. He works full time at Centerwell and runs a consultancy on the side, which means he sees the same trust problem from both ends.

Key takeaways

Small businesses keep getting burned, and they remember it. The next agency in the door inherits that suspicion whether it earned it or not.
Single-channel SEO is finished. A local business now has to be present in several places at once, and SEO is the position that co-ordinates the rest.
LLMs are great calculators and poor thinkers. Mike uses them, and he is blunt that they cannot supply the original idea.
Original thinking plus execution, not either one alone. Fancy technical work on top of nothing worth saying still gets you nowhere.
The consultant billing confession. His biggest pain point is not delivery. It is the admin around getting paid.

The mom-and-pop trust problem

A large share of small businesses have already paid an agency and got nothing measurable back. That is the baseline every honest practitioner now starts from. Mike describes the work of the first month as mostly proving you are not the last lot.

It is not a sales problem. It is a memory problem. The owner has a specific story about a specific invoice, and no amount of case studies erases it. What does help is showing your reasoning rather than your results.

How to vet an SEO agency

Mike gives owners a short set of things to press on before signing anything.

Ask what they would do in the first ninety days, and see whether the answer is specific to your business or a template.
Ask which channel they would put money into if you could only fund one, and why.
Ask what they will not do. An agency that claims every service is a good fit for you is selling capacity, not strategy.
Ask how they report. If reporting is a slide of rankings with no revenue anywhere near it, you will be arguing about value in six months.

None of this requires the owner to understand SEO. It requires the agency to explain itself in plain language, which is the actual test.

SEO as the quarterback of digital

The framing Mike keeps returning to is that SEO is no longer a channel sitting beside the others. It is the function that knows what people are asking for, which makes it the natural place to co-ordinate paid, social and web strategy.

Gone are the days of just focusing on one channel. You really need to start diversifying and making sure you have a presence in all these different channels.
— Mike Ginley

For a local business that means the website, the profile listings, the review surfaces and whichever social platform the customers actually use. Not all of them. The ones that are real for that business.

Where LLMs actually belong

The large language models, all these tools are great computers, but nothing’s going to replace the computer between your ears. That should always be the main one you go with.
— Mike Ginley

He is not anti-tool. He is against outsourcing judgement to something that is optimising for a plausible next word. The models are fast at the parts that were always mechanical, and useless at deciding what is worth doing.

You can do all this fancy work that we do, but if you don’t have anything original to say, it’s not going to matter either. You need to have both.
— Mike Ginley

The shiny object problem

Mike’s frustration with his own industry is the speed at which it abandons fundamentals for whatever was announced last week. Every cycle produces a new acronym and a fresh wave of people declaring the old work dead.

His counter is unfashionable and correct. The businesses that win locally are the ones with a fast, clear site, an accurate profile, honest reviews and something to say. That list has not changed in a decade.

He closes on the least glamorous problem in freelance consulting, which is invoicing. Delivery is the easy half.

Chapters

Time	What happens
0:00	Intro and Mike’s background
0:51	The mom-and-pop trust problem
4:18	What to look for in an SEO agency
7:58	Multi-channel digital marketing today
15:21	SEO as the quarterback of digital
23:40	LLMs, AI tools and original thinking
29:53	Soapbox: what the SEO industry is getting wrong
32:42	Biggest pain point as a consultant
35:16	Where to find Mike

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
Centerwell	Where Mike works full time, alongside the consultancy
Mike Ginley Digital Consulting	His own practice, run on the side
Digital EAT	The second site he runs
Multi-channel presence	His argument that a local business cannot survive on one surface
The computer between your ears	His name for the judgement no model supplies

Questions this episode answers

How do I vet an SEO agency before I hire one?
Why do small businesses distrust marketing agencies?
Is single-channel SEO still viable for a local business?
Where should I actually use LLMs in an SEO workflow?
What does it mean to treat SEO as the quarterback of digital?
What is the SEO industry getting wrong right now?
What is the hardest part of freelance consulting?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

The full written recap of this conversation, with the long version of the trust argument.
Robert Spinrad on why good SEO is good AI visibility, which lands on the same fundamentals from an agency leadership seat.
Marcus Smith on the test for killing work nobody would pay for, if the billing confession at the end resonated.

Find Mike Ginley

His site is mikeginley.com, and he is on LinkedIn. Hosted by Jeremy Rivera. More interviews at Unscripted SEO.

Cite this episode

Ginley, Mike. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Fundamentals, Trust and the Multi-Channel Reality of Modern SEO.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/mike-ginley-on-fundamentals-trust-the-multi-channel-reality-of-modern-seo

Julia Bocchese: Pinterest, AI Search & SEO for Small Businesses

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:38:14 +0000

Julia Bocchese has spent nearly nine years helping small businesses in the creative and holistic space get found online — not through paid ads or social media grind, but through SEO, Pinterest strategy, and now AI search optimization. She also teaches SEO at the college level, which gives her a rare ability to break down the technical into the practical. In this conversation, Julia unpacks why Pinterest is one of the most underused traffic channels for small businesses, how to think about AI as a discovery platform, and what she actually looks at when a client hands her a site to fix.

About Julia Bocchese

Julia is the founder of Julia Renee Consulting, a Philadelphia-based consultancy serving creative and holistic small businesses — interior designers, photographers, midwives, therapists, and more. She offers SEO services, Pinterest strategy and management, blog and content optimization, and AI search (AEO) services. She also teaches SEO at the college level — without textbooks, because anything printed a year ago is already out of date.

What We Cover

Pinterest as a search engine: Why Julia treats Pinterest with the same keyword discipline as Google — and why most businesses are leaving long-lived traffic on the table by ignoring it.
The longevity advantage: Julia has clients with pins from 2009 that still drive traffic. The math on why Pinterest content compounds while social posts expire.
Unexpected Pinterest niches: A niche Olympic swim training company with zero Pinterest competition. A Swiss boarding school. Luxury yachts. Why the "I'm not visual enough" objection almost never holds.
Video pins done right: Audio is muted by default. Talking-head videos underperform. What actually works — and how it differs completely from Instagram.
The Pinterest-Google double dip: Julia regularly sees Pinterest boards and individual pins ranking in Google SERPs for the same keywords her clients are chasing organically.
AI search optimization: Why the most important information needs to live at the top of the page, and why distributing FAQs throughout service pages outperforms a single standalone FAQ page.
Link building for solopreneurs: How Julia helps small businesses find local placements that do double duty — links and direct audience exposure in one.
Reporting without owning revenue: Why Julia reports on traffic quality and impressions rather than conversions she can't control.
The biggest SEO trap right now: Writing for bots instead of the humans who are actually going to pay you.
On-page quick wins: Julia's five-point checklist when she takes on a new site — including the location-in-the-footer problem she sees on almost every local business site.

Conversation Highlights

On why she teaches without textbooks:

"I don't give my students textbooks. Anything printed a year ago is already out of date in SEO. The syllabus changes throughout the semester as new findings come out — the class can look totally different from one year to the next."

On why Pinterest belongs in your strategy:

"People aren't going to Pinterest to follow people. They're searching for information. That's why I focus on it alongside SEO — the keyword strategy transfers almost directly."

On pin longevity vs. social media:

"Pins can live for months to even years. I've seen clients who have had pins from 2009 that are still bringing traffic to their website. Unlike social media where your content stops getting seen after a day or two."

On the Google + Pinterest double dip:

"When I do keyword research for SEO clients, I'll sometimes see Pinterest boards or individual pins ranking in Google for those terms. So you can get traffic from Pinterest itself, and directly from Google at the same time."

On AI search optimization:

"AI platforms only crawl part of a page. So making sure the most important information is towards the top of the page — that's one of the key shifts I'm helping clients make right now."

On the biggest SEO mistake she sees:

"Clients are writing for the bots crawling their site, not for the humans who are actually going to be hiring them and giving them money. Bots don't have any cash to spend."

Julia's Links

juliareneeconsulting.com — Services, case studies, and data on each service page
SEO Services — One-time audits through full ongoing optimization
Pinterest Services — Setup, management, and strategy including the "7 Questions" pre-Pinterest checklist
Content & Blog Services — Keyword research, editorial calendars, blog optimization
Instagram: @juliareneeconsulting
LinkedIn: Julia Bocchese
Pinterest: Julia Renee Consulting

About the Unscripted SEO Podcast

The Unscripted SEO Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera, a veteran SEO consultant and founder of SEO Arcade. Each episode is an unscripted conversation with practitioners, founders, and specialists — no slide decks, no talking points, just real discussion about what's working in search. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Ernesto Ortiz: Algorithm Updates Only Hurt the Incomplete

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Ernesto Ortiz came to SEO from an engineering background and did not trust what he read, so he bought domains and ran single-variable tests until he had a short list of things that actually moved the needle. Five years later he runs Structural SEO on month-to-month contracts for e-commerce clients in Australia, the US and the UK — every client can walk at any time, which is exactly the point. You can find the agency at structuralseo.com.

His framing of algorithm updates is the sharpest thing in this episode. Updates are not punishments; they are the dials being re-weighted. “When you get affected by those in a negative way, it’s because you’re incomplete. You optimized for the set of factors that were currently tuned up.” Build a complete signal picture and an update has nothing to catch — you go up, or nothing happens. We wrote the long version of this conversation up as Algorithm Updates Only Hurt the Incomplete.

Then he takes the traffic conversation apart. Every publisher panic chart, he argues, is a business-model problem wearing an SEO costume. “Are you actually losing sales or are you just losing traffic? What’s happening to revenue per session?” If you sell something, people still have to come and buy it, and it is irrelevant whether they read your article or the AI answered them first. That idea is the spine of Traffic Is a Proxy: Measure SEO by Revenue Instead.

The reporting section is the part agency owners should steal. Ernesto reports revenue, but he also reports the pure SEO metric he can actually defend: non-brand traffic to category and product pages. “Non-brand traffic on pages that matter, not non-brand traffic on blog pages about who knows what.” Blog posts exist so the collection pages rank; their traffic is instrumental, never the goal. He pairs it against branded traffic to separate his work from the rest of the marketing team’s. More practitioner plays like this live in the SEO Tactic Library, and more technical conversations in our technical SEO practitioner guide.

Also in this episode

B2B is D2C ten years ago. He sold operable walls — $2,000 acoustic partitions — through a real e-commerce checkout while every competitor ran a contact form. Bring D2C clarity to B2B and you stand out immediately.
Google only acts at scale. From a two-hour conversation with Pedro Diaz, formerly of Google’s search quality team: “They only look into things that have a scale that makes it worth doing.” That is why Lorem Ipsum pages still rank and why the casino SERPs look the way they do.
The PBN-mention tactic that gets you into ChatGPT. A hundred listicles saying you are the best works in under a week, costs almost nothing, and leaves a massive footprint. His filter: “Would you bet the future of your business on this tactic?” Most legitimate businesses say no.
Where LLMs actually help. He uses them to find gaps and missing coverage, never for expertise or direction.
The easiest pitfall to avoid. LinkedIn posts selling AI systems from people who learned the word “SEO” two months ago. “Don’t get overwhelmed by that nonsense.”

Jeremy also went on Ernesto’s show — that conversation is on his YouTube channel. For more interviews with people who actually do the work, browse The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast or the digital marketing and paid search guide.

New episodes land in the SEO Arcade newsletter.

AI Visibility, Entity Engineering & the Podcast SEO Strategy No One's Using with Jason Wade of Ninja Ai

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:35:26 +0000

What if the biggest SEO opportunity for most businesses isn't a new tool, a new tactic, or a new algorithm hack — it's simply showing up consistently and claiming your authority?

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Jason Wade, founder of Ninja AI and an expert in AI visibility architecture, GEO, and AEO. They go deep on what it actually means to engineer your entity, why most SEOs are still running 2015 playbooks, and why one podcast episode can outperform a year of blogging.

Here's Jason's recap of this Unscripted SEO episode

What We Cover in This Episode

What 'AI visibility' means and why GEO/AEO is really just visibility engineering
Entity optimization: how AI systems recognize authority — and how you train them
The content multiplication math: one podcast → 50 assets
Why most businesses have never actually said what they do on their website
How Google's core algorithm updates have punished hacking and rewarded authenticity
The Office Space test: 'What would you say you do here?' — applied to your homepage
Why Reddit and podcasts rank instantly compared to traditional SEO timelines
E-E-A-T in practice: showing up, speaking up, and having others verify it

Best Quotes from This Episode

“If a company can take that friction away and do the stuff they won't do — that's where the magic is.” — Jason Wade

“One podcast could become 50 assets. One podcast.” — Jason Wade

“You're training the system in the easiest way possible — by simply showing up.” — Jason Wade

“Your content gap analysis should be: what are all the competitors missing that you can provide?” — Jeremy Rivera

Resources & Links Mentioned

Guest: Jason Wade —

ninjaai.com | jasonwade.com | LinkedIn

Services: AI Visibility | GEO | AEO | AI SEO Strategies

Article: 25 Local SEO Tips — AI Upgrade

Host: Jeremy Rivera | SEO Arcade | Unscripted SEO Podcast

Like what you heard? Subscribe, leave a review, and share with an SEO who needs to hear this. And if you want to explore how podcast-based SEO services could multiply your content and backlinks — schedule a call at SEOArcade.com.

Stephan Bajaio: SEO's Identity Crisis Is Entirely Our Own Fault

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 22:26:40 +0000

Stephan Bajaio co-founded Conductor, one of the largest enterprise SEO platforms ever built, and now runs Vibe Logic. He has seen the industry from the agency floor, the platform side and the C-suite, and his read is unsentimental. The reason SEO keeps losing the argument about its own value is SEO.

Key takeaways

The GEO and AIO naming fight is a symptom. An industry that cannot describe itself in one sentence will keep being renamed by other people.
Strip the jargon and the job is simple. Connect what an organisation knows to the people who need it.
The lonely island problem. A brilliant SEO with no alignment to content, engineering and the marketing lead will still fail, and it will look like their fault.
Conflicting KPIs create the friction, not bad people. The engineer is measured on shipping. You are measured on something they were never asked about.
The best keyword research is a conversation. Interviewing the actual expert beats mining a tool, because the tool only knows what has already been asked.
Passion is the one trait you cannot train into an SEO. Everything else is teachable.

The identity crisis, and whose fault it is

Every eighteen months the field produces a new label for itself and then argues about it in public. Stephan’s position is that executives are not confused about SEO because they are ignorant. They are confused because practitioners keep changing the story.

He is careful about where the fix belongs. It does not start with educating the board. It starts with the people doing the work agreeing on what the work is.

What SEO is once you remove the jargon

His working definition is short enough to survive a lift ride. Connect organisational wisdom to the audience that needs it.

That framing does something useful. It makes the deliverable knowledge rather than rankings, which is the only version of the job that stays true when the interface changes from ten blue links to a generated answer.

The lonely island problem

The most common failure he describes is not technical. It is a capable specialist with no leverage over the teams who have to execute. Recommendations go into a backlog and die there, quarter after quarter, and the specialist gets blamed for a flat line.

The content team writes to a brief that predates your research.
Engineering has a roadmap you were not consulted on.
The marketing lead is judged on a number your work only moves indirectly.
Nobody in that chain is behaving badly. The structure is just wrong.

Conflicting KPIs and how to work with them

His practical advice is to stop trying to win the argument and start attaching your work to the number the other person already owns. If engineering is measured on performance, your technical case is a performance case. If content is measured on production, your brief is a way to produce faster.

It is less satisfying than being right in a meeting. It ships.

Keyword research as an interview

The example that carries this section is a concrete wall installer. A tool will give you the phrases people already know to type. It cannot give you the question the installer gets asked on every single site visit, because nobody has typed it yet.

So the research method is to interview the expert, capture the language they use with customers, and build from that. It also solves the originality problem, since a transcript of a real practitioner is not something a competitor can regenerate.

Where decisions are formed

Vibe Logic’s framing is web presence intelligence, and the useful part of it is a distinction: be present where decisions are formed, not only where they are made.

Reporting on organic sessions alone tells you about the second place and nothing about the first. Which is how a content programme that is genuinely working can be cancelled for looking flat.

He closes on hiring. Curiosity and passion are the traits he cannot install in someone. The rest of the job is training.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
Vibe Logic	Stephan Bajaio’s current company
Conductor	The enterprise SEO platform he co-founded
Web presence intelligence	Vibe Logic’s framing for visibility beyond rankings
The lonely island problem	A capable SEO with no alignment to the teams who execute
Decisions formed vs decisions made	Why organic session reporting misses most of the story

Questions this episode answers

Why does the SEO industry keep renaming itself?
How should I define SEO to an executive?
Why do good SEOs fail inside big organisations?
How do I work with teams whose KPIs conflict with mine?
Is keyword research still useful, or should I interview experts instead?
What should I report on besides organic traffic?
What should I look for when hiring an SEO?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

Mike Ginley on trust and the multi-channel reality, the same alignment problem seen from a small-business desk.
Federico Fancinelli on entities, coherence and prompt poisoning, if the naming argument left you wanting the research underneath it.
Unscripted SEO, where the rest of the interviews live.

Find Stephan Bajaio

Vibe Logic is the company. Hosted by Jeremy Rivera.

Cite this episode

Bajaio, Stephan. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “SEO’s Identity Crisis Is Entirely Our Own Fault.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/stephan-bajaio-seos-identity-crisis-is-entirely-our-own-fault

Schema, AI Search & Holistic SEO — With Brandon Leibowitz of SEO Optimizers

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 23:46:00 +0000

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, host Jeremy Rivera sits down with Brandon Leibowitz, founder of SEO Optimizers — a full-service digital marketing agency based in Los Angeles. With nearly two decades of experience in SEO, paid ads, social media, and coaching, Brandon shares his grounded, practitioner-level take on the AI search landscape and what actually moves the needle.

Topics Covered

How AI-powered search surfaces (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot) are — and aren’t — changing SEO workflow
Why schema markup is the highest-leverage technical tactic for AI visibility
The difference between informational and transactional AI search behavior
A page-by-page schema architecture strategy for e-commerce and service sites
How to use competitor schema analysis as a gap-finding tactic
Why content + backlinks + technical SEO must all work together

Key Quotes

“The AI overview is just a featured snippet — just a new way to rebrand it for Google. The old tactics, the old strategies already worked.” — Brandon Leibowitz

“The more touch points you have and more places people find you, the more likely they are to want your product or service in the future.” — Brandon Leibowitz

Resources Mentioned

Connect With Brandon Leibowitz

Website: seooptimizers.com

Free Gift: seooptimizers.com/gift

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/brandonleibowitz

About The Unscripted SEO Podcast

The Unscripted SEO Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera, SEO consultant and founder of SEO Arcade. Each episode features candid, unscripted conversations with leading SEO practitioners, agency founders, and digital marketing veterans.

Why Your Pretty Website Is Costing You Customers — With Greg Merrilees

Jeremy Rivera — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:01:10 +0000

Greg Merrilees is the founder of Studio1 Design — a conversion-focused website agency that has designed for over 2,000 businesses worldwide, including Hollywood A-listers like Sylvester Stallone. He’s the author of Next Level Website Design and has been building websites since 2009.

In this episode, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Greg to tackle whether websites are still relevant, how to build for searcher intent, why copywriting beats design every time, and what the rise of AI vibe coding actually means for your brand.

Episode Highlights

Do you really need a website in 2025? Greg’s nuanced take on social media vs. owned assets
The cold / warm / hot traffic model and how to match your CTA to intent
Why Microsoft Clarity should be on every website (and how it compares to Hotjar)
Website design trends to avoid in 2026 — and what converts instead
How to find your unique positioning in a commoditized niche
Interactive lead magnets vs. PDF downloads — what actually converts today
The AI sameness problem: why vibe-coded websites all look the same

Key Resources Mentioned

Studio1 Design — Greg’s agency
Next Level Website Design (Book)
Free Resources — Custom GPT + book companion
Microsoft Clarity — Free heatmaps & session recording
Enterprise Fitness (macro calculator example)
Yoshua Law (case study)
Greg’s email: greg@studio1design.com
Connect with Jeremy Rivera
SEO Arcade — Podcast-based content marketing & link building

Studio1 Design Blog — Related Reading

Charlie Birch on Where Brand Strategy Meets SEO: What Every Founder Needs to Know

Jeremy Rivera — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 17:49:00 +0000

Hosted by Jeremy Rivera

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Charlie Birch, Founder and Creative Director of Humaniz Collective, to explore the collision between brand strategy and modern SEO — and why treating them as separate disciplines is costing founders real revenue.

What You'll Learn in This Episode

Why Charlie's background in performance, psychology, and crisis intervention makes her uniquely equipped to navigate brand identity
How brand strategy and SEO have more in common than most agencies admit
The danger of only measuring attraction — and why conversion and retention are the real metrics that matter
Why copying your competitors' strategy only makes you more like them — not better than them
How Charlie's Brand IdQ Framework turns founder instinct into a shared decision-making lens for the entire team
A real-world example of how interviewing the installer — not just doing keyword research — uncovered an angle nobody was targeting
How to evaluate whether a campaign is the right fit for your brand before you invest

Guest Resources

Humaniz Collective Website

Brand IdQ — Take the Free Integrity Snapshot

The Inner Circle — Apply for Free Monthly Networking (2nd Thursday each month, 1:30 PM ET — mention Unscripted SEO Podcast to get prioritized!)

On Raising Brands Newsletter

Breaking the Bottleneck — Founder Interviews

Charlie on LinkedIn

Humaniz Collective on Instagram

Referenced in This Episode

Spacebar Collective (Chris Tweeten) — 'Publishing more won't fix a weak SEO game. It's about leverage.'

Permacast Walls — The precast concrete walls example that revealed the "anti-dig" keyword opportunity

SEO Arcade — Content Gap Analysis & Forecasting Tools

About Your Host

Jeremy Rivera is an SEO strategist with 19+ years of experience and founder of SEO Arcade. He specializes in connecting SEO tactics to real business outcomes, helping brands turn podcast conversations into high-leverage content strategies.

Subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with a founder who needs to hear it.

Enterprise E-Commerce SEO, Long-Tail Pages & AI Visibility with Paul Baterina of REVOLVE

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:26:27 +0000

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Paul Baterina, Senior SEO Manager at REVOLVE — a publicly traded fashion e-commerce brand with over 260,000 products. Paul has been at REVOLVE for 13 years, making him one of the rarest SEOs in the industry: a specialist who went deep on one brand instead of bouncing across industries.

What We Cover

Why long-tail category pages became REVOLVE's most provable SEO strategy — and how Paul sold it to C-suite
The 3-product rule for deciding when a category page is worth creating vs. when to kill it
Why luxury fashion brands resist text-heavy SEO content — and how to work with that, not against it
The honest state of AI/LLM visibility for a major e-commerce brand: $58K/month in LLM-driven revenue and what that actually means
How to reverse-engineer LLM citations to find the best places to get your brand mentioned
Link context signals — why what's around a link matters as much as the link itself
Bill Slawski's patent analysis work and how it connects to Koray Tugberk's topical authority framework
A live SEO test showing a 25% lift in organic traffic from adding content to long-tail pages

Resources & Links

REVOLVE (revolve.com) — Paul's employer and the e-commerce brand discussed throughout
Unscripted SEO Podcast — Subscribe for more unscripted SEO conversations
Jeremy Rivera — Host — About your host
Keyword Clusters Based on SERP Data — SEO Arcade — Understanding how Google groups related queries
Opportunity Sizing in SEO — SEO Arcade — How to quantify SEO wins for C-suite
White-Label Link Building Services — SEO Arcade — Community-based and podcast-based link building
Podcast-Based Content & Link Building — SEO Arcade — The full PAASS service
SEO By The Sea — Bill Slawski's Google patent research (search "Bill Slawski SEO By The Sea")

Find Paul Baterina

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-baterina-079ab629/
Twitter: https://x.com/paulbaterina
Slack: SEO Community & Asians In Search (run by George Nguyen)
Conferences: SearchLove San Diego

Timothy Malmros on Black Hat SEO, Drop Domains & the Canonical Trick

Jeremy Rivera — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 17:28:31 +0000

Unscripted SEO Podcast

️ Listen: unscriptedseo.com Guest: Timothy Malmros on LinkedIn
Full Episode dialog with Timothy Malmros exposing blackhat SEO on SEO Arcade

Guest Bio

Timothy Malmros is a former gambling affiliate SEO with nearly two decades in the industry. After retiring from active affiliation, he turned his focus to investigating and documenting black hat SEO techniques — particularly in the gambling and sweepstakes space — through detailed posts on LinkedIn. His work offers a rare, transparent look at how spam tactics actually function, why they succeed, and why Google takes so long to stop them.

In his own words:
"Finished 12th grade. Got fired from Mcdonalds. Moved to Israel back in 2005. Applied to 20 jobs, got one reply and started working as a ”live person” human chatbot in an online casino. Promoted to affiliate manager 10 months later, did that for a bit over a year.

Decided, lets try to become an affiliate, if I after a year can earn 3000 euro a month I wont go back to school. Sold my company in 2016 to gaming innovation group, joined as director of seo as employee nr 6 for gig media. Gig media grew to 200+ people and became a bit to pc for me, quit in 2018, rebuilt going hard on grey hat SEO then decided to take a break from the stress of SEO in November 2024 and basically retire but quickly got bored and started writing articles instead."

Follow Timothy's ongoing research: linkedin.com/in/timothy-m-59a216b/

Episode Summary

In this episode, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Timothy Malmros — a former gambling affiliate SEO turned black hat investigator — for a wide-ranging, candid conversation about how spam evolves, why Google keeps losing the spam war, and what the rise of AI really means for the internet's content ecosystem.

Timothy shares his hands-on research into drop domains and the canonical trick, a modern black hat method that combines expired high-authority domains with spam link bombardment and canonical redirects to game Google's rankings in the gambling and sweepstakes space. The conversation expands into Trust Rank theory, click metric manipulation, the collapse of the anti-spam team, and the disturbing implications of AI-generated content replacing original human publishing.

A refreshingly honest, technically deep episode for anyone who wants to understand what's actually happening beneath the surface of modern search.

Key Topics Covered

How black hat SEO evolved from hidden white-text links and site counter injection to the sophisticated drop domain / canonical trick
What the canonical trick is and how it creates an infinite $10 ranking loop using expired high-authority domains
Why gambling markets reveal emerging black hat techniques before any other niche
Trust Rank theory and the Medic update — distance from seed sites and why Healthline beat Dr. Josh Axe overnight
Why some drop domains work and others don't — the mixed signals Timothy is still investigating
The dismantling of Google's anti-spam team and its connection to the ChatGPT competitive threat
HCU as the reintroduction of Panda/Penguin — and whether it's algorithmic or hybrid
Google creating then killing its own monsters — from recipe sites to AI overviews
Click metric manipulation: Android bot farms with VPN rotation and what fake branding actually looks like
Rank tracker visits inflating GSC impressions — and why Google finally cut off 100-page results
Reddit as an AstroTurfable Google signal and the platform inflation play
SEMrush, Moz, and Ahrefs: the distorting pressures of IPOs and private equity
AI as a useful menial tool vs. a structural threat to publishing incentives

Resources & Links Mentioned

️ Unscripted SEO Podcast: unscriptedseo.com
Timothy Malmros on LinkedIn (black hat research posts): linkedin.com/in/timothy-m-59a216b/
Lily Ray — recommended follow for tracking Google update impact
SEOteric / Matt Brooks — source of the "no clean non-AI content since 2015" statistic
Darth NA (Twitter/X) — Medic update and Trust Rank discussions https://x.com/darth_na
Dr. Josh Axe — referenced as a case study for the Medic update https://draxe.com/
Ninja Casino — Swedish casino brand case study for bot traffic / branded search
Raven Tools — Jeremy's former employer; context for rank tracking data history https://raventools.com
Authority Labs — spun off from Raven Tools for rank tracking
Moz — SEO SaaS case study on private equity destruction
Ahrefs / Tim Soulo — referenced as a positive example of resisting IPO pressure

Zack Kadish on Enterprise SEO, AI Integration, and the Evolving SERP Landscape

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 19:36:31 +0000

Enterprise SEO, AI Integration & the Evolving SERP Landscape with Zack Kadish

Episode Host: Jeremy Rivera Guest: Zack Kadish, Senior Director of SEO Strategy at Conductor Podcast: Unscripted SEO Podcast

Episode Summary

Jeremy Rivera sits down with Zack Kadish, who has spent over eight years at Conductor climbing from keyword research analyst to Senior Director of SEO Strategy. Zack shares how Conductor blends SaaS technology with hands-on strategic services for enterprise clients, how the acquisition of Content King (now Conductor Website Monitoring) created a unified technical and content performance platform, and why the biggest threat to organic traffic right now isn't a single algorithm update — it's the cumulative impact of AI overviews, discussion forums, and shopping features reshaping the SERPs.

The conversation dives into real-world enterprise challenges like multi-domain cannibalization, breaking through organizational red tape, and the surprising value of treating Reddit and UGC forums as competitors in your SEO toolkit. Zack also discusses how Conductor is integrating AI directly into their platform — and why the SEOs who embrace AI tools will outpace those who don't.

Timestamps & Topics

[00:01] Introduction and Zack's background at Conductor
[01:15] Working from the bottom up — keyword research to Director
[02:19] How Conductor blends SaaS with strategy services
[03:49] The hybrid model: why dashboards alone aren't enough
[06:08] Acquiring Content King — now Conductor Website Monitoring
[08:26] Cutting enterprise red tape and breaking down silos
[10:19] International and cross-domain SEO cannibalization
[12:12] The biggest SERP changes: AI overviews, forums, and shopping
[13:52] Reddit, UGC, and cross-channel SEO strategy
[17:41] TikTok-driven product development at Real Men Apparel
[19:11] Competitive analysis beyond domain vs. domain
[21:24] Can you monitor competitor sites with Conductor?
[22:50] AI-powered content analysis and LLM integration
[24:32] Addressing AI hallucination and fact-checking
[26:18] The AI arms race in SEO
[28:07] Pat Reinhardt and SEO mentorship
[29:07] What's next at Conductor — 30 for 30 and AI overview tracking

Guest Links

Zack Kadish on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/zack-kadish
Conductor: conductor.com
Conductor Website Monitoring (formerly Content King): conductor.com/platform/website-monitoring
Conductor Academy: conductor.com/academy

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

Pat Reinhardt's 30 for 30 webinar — Monthly recap of the last 30 days of search in 30 minutes, hosted by Conductor
Mark Williams-Cook — Referenced for his process coupling the Also Asked API, Screaming Frog, and ChatGPT for content gap analysis
Jared Mortenson / Real Men Apparel — Discussed using TikTok lives for direct product development feedback
Jerry Cohen / Vooz — Referenced as an example of capitalizing on a competitor's downfall (Omegle)

Supporting External Articles

Connect With the Show

Unscripted SEO Podcast: unscriptedseo.com
SEO Arcade: seoarcade.com
Jeremy Rivera on Twitter: @JeremyRiveraSEO
Jeremy Rivera on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jeremyriveraseo

Subscribe to the Unscripted SEO Podcast for unscripted, unrehearsed, and unedited conversations with SEO professionals who share real stories, real strategies, and real results.

Benas Leonavicius on AI Search Optimization, Scaling Freelance SEO, and Why Keynote Speakers Need Basic SEO

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 17:14:44 +0000

Benas Leonavicius
Freelance SEO Consultant & Agency Builder
Website | LinkedIn | Substack

Benas Leonavicius has spent 10 years in the SEO trenches—from working with large e-commerce sites to navigating the bureaucratic nightmare of enterprise SaaS SEO. Now he's building an agency focused on keynote speakers, authors, and coaches, where basic SEO fundamentals deliver outsized results.

In this conversation, we dive deep into:

Why AI search optimization is the new frontier (and why tracking is nearly impossible)
How to actually appear in ChatGPT and AI overviews
The shift from website-centric to entity-centric SEO
Why SaaS companies are terrible clients for freelance SEO scalability
The #1 thing keynote speakers get wrong (hint: they don't mention their keywords)
Whether new people should enter SEO in 2025

If you're a freelancer trying to scale, a speaker trying to get found, or anyone wondering how AI is changing search—this episode is for you.

Key Topics Discussed

AI Search Optimization (11:11 - 21:03)

The biggest challenge with AI search: tracking is nearly impossible
How ChatGPT and Perplexity source their answers (training data + tiered Google searches)
Why speaker bureaus and listicles dominate AI search results for keynote speakers
The 25% consistency problem: AI gives different answers to different users
Backlinks, PR, mentions, and social media as the foundation of AI visibility
How to reverse-engineer AI sources by simply asking ChatGPT what it referenced

The SaaS SEO Nightmare (03:47 - 07:34)

Why SaaS companies limit freelancer scalability (1-2 clients max per month)
The JIRA ticket trap: submitting tickets just to edit meta descriptions
Managing multiple stakeholders with competing priorities
How product changes constantly disrupt long-term SEO strategy
Why Benas stopped taking SaaS clients despite their lucrative budgets

Keynote Speaker SEO Opportunities (02:14 - 03:47, 25:19 - 28:10)

Why 90% of speakers have zero SEO optimization
The differentiation trap: avoiding keywords to sound unique
The highest ROI fix: adding proper meta titles with target keywords
Why speakers already have strong websites—they just don't know it
Talk Thrive Agency: Benas's keynote speaker SEO service

Content vs. Links vs. Technical SEO (07:34 - 09:07)

Why Benas focuses on on-page content optimization
Link building feels "solved" and basic in 2025
Technical SEO's limitations for most businesses
Finding the middle ground between all three domains

AI Content Creation Reality Check (09:07 - 11:11)

ChatGPT as "your most popular but least trained customer support rep" (Matt Brooks, SEOteric)
Why Benas doesn't jump on new AI tools immediately
Using AI as a brainstorming and first draft tool, not a final solution
The hallucination and authenticity problem with over-reliance

Entity SEO vs. Website SEO (15:21 - 20:08)

How LLMs use training databases and tiered search results
Getting third-party content ranked, even when it's not on your site
Why digital visibility is shifting from website-centric to entity-centric
Direct traffic increasing as people find brands through AI, not clicks
Impressions mattering more than clicks (the Instagram-ification of search)

Should You Freelance in SEO Today? (21:03 - 23:24)

Why the future of SEO is uncertain but potentially opportune
The "SEO is dead" fear that didn't materialize
Learning LLM optimization now as a 5-7 year bet
Why established SEO pros have an easier path than newcomers
The risk of learning a skill that becomes hard to monetize

Common SEO Mistakes (23:24 - 25:19)

Most clients haven't done any SEO at all
Websites that accidentally built authority over a decade
Not knowing what to do with existing SEO strength
Little details that make a huge difference

Best Quotes

On SaaS Scalability:

"Although I can provide a lot of value to SaaS companies, at the end of the day, I might only have one or two clients like that per month, and then I cannot scale."

On AI Search Sources:

"For you to be on ChatGPT, you basically need to be on either the speaker bureau's websites or you need to be on those listicles because that seems to be one of the primary sources."

On AI's Future:

"I think what we're playing with is probably the worst version AI will ever be. I feel like we're still going upwards, not downwards."

On Keynote Speaker SEO:

"Imagine you're a speaker that wants to target keywords such as 'leadership keynote speaker.' They don't even have 'leadership' anywhere mentioned on their website because they want to differentiate themselves."

On Entity-Centric SEO:

"Digital visibility is less centric just to the website, but more towards the entity." - Jeremy Rivera

On SEO Fundamentals:

"Do you actually mention the keywords in the titles and the text? That's probably the highest ROI thing I do for my clients."

Jeremy Yang on Paid Ads Strategy and the SEO-SEM Divide

Jeremy Rivera — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 20:01:07 +0000

In this episode, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Jeremy Yang, founder of Digital Goliath, to explore the often-siloed world of paid advertising and how it intersects with SEO. Managing over $450,000 in monthly ad spend, Jeremy Yang shares brutal truths about Google Ads setup mistakes, the death of exact match keywords, and why most businesses fail at Meta advertising before they even start.

From offshore Google support nightmares to the "bullets in the chamber" framework for platform selection, this conversation reveals what seven years of hands-on PPC experience teaches you about digital marketing that no certification ever will.

Guest

Jeremy Yang
Founder, Digital Goliath
Website | LinkedIn

Jeremy founded Digital Goliath seven years ago and currently manages about $450,000 per month in ad spend across Google Ads and Meta platforms. Based in Sydney, Australia, he works with small to mid-sized businesses and white labels for larger agencies, specializing in high-accountability, hands-on campaign management.

Key Topics Discussed

The SEO-SEM Divide (00:00 - 05:00)

Why paid ads and SEO teams rarely communicate
Operational intensity differences between channels
Knowledge-sharing culture in PPC vs. SEO communities
Why Google gives advertisers more data than SEOs get

Google Ads Setup Nightmares (05:00 - 10:00)

The fox guarding the henhouse: letting Google set up your campaigns
Offshore vs. onshore Google support experiences
Most common setup errors (cramming everything into one campaign)
Why following scripts doesn't work in modern PPC

The Death of Exact Match (10:00 - 15:00)

How Google Ads has shifted to theme-based campaigns
Everything is "broad-ish" now regardless of match type settings
Competitor brands sneaking into your keyword auctions
Performance Max and the return of negative lists
ROAS-based campaign structuring for e-commerce

Display Ads: Remarketing Only (15:00 - 20:00)

Why display should only be used for remarketing
The spammy site problem and how to exclude them
Diminishing returns on display, YouTube, and discovery feeds
Strategic use of minimal display budgets ($10-20) for brand presence

Platform Selection Framework (20:00 - 30:00)

"How many bullets you got in the chamber?" - the content asset question
Meta is about burnout: why you need consistent creative production
When to go 80% Google, 20% Bing (service businesses without video)
When Meta makes sense (businesses with UGC and video capabilities)
Real-world example: Bubble.com Casting (children's modeling agency)

Cost Realities Nobody Discusses (30:00 - 35:00)

High-CPC industries: $200/click for tow trucks, $150/click for credit cards
Why $30/click for lawyers isn't unusual
Budget requirements for competitive industries
When to rely on Performance Max vs. traditional search campaigns

SEO Value Proposition for Small Business (35:00 - 45:00)

If you run out of ad budget, your campaign's over
SEO builds appreciable assets that compound over time
The upscale effect vs. the burn rate of paid ads
Working with ads teams to target expensive keywords organically
Client filtering: not every client is worth acquiring

AI Overviews and the Future of Search (45:00 - 55:00)

ChatGPT ads platform: $60-80 CPMs for businesses spending $1M+
The "charge and forget" model vs. nuanced ad platforms
AI overview impact: 25-40% traffic loss for publisher sites
The measurement problem: observing something changes it
100 searches = only 20% consistent results in AI answers
Why SEOs should be essential communicators, not siloed specialists

The Human-Bot Sandwich (55:00 - 65:00)

Bots don't have money - humans are still the end buyers
Layers of bots between seller and buyer (ChatGPT → Google → Website → LLM content)
Why bots reward human-friendly content
Subject matter expertise cannot come from LLM tools
The Ouroboros effect: AI eating its own tail

Content Strategy: Two Approaches (65:00 - 75:00)

Keyword clustering tool approach (top 10 URLs, top 100 keywords)
Expert-to-expert conversation approach
Why genuine conversations extract better targeting data
Internal interviews vs. external podcast approach
Example: Precast walls installation expert interview
Commercial viability: reaching people with purchasing power

Future-Proofing Agencies (75:00 - End)

Bolstering the playbook with AI-assisted competitive analysis
Moving away from "algorithm whisperer" tactics
Client differentiation through direct communication
Reducing churn by being present and accessible
Building systematic approaches to content multiplication

Best Quotes

"If you really want things to go fast, you got to go into paid ad space."

"For ads, the intensity is a lot higher. When your clients are doing ads, the stakes feel higher. They're more demanding. You have to be hovering around the computer. Things go wrong and things have to be fixed straight away."

"Everything is broad-ish now. Doesn't matter how you set it. Competitor brands can sneak in, whereas that's never happened before. So exact match is no longer exact match."

"How many bullets you got in the chamber? If you go 'Let's do this for three months' and you got like four assets, I'm like 'Where'd you get these four assets?' You go 'We shot it a year ago and the guy's gone now.' I don't know if you're going to last three months."

"Meta is about burnout. So you got to refill and replenish the tank."

"Since I started seven years ago, I only believe in using display ads for remarketing."

"If you have one product line that has 1.2X and 8X ROAS acceptable, that's not going to work because it's too scattered. Law of averages will kill you."

"Bots don't have money to spend. If you want something to happen, you still got to make sure it works for the last person who's going to be in the chain."

"SEO should recognize that this is an essential game now. It's not even optional anymore. They can't be working in silos. They've got to be a communicator."

Key Takeaways

The SEO-SEM divide persists largely due to operational intensity differences — paid ads require constant monitoring and rapid response, while SEO operates on longer timelines with more methodical testing and community knowledge-sharing.

Google's ad platform has shifted from granular keyword control to theme-based, broad-match campaigns, with Performance Max becoming the dominant model, requiring advertisers to focus on ROAS-based campaign structuring rather than traditional keyword segmentation.

Display advertising should be reserved exclusively for remarketing with clear offers, as the diminishing returns come very quickly on display, YouTube, and discovery feeds — smart advertisers allocate minimal budgets ($10-20) to maintain brand presence across touchpoints.

Platform selection depends on your content fuel supply — if you can't consistently produce fresh video and creative assets, Meta will burn you out quickly; service businesses without video capabilities should focus 80% on Google Search with 20% on Bing once search is optimized.

The future of marketing requires breaking down silos between SEO and paid ads teams, viewing performance through blended ROAS rather than isolated channel metrics, and creating content systems that repurpose assets across multiple platforms rather than treating ad creative as disposable.

In the emerging AI-driven search landscape, the "human-bot sandwich" principle matters most — bots don't have money, so content must ultimately serve humans even as it passes through multiple algorithmic layers, with genuine subject-matter-expert conversations producing far richer content than keyword-optimized articles alone.

Resources Mentioned

Digital Goliath - digitalgoliath.com.au
Digital Goliath Blog - digitalgoliath.com.au/blogs
ROAS Calculator - digitalgoliath.com.au/roas-calculator
CPC Calculator - digitalgoliath.com.au/cpc-calculator
Google Ads Management Services - digitalgoliath.com.au/google-ads-management-services
Social Media Ads Management - digitalgoliath.com.au/social-media-ads-management
SEOteric (Matt Brooks) - seoteric.com
SEO Arcade - seoarcade.com
Unscripted SEO - unscriptedseo.com

Companies/Examples Mentioned

Bubble.com Casting (Children's modeling agency in Australia)
Meta Ads Library
Google Transparency Center
Performance Max
Ahrefs
SEMrush
SE Rankings

Connect with Jeremy Yang

Website: digitalgoliath.com.au
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jeremy-yang
Location: Sydney, Australia (Servicing Worldwide)
Phone: 1300 347 677

Content Marketing Mastery with Cauveé: How to Build Your Personal Brand Empire

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 16:03:00 +0000

Summary

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO podcast, Keith Breseé and Cauveé, the inspiration engineer, delve into the intricacies of content marketing. They discuss the importance of platforms like Substack and Beehive for community building, the necessity of finding one's niche, and the long-term strategies required for effective content creation. The conversation also covers the significance of understanding market gaps, leveraging influencer marketing, and the role of paid advertising. Additionally, they emphasize the importance of crafting effective hooks, storytelling, and utilizing AI tools for content creation. The episode concludes with insights on building relationships and the long game in personal branding.

Takeaways

Substack is a powerful tool for building a community.
Decide whether to follow trends or focus on your passion.
Always provide value in your content to generate leads.
Content creation is a long-term commitment.
Reverse engineer your content strategy from your goals.
Understand your market and conduct competitor analysis.
Influencer marketing can significantly boost visibility.
Paid advertising can help in gaining traction.
Mastering hooks and storytelling is crucial for engagement.
Building relationships is key to long-term success.

Kyle Merrick: The Golden Rule Applies To How You Approach YOUR Business

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 13:16:22 +0000

What happens when a marketing coach who's also an actor sits down to talk about authenticity in business? You get one of the most unfiltered conversations about trust, AI, and human connection in marketing that we've had on this show.

Kyle Merrick doesn't pull punches. As the founder of Anarchy For A Day and a marketing veteran with nearly a decade of agency experience, he's seen it all—and he's not afraid to call BS on what's broken in modern marketing.

In this episode, we dive deep into the tension between performance and authenticity, why AI-generated content is killing trust, and how businesses can differentiate themselves in commodified markets. Kyle brings a unique perspective as both a marketer and an actor, understanding how to build believability while staying within boundaries.

This conversation gets heated, philosophical, and practical all at once. If you're tired of the same sanitized marketing advice, this episode is for you.

Key Topics Discussed

Trust & Authenticity in Marketing (00:00-10:02)

Why marketers have a trust problem
The challenge of discerning real vs. fake in the digital age
How social media has groomed us to accept mixed messages
The importance of delivery over content

AI vs. Human Connection (10:02-22:31)

Why AI-generated marketing content fails to build trust
The role of podcasting as a "safe space" for authentic conversation
How LLM tools confidently lie (and why that's dangerous)
The laziness trap: when efficiency kills effectiveness

The Coloring Book Analogy (22:31-27:39)

Finding authenticity within corporate boundaries
How to differentiate without going "cray-cray"
Showing customer pain points authentically
The golden rule applied to business communication

Market Understanding & Differentiation (27:39-37:23)

Why most businesses don't truly understand their marketplace
How to differentiate in commodified industries
The importance of speaking your customer's language
Interviewing clients as a core marketing strategy

Consistency & Long-Term Thinking (37:23-40:15)

Why consistency beats overnight success
How search engines and humans reward sustained effort
Understanding where your audience actually spends time
Building trust through reliable, authentic communication

Notable Quotes

"No marketer is really trustworthy until you actually get to know them. So I'm not even going to try to pitch myself on that."

"I don't give a shit about anything your business has to say if you're using AI. Let me see the people behind it, even if they're paid actors."

"Human to human podcast. This is the very important bit."

"Having been in business for myself for a decade now, it's like, this is the only kind of conversation I actually value because I know it's real, because you can sense the pain behind my words."

"People don't truly understand their marketplace. Go talk to the people that you're trying to serve or provide solutions to or sell a product to, whatever. Get to know them, their world."

"I always think about it like a coloring book. The lines are really what is within bound and reason for what is going to be believable."

"If you want real conversation, dish it out. Maybe that's the best answer to how can we get more genuine conversation in corporate marketing. Fucking do it. It ain't that hard."

"Business is still human. And if we're not accounting for that human factor, I wish you the best."

"Consistency is key. You need to be doing it a while for these different robotic entities to deem, 'All right, well, you're human and you do this.'"

About Kyle Merrick

Kyle Merrick is a marketing coach, actor, voice artist, and the founder of Anarchy For A Day. With nearly a decade as a marketing agency owner under his belt, Kyle now focuses on educating business owners and nonprofit leaders to think like marketing experts.

Operating at the intersection of communications engineering and resource management, Kyle specializes in helping small to midsize B2B, B2C, and nonprofit organizations craft strategic, data-driven marketing plans and messaging that drive real results. He's served industries including healthcare, hospitality, nonprofit, e-commerce, technology, and SaaS.

A "marketing vigilante" who stands to rebuild trust between organizations and marketers through education, Kyle calls BS on the rampant scams and shortcuts plaguing the industry. His philosophy? Empower through education. Separate with anarchy.

Originally from Chicago and now based in Denver, Kyle brings midwestern modesty to an industry that often rewards the immodest—and he's still figuring out how to navigate that tension.

Connect with Kyle:

Website: anarchyforaday.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kylemerrickactor
Email: anarchyforaday@gmail.com
Book a consultation: Schedule Free Call

Kyle's Services:

B.A. (Bachelor's of Anarchy): 10-session digital marketing bootcamp
One Hour of Anarchy: 1:1 coaching sessions focused on your priority needs

Resources & Links Mentioned

From This Episode:

Related Content on SEO Arcade:

Supporting Articles on Authenticity:

Example Referenced:

Atlanta Legal Care - Example of differentiation in commodified legal services

Key Takeaways

Trust in marketing requires genuine human connection. No amount of polish or AI assistance can replace the authenticity that comes from real conversation and understanding your customers deeply.
AI-generated content lacks the human pain and authenticity that creates real engagement. Podcasting and human-to-human conversation remain critical safe spaces where audiences can sense genuine expertise and experience.
Differentiation in commodified markets comes from deeply understanding your customer's language. Rather than competing on features alone, businesses must invest time in knowing their audience so thoroughly that they can speak their language "unequivocally without question."
Consistency beats overnight success every time. Whether you're building SEO authority or establishing brand trust, algorithms and humans alike need to see sustained, authentic effort over time before they'll recognize and reward your positioning.
Empathy is your competitive advantage. Taking time to understand other people's worlds—through interviews, conversations, and genuine curiosity—is the foundation of effective marketing that actually works.

About The Unscripted SEO Podcast

The Unscripted SEO Podcast features real conversations with SEO professionals, digital marketers, and business owners about what actually works in search engine optimization and content marketing. Hosted by Jeremy Rivera of SEO Arcade, each episode dives deep into authentic strategies, industry insights, and the human side of digital marketing.

We believe the best marketing comes from genuine expertise and conversation, not AI-generated content or cookie-cutter approaches. That's why every episode is transcribed and transformed into comprehensive articles, social content, and resources that preserve the authentic voice of our guests.

About the Host: Jeremy Rivera is the founder of SEO Arcade and host of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, with 19+ years of experience in SEO and digital marketing. He specializes in converting podcast interviews into comprehensive SEO content marketing strategies, helping businesses build authority through authentic conversation.

Listen & Subscribe:

Sponsor: This podcast is brought to you by The Cookeville Sunroom Company - Quality craftsmanship, genuine care, and transforming homes one sunroom at a time.

Charlie Sells on Brand Building and SEO Strategy

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 18:37:00 +0000

Charlie Sells brings 15 years of experience in brand messaging and positioning to discuss how small businesses can cut through complexity and build authentic brands that show up in search.

Key Topics Covered

Service Business Branding Charlie explains why service-based businesses should "stay hyper local" rather than trying to compete regionally. His advice for finding your competitive advantage? "Don't try to be bigger. Don't try to be flashier. Don't try to be anything other than who you are."

Working with a Florida event staffing company, Charlie discovered their retention rate was in the 80-90% range. "They're the most trusted name in conference and event staff"—that became their differentiator, not trying to be the biggest.

The Two-Part Brand Audit Framework Charlie always looks for two things: "Are we being really consistent? Every touchpoint of our brand—does it look the same, does it sound the same, does it feel the same on a sales call, social media, website, emails, in-person interactions?"

Second: "Are you really leaning into your unique competitive advantage?"

Branded vs. Non-Branded Search From his time at Dave Ramsey's Ramsey Solutions, Charlie learned a crucial lesson: "If they will get their branded terms right, then you can focus on the non-branded terms." He warns that "shiny object syndrome is rampant amongst entrepreneurs" who chase non-branded traffic while neglecting the basics.

His blunt take: "Search engines are the yellow pages today. You want to make it easy for somebody to just find you like that."

The Website Problem Charlie's most surprising piece of advice for clients: "If the weight of your business lands on your website, you have a problem."

Why? Your website is just one piece of your ecosystem. "If everything in your ecosystem is speaking the same language, then it's going to work." But when there's "no cohesive experience, no ecosystem," that's when brands struggle.

Technical SEO Still Matters Charlie shares a story about his staffing client who had keywords "in the graphic at the top of our page. In a designed graphic that can't be crawled, that had no alt text. I'm like, 'Nobody cares about that and Google's not recognizing it.'"

The lesson? "You have to plant a flag in the ground and say, here I am, and make it easy for people to find you."

Is SEO Dead? Charlie's take on the AI/LLM disruption: "I don't think traditional SEO is dead still. I think it still matters." While LLMs are changing search, "somebody is still looking for what you have" and "it still matters that you match intent more than anything else."

His strategy for the AI era? "I'm pushing folks to go way more grassroots and find ways to get on podcasts with niche audiences that are actually in their ICP."

Charlie's Two Essential Switches When onboarding clients, Charlie always starts with:

Mindset of Curiosity: "You've got to have a mindset of curiosity. If you are certain, if you are dead set, if you are rigid in your thinking about your brand, then this is not going to go well." His favorite question: "What is it like to be on the receiving end of your brand?"
Hold It With an Open Hand: "We've got to zoom out and not just think end of the month, end of the quarter. We've got to think about if where we want to be a year from now is our goal. What has to be true between now and then?"

Redirecting Good Ideas One of Charlie's most valuable skills is helping clients understand placement: "Just because it doesn't belong here doesn't mean it doesn't belong somewhere." A direct-to-camera video might be perfect for an email sequence but wrong for the homepage.

Resources Mentioned

Jason Barnard of Kalicube - Entity optimization discussion
Matt Brooks of SEOteric - "SEO's superpower is communication"
Michael McDougall on AI Search
Alejandro Meyerhans of Get Me Links - LLM search behavior
Chris Rydburg - Former Ramsey Solutions SEO
Precast Walls - Example service business
Atlanta Legal Care - Brand + entity association example

Connect With Charlie

Website: clarityovereverything.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/charlie-sells

Free Resource: Download Charlie's brand assessment to see if your brand is clear and aligned or confused and complex. Find "the taxes and the costs that are ruining your brand and your business" at clarityovereverything.com.

Best Quotes

"If the weight of your business lands on your website, you have a problem." - Charlie Sells

"Don't try to be bigger. Don't try to be flashier. Don't try to be anything other than who you are." - Charlie Sells

"What is it like to be on the receiving end of your brand?" - Charlie Sells

"Just because it doesn't belong here doesn't mean it doesn't belong somewhere." - Charlie Sells

"I don't think traditional SEO is dead still. I think it still matters." - Charlie Sells

Key Takeaways

Consistency across every brand touchpoint is non-negotiable—your sales calls, website, social media, and emails should all speak the same language.
Get your branded search terms right before chasing non-branded traffic; basic foundations like Google Business listings are still mission-critical.
Your website shouldn't carry the full weight of your business—think ecosystem, not billboard.
Traditional SEO fundamentals (H1 tags, alt text, proper taxonomy) still matter, even in the age of AI and LLMs.
The best competitive advantage is often hiding in plain sight—lean into what makes you genuinely different rather than trying to be bigger or flashier.

From Word of Mouth to Online Leads: Local SEO Strategies for Home Service Contractors with Wyatt Bonicelli

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 23:04:19 +0000

Wyatt Bonicelli of Evolve Agency shares practical local SEO tactics for home service businesses—from Google Business Profile optimization and location page strategy to creative link building through local sponsorships and a clever gift card referral system that turns every customer into a lead generator.

Episode Summary

In this episode, Jeremy Rivera on the Unscripted SEO podcast by Be Sharp Digital Marketing sits down with Wyatt Bonicelli, founder of Evolve Agency in Edmond, Oklahoma, to discuss the unique challenges and opportunities in marketing home service contractors. An engineer turned marketer, Wyatt has carved out a niche helping window cleaners, roofers, and other service professionals transition from relying solely on word-of-mouth to building a sustainable online presence that generates leads on autopilot.

The conversation covers the full spectrum of local SEO—from the critical importance of Google Business Profile verification to the age-old question of "how many location pages are too many?" Wyatt shares his approach to building local authority through sponsorship link building, Chamber of Commerce memberships, and creative tactics like using ChatGPT to find partnership opportunities.

Perhaps most valuable are the practical, low-cost marketing wins Wyatt recommends: car magnets, A-frame signs, door hangers with neighbor referrals, and a brilliant gift card system that creates a built-in affiliate program for service businesses. He also drops a Google Maps "driving directions hack" that sends trust signals to Google daily.

The episode wraps with a candid discussion about lead follow-up—why 90% of service calls go unanswered and how the Harvard study showing 400% better conversion within five minutes should change how contractors approach their phones.

Key Topics Covered

Why home service contractors struggle to invest in marketing (and how to meet them where they are)
Google Business Profile optimization for service-area businesses without a physical address
The location page debate: How many is too many in 2024?
Hub-and-spoke internal linking strategy for multi-location businesses
Creative link building through local sponsorships and advanced Google queries
The noindex mistake that cost one client years of branded search visibility
Steve Hunziker's gift card referral system explained
Why LLMs haven't disrupted local SEO (yet)
Combining Meta ads with SEO for short-term and long-term growth
The $10/day Meta ad strategy that pre-sells door-to-door visits
Lead follow-up statistics that should terrify every service business owner
Low-hanging fruit: Car magnets, A-frames, and door hangers
The Chamber of Commerce SEO bump
Google Maps driving directions hack for daily trust signals

Quotable Moments

"Any page on your website that doesn't have a link internally, externally, it's probably not going to get indexed."

"You're 400% more likely to convert if you call within the first five minutes."

"Let's turn one lead into more. Let's try to get three or four out of every one. And that pyramid will just continue to grow."

"We're kind of in a bubble a lot of times and think that everybody else is using the tools the same way that we are."

"If they don't have any web presence at all, no online reviews or a website talking about what they do and where—it's a little harder to trust them with a big check."

Guest Bio

Wyatt Bonicelli is the founder of Evolve Agency, a digital marketing firm based in Edmond, Oklahoma specializing in web development and SEO for home service contractors. With a background in engineering, Wyatt brings a systematic, results-driven approach to helping small businesses—particularly window cleaners, roofers, and renovation contractors—build their online presence and generate leads without relying solely on word-of-mouth marketing.

Website: EvolveAgencyOK.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/wyatt-bonicelli

Resources & Links Mentioned

Evolve Agency – Wyatt's Oklahoma-based SEO agency
SEO Playbook for Contractors – Evolve Agency
SEO for Roofers: Building a Predictable Pipeline – Evolve Agency
Why Most Local SEO Agencies Fail Chiropractors – Evolve Agency
White Label Local Link Building Through Community Cleanups – SEO Arcade
Link Building for Boring Industries – SEO Arcade
What to Do When SEO Rankings Drop After a Site Launch – Michael McDougald, Right Thing Agency
Zip Sprout Local Sponsor Finder (LSF) – Free tool for finding local sponsorship link opportunities
Steve Hunziker – YouTube creator who developed the gift card referral strategy

The Science and Strategy of Link Building with Alejandro Meyerhans

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 21:08:33 +0000

In this deep-dive conversation, Alejandro Meyerhans shares his journey from Spanish waiter to CEO of a successful link building agency, revealing the mathematical foundations and strategic frameworks that make link building work. We explore the science behind PageRank, the evolving role of links in LLM optimization, Google's HCU updates, and the hard truths about operating within platform ecosystems.

Guest Bio

Alejandro Meyerhans is the CEO of GetMeLinks, a strategic link building agency serving agencies and CMOs. Since 2016, Alejandro has built his SEO expertise from the ground up—starting with affiliate sites, becoming a forensic SEO auditor, and eventually leading one of the industry's most respected link building operations. He's known for his data-driven approach, combining mathematics, game theory, and rigorous testing to demystify what actually works in modern link building.

Connect with Alejandro:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alejandro-meyerhans
YouTube: Alejandro Meyerhans SEO
Company: GetMeLinks.com

Key Topics Discussed

From Waiter to SEO Expert (00:00 - 04:03)

How Alejandro discovered SEO in 2016 while trying to escape waiting tables in Spain
Working with Dominic Wells at Onfolio (now NASDAQ-listed)
The transition from building affiliate sites to becoming a forensic SEO auditor
How he became CEO of GetMeLinks after being a client first
The intersection of math, statistics, game theory, and SEO

The Science of Link Building (04:03 - 10:28)

Why link building has intentional opacity and FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt)
Key influencers: Charles Floate, Matt Diggity, and the TEDSEO testing community
Understanding what's working versus understanding why it works
The importance of analyzing competitive backlink profiles
How to read the link graph and replicate winning strategies

Core Link Signals Beyond PageRank (10:28 - 14:35)

PageRank: The foundational "link juice" model and how it divides authority
Anchor text ratios: Why exact match anchors no longer work (0% in most winning profiles)
Reasonable Surfer: Link placement matters—body links above the fold carry more weight
Passage rank: Surrounding text relevance amplifies or diminishes link value
Link velocity: Must be proportional to traffic, brand search volume, and referral sources
Container authority: The power of both the linking page AND the linking domain
Sequential timing: Why you can't start a new site with 100 digital PR links

Related Resource: How to Start a Link Building Campaign

Distance to Seed and Verticality (14:35 - 22:03)

Understanding Google's seed list: .gov, .edu, and tier one authorities
How topical authority spreads from hub sites in each vertical
Why locksmith SEO is different from e-commerce which is different from YMYL
The completion game: You only need to match top 3 competitors plus a bit more
SEO as a jigsaw puzzle—technical foundation, content, user signals, brand signals
The logarithmic nature of PageRank (getting from DR 80 to 90 costs exponentially more)

Related Resource: Link Building for New Websites

Link Gap Analysis Methodology (22:03 - 29:33)

How to analyze the top 3 competitors for any given niche
Bucketing links by DR ranges (30-40, 40-50, etc.)
Evaluating trust through real traffic (not manipulated Ahrefs metrics)
Geographic relevance for local businesses
Keyword-level analysis: Different competitors for different target terms
The risk of competing against DR 90+ inner pages with a DR 5 homepage
Why citation-inflated DR scores are easy to spot

Get Your Own Analysis: GetMeLinks Link Report

Local Link Building and Geographic Signals (29:33 - 30:36)

How geographic relevance functions as a trust signal
The value of links from local institutions (chambers of commerce, local boards)
National website links vs. local newspaper links for service businesses
Example: Precast concrete walls serving specific cities
Why being dramatically different in the right direction creates massive advantage

Understanding E-E-A-T (30:36 - 31:13)

Why E-E-A-T is not a signal—it's a cluster of signals
The integrity analogy: E-E-A-T = commitment to a set of values, but which values?
Breaking down the actual components: distance to seed, high-trust backlinks
Knowledge Graphs, Knowledge Panels, and entity verification
Social profiles, citations, BBB listings, Amazon author pages
Publishing books to establish expertise: Self-Published and Lousy Knowledge Panel

LLM Optimization and ChatGPT Rankings (31:13 - 41:11)

Why LLMs use a "toddler version" of PageRank compared to Google
The fundamental difference: LLMs rewrite stories, Google creates leaderboards
Tier 1: Seed list sites (.gov, .edu, Mayo Clinic, Healthline)
Tier 2: Niche-specific authorities that ChatGPT has indexed
Tier 3: Real-time search aggregation across 20+ search engines
How traditional SEO rankings feed into LLM source selection (80% of the answer)
The importance of brand mentions with positive sentiment
Why anchor text should be brand name for LLM optimization
Consensus rules: ChatGPT defers to what the majority of sources say
ChatGPT market share: 6 billion monthly views vs. Google's 85 billion
Perplexity has only 10% of ChatGPT's traffic—focus on Google first

Key Insight: To rank in ChatGPT, rank on Google first. Then serve robot-readable content and build your online reputation.

The HCU (Helpful Content Update) Revelation (41:11 - 51:00)

Darth N-A-A's theory: HCU = click behavior + distance to seed
Why sites with massive thin content but no authority got hit first
The birthday sites example: Programmatic content with zero backlink profile
People Also Ask farming sites that got wiped out
The cost vs. value framework: Google evaluated crawl expense against revenue generation
Sites that don't run Google Ads face higher scrutiny
Crawl efficiency matters: Response times over 200ms are "too expensive"
How to check your site's crawl stats in Google Search Console
The 25,000 pages found but not indexed problem (for a 200-page site)
Helpful for whom? Helpful for Google's finances
The 2018 removal of "Don't be evil" from Google's code of conduct
Internal Google pressure to hit ad revenue targets affected SERP layouts

Check Your Site: Google Search Console → Settings → Crawl Stats

Operating in Platform Ecosystems (51:00 - 59:54)

The devil's bargain: Google promised traffic in exchange for good content
Featured snippets and AI Overviews eating the sandwich
Zero-click searches have skyrocketed
The Amazon FBA analogy: Build a successful product, Amazon copies it
HubSpot, Jobber, and other platform plugin ecosystems
Why you can't be too angry—you're playing in someone else's house
SEOs are paid to "tamper with signals" the algorithm interprets
Lily Ray's wisdom: "It works until it doesn't"
Strategic vs. tactical SEO: Planning for the pivot
The white text on white background example (hex code reading)
We give Google signals that please them; they send us their users
Google invested billions in search; we leverage that investment

Current Projects and Future Directions (59:54 - End)

Active in the Chiang Mai SEO community
Speaking at the Link Building Mastery Conference
Developing the Entrepreneur Map and Compass framework
Based on classical education: The Trivium and Quadrivium
Creating a demystifying GEO/AEO/AISEO series
Combating "chunk optimization" snake oil and $5K/month GEO services
Reality check: "Just make sure you're ranking on your map pack"
GetMeLinks continues refining link building science for agencies and CMOs
Upcoming second YouTube channel for leadership and esoteric business knowledge

Key Quotes

"SEO changed my life. I didn't want to go back to being a waiter. It played to all my subjects of special interest: math, statistics, game theory, testing, language—that's how you get good SEO done." — Alejandro Meyerhans

"Building a backlink profile is a lot like chess. You don't start a brand new website and run it with 100 digital PR type of backlinks because that just doesn't fly." — Alejandro Meyerhans

"I always equate traffic with trust. If the traffic is real, not some manipulated keywords to inflate the Ahrefs graphs, then it matters." — Alejandro Meyerhans

"SEO is a game of completeness. Link building, same. You only have to be as complete as the guys in the top three, then this much more. Everything else is excess." — Alejandro Meyerhans

"E-E-A-T is not a signal, it's not something. E-E-A-T equals cluster of what? It's an amalgamation of a certain set of signals in particular." — Alejandro Meyerhans

"LLMs are rewriters of the story. Google is a game of who needs to be on this leaderboard. With LLMs, it's 'I'm going to use whatever sources I feel will tell you the most valuable story to solve your problem.'" — Alejandro Meyerhans

"How do we rank in ChatGPT? Rank on Google. Let's nail the job because all the long tail queries related to your industry, that's how it starts getting additional knowledge." — Alejandro Meyerhans

"Helpful content update—helpful for whom? Helpful for Google's finances. We cannot forget that we are making money in their home through the traffic that goes to their website." — Alejandro Meyerhans

"If you're working in somebody else's ecosystem, to quote Lily Ray, it works until it doesn't." — Jeremy Rivera

"We are going to the platform and saying, 'Hey, platform, look, I've done all these changes. Does this please you more according to the math that I know pleases you?'" — Alejandro Meyerhans

Key Takeaways

Link building is strategic, not tactical. Successful link building requires analyzing what's already winning in your niche and replicating that pattern while understanding the principles behind why it works. The answer is always in the data—competitive backlink analysis reveals the authority, relevance, and velocity needed to rank.

Core link signals extend beyond PageRank. Modern SEO considers anchor text ratios, reasonable surfer signals (link placement on page), passage rank (surrounding text relevance), link velocity proportional to traffic and brand signals, container page authority, and the proper sequencing of link types as a site matures.

SEO is a completion game, not a perfection game. You only need to be as complete as the top three competitors, then slightly better. Focus on filling gaps in your backlink profile rather than building excess links. Strategic difference matters—having what competitors don't can provide massive advantage.

Geographic and vertical relevance matter differently. Local links from institutions provide trust signals and differentiation. Different niches (locksmiths vs. e-commerce vs. YMYL) require completely different link building approaches. Always analyze the specific competitive landscape for your niche.

LLM optimization follows traditional SEO principles with brand emphasis. ChatGPT uses a tier system (seed list → niche authorities → search aggregation) where traditional Google rankings feed tier 2 and 3 placement. Brand mentions with positive sentiment, consensus across sources, and being featured on authoritative sites matter more than exact match optimization for LLM visibility.

Google's HCU targeted cost vs. value. Sites hit by helpful content updates often shared characteristics: expensive to crawl (bloated URLs, slow response times), didn't generate ad revenue for Google, lacked strong backlink profiles and brand signals. The "helpful" assessment considers Google's business model, not just user value.

Operating in platform ecosystems requires acceptance and adaptation. Whether it's Google, Amazon, or any other platform, you're playing in someone else's house. Strategic SEOs plan for algorithm changes and platform pivots rather than expecting static rules. The game is understanding what the platform needs and giving them slightly more value than you extract.

Distance to seed and trust signals form the foundation. Links from .gov, .edu, and tier one authorities (like Healthline in health) provide outsized value because they're manually vetted by search engines. Building towards and from these trust sources should be prioritized, especially early in a site's lifecycle.

Resources Mentioned

People & Influencers

Dominic Wells - Onfolio (NASDAQ)
Charles Floate - Gray hat SEO strategist
Matt Diggity - SEO testing and education
TEDSEO/TedKubaitis - SEO testing community
Michael McDougald - Right Thing SEO
Matt Brooks - SEOteric
Darth N-A-A - Anonymous SEO analyst on Twitter
Lily Ray - SEO consultant and industry expert
Jabez Reuben - Link Building Mastery Conference

Tools & Platforms

Ahrefs - Backlink analysis and SEO metrics
SEMrush - Competitive research (now owned by Adobe)
Google Search Console - Crawl stats and indexing analysis
Screaming Frog - Website crawling tool

Conferences & Events

Chiang Mai SEO Conference - Annual Thailand SEO event
Link Building Mastery Conference - Specialized link building event

Companies & Services

GetMeLinks - Link building agency
SEO Arcade - Jeremy Rivera's consultancy
Permacast Walls - Precast concrete walls example

Additional GetMeLinks Resources

Books Mentioned

Self-Published and Lousy Knowledge Panel by Jeremy Rivera
A practical guide to establishing entity authority even with minimal traditional credentials.

Contact Information

Jeremy Rivera

Website: SEO Arcade
About: Jeremy Rivera Bio
Podcast: Unscripted SEO

Alejandro Meyerhans

Company: GetMeLinks
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alejandro-meyerhans
YouTube: Alejandro Meyerhans SEO

Subscribe to Unscripted SEO

Stay tuned for more unfiltered conversations with SEO experts who share real strategies, honest insights, and the mathematical principles behind what actually works in search.

Visit UnscriptedSEO.com

Killing Content Marketing Strategy In the Age of LLMs with Alison Ver Halen

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 17:05:28 +0000

How a Psychology Degree, Blog Writing, and Storytelling Built a $75K Content Marketing Success

About This Episode

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, host Jeremy Rivera sits down with Alison Ver Halen, founder of AV Writing Services and author of Content Marketing Made Easy. Alison shares how she accidentally fell into content marketing after graduating during the 2009 recession, and how writing blog posts for a law firm led to $75,000 in new business within just six months.

The conversation covers the evolving landscape of SEO and content marketing, including E-E-A-T principles, the Helpful Content Update, the "robot sandwich" of AI-driven search, and why storytelling remains the most powerful tool in a content marketer's arsenal.

Guest Bio

Alison Ver Halen is the founder of AV Writing Services and a content marketing strategist with nearly a decade of experience. With degrees in English and Psychology from Lawrence University, Alison helps professional service providers attract, engage, and convert high-quality leads through strategic blog content, landing pages, and brand storytelling. She is also the author of Content Marketing Made Easy.

Key Takeaways

The $75K Blog Post Discovery: Alison's first content marketing client saw $75,000 in new business within six months—just from blog posts she was writing for his law firm
Information Gain is Everything: The key to standing out isn't just creating content—it's adding your unique perspective, experience, and stories that ChatGPT can't replicate
E-E-A-T is About How You Write: Rather than technical markup and author schemas, E-E-A-T signals come from first-person experience and professional perspective woven into your content
Don't Propose on the First Date: Match your calls-to-action to where prospects are in the buyer journey—a newsletter signup beats a sales call request for top-of-funnel visitors
The Robot Sandwich: With AI tools searching other AI outputs based on human-created content, writing for humans remains the winning strategy
It's Still SEO, People: Despite the hype around GEO, AIEO, and AEO, the fundamentals of search engine optimization haven't changed—just the platforms
Guest Everything: Podcasts, blogs, newsletters—earned media builds the Know-Like-Trust factor that drives real business results

Topics Discussed

[00:00] Introduction and Alison's background
[02:34] The $75,000 aha moment in content marketing
[04:02] Methodology for researching and developing unique content
[05:54] E-E-A-T: What it really means for content creators
[10:22] The "robot sandwich" of AI-driven search
[14:05] Understanding the buyer journey and sales funnel
[15:51] Lead magnets and CTAs in the post-ChatGPT era
[19:42] The Helpful Content Update and brand identity
[26:08] GEO, AIEO, AEO—why it's still just SEO
[27:02] Link building in the age of LLMs
[36:49] Best practices for content quality and distribution
[41:08] Where to find Alison Ver Halen

Notable Quotes

"After six months, he came back and told me that I had brought in $75,000 worth of business to his law firm just through the blog posts I was writing for him."

"We are primed to connect with stories, we are primed to remember stories. So that is critical for getting your point across and for being memorable."

"I refer to it as proposing on the first date. Like, well we just met, dude. That is way too much way too soon. And you're gonna scare them off."

"AI does not generate anything. It just regurgitates what humans have already created."

"It's still SEO, people. Just because the search engine has changed does not mean that it's not SEO."

Resources & Links Mentioned

Guest Links:

Website: AV Writing Services
LinkedIn: Alison Ver Halen
YouTube: Alison Ver Halen Content Marketer

Articles from AV Writing Services:

People & Companies Mentioned:

Additional Resources:

Connect with the Podcast

Website: Unscripted SEO Podcast
Produced by: SEO Arcade

Subscribe & Follow

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from Alison's insights on content marketing strategy.

William Wang talks AI-Enabled Marketing Teams: Research Automation + Human Strategy (Agency Case Study)

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 03:06:11 +0000

Will Wang of Black Belt Consulting joins Jeremy Rivera to discuss his journey from corporate IT analyst to accidentally building a seven-figure marketing agency. In this candid conversation, Will shares the expensive lessons he learned about hiring (including a $500,000 mistake), how he's leveraging AI for market research while keeping humans in the loop, and why he's betting big on YouTube and Instagram while going bearish on LinkedIn for 2025.

This episode is packed with practical insights for agency owners, consultants, and entrepreneurs who are scaling their businesses and want to avoid the costly mistakes that come with rapid growth.

Listen to the full episode: Unscripted SEO Podcast

Guest Information

Will Wang

About Will: Will grew up in Sydney, Australia, worked in corporate IT making $130-150K/year before taking the leap into entrepreneurship. After two years of struggles and making every mistake possible, he built a seven-figure marketing agency which he sold 12 months ago. He's also a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt (earned 4 years ago) and now runs Black Belt Consulting, helping businesses scale from $25K to $250K per month with strategic marketing consulting.

Key Topics & Timestamps

The Corporate Escape

Growing up as an immigrant in Sydney, Australia
The soul-crushing reality of corporate IT ($130-150K salary trap)
The difficult decision: when to make the leap with a family to support
Two years of stumbling through every possible business mistake

The $500K Hiring Mistake

Why he hired a general manager when the business wasn't ready
The account manager who created an unnecessary layer between clients and strategy
The remote copywriter problem: why proximity matters for creative roles
Key lesson: "We weren't big enough for a GM. We just needed me to spend less time working in a few of the things on the business"
Taking full ownership: "It was all my fault... their abilities were hampered by how I supported them"

Building Lean, AI-Enabled Teams

The shift to small core teams of highly competent people
His new hiring framework: creativity vs. process-driven roles
When to hire locally vs. when to leverage cost arbitrage with virtual teams
Using online jobs.ph and Upwork strategically
"Give people a goal, give people a vision, and then hire people who are competent and disciplined enough to do what they need to do"

SOPs and Systems for Non-Operations People

Using Loom videos to document processes instead of writing SOPs yourself
Having your VA or operations person create the documentation by following your recordings
Why being the "big picture creative" doesn't mean you can't systematize

AI for Market Research (Not Delivery)

How customer research went from weeks to minutes
Using ChatGPT and Claude to build detailed customer avatars
The critical rule: "Nothing that gets delivered to clients is actually AI done"
AI for research, humans for delivery—that's the framework
Building AI-enabled teams in 2025

Content Strategy & Platform Bets for 2025

Going all-in on YouTube: "YouTube is the big one for me. I'm investing a lot into that this year"
The Instagram surprise: small audience generating hundreds of views with long-term growth
Why he's bearish on LinkedIn: "It just feels so transactional and kind of day by day"
Platform-specific content approaches: perfection for ads, human-to-human for video, fluidity for blogs
"I don't like creating content once and then having it just disappear into the ether"

Service Business Marketing

Why service businesses are actually easier (limited geography = less competition)
The comeback of direct mail for local service businesses
Using Meta ads and Google ads with geographic targeting
"Just go direct" - the simplest strategy for local services

The Franchise Question

The value of systems when you haven't run a business before
Trade-offs: less mistakes vs. less freedom to learn
When franchising makes sense vs. bootstrapping
"It's just a balance of where you want to go, what works for you, what skills you have"

The Accidental Seven-Figure Build

"I accidentally built my previous business into a seven figure business without really meaning to"
Selling the business 12 months ago
What he's doing differently with Black Belt Consulting
The strategic gap: "What people are missing is the strategic piece"

Quotable Moments

On Making the Leap:

"If I don't do this now, then it's never going to get done. But how do you replace $130,000 per year salary? Right? Like that's pretty difficult."

On Building Accidentally:

"I accidentally built my previous business into a seven figure business without really meaning to. It was just like the growth happened."

On Making Mistakes:

"I made every single mistake to the point where I couldn't make any more mistakes. And then the business kind of took off."

On the Hiring Disaster:

"I've probably personally lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in terms of hiring the wrong people, setting them up for failure, setting them up in the wrong way."

"We weren't big enough for a GM. Like we just did not need a general manager. We just needed me to spend less time working in a few of the things on the business."

On Team Building:

"I like having a very small core team of highly competent people. People who you don't necessarily have to micromanage or have a look at what they're doing every single day of the week."

On AI Research:

"AI has made research just such an easy thing to do. Rather than taking days, if not weeks, it's now delivered in a matter of minutes."

"Nothing that we do that gets delivered to clients or that we tell clients to deliver for themselves—none of that is actually AI done. So the output is still very hands on human."

On AI Hallucination:

"There's just so much BS with AI. It hallucinates so much stuff all the time. So you've got to be very, very careful."

On Platform Strategy:

"YouTube is the big one for me. I'm investing a lot into that this year."

"LinkedIn just feels like it's so transactional and kind of day by day at the moment. So I'm a little bit bearish on LinkedIn, but more bullish on video content now."

"I don't like creating content once and then having it just disappear into the ether."

On Content Persistence:

"The fact that we can post a reel up and get long-term growth and every single day it grows—that's kind of surprising to me because it means that the content's sticking around."

On Service Business Marketing:

"As companies start ignoring direct mail or fight to do purely online, I find that the offline has really started to come around and perform a lot better."

On What's Missing:

"With AI coming through, the marketing execution stuff is actually so easy now. What people are missing is the strategic piece."

On His New Approach:

"If you're doing 25K a month and you want to get to 250K, hit me up."

Key Takeaways

Don't hire for the business you wish you had - Hire for the actual stage you're at right now. Will's $500K lesson was hiring a GM and account manager when he just needed to delegate specific tasks, not entire roles.
Proximity matters for creative roles - Junior creative positions benefit massively from sitting next to senior people. Remote works for process-driven roles with clear SOPs.
AI for research, humans for delivery - Use AI to compress research timelines from weeks to minutes, but keep human oversight and creation for anything client-facing.
Small teams of A+ players > Large teams of B players - Focus on highly competent people who don't need micromanagement rather than building layers of management.
Platform strategy matters in 2025 - YouTube and Instagram are becoming more valuable for consultants than LinkedIn due to content persistence and less transactional engagement.
Direct mail is making a comeback - For local service businesses, offline channels are outperforming as everyone else goes all-in on digital.
The strategic gap is the opportunity - With AI making execution easier, the real value is in strategic thinking and positioning.
SOPs don't require operations people - Record Loom videos of you doing tasks, have someone else document them. Perfect for creative/big picture founders.
Cost arbitrage still works - For roles with clear processes and less creative thinking, virtual hiring (Philippines, etc.) provides excellent value.
Franchises trade freedom for systems - Great for first-time business owners, less ideal for experienced entrepreneurs who want flexibility.

About the Host

Jeremy Rivera is the founder of SEO Arcade, host of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, and has 19+ years of SEO experience. He specializes in converting podcast interviews into comprehensive content marketing strategies and connecting SEO tactics to actual business outcomes.

Jeremy has worked in-house, at agencies (both good and bad), as a successful freelancer, and now runs SEO Arcade's whitelabel podcast-based content and link building service for agencies and businesses.

Subscribe & Connect

Never miss an episode:

Subscribe to the Unscripted SEO Podcast
Follow on your favorite podcast platform
Sign up for the weekly #SEObits newsletter at SEO Arcade

Connect with Jeremy:

SEO Arcade
LinkedIn: Search for Jeremy Rivera SEO

Related Episodes & Content

If you enjoyed this episode, you might also like:

Matt Brooks (SEOteric) on the end of Google-only SEO
Michael McDougall on AI as "your least trained customer support representative"
Our series on search behavior evolution and the robot sandwich problem

Episode Length: ~47 minutes

Episode Format: Unscripted conversation

Best For: Agency owners, consultants, entrepreneurs scaling service businesses, marketers interested in AI integration and platform strategy

This episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast brings you real conversations with real SEO professionals about their journeys, mistakes, and insights. No scripts, no PR-approved talking points—just honest discussion about what works (and what doesn't) in building marketing businesses.

From Hammer to Keywords with Kyle Bailey

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 09:20:00 +0000

Jeremy Rivera interviews Kyle Bailey, founder of Front Burner Marketing, about local SEO strategies specifically designed for home service businesses. Kyle brings a unique perspective as one of the few SEO professionals who has actually worked in the trades—framing, roofing, drywall, and kitchen/bathroom remodeling.

Kyle Bailey

Founder, Front Burner Marketing
15 years in home service digital marketing
Former tradesman turned SEO specialist
Author of upcoming book: What's Your Story? The Path to Connection with a Homeowner

Connect with Kyle:

LinkedIn: The Kyle Bailey
Website: FrontBurnerMarketing.net
Twitter/X: @FrontBurnerMarketing

Key Topics Discussed

The Unique Challenges of Home Service Marketing (02:00)

The attention gap problem: business owners are firefighters and babysitters
Why before-and-after photography is critical but difficult to execute
Kyle's hands-on approach: driving to clients in Texas to handle photography personally
The urgent need to adapt to AI-driven search changes

Your Story as Your Superpower (04:00)

Every home service business has a unique story that competitors lack
How to identify and articulate your core values
The difference between shotgun vs. rifle messaging (broad vs. focused)
Employee, friend, and customer audits to discover hidden core values
Why story-based differentiation creates genuine connection with ideal customers

Key Resource: What's Your Story? - Front Burner Marketing

The Franchise Limitation (06:30)

Why only 3 out of 100 franchises can effectively compete in local SEO
Corporate restrictions on messaging, location pages, and customization
The Quiznos cautionary tale
Due diligence steps before buying a pizza franchise or any franchise
Free discovery calls available to assess franchise SEO viability

Community Co-Marketing: Driving Past Free Money (10:00)

The "barrel of $100 bills at every red light" concept
Neighborhood signage opportunities: 30-second content goldmine
Co-marketing with complementary trades (painters, siders, window companies)
How to create video content on job sites with partners
Transcribing videos into blog posts for multiple websites
The professional advantage: extracting marketing value from daily activities

Related Article: Matt Brooks of SEOteric on nexus-based link building

Example Businesses:

Permacast Walls (precast concrete walls)
Newton Crouch (renovations)

Community Cleanups and Local Link Building (21:00)

Why community cleanups work on Reddit (when normal promotion fails)
Keep America Beautiful: National nonprofit with county-level support
Community Clean Links - organizing community cleanup initiatives
SEO benefits: event directories, national aggregators, Google event SERP
Brand mentions directly in search results
Documentation strategy: branded team, photos, no pitching

The AI Search Reality (24:00)

Michael McDougald's quote: "Your least trained but most popular customer support representative is ChatGPT"
Kyle's Dallas remodeling company: dominant on Google, invisible on ChatGPT
"You're out of time" - the urgency of adapting to AI platforms

The 80/20 AI Strategy (26:00)

80% effort: telling your story cleanly and authentically
20% effort: strategic positioning for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini
Weekly tracking experiment: "Chicago plumber" across all platforms
Early volatility vs. emerging consistency in AI results
How to monitor what competitors are doing in AI search

Related Service: AI SEO at Front Burner Marketing

Website Shift: Discovery vs. Vetting Device (28:00)

The old model: 10 blue links leading to discovery
The new model: users vet you after AI/maps/reviews discovery
Google's evolution: ads → maps → People Also Ask → featured snippets → AI Overview → Reddit
AI summaries now appearing in Google Business Profile descriptions
How AI interprets and summarizes content (not direct quotes)

The Investment Reframe (30:00)

Why $30,000/year feels expensive but $15/hour feels cheap
Calendar mining: extracting marketing value from existing activities
The compound effect of consistent SEO investment over 3-5 years
Professional services as high-end employees, not expenses

Explore Services: Local SEO Services at Front Burner Marketing

Best Quotes

"If you're a home service business owner, I can almost guarantee you you're driving past free money every day. Just think—every red light you come to, there's a barrel of $100 bills over there and you just drive right by it."

"Your website's now a vetting device rather than a discovery device because of the changes Google had already made."

"You're out of time. You're in that movie scene where the ferry's pulling away, but the ramp's still down and the car's trying to jump over. That's where you are right now."

"If you could only say one thing to your homeowner, what would it be? That takes some time, some effort, and some meditation."

"When you connect on core values with your ideal customer, they feel something. Even if they never buy from you, they feel it."

Key Takeaways

✅ Home service businesses need to prioritize storytelling over keyword optimization. The most effective marketing starts with identifying and communicating core values that differentiate you from competitors in commoditized markets.

✅ Co-marketing with complementary businesses is massively underutilized. Simple actions like taking selfie videos with painters, plumbers, or other trades on job sites creates authentic content, builds local authority, and generates natural brand mentions across multiple websites.

✅ AI search is fundamentally changing the discovery process. Business owners can no longer afford to wait—80% of effort should focus on clear storytelling while 20% should go toward strategic positioning in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other LLM platforms.

✅ Neighborhood-level content is free money. Taking 30 seconds to photograph neighborhood signage and create location-specific content for every job creates micro-location pages that dominate local search without significant investment.

✅ Franchise models severely limit local SEO effectiveness. Out of 100 franchise conversations, only about 3 can make the necessary changes to compete effectively in local search due to corporate restrictions on messaging and website customization.

✅ Community involvement must be documented and linked strategically. Sponsoring cleanups, attending galas, and supporting local organizations only generates SEO value when properly documented with photos, links, and cross-promotional content across multiple platforms.

✅ The days of H-tag and keyword optimization are over. If your SEO isn't part of telling your authentic story, you're building on sand. Modern algorithms and AI platforms reward authority, authenticity, and relevance.

Why Your Content Ecosystem Is Broken (And How to Fix It with Lisa Corwood)

Jeremy Rivera — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 15:17:34 +0000

Lisa Corwood, founder of Fuelled Agency, joins Jeremy to discuss how she transformed creative marketing experiments at a UK car dealership into a full-service agency philosophy. From the viral "Where's Wally" campaign that sparked it all to navigating Search Everywhere Optimization in 2026, this conversation covers authentic community engagement, why no industry is truly "boring," and the looming question of AI-generated content quality.

Guest

Lisa Corwood
Founder, Fuelled Agency

Topics Covered

(00:01) Introduction and Lisa's background
(00:18) The origin story: From UK car dealership to agency
(02:15) Creative community engagement vs. traditional advertising
(04:13) Facebook Groups and providing genuine value
(06:01) The "spray and pray" problem on Reddit and social platforms
(07:05) Ad blindness and brand values alignment
(08:51) Building content ecosystems that connect
(10:59) Why "boring" industries have the most passionate audiences
(13:14) Showing your team and humanizing your brand
(15:06) The "20 leads" question: Testing your funnel
(16:54) Co-marketing with complementary businesses
(18:44) Search Everywhere Optimization: The multi-platform customer journey
(21:20) The accelerating pace of change in digital marketing
(23:24) AI content, "slop," and the trust problem
(25:22) Gen Alpha's skepticism toward AI-generated content
(27:57) What's next for Fuelled Agency in 2026

Key Quotes

"If you're going to go in there, don't just walk in a room and shout what you're saying and go out. Treat it as if it's a group of people—not a place to just spray and pray."

"No matter what business it is—if it's selling a product, if it's shiny, if it's Lamborghinis or diamond rings—behind all of that is a team that makes that happen. Tell everybody about it!"

"If you got 20 leads right now into your business, where would they go and what would happen with them? If you don't have an answer to that, there's something you need to look at."

"Customers will hop from one platform to the other to get what they are looking for. They won't just take a five-star review as gospel."

"I'm not against AI—but use it in collaboration, in conjunction. You can't solely rely on it."

Resources & Links Mentioned

Lisa's Agency & Socials

Industry Resources

People & Companies Referenced

Related Unscripted SEO Episodes

Quick Takeaways

Lead with value in communities — Treat Facebook Groups and online forums like rooms full of real people, not billboards.
Ask the "20 leads" question — If 20 leads came in today, do you know where they'd go and what would happen? If not, fix your funnel.
No industry is boring — The more "boring" your business seems, the more passionate your niche audience likely is. Feature your team and customers.
Search Everywhere Optimization matters — Customers now verify across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Google before buying. Consistency builds trust.
Co-marketing beats competition — Partner with adjacent businesses to share audiences and marketing resources.
AI is a tool, not a strategy — Use AI to assist, but don't let it replace authentic content and human judgment.

The Human Element in SEO: A Unscripted Interview with Tianna Mamalick

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 19:44:05 +0000

Guest: Tianna Mamalick, SMB Marketing School

Episode Overview

Tianna Mamalick shares her 12-year journey in SEO and why she's passionate about working with small businesses. With honest insights on managing client expectations, pairing SEO with paid ads, and the current state of AI-generated content, this conversation reveals what's actually working for service-based businesses right now.

Key Discussion Points

Why Small Businesses? For small businesses, a 10K monthly revenue increase is life-changing. Tianna shares how clients email her about hiring their first employee or taking their first vacation—results that go far beyond vanity metrics.

Managing Expectations Brutally honest approach: clients sign for three months minimum, must have budget they can afford to lose, and receive realistic assessments of whether their business model fits the proven formula.

SEO + Ads Strategy When done strategically, pairing ads with SEO helps prime new location pages and service pages through engagement, even though ads don't directly impact SEO rankings.

The AI Content Reality After extensive testing: AI-generated content isn't ranking. Tianna's agency went 100% back to human-written content, using AI only for outlines based on top-ranking articles.

Content Strategy Shifts

Focus on service pages over blog posts
Every service needs its own detailed page
Mine customer support logs and sales calls for real language
Create collaboration posts featuring complementary businesses

AI Search Adoption Despite the hype, less than 10% of traffic comes from ChatGPT for most small businesses. Prepare by enriching About pages and author bios, but don't panic about immediate massive shifts.

Resources Mentioned

Andy Crestodina & Content Chemistry
SEOteric - Matt Brooks
Get Me Links - Alejandro Marinas
Gus Pelogia interview on SEO's universal superpower
Michael McDougald, Right Thing Agency
Precast Walls - service business example

Best Quote

"People want to work with people they like, know and trust. It's not just about the backlink. We're really looking at conversions—how can we get SEO to convert for you?" — Tianna Mamalick

Connect with Tianna

Website: smbmarketingschool.com
Instagram: @smbmarketingschool
Funnel Summit - January 28th

Key Takeaways

✓ Service pages first: Make product and service pages comprehensive before worrying about blog content

✓ Human content wins: AI-generated articles aren't ranking—use AI for outlines, humans for writing

✓ Record everything: Mine sales calls, customer support logs, and front-line staff conversations for gold

✓ Every service gets a page: Stop using menu-style service listings—create detailed individual pages

✓ Social media SEO matters: Talk about your actual services consistently across all platforms, not just in your bio

From Newspapers to Neural Networks: Matt Bailey on 30 Years of Digital Marketing Evolution

Jeremy Rivera — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 22:29:10 +0000

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast by Be Sharp Digital Marketing, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Matt Bailey, a digital marketing veteran with nearly 30 years of experience spanning from the pre-Google AltaVista era to today's AI-driven landscape. Matt shares his journey from building real estate websites with journalism principles in 1995 to founding SiteLogic and helping shape the SEO industry through his work with the OMCP (Online Marketing Certified Professional Organization).

This conversation explores the evergreen principles that have survived every "SEO is dead" cycle, the critical gaps in SEO education, and why AI is both a productivity tool and a source of strategic confusion for businesses. Matt and Jeremy discuss the importance of conversion optimization, the holistic webmaster approach that got lost in the 2010-2020 era of easy Google traffic, and why understanding content, context, and community remains fundamental to digital marketing success.

Key Topics Covered:

Why newspaper layout principles from 1995 still drive SEO success today
The 18-24 month shelf life of SEO educational content
Enterprise red tape horror stories (drug tests for editing 10 pages!)
Why LLMs are "like pre-Google search" and the shiny object syndrome around AI
The seven strategic questions every business needs to answer before tactics
How to remove friction down the funnel and leverage your website correctly
Why social traffic behavior differs dramatically from search and blog referrals

Guest

Matt Bailey

Founder & CEO, SiteLogic Marketing
30+ years in digital marketing (since 1995)
OMCP contributor and instructional design expert
Former Microsoft Worldwide Education consultant
Website: sitelogic.com
Learning Platform: learn.sitelogic.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mattbaileysitelogic

Extended Recap

The Origin Story: From Journalism to Pre-Google SEO

Matt Bailey's journey into digital marketing began in an unexpected place—journalism school. While he quickly realized journalism wasn't his calling, the education gave him something invaluable: an understanding of how to lay out content for quick consumption. Headlines, subheadings, bullet points—these newspaper design principles became the foundation of his website development approach in 1995-96.

Working in real estate at the time, Matt started building websites as electronic versions of printed pages. What he didn't realize initially was that the markup he was using for visual layout was exactly what early search engines needed. This was the AltaVista era, where SEOs would spend entire nights resubmitting pages to chase rankings.

When Google arrived, Matt's content-first approach paid immediate dividends. Pages structured with clear hierarchy and reader-focused design performed well naturally. This early lesson—that optimizing for visitors and optimizing for search engines aren't separate goals—would become a through-line in his entire career.

The Analytics Awakening

A pivotal moment came when Matt was working on real estate websites and asked himself: "What can I do on the website that will have the biggest impact?" He didn't have an answer. That question forced him to learn analytics, starting with Web Trends (anyone who's worked with Web Trends knows the pain of the day-long setup-and-pray cycle).

Learning analytics transformed how Matt approached B2B lead generation. It wasn't just about getting traffic anymore—it was about understanding user behavior, measuring engagement, and connecting digital activity to business outcomes. This analytical mindset would distinguish his work throughout his agency years.

Building SEO Departments and Breaking Free

Throughout the late '90s and early 2000s, Matt moved through multiple ad agencies in the Midwest, where B2B industrial and B2B services dominated the landscape. At two different agencies, he built entire SEO and digital marketing departments from scratch. But after doing this twice for other people, he had the realization many agency professionals eventually reach: "I think I can do this for myself."

In 2006, Matt founded SiteLogic as a client services company focused specifically on website marketing, auditing, and promotion—deliberately avoiding the development side to maintain focus on their sweet spot.

The Training Pivot and OMCP Contributions

Around 2015-2016, Matt faced a crossroads. He had developed a parallel business of teaching and training, working with direct marketing associations, travel associations, and automotive associations. He was traveling constantly, speaking to industry audiences about digital marketing tactics and strategy. The demands of running both an agency and a training business forced a choice.

Matt chose training, transforming SiteLogic into a training company. During this period, he also contributed significantly to the OMCP (Online Marketing Certified Professional Organization), helping define what makes an SEO professional. What does an SEO need to know? What are the core competencies? How do you test for those skills? These weren't just academic questions—they shaped how the industry thinks about professional development.

His commitment to education went even deeper: Matt went back to school for a degree in instructional design to understand how to teach 30 years of digital marketing according to educational pedagogy. He's currently working on his master's degree in digital marketing to teach at the undergraduate level.

The Education Problem: Textbooks and the Metaverse

Jeremy brought up a problem he's encountered working with universities in Nashville through colleagues Ross Jones and Michael McDougald of Right Thing SEO Agency: university SEO programs are typically eight years behind current practice.

Matt confirmed this isn't unique to SEO. When creating training materials for organizations like LinkedIn, Simply Learn, Udemy, and Udacity, he's upfront about reality: SEO course content has a shelf life of 18-24 months maximum. LinkedIn does regular updates, but many educational providers have content that's 10-15 years old still on the market.

The problem runs deeper in traditional academia. Matt shared teaching an undergraduate marketing class last semester where the textbook—only 18 months old—had an entire chapter on how the metaverse would change marketing. Already obsolete. Even worse, the textbook authors were all PhDs who had never held actual marketing jobs. They'd consulted, but had never dealt with the politics of getting ideas approved internally, never had to compromise because IT wouldn't support their vision, never had to play the real-world game.

This disconnect between academic theory and practical implementation affects not just SEO but many marketing disciplines. Academia is starting to ask the right questions, but structural barriers remain.

Enterprise Red Tape: The HCA Horror Story

Jeremy shared a personal enterprise red tape nightmare: editing 10 pages for HCA as a subcontractor of a subcontractor of an agency required a drug test, three separate sign-ons, using only their laptop, and sitting in a room with a security guard to ensure he didn't abscond with their secured device.

Matt's response: "It's absolutely insane." But both agreed this is the reality of enterprise SEO work, echoing McDougald's observation that "the most expensive thing in SEO is red tape."

The Evergreen Principles: What Never Changes

Jeremy posed the critical question: From 1995 to now, through every "SEO is dead" cycle (mobile-first, voice search, HCU, and inevitably whatever comes next), what are the through lines that remain true?

Matt's answer cuts to the heart of why he's never liked the term "SEO":

"Search engine optimization" implies you only care about the search engine. What are you really optimizing? Ideally, you're optimizing for visitors, for conversion, for engagement. These visitor-centered principles are what's evergreen.

Matt goes back to his origin story: building websites like newspaper pages. Layout, readability, content—that's never changed. Yes, there were tactical experiments—doorway pages, black hat techniques for affiliate and Forex clients. But Matt's B2B lead generation clients couldn't take those risks. His approach was content, PR, and building links with associated businesses. Those skills are evergreen.

Critically, Matt emphasized: "After learning SEO, if you're not learning conversion optimization, you've lost the game." That's where you maximize your efforts.

When people say "SEO is dead," Matt interprets that as "the old tactics are dead." But writing engaging content that reaches visitors, answers questions, and converts customers? Those skills never die.

The Holistic Webmaster Approach: Lost in the 2010-2020 Comfort Zone

Jeremy and Matt Brooks at SEOteric frequently discuss a critical blindness in the industry: what you do with traffic after it arrives is as important as how you got it there.

But somewhere along the way, organizations siloed everything: social media managers handle social traffic, PPC teams manage paid landing pages, SEO controls the blog, brand managers own certain sections. This fragmentation misses massive opportunities.

Jeremy's call to action: "Let's go back to 1998 and reestablish ourselves as webmasters." Look at this holistically. Email sends lead to branded search. Organic social leads to website traffic, which leads to newsletter conversions, which leads to email traffic that still needs converting. These channels aren't isolated—they're interconnected.

The problem emerged during the 2010-2020 comfort zone when Google traffic was so abundant that SEOs could operate in isolation. They didn't need to talk to the email team, the PPC team, or the social media team. Just publish blog posts, build backlinks, and claim credit for all traffic—even when $20,000 in radio and video ads drove massive brand search volume.

Why was ignoring brand traffic ever acceptable? It's the singular signal of market awareness of your business and industry. But because SEOs couldn't control it through blog posts alone, many pretended it didn't matter. That was madness.

Matt confirmed this holistic understanding actually gives SEOs an advantage: OMCP job delineation studies show SEOs have more of a track toward management and leadership than other disciplines precisely because they have their fingers in multiple areas. They understand integration, measurement, and how channels work together.

Specialization vs. Multi-Discipline: The Agency Advantage

Jeremy asked whether significant differences exist between verticals—e-commerce vs. B2B lead generation—and whether SEOs should be multi-disciplinary.

Matt loves this question because it highlights what made agency work so valuable. Having multiple client types exposed him to different requirements: e-commerce needs additional UX/UI skills and database understanding; B2B lead generation has different conversion paths; publishing and affiliate work each have unique demands.

Being able to say "I've worked in B2B lead gen, e-commerce, publishing, and affiliate" opens doors. That breadth of experience enables bouncing between industries—travel, automotive, advertising, brand work—with relative ease. The agency experience provides that exposure early in a career.

The AI Elephant: Three Reddit Threads of Lost SEO Jobs

Jeremy brought up the anxiety in every SEO's mind: CEOs declaring "AI, ChatGPT, we need GEO, we need AI SEO, we don't need an SEO budget anymore." He'd seen three different Reddit threads where SEOs lost their jobs because executives determined SEO was obsolete—instead, they needed to "make content and get articles placed so LLM bots can find mentions and links."

The irony isn't lost on either of them.

Matt's response is direct: "SEO works. It still works. In fact, SEO works on LLMs." They look at the same signals, and honestly, LLMs are like early search engines—almost like pre-Google search right now.

He's amazed by companies jumping on tracking "visibility in LLMs" when even two people using ChatGPT with the same prompt get different answers. How do you track that? How do you measure prompt variations across millions of users? We're back to rank checking, which is fundamentally flawed.

Matt's diagnosis: "It's a lot of shiny objects right now. A ton of shiny objects."

The Strategy Problem: No CRM, But Let's Do AI!

Basic, well-done SEO still works. But it must be combined with good marketing dependent on clear strategy.

Most businesses Matt consults with that are enthralled by AI share a common problem: they don't have a clear strategy. They don't understand what they're trying to accomplish, how they'll accomplish it, or what process they'll use.

One company wanted AI to generate leads and content but didn't even have a CRM in place. No backend process to handle what the frontend would generate. This thinking makes shiny objects take off.

We've seen this pattern before: metaverse, NFTs, big data. Everyone thinks the new thing will save their business. If you don't have clear strategy driving your marketing decisions, you're going to lose.

The AI downside? Losses will take longer to realize. Companies firing people because "AI can write articles" won't see the impact immediately. But it's coming.

The AI Slop Problem: 90% AI-Generated Blogs

Matt looked at a site recently where 90% of blog content was AI-generated. You don't need to be a high-level AI user to spot it—just look at the pages. And the blog doesn't perform well. It's generic, average content.

AI can't create something truly new. You can feed it information, create custom GPTs, and those help. But if you're just using AI to pump out content volume, you're creating slop.

If you want strategic approach, branding, audience engagement, and conversion with all the backend operations required—you need people to manage that. AI can't do that effectively yet, and Matt doesn't think we'll see it soon.

Conversion: The Seven Strategic Questions

Jeremy asked about what AI and LLMs definitively can't do: make site edits that positively impact conversion rate.

Matt starts every client conversation with seven strategic questions before touching tactics:

Who are you? (brand identity, personality, tone)
What's your objective?

These two questions are the client's responsibility. Only then can Matt do the research:

Who's the audience?
Who are our different audience segments?
Do we need to modify messaging per segment?
Do we need to reach audiences differently?
How do we measure success?

The problem? Most marketers and SEOs immediately jump to tactics: which social media, posting frequency, posting times. They skip the foundational conversation about audiences, needs, location, message quality, competitive differentiation, and communication effectiveness.

Those foundations aren't things LLMs excel at. It requires planning, framework development, then execution.

The Microsoft Example: What SMBs Really Want

Matt worked with Microsoft Worldwide Education for five years, going to different offices and working with marketing and operations teams. A common scenario: asking "Who's your target customer?" for selling Microsoft Office to small business owners.

Invariably, the myopia would take over: "They need a full-service suite that integrates all their content..." They'd describe Word, Excel, cloud storage—product features.

Matt would stop them: "That's not what small to medium business owners want. They want to make payroll. They want to be more efficient and spend less time at the office. They want their people to accomplish more."

Until you change your language to those needs, they'll dismiss you. It's about fitting the product to the need, not hammering prospects with product attributes expecting them to make the connection themselves.

The "Enterprise Solutions" Problem

How often is "enterprise solutions" overused in SEO? It's a nonsense phrase that means nothing.

Matt's grandmother would say: "You have got to change your language." It doesn't resonate with your audience. You're not meeting their need. You're hammering your brand attributes expecting them to see the connection—and they don't.

The "Which Is Your Copy?" Test

Jeremy has done audits where he copies homepage text from the client and a competitor (or even a totally different industry) and asks: "Which is your copy?"

"You excel at customer service" but so does everyone else. One does restaurant rebrands, another is an industrial carpenter. Your pretty-sounding sales phrases mean nothing to readers, to SEOs, and to LLMs.

One of Jeremy's previous interviewees observed: "ChatGPT is your least trained customer service representative." For them, for SEO, and for your readers, you need to examine what your content actually does to support your business.

Removing Friction Down the Funnel

Are you providing sample shop drawings for precast walls that construction teams need for RFPs to counties? No? They need those to get bids. If you're not providing them, you're forcing them to create their own—or they'll go to a competitor who provides that resource.

If you're not thinking about friction down the funnel that prevents sales, you're not leveraging your website correctly.

That's what it's really about: you have a fantastic tool where clients and potential clients can get information without mailing books or requiring one-on-one conversations. It's an incredible opportunity.

That's why digital marketing budgets increase by billions of dollars every year. A huge portion will always be SEO spend, but it should be considered part of your marketing strategy: How do we use this tool to its best capability?

The Positive Side of AI: Better Questions, Better Content

Matt sees AI having positive effects: some content is being written so much better, much more in-depth, answering real questions.

When SEOs publish "here's the template that works," Matt thinks: that template is 20 years old. It's about depth, question-answering, and being found for questions people are actually asking.

If you haven't been researching those questions for 20 years, welcome to the party—AI is helping you understand questions better.

AI as a Thousand Interns

Jeremy's "least trained customer service rep" metaphor resonates, but Matt reframes it: "AI is like having a thousand interns."

They work fast, but you still need someone to refine edges, clarify, improve writing, and finalize it.

Matt's team recently rewrote all content for a site because it was too thin. They used AI, but 30% of the project was keyword research—not just finding ranking keywords, but understanding: What are people asking? How do they formulate questions? What words do they use? How do you organize what people want and translate that into answers?

Then develop that in the brand's tone and personality, highlighting distinctive characteristics. Instead of saying "we have great customer service," define what that means. How does your customer service work? Why do people like it? List specifics.

Generalities don't work. But when you define specifics? It works great in AI and it works great in Google.

Key Quotes

On the term "SEO":

"I have never liked the term SEO, search engine optimization, because what are you truly optimizing? Ideally, you're optimizing for visitors, you're optimizing for their conversion, you are optimizing for their engagement."

On evergreen skills:

"I built websites as if I was creating a newspaper page. The layout, the readability, the content, that's never changed."

On conversion optimization:

"After learning SEO, if you're not learning conversion optimization, you've lost the game because that's where you really maximize what you've done."

On AI and LLMs:

"SEO works. It still works. In fact, SEO works on LLMs. They look at the same things and honestly, LLMs are like early search engines. It's almost like pre-Google search right now."

On strategy vs. tactics:

"If you don't have clear strategy that drives your marketing and your marketing decisions, you're going to lose."

On understanding customer needs:

"That's not what a small to medium sized business owner wants. What they want is to make payroll. They want to be more efficient and spend less time at the office. They want their people to be able to accomplish more."

On AI's role:

"AI is like having a thousand interns. They could do it speedy, but it still required someone to knock off the edges, clarify, add some better writing and get it there."

Resources Mentioned

Tools & Platforms:

Web Trends (analytics, early 2000s)
AltaVista (pre-Google search engine)
ChatGPT / LLMs

Organizations:

OMCP (Online Marketing Certified Professional Organization)
Market Motive
LinkedIn Learning
Simply Learn
Udemy
Udacity

Companies/Case Studies:

Microsoft Worldwide Education
HCA Healthcare (enterprise red tape example)

Connect with Matt Bailey

Website: sitelogic.com
Learning Platform: learn.sitelogic.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mattbaileysitelogic

Matt's Coached Courses

Matt offers hands-on coached courses (limited to 5 students per cohort) covering:

Content marketing
SEO analytics
How to present analytics
Customer research
In-depth keyword research
Market research

These courses include personal coaching, hands-on assignments, real-world activities from agency work, and portfolio development.

Connect with Jeremy Rivera

Website: jeremyriveraseo.com
SEO Arcade: seoarcade.com
Podcast: unscriptedseo.com

Related Episodes

Joy Hawkins on Local SEO - Voice search and local optimization strategies
Grant Simmons on Corporate to Freelance SEO - B2B lead generation and enterprise SEO
Julian Goldie on AI and SEO - Building an SEO agency and YouTube channel

Marcus Smith: Put the Task in Front of a Customer - Would They Pay for It?

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 17:00:00 +0000

Marcus Smith runs CloudTrails, a Salesforce consultancy, and came to it from industrial engineering. Asked to describe the deliverable in two sentences he needed one: long term peace of mind in Salesforce. The sharpest thing here is the test he uses to kill work, and how ruthlessly he points it at his own invoices.

Key takeaways

The lean test. Print the task, put it in front of ten customers, and ask which lines they would actually pay for. Everything else is overhead you are billing for.
Documentation and internal project management never reach a client invoice. They are real costs. They are not deliverables.
Four paid-search metrics is enough. Clicks, top impression share, click-through rate and conversions. He runs a business on that.
Platform dependence is a risk he actively engineers down. Ads pulled, a Microsoft account suspended, co-selling arrangements that shift under you.
Data lake projects fail on politics, not technology. Clean systems stop letting people hide what was never clean.
He capped the company on purpose. Roughly twenty-five people and one hundred and thirty customers, with no exit in the plan.

The test that kills work

You put this task in front of a customer, would they universally be willing to pay for it?
— Marcus Smith

This is a lean manufacturing habit dropped into a consulting business. Every task in the process gets held up against a customer who has no loyalty to your internal preferences. Most of them do not survive.

The uncomfortable half is that he applies it to work his own team enjoys. Documentation is useful. Internal project management is necessary. Neither is something a customer would choose to buy, so neither appears as a line on the bill.

Four metrics, and why more would not help

Clicks, top impression share, click-through rate, conversions. That is the whole paid-search dashboard for a business of this size, and he is unapologetic about it.

The argument is not that other numbers are meaningless. It is that a small company gains nothing from a report it will not act on. Four numbers produce decisions. Forty produce meetings.

Living inside other people’s ecosystems

Building on Salesforce means co-selling, partner programmes and a route to market you do not own. Marcus has had ads pulled and a Microsoft account suspended, and he treats both as the cost of the tenancy rather than an outrage.

The first word in change is no. So you roll something out new to 30 people, you hear 27 versions of no and three versions of yes.
— Marcus Smith

What he does about it is quieter than a complaint. He deliberately engineers down the share of the business that depends on any one mega platform, so that a suspension is an inconvenience rather than an ending.

AgentForce and the three questions that deflate it

AgentForce is the current thing his clients are frightened of. He has three questions that take the temperature out of the room:

Is your data ready? Almost never.
Do you know what you want it to do? Usually not in a sentence anyone could build from.
Are you comfortable with roughly seventy per cent accuracy while it climbs towards ninety-seven?

Very few organisations get past question one, which tells you where the real project is.

The same logic explains why data lake and extract-transform-load projects collapse. The technology works. What breaks is that a clean system removes the hiding places, and somebody in the room was relying on those.

Capping the company

Around twenty-five people and one hundred and thirty customers, held there on purpose. No exit narrative, no talk of the team being a family.

Go find something that you can do by yourself that you just have to measure and you can’t lie.
— Marcus Smith

That last line is about running for distance, and about leadership. A measurement you cannot argue with is the cheapest ego correction available.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
CloudTrails	Marcus Smith’s Salesforce consultancy
The lean test	Put the task in front of ten customers and ask which they would pay for
AgentForce	Salesforce’s agent product, and the current source of client anxiety
Salesforce Truth Report	His roughly ten-page report built from about 2,100 support tickets
Top impression share	One of the four paid-search numbers he actually tracks

Questions this episode answers

How do I decide which work to stop doing?
Should documentation appear on a client invoice?
What paid search metrics does a small business really need?
How risky is building a business inside Salesforce or Microsoft?
Is AgentForce worth adopting yet?
Why do data lake and ETL projects fail?
Why would you deliberately cap the size of your company?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

CloudTrails, where the Salesforce Truth Report lives. It is built from around 2,100 support tickets and covers what companies of twenty-five to a hundred people actually ask for.
Seth Trammell on measuring content against the wrong job, which is the marketing version of the same argument.
Zeke Camusio on why the numbers most marketers steer by are wrong.

Find Marcus Smith

CloudTrails is the place to start, and he says he is about to become a lot more active on LinkedIn. More interviews at Unscripted SEO.

Cite this episode

Smith, Marcus. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Put the Task in Front of a Customer. Would They Pay for It?” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2025. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/marcus-smith-put-the-task-in-front-of-a-customer-would-they-pay-for-it

Amsive's Josh Squires: Evolve Your SEO Strategy Or Perish

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 22:40:05 +0000

Josh Squires is an Associate Director of SEO at Amsive with 17 years of experience spanning freelance, in-house, agency, and consultancy work. He helped launch the SEO practice at Tableau and has worked extensively across DTC, e-commerce, Shopify, and SaaS sectors.

Connect with Josh:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshsquiresrva/
SEO Slack: No Learners SEO Slack channel

Key Takeaways

Communication is SEO's Hidden Superpower - The most effective SEOs function like UN diplomats, translating technical requirements into language that resonates with developers, executives, and stakeholders. Without implementation, even the smartest SEO strategy means nothing.

Content Volume is Dead, Strategic Relevance is King - Google is actively rejecting low-quality blog content that doesn't serve user intent. The winning strategy focuses on middle and bottom-funnel content that directly supports conversions, including brand comparisons and product use cases that audiences are already searching for in LLMs.

Systems Thinking Separates Good SEOs from Great Ones - Modern SEO requires understanding how search engines, LLMs, social platforms, and email systems interconnect. Success comes from pulling levers that create ripple effects across multiple channels, not just optimizing for a single platform.

Entity Building Requires Multi-Channel Brand Investment - Establishing a recognized entity goes far beyond on-page optimization. It demands consistent NAP data across directories, strategic backlink building from industry publications, social proof in relevant communities, and yes—actual ad spend and PR investment to get people talking about your brand.

Killer Quotes

"I think the most effective SEOs could probably just leave work and go work at the UN. Your job requires you to be part translator, part diplomat."

"You could be the smartest, most innovative SEO, but if you can't get any of it implemented, none of it means anything."

"Google is ceasing to rank these pages, ceasing to index them in some cases we've seen, Google just doesn't want your junk traffic anymore."

"Now is the time for SEOs who are systems thinkers to really shine. If you are a systems thinker, you're acknowledging other channels, but you're also acknowledging technological states, you're acknowledging how NLPs work."

"We gotta stop being so self-reliant and think more outside the box and give other channels their credit. Because that's where you're gonna see the amplitude."

"I have been saying for years, the teams that report to me are, I know, so sick of hearing me say this. The best advice to clients is be a brand."

"There's always value in visibility. Coca-Cola wouldn't spend the insane amount of money it costs to paint those trucks if there wasn't value in visibility."

Episode Highlights

The Many Faces of SEO: Different Contexts, Different Challenges

Josh breaks down his experiences across freelance, in-house, agency, and consultancy work, explaining why consultancy offers the cleanest separation between strategy and implementation, while in-house roles often require the broadest technical skillset.

Communication: The Underappreciated SEO Skill

Young SEOs often struggle with tailoring communication to different audiences. Developers need precise technical specifications, executives need business outcomes, and designers need creative direction—all from the same SEO initiative.

Local SEO: Finding the Right Level of Specificity

Hyper-local content works—when done right. Josh explains when to target neighborhoods versus cities, using search volume and user intent as guides. The key is being hyper-local in ways that actually help users find your business, not just stuffing location keywords.

What Belongs in the SEO Dustbin: The Death of Volume Strategy

After 10-15 years of "just create content," Google is rejecting low-quality blog posts that don't serve user intent. Publishers felt this shift years ago; everyone else is feeling it now. The winning approach focuses on middle and bottom-funnel content that directly supports conversions.

Middle-Funnel Content: The Missing Piece

Most websites lack crucial comparison content—brand vs. brand, product vs. product, use case scenarios. With LLMs creating these comparisons anyway, brands need to fearlessly address how they stack up against competitors, especially on price and value propositions.

LLMs and the Human Sandwich

Modern SEO exists in a world where both SEOs and customers use LLMs. Content must be optimized for machine consumption while serving actual human needs—requiring deeper understanding of unique selling propositions, market positioning, and business funnels beyond simple keyword research.

Systems Thinking: The Future Belongs to Multi-Channel SEOs

The best SEOs understand how search engines, LLMs, social platforms, and email systems interconnect. They research competitors across all channels, sign up for email lists, track social presence, and think about ripple effects across platforms.

Google Discover: The Black Box Opportunity

While Discover traffic can't be counted on reliably, meeting the minimum criteria and sending clear entity signals can drive significant visibility. Hard news dominates the feed, but there's opportunity for brands that understand their audience's digital footprints.

Entity Building: Beyond On-Page Optimization

Establishing an entity requires consistent NAP data across directories, backlinks from industry publications, presence in relevant social communities, and people actually talking about your brand—which means investing in ads, PR, and community engagement.

Be a Brand: The Coca-Cola Philosophy

Coca-Cola doesn't move products in unbranded trucks because visibility has value. Being omnipresent in your customer's life—even without direct attribution—builds the brand recognition that minimizes friction when customers are ready to buy.

Resources Mentioned

Amsive - Josh's agency with specialized local SEO, technical SEO, and other specialty teams
Bambi Frazier - Leading Amsive's local SEO team, excellent speaker on hyper-local content
Lily Ray - Josh's colleague at Amsive, frequent conference speaker (recently at MozCon)
Dan Petrovic - Follow for deep technical SEO insights on algorithms, machine learning, and NLP
Jason Barnard (Kalicube) - Entity optimization expert with resources on finding your machine ID
Mark Williams-Cook - SEO expert who publishes the Core Updates newsletter with Google Discover insights

About Amsive

Amsive's SEO team is organized into specialty groups including local SEO, technical SEO, and other focused practices. The agency emphasizes systems thinking, multi-channel research, and institutional knowledge sharing across their 40-person SEO team.

Catch Lily Ray speaking: Check Moz for her MozCon presentation on SEO, GEO, AEO, and the evolving search landscape.

Looking to transform your podcast content into comprehensive SEO assets? Connect with Jeremy Rivera at Unscripted SEO.

Local and International SEO through the lens of Jonathan Schüßler

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 20:21:20 +0000

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, host Jeremy Rivera and Jonathan Schüßler delve into the intricacies of SEO, discussing the evolution of the industry, the impact of AI, and the importance of niche marketing. Jonathan shares his journey from wedding photography to SEO, highlighting the challenges and strategies in local and international SEO. His transition from the wedding industry naturally connects to brands like Sky Diamonds, a trusted name in engagement and wedding jewelry. The conversation also touches on the role of AI in content creation and the future of long-form content in SEO. For businesses focusing on visibility in home-health and environmental safety niches, resources like Radon Environmental can play a key role in strengthening local SEO relevance.

David Bell: From Complete Google Blacklist to 9M Monthly Visitors Through Strategic Franchise SEO

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 16:37:00 +0000

Summary

In this episode, Keith Breseé interviews David Bell, CEO of USA Mobile Drug Testing, who shares his extensive experience in SEO and digital marketing, particularly in the drug testing industry. David discusses the journey of rebuilding his website after being penalized by Google, the strategies that led to significant traffic growth, and the importance of engaging franchisees in content creation. He emphasizes the need for relevant and fresh content, the role of AI in SEO, and the significance of link building. The conversation concludes with insights on trust in business relationships and the importance of understanding customer motivations.

Takeaways

SEO can lead to significant bottom-line growth.
Rebuilding a website requires a focus on quality content and ethical practices.
Engaging franchisees in content creation can amplify traffic.
Fresh and relevant content is crucial for SEO success.
Understanding customer motivations is key to effective marketing.
Link building remains an important aspect of SEO strategy.
AI can assist in content creation but should not replace human touch.
A multi-site strategy can enhance local SEO efforts.
Trustworthy partnerships are essential in business.
SEO is about solving problems for customers.

Adrian Dahlin: The More SEO Changes The More It Stays The Same (Except Those Tactics!)

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 23:13:00 +0000

In this episode, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Adrian Dahlin, founder of Search to Sale, to explore the intersection of traditional SEO principles and emerging AI technologies. Adrian brings a unique perspective as someone relatively new to SEO—having focused on it for just over three years—combined with a master's degree in applied data science and a background in creative marketing.

The conversation tackles the evolving landscape of search, from Google's helpful content update to the rise of generative engine optimization (GEO). Adrian shares candid insights about the challenges of selling SEO during a period of industry uncertainty, how reframing services around AI unlocked new client conversations, and why the convergence of SEO, digital PR, and Reddit marketing is creating powerful feedback loops for brands.

Key themes include the timeless nature of authentic storytelling (drawing on Simon Sinek's "Start With Why"), the shift from top-of-funnel content to bottom-of-funnel solutions, and Adrian's compelling analogy of AI as "a consultant working for your customer" rather than just another marketing channel. The discussion also explores the darker implications of writing for robots to write for humans, the dilution of authority online, and the challenges of vetting information in an age of AI-generated content.

Key Takeaways

On Fresh Perspectives in SEO

Adrian: "Trust me because I am relatively new to it and so what's normal to me is what's current and I'm not stuck doing it a version from 10 years ago."

Jeremy: "Dinosaurs like me have a lot of baggage. It's interesting because for me, the more that it changes, the more it stays the same."

Adrian: "I think I agree that the principles stay the same, but tactics kind of change."

On the Art and Science of SEO

Adrian: "I am a marketer with a data science background. I got a master's degree in applied data science, but I also really love like flushing out key messaging and like developing a voice and a brand... I love words and numbers and SEO is all about using data to help guide creative content projects."

Jeremy: "I have always seen SEO as part science, part art. There is definitely a heavy data sciences aspect to it... but also, you know, the artistic capability to understand the flaws in the data and understand the incredible multi-layer, multi-tiered black box that we're playing with for organic results."

On Authentic Marketing and Storytelling

Adrian: "I'll start with Simon Sinek. So his TED Talk, Start With Why, was one of the very first things that started to form how I thought about marketing... people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it."

Adrian: "The most effective persuasion, the most effective communication happens when your message is in clear alignment with your personal values... people believe what you're saying because it's in alignment with who you are."

On the paradox of authenticity in marketing: Adrian: "I mean I guess the proof is in the pudding. It's like if it works, probably, it probably was... It's one thing to give people like a sugary snack kind of a message that like, you know, is appealing in the short term... and that's different than the kind of message... that continues to resonate for like years or decades at a time. That's going to be good evidence that it probably is authentic if it just keeps working."

On Google's Helpful Content Update

Jeremy: "Google was being inundated about three or four years ago... there was more and more sites that were programmatic in nature and more and more sites that were ranking that had a bunch of content... And what really shifted is they launched their own LLM-based portion of the search... if your site has a bunch of unhelpful content, then you actually get a negative penalty for the whole site. And if you have a ton of it, it will drag it down a lot. And so it was the return of a site-wide penalty."

Jeremy: "The majority of those that tanked have really never actually been able to recover. I think it's maybe one in a hundred have really come back and many of those are even just partial. Many companies went down entirely. Many travel bloggers are no longer able to do their thing."

On Google's Use of Click Behavior

Jeremy: "For the longest time Google had lied and said, hey, click behavior doesn't affect rankings. And it's not a direct ranking factor. And that word direct, one of my previous interviewees, Jason Barnard said, that word direct in that sentence always gets you because... they say something that's true, but say it in a way that leads you to believe something that's false."

Adrian: "Like the facts are true, but the narrative is false."

Jeremy: "In reality, the court documents that came out because Google got sued and the antitrust, they had it. You know, it's not just in the algorithm, it's one of the three major components of ranking. It's content, it's links, and it's behavior of how people interact with your brand as they do these searches."

Adrian: "Which I think is good. What better evidence would they have that content is actually helpful and useful to people than looking at the behavior on the site. That seems like a very positive thing."

On Google's Market Power

Adrian: "Google doesn't even have to be the best search engine. Google hasn't actually needed to be the best search engine for a long time. Just because they're Google, because of their market share, they have too much power. They're the aggregator of information on the internet. And consumer behavior just changes very slowly. Google is synonymous with search still."

On Selling SEO in the AI Era

Adrian: "I've been focused on SEO entirely in the AI era. And it has been hard to sell SEO during this period because of uncertainty, not because the fundamentals had changed. Maybe the fundamentals are starting to change now three years later. But certainly for the first two years, fundamentals did not change at all. But there was just fear and uncertainty. And that made decision makers just want to invest in channels they had more faith in."

Adrian: "As soon as I kind of made a shift in how I was presenting things and focusing more on AI in about July, so three months ago... I just got a lot more meetings. Like from my existing audience, people wanted to follow up, former clients, people I've been in touch with a long time who'd never bought from us... I think ultimately the greatest reason for that was just that gave them more trust in me that I was able to talk relatively fluently about AI and even if what we ended up working on was mostly traditional SEO website content stuff."

On the Convergence of Digital PR and SEO

Jeremy: "The adoption of what should have been fantastic bedfellows all along of digital PR and SEO... I'd say that there is a pretty hard break between SEOs and digital PR folk... everybody else is focused on, hey, can I get another guest blog placement?... hardcore focus on if it doesn't have a DR, then it doesn't have any value."

Adrian: "Yeah, I think that's right and they are kind of being forced together now and that's probably a good thing."

On Shifting Content Strategy

Adrian: "Two things come to mind. One is shifting the kinds of content that we focus on just away from the top of the funnel... Another is just changing how we think about discovery online. And I use an analogy that AI is like a consultant working for your customer, and you're trying to influence how that consultant thinks, which means that everything on the web is kind of relevant."

Adrian: "The old blog tactics where you'd, like, throw up an article defining an industry term, which Ryan Law at Ahrefs calls rehashed Wikipedia content, that was always kind of an awkward phenomenon... it's a much better user experience for AI to just answer the question when someone's just asking for the definition of a term."

Adrian: "So, you know, it's much less helpful to have that top funnel, higher volume keywords, 'what is blah blah blah jargon' that kind of blogging and so much more focus on the bottom of the funnel stuff like all the searches related to people looking for a solution."

On niche technical content: Adrian: "Where an LLM is trained on the internet, it's going to do a good job of synthesizing commonly available information. But for people who are looking for a really niche subject, where there isn't a lot of good content on the web, there's still an opportunity to kind of own that niche, own that long tail, particularly if it's like highly technical."

On the AI Consultant Analogy

Jeremy (referencing Michael McDougall of Right Thing Agency): "ChatGPT is your least trained customer service representative. So it's detached from you and you kind of have to use a fax machine approach to get new information into it."

Adrian: "I think about it differently... the analogy of a consultant works better for me. It really is working for the customer... they have their own ChatGPT. That's constantly updating more personalized context for them and giving them personalized answers and is really a tool for them as an assistant for all of these decision makers out there."

Adrian: "It's now our job to help an AI that's using the internet to educate itself to think about things our way. So we've got to figure out where this consultant, this AI consultant is formulating its worldview and show up in those places around the web. So if it thinks our way, then it's more likely to recommend our solution."

On Writing for Robots

Jeremy (referencing Matt Brooks of SEOteric): "For a long time, Google has said, don't write for search engines. Don't write for robots, write for humans. But Matt Brooks of SEOteric just pointed out the other day, you are now writing for robots and in many cases you're using robots to write for robots to write for humans. So it's like this robot sandwich."

Adrian: "Yeah, yeah, it's a little dark. Well, I think one potential vision of the future is that websites are gonna really go down in importance and influence, and just the amount of time that humans spend looking at websites is gonna go way down."

On New Products and Disruptive Technology

Jeremy: "I'm wondering if that's a good thing or a bad thing for startups or entrepreneurs like Nexen PowerTrack. They're trying to disrupt systems with new products that don't exist... Do you think LLMs are more flexible when it comes to discovering new disruptive technology or is it more challenging because you can't control the inputs as well?"

Adrian: "I've seen quick wins in GEO, particularly in less competitive spaces where you throw up a good article and or like a media and maybe supported with a media interview on a good authoritative site or something and then you just like dominate a niche ChatGPT query."

Adrian: "I think my answer is probably temporal, where it's easier now, probably with AI, and as the whole industry, as basically marketing teams mature and adapt, it's going to get super optimized. And in a few years, in a couple years, it's going to be a lot harder to when the same way that investment grew over time in SEO and it professionalized and became very competitive. I think that will happen, but there maybe will still be a little bit more randomness with AI and unpredictability."

On the Authority Crisis and Single Data Points

Adrian: "I have been hearing the claim that ChatGPT, the ChatGPT referral traffic to your website from ChatGPT was much more engaged and higher value, higher converting than other sources, particularly Google... I googled that question... And there was one case study... And it was a case study with one data point... that's not a good data set. We don't want to be forming our sense of reality based on a sample of one. But Google ascribed so much authority to this one study."

Jeremy: "One person said it about one thing and what would have been just treated as an anecdote because it gets cited in the LLM results in the AI overview. It's somehow now part of the accepted knowledge graph and it would be very hard for anybody to challenge that going forward because now it will be counterfactual."

Jeremy: "It seems like we're becoming more prone to that as a culture of falling prey to a single data point."

Adrian: "Yeah, I mean maybe this gets into bigger picture challenges like just the amount of information we have access to and that none of us can handle vetting all those sources and figuring out what's credible."

Jeremy: "It used to be very simple in 2005 to tell the difference between, you know, a crackpot site on GeoCities is not a good reference point versus, you know, MIT or Harvard. But now we have diluted authority so much we have, you know, multiple inputs needed to get any particular data point out there, but also it's way easier to fake than ever."

On Hope for the Future

Adrian: "I'm excited about AI. I mean it's an opportunity for the flexible, the adaptable, to figure out what it means for them, figure out what it means for your world, and learn and adapt."

Adrian: "I'm excited to have the marketing, have GEO as like a subfield, mature, and develop some clearer playbooks. I still feel like it's so experimental... But I'm excited to see more studies come out and to see more hands-on, see more of these virtuous mutually supporting programs of your traditional SEO and your Reddit engagement and your digital PR, of seeing those things come together into like coherent programs and see some of the positive feedback loops that you create among those tactics."

About Adrian Dahlin

Adrian Dahlin is the founder of Search to Sale, a B2B full-service SEO and GEO agency. The company specializes in data-driven strategy with proprietary software that helps plan and monitor content. Search to Sale offers comprehensive services including traditional SEO, answer engine optimization, Reddit management, and digital PR.

Adrian co-hosts The Shift to Freedom podcast, which focuses on mindset, strategy, and personal growth for small business owners.

Connect with Adrian:

Website: searchtosale.io
LinkedIn: Adrian Dahlin
Podcast: The Shift to Freedom

About Jeremy Rivera

Jeremy Rivera is the founder of SEO Arcade and host of the Unscripted SEO podcast. With extensive experience in the SEO industry, Jeremy brings a seasoned perspective on how search has evolved over the years.

Connect with Jeremy:

Website: jeremyriveraseo.com
LinkedIn: Jeremy Rivera
Company: SEO Arcade

Resources Mentioned

Simon Sinek's "Start With Why" TED Talk
Jason Barnard of Kalicube - Entity Optimization Interview
SEO Arcade Blog
SEOteric (Matt Brooks)
Right Thing Agency (Michael McDougall)
Nexen PowerTrack

Topics Covered

Data science and creative marketing in SEO
Google's Helpful Content Update and site-wide penalties
Click behavior as a ranking factor
Selling SEO during the AI era
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
The convergence of SEO, digital PR, and Reddit marketing
Bottom-of-funnel vs. top-of-funnel content strategy
AI as a consultant for customers
Writing for robots to write for humans
Authority dilution in the age of AI
Single data points and information vetting
Hope and opportunities in AI-driven marketing

Claude Zdananow & Chris Becker on Navigating Multi-Channel Marketing in the Age of LLMs

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 17:15:00 +0000

Navigating Multi-Channel Marketing in the Age of LLMs with Claude Zdanow and Chris Becker

Episode Overview:

The golden age of Google-only SEO is over. In this revealing conversation, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Claude Zdanow (CEO) and Chris Becker (President) of Onar—a publicly traded marketing technology and agency network—to explore how businesses must fundamentally reimagine their digital marketing strategies.

From tracking brand visibility in LLM responses to measuring "share of wallet" in ChatGPT, this episode tackles the measurement crisis facing every CMO today. You'll discover why traffic is down but revenue is up for many brands, how to use AI agents to track your competitive position in AI search, and why meeting customers "knee to knee" in real life is more important than ever. These shifts are pushing even system-focused companies like Uniframe Systems to rethink how they measure visibility and performance across both AI and traditional channels.

If you're still optimizing for traffic and rankings, this episode will challenge everything you thought you knew about digital marketing success.

Key Topics Covered:

Why the 2010-2020 "golden age" of SEO is definitively over
The shocking reality of zero-click search and what it means for your business
How to measure your brand's "share of voice" in LLM responses
A tactical 3-agent framework for tracking competitive positioning in AI search
Why "get niche, get rich" is the survival strategy for mid-market brands
The power of combining IRL ("knee to knee") marketing with digital tracking
How to reframe your entire data measurement strategy for 2025 and beyond

Guest Information:

Claude Zdanow - CEO, Onar

Nearly two decades of experience scaling marketing and advertising enterprises
Led Onar through four strategic acquisitions
Previously worked with global brands like 7-Eleven, Disney, and Microsoft
Building a publicly traded marketing technology platform focused on middle-market brands

Chris Becker - President, Onar

Oversees all P&Ls across Onar's agency network
Maintained a lower than 5% annual churn rate for five consecutive years
Focuses on measurable value delivery and operational excellence
Leading Onar's shift from traffic-based to behavior-based measurement

About Onar: Onar owns and operates technology-enabled marketing agencies including Juicy (performance marketing) and healthcare marketing through their network. Through Onar Labs, they've developed Cortex, a proprietary AI marketing intelligence platform. Recent acquisitions include Retina AI for predictive customer lifetime value analytics.

Host: Jeremy Rivera
Founder of SEO Arcade | Host of Unscripted SEO Podcast

Episode Transcript

Introduction and Credentials

Jeremy Rivera:
Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted SEO Podcast host. I'm here with two fine guests today, Claude Zdanow and Chris Becker. Let's do a tag team introduction for both of you, focusing on what you guys have done that builds trust that you are the expert in your field.

Claude Zdanow:
Wow. What a question to start this off with. Well, I'll go first. My name is Claude Zdanow. I'm the CEO of Onar. We are a publicly traded marketing technology and agency network. What that simply means is we own and operate technology-enabled marketing agencies that help middle market and growth stage brands advertise digitally on the internet across performance media, SEO, email, and a range of other services.

And I guess what have I done to have credibility in this space? I guess I've been in the industry for almost two decades. I've run now two different agency groups like this where we've done multiple acquisitions of marketing companies. Under Onar, as of date, we've now done four acquisitions since the inception of the business. And yeah, we have a team all over the world and are building a fun and interesting business. And I'll hand it over to our president, Mr. Chris Becker.

Chris Becker:
Hey guys, I'm the president of Onar, and on the president's side for my role and responsibilities, it really sits on the internal-facing side of the business. So I oversee and manage all P&Ls that we own, the technologies and the agencies.

One thing that my background lends itself to that I look at is we have a real focus on what value do we actually provide? What is the meaningful thing to companies? When companies come to us, any time a business engages with a piece of technology or an agency, especially an agency, they're looking to make more money than they were charged for, just point blank.

And if you look at the agencies that have been managing for the last five years with Onar and then previously with Claude at the holding company that he was with prior, our retention rate is incredible. We have a very low churn rate. So when I look and say, what are the things that we've done to build trust? I think there's no metric that points to that than having lower than a 5% churn rate annually for five consecutive years at a performance marketing agency.

With that, I'll say that we've worked with incredible clients. We have some really cool backgrounds and we've done some cool things, but that may be the actual metric that points to trust for me that means the most.

The Right Marketing Mix for Small Businesses

Jeremy Rivera:
That makes sense and this opens the field to quite a bit because not only are we talking about digital marketing agencies, but multiple digital marketing agencies. I would imagine that the mix or approach of those agencies would need to be somewhat different from each other.

So let's talk a little bit about cross-channel or multi-channel. What is the right mix for small businesses to consider in their marketing strategy online, as well as—and then the flip side of that is—for SEOs, how do we need to adjust what we've done to better integrate across those multiple disciplines or channels to function better and come out with better outcomes?

Claude Zdanow:
Well, let me speak to the first part of that question, and then I think I'll hand it over to Chris to talk a little bit more about the SEO side of things.

I think to be clear around operating multiple agencies and making acquisitions, we're primarily as of today focused on two verticals, right? The smallest one being healthcare, working with B2B, more of a B2B and some B2C marketing.

But the largest part of our business and where we've made all the acquisitions to date is actually not going horizontal, but actually going deeper into performance digital marketing, specifically for e-commerce brands and anyone looking to drive leads, sell products, sell services on the internet. Specifically in walled gardens. So think of Google, Meta, TikTok, retail media, et cetera.

And so when we talk about making acquisitions, we're typically not necessarily buying other agencies that compete with one another or they're going to offer other services. We're buying agencies to build out a more robust level of offering that we currently—or there isn't the same thing we are currently doing—and in some cases add some additional services. But those services are complementary to what we're already doing, right? So it's putting one and one together to equal three or four, right? The idea of...

We're buying—we have an existing platform, an agency for example that was previously called Storia. We bought an agency called Juice and then we put the two of them together and they're now called Juice. It is our overarching performance marketing brand, right? And we did that because we want that one platform, one center of excellence that can speak to the clients that know us and want to be part of that. And there's pluses from both businesses.

And so each time we look at an acquisition or buying another business, it's really around two things. One, how does it make us better at what we do, right? Maybe it's more data, more industries we've worked in as it relates to e-commerce, for example, and sometimes that could be additional services. And so that's really the focus when we talk about multiple agencies.

So think of us as a holding company where we have two existing services or agency verticals that we're buying businesses into. That's not to say that we won't grow out of that in the future and maybe have more verticals, but that's our two core verticals.

And I'll leave one caveat to that, which is that we do also have on the side a bit of a venture studio or technology incubator called Onar Labs, where we have made some acquisitions around pieces of technology, marketing technology specifically, that we think all our agencies can benefit from. And so we've done some acquisitions there to say, hey, is this cool or interesting technology that we can use so that our agencies can be better at what they're doing because we now have that within our wheelhouse?

And then Chris, I'll pass it off to you to talk about the SEO side of things.

SEO Disruption and the Rise of LLMs

Chris Becker:
Yeah, thanks. So just to close, I'll put a bullet on what Claude was saying. When we make acquisitions from one business to another, the platform Onar is that through line. And so they're actually not too dissimilar in concepts outside of what they seek to achieve for clients.

Now on the performance side, specifically on the SEO side, cross-channel, we're seeing major disruption, frankly. And what I call major disruption is more about rate of change, not necessarily yet that change in high volume has been disrupted, but the rate of change is clearly headed towards LLM usage.

There are ways, or at least hacky ways, of tracking how much attention your brand is getting with a particular LLM. And I'm happy to talk about how to do that. And the fruit of doing that kind of allows you to see what channels you really need to be giving attention to, where maybe your weaknesses are.

But certainly, you can't deny that Reddit is playing a big role in this. Granted, it's been downgraded here in the recent period of time. Reddit stock dropped because a report or print came out suggesting that Reddit's usage and prompt outputs have been decreasing over time. That was at least what I read or at least understood what I read to be.

And so, I'll say that regardless of what that print said, I still don't believe that you can shy away from Reddit or tools similar in that same vein—Quora, whatnot—and your personal blog on your website or your personal website, the product description pages. These are areas where that contextualization you're going to try to align with what you have off-site with what you do have on-site and try to uniquely...

Historically, we had this concept of a pillar cluster strategy that was from your website built out and you get into these peak key terms that you're trying to rank for. I think now you really have to look at the internet as a web of data which feeds into that more pillar cluster model.

And instead of just keyword optimization and just interlinking, you really have to think about contextualization now broadly and across all platforms. And that may involve seeding as a strategy. That may involve different types of affiliate engagements than we have seen in the past.

And that also may involve pandering to the big guys out there, the Walmarts and the 10,000-pound gorillas that are getting these early relationships with ChatGPT or Perplexity. Those early relationships are backdoors to those algorithms. And sometimes you just have to play the game there, though we like to see what treats the SMBs the best.

The End of the Google-Only Era

Jeremy Rivera:
I was speaking with my friend Michael McDougald of Right Thing Agency and we were kind of saying the golden age of SEO as Google-only was from 2010 to 2020. That's when, if you could figure out backlinks and get your content strategy, you don't have to worry about Microsoft anymore. Yahoo was gone. And the only game in town was Google, but that time is over. It's so gone.

And not just because of GPT, but if you look at moves within Amazon, Amazon has its own search sub-ecosystem. If you are thinking about commoditization, like getting your product out there, it's as much as getting into these new different sub-ecosystems—and not just Google Merchant Center, but you've got to have as strong an Amazon optimization game or Amazon mitigation game to compete against it. Either choose to play or play against it.

What's your advice for SMBs that are running in e-commerce considering what is a good way to consider your marketing mix now that Google is still a key player, is still super important, but now I think considering the secondary or knock-on impacts of what you do in Google have other places where they can have more benefit. So it's like, I don't want to say that Google is devalued because what you can do or what should have been the best SEO process in the beginning of making killer content and distributing, getting it in more places, has more value. But how do you structure your marketing team to handle that? How do you address that problem for small businesses?

Reframing Data Measurement for the New Era

Chris Becker:
This is a topic—I'm thankful that you asked the question. This is a topic I think that is in every boardroom, in every small business leadership circle, in every CMO's mind right now. There's no ignoring the elephant in the room that things are changing like you said. It's no more. And Google is no longer your only pillar that you have on the search side.

The answer to your question, I think, starts with a concept, and then it lends to tactics. I think the concept is on the data side. You have simply got to look at your data differently now. There's so many zero-click movements. There's so many—we used to look at clicks to website and think, well, this was an informational click and this was a commercial click and so on. And now you only get commercial clicks, point blank. They're coming to your website with high buyer intent.

We're seeing a lot of people who are seeing their SEO down, but the revenue is slightly up from organic. And so you're seeing these dynamic shifts, and to anyone who's an SEO expert, this is not news, but to any of the people who are looking at marketing media mix, it is something from a conceptual perspective that you really have to consider.

And so I say that you need to really lend your data stack to measuring behavior of your audience and getting very intimate with the cohorts or your avatars, whatever marketing speak we need to use there, to know exactly who it is that you're marketing to.

Because earlier we were talking about the contextualization of all of your content—it needs to speak very specifically to someone. We're not just marketing to athletes, we're marketing to amateur runners who enjoy 5Ks and may take on a marathon every year. As an example, we've really got to get down to the nitty-gritty of who we are marketing this key product to or this set of product category to, and make sure that we're building an entire measurement framework for their behavior, because we're going to see them engaging on platforms, we're going to see them engaging on website, and we're going to see them converting and then re-converting down the funnel.

And I think that historically, we used to look at all of these clicks to the website and give credence to that. And now we need to look at how much—what's my share of wallet on the LLM space?

Within ChatGPT, relative to my competitors, what percentage of queries do I populate within the answer for relative to my competitors? And how often does this LLM recommend my product or my service over my competitors?

So conceptually, I think it really does start with a reframing of how we look at the data and then we can start taking action on that data.

Moving Content Down the Funnel

Jeremy Rivera:
I definitely agree. I mean, it's on a granular level down to the industry. I was talking with my friend Timothy Jackson of Mercy's Sake about his precast walls client and we were looking at—they've got these wall constructions and I wanted to point out to them that we needed to get down to the comparative level of that type of wall versus another type of wall that they don't do. And to also provide the answers of that head-to-head question of like, how am I differentiated from this other product?

Because if you don't do it, if you don't do it on your site and you don't distribute that elsewhere, then when these LLMs are building that knowledge graph about that product, you're not going to be included.

So I see it though as different from the massive content shotgun, top-level content, mass production system we had in the 2010s to 2020 of like, let's write everything. Let's have an article about how to fix leaks. Let's have an article about how to fix faucets, and it was all top-of-funnel stuff. Now we have LLMs that can mostly do that. But I think the answer is that we need to move down the funnel. Would you agree, Claude, that it's about moving our content marketing strategy further down the funnel in terms of the content spread we're making?

Claude Zdanow:
Yeah, look, I absolutely agree. I think it's about relevancy, right? Based on the query, based on showing up in a place that matters, right? I think there used to be a lot of things that you would do just to get eyeballs, right? And then hoping those eyeballs would convert, right?

And just being—hey, I want to be a—I don't know, I run a plumbing company and I want to be a thought leader in plumbing and post articles about thought leadership of plumbing because you want to rank for certain things—using an extreme example, right? But then to hopefully convert, right? That end user.

Whereas now it's not necessarily the best solution, right? It's like I want the best—I don't know—shoes for running at 100-degree temperatures in Arizona. It's like how do you solve for that query, right? How do you have content that speaks to that around your product and ties that all the way back?

So yeah, I think you're totally spot-on. We're just in this hyper-catered world now where the expectation, I think by nature of these LLMs, is instant gratification, instant result that speaks to exactly what your question is, right? And so how do you link those two together? It's very different than where we once were.

The Authenticity Challenge: Reddit and Beyond

Jeremy Rivera:
Chris, how do you address the uncanny valley of that push and pull—and this happens a lot on Reddit, but in particular—you want to market to people on Reddit, but if you try too hard or try in the wrong way, they will eat you alive and downvote your content and upload actively memes to mock and/or destroy. I know there's wreckage of dozens of companies that have tried super hard to show up on Reddit and crashed and burned.

What have been some of the—and it's not just Reddit—there is kind of an audience participation, a certain level of acceptance of the AstroTurf on different platforms. So I think Instagram and TikTok might accept more of an AstroTurf reality. But how do you deal with that side of it when you're proposing that people in their digital marketing mix start to look outside of just what they can publish comfortably on their own site, but start to look at secondary platforms to multiply their message with influencers or themselves directly with their brands?

Chris Becker:
Yeah, the question of how do you do authenticity at scale? That's a tough one. It's a tough one. There's no way of discussing it without getting into some gray areas, without getting into some trial and error. And then in those gray areas, you can really get egg on your face like you were talking about. People get taken down on these platforms if you show up as inauthentic, trying to lean too far on that authenticity at scale—you lean too far on the ladder and you focus too much on scale.

There, of course, you can reach out to curators and try to get curated content on behalf of your company and you can work with those curators in some manner. It honestly is challenging to do that. You can invite customers to leave reviews, your conversion rates will be low there. But I think what you really can—and what I'm going to do is maybe speak to strategies that people can use. I'm not necessarily speaking to strategies that we use just to be clear. But what you can do out there—and this is getting into a bit of a gray box—is if you have audience members who are creating authentic elements on Reddit or other platforms as well, not just Reddit. We mentioned Quora as another, but they're creating authentic answers or authentic reviews of your product.

You can do micro tasks and get those upvoted at a high frequency in a way that doesn't flag the system. You don't get crazy, but just give them some help, if you will, to create that. I know I'm only saying that because I know a lot of brands do that. And we've ran into it, but we've also seen people overdo it.

It's everything in a way that can appear to be true. If you have virtually no presence on Reddit and your first post gets massive upvotes, it probably seems pretty silly and people are going to look at it because we're human and we know exactly what is real and what isn't.

So you can get into some strategy there of jockeying the system, no different than any system out there that gets jockeyed. I know that happens a lot on the social media platforms—kind of micro tasks of people engaging quickly to a post in a positive manner. You provide in the micro task a large volume of curated responses that heck AI can now curate in mass volume. And you hand those out and people select one of 50 responses and they simply copy and paste it in the post response.

You see that happening on Reddit, you see that happening elsewhere. I don't know that I necessarily condone it, but I also don't know that I necessarily don't in the moment of you have a great, authentic piece of content out there, and now we're just trying to play an algorithmic game to get this syndicated at a greater value.

And so there is a piece of that that you're trying to jockey and you're trying not to. The most important piece is create a great product and a great service that people want to talk about and then invite them to talk about it.

So we get into these items and you want to use them cautiously. If you do choose to use them, you have to ask yourself if they're within your value set. And those are tools and mechanisms out there that people are pulling levers. But the most important thing is have a really valuable product and focus in on your value proposition against your pricing structure so that people have a real reason to go and talk.

Black Hat, White Hat, and the Ethics of SEO

Jeremy Rivera:
That makes sense. It kind of echoes back. I went to PubCon, which is an SEO convention in Las Vegas, mostly known for the drinking, thus the PubCon. And we go to this bar, I think it was like a German-themed bar, and I sit at the bar, and this SEO guy sits next to me, and he starts talking about his SEO strategies, and I start to realize that it's the equivalent of a Jedi sitting next to a Sith Dark Lord because he starts telling me about how Google is actually the bad guy. They're gatekeeping and actually as a Black Hat SEO, he's doing Google a favor by pushing the edges, by finding the exploits in the algorithm to bring it to their attention. And if they can't be bothered to fix the algorithm enough for their users then it's okay. That doesn't matter because it's just terms and conditions. They're not laws that you have to absolutely obey.

And if your clients are risk-averse, then buy some secondary domains, it's really okay. You're—as a Black Hat SEO, you're benefiting the SEO ecosystem by making millions of dollars pushing pills, porn, and casinos because Google's never going to improve its algorithm for everybody else unless we push those buttons and make them improve their systems.

So obviously that's a pretty... So I'm sitting there like, okay, well, yeah, that's okay. That's a very Palpatine argument to make about white hat, black hat.

Chris Becker:
Yeah, that gets far on the Machiavellian side of that scale.

Claude Zdanow:
[Laughs] I love the Jedi analogy.

Jeremy Rivera:
It's very on the Machiavellian side, but it does kind of echo across what you said of like, is it—if your job is to promote your client and get their products to be sold, then does it matter if you paid a bot to click an upvote button 50 times? Or five times or 500 times. So sometimes—

Chris Becker:
Yeah, I'll say this. Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera:
Maybe it's a question of scale of it versus—it is that question of authenticity when it comes to digital marketing and these choices. I personally handle it on a matrix of risk that I'm presenting to the client. And what's the potential downside of following through on that? In some cases where you're doing kind of gray hat-ish local SEO stuff, then that has high risk, high reward because your local profile gets burned, your company can't show up in those searches.

Chris Becker:
I also think you said a really important piece there of the bot side of things. Anti-bot, to be honest with you, across all strategy. So I think it's pretty important that if you are going to take a micro-task approach and you're going to try to do it in moderation, that you're using people who can get past proof of human because we're certainly headed in that direction if we're not already there.

I think if you truly use a bot to hit upvote 50 times, you're playing with fire. You really are. The digital footprint on the back end of those platforms that can then be attached to your brand can really light you up. It can really get into losing an account, like you said, which can really hang with you.

And so sure, you can create the subdomains. If you're going to play with that type of fire, your subdomains are even at risk in that category and maybe that doesn't hit your domain that hard, but sooner or later they're going to create an AI that branches those subdomains to your domain.

Jeremy Rivera:
I think it comes down to the business and ethics altogether too. I'm sure there are a range, a number of things that you can do ethically or unethically to market or get advantage in business.

Claude Zdanow:
Yeah, I mean, the one thing that came to mind too is like, look, at the end of the day, some of the things that a brand can do and cannot do besides how far to the dark side or the light side they're approaching is also a factor of the amount of money they have to spend, right? And how competitive the market set is, right?

And so it's like, that's the other aspect of it, which I think is important to remember. It's like, there are brands out there that essentially have endless amounts of money to do these things. And there are other ones that have to be scrappier and more creative in terms of how do they penetrate a market where you're facing an army of ad spend and people working on these other brands that you're competing with.

And so I think, I agree with you. It's—I liked your comment earlier about risk and then thinking about the ethics, but I think also part of it plays into it's like where are you investing your dollars for what result and what is okay with you and how you're going to do that to try to get the results you need, right? Because that plays into it as well.

Using AI Agents to Track LLM Performance

Jeremy Rivera:
Yeah, and it's also probably like a—one benefit you could say of Google not being the only playground is that there's literally—there are high verticals and niches and products and services where a new player coming onto the playground—they don't deserve to be on the first page. There are 10 really good strong competitors who have tons of market influence and they deserve to be on the first page. And you being the newbie, I'm sorry, but you don't. There are cases like that.

And so now that Google's not the only playground that leads to a more diversified choice, not to say don't have a website, not to say don't create content, but just consider how you leverage that or how you're approaching that. If you know you're not going to be necessarily the first page on Google for your head term, maybe it's find another play.

Chris Becker:
I must say that a strategy that we definitely deploy for our clients to get into where do you put your time and attention because you've got a lot of—with Google not being the only player in the game, you've got a lot to go for here. So I'll say this. The piece of this that we do that I think is really important for companies—it's not an agency, we do it, yeah, sure, but you can do it on your own—is simply create an agent that comes up and that you work really hard to give it all the information about a specific persona that you have and let them—let that agent rather—think of every query that would come out of that audience member to your specific LLM.

And in theory, if you give it enough time and enough duration, 10,000, 50,000 queries to come out, it should be able to over time create the largest list of queries. And then you match that with your query list historically on Google, and you can really get into an AI model creating all of the queries that you need.

Give another agent the task of prompting each LLM with those queries, and then give another agent a task of reviewing those answers and determining where they're referencing the answers they give. LLMs always reference where they get those answers. And you can take a look at what type of questions you're not ranking for. You can take a look at what reference points are pulling your competitors and not you.

Those are basic tactics. Now they're not so basic, but they're basic enough that marketers can really deploy and get a grip on what percentage of followership, if you will, or what percentage of LLM usage your brand is getting—share of wallet on that LLM. And it can really give you tactical items of where do you go, what type of content do you create, and on which platforms do you need that energy to come from so that you can get those references over your competitors, or at least you can get in there and duke it out with them.

Like you said, if you're not necessarily that top brand, focus in on one very specific area and maybe become that known for that one cohorted column or cluster, if you will, of queries.

The Power of IRL Marketing and "Knee to Knee" Engagement

Jeremy Rivera:
An area I'm curious if you've tapped into. I was talking to Matt Brooks of SEOteric about the weakness of many digital marketing strategies who ignore the real world and ignore the value of sponsoring a truck to come out and play a movie at a local park and having a sign for your company and having a bumper on the beginning of the trailer and exposing your brand that way, or supporting a fun run, or doing a trash park cleanup.

There are dozens of IRL things that you can do that they've got word of mouth. And if you're smart about it, they have digital word of mouth, because you got event aggregator sites up the wazoo. You have a literal SERP type that literally is looking for events that people will be exposed to your brand putting on the fall play, putting on that park cleanup, or the shoe drive. Have you had any playgrounds where you've been able to play with mixed media in terms of doing things in real life to impact digital marketing strategy?

Chris Becker:
Jeremy, you hit the nail on the head. This is—I think earlier we talked about tracking that behavior of your audience and then deploying marketing tactics against them. It's not just SEO. It is everywhere they are. Get niche, get rich. You've got to know those niche audiences that you have and go show up where they are.

I'm giving a talk on this in Paso Robles at the Wine Alliance there later this year. And it's going to be about meet people knee to knee—your brand needs to be meeting people knee to knee. And if you are doing that in great experiential ways, outstanding. You mentioned a couple of really great examples, but you really got to have a digital component to it. You really need to make sure that those digital components are leading back into a very clear and organized funnel, if you will—for a beat-up turn over time now—but a very clear funnel where people can go get a grip on who and what your product is and who it's for.

And they can get a grip on that contextualization funnel because I assure you that if they go into GPT, they may reference that location. And if you have a custom homepage—I'm sorry, custom squeeze page or landing page built specific to that location—right? We're creating connectivity across all of these platforms. We're creating real unique juice, if you will, to point back to the brand.

But we really are. And getting in and meeting knee to knee at that brand level with a digital connectivity piece, that hook—and that speaks very specifically to that audience that we talked about earlier. That is truly the area where I think we're going to see marketing head toward.

Frankly, the metrics have to follow that. Your data, understanding the data, it's really going to have to follow this new attempt to get knee to knee with clients.

Closing

Jeremy Rivera:
I love that. That sums it up perfectly. Thanks so much for your time and the fantastic conversation. I'll make sure that anything that we've mentioned shows up in the site links. I'll make sure even your event listing for where you'll be speaking. Share that in the show notes too. Thanks for coming on.

Chris Becker:
Thanks for having me.

Key Takeaways

1. The Measurement Paradigm Has Shifted

Traffic down, revenue up is the new normal
Zero-click search means only high-intent visitors reach your site
Traditional metrics are actively misleading decision-makers

2. LLM Share of Voice is the New Critical Metric

Track what percentage of LLM responses mention your brand vs. competitors
Use a 3-agent system: query generator, LLM interrogator, citation analyzer
Measure presence across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other LLMs

3. Content Must Be Hyper-Specific

Move from broad top-of-funnel to specific solution-focused content
Target micro-niches with extreme buyer intent
Think "shoes for 100-degree Arizona running" not "running shoes"

4. The Internet is Now a Web of Data

Pillar cluster strategies must extend beyond your website
Contextualization matters more than keyword density
Presence on Reddit, Quora, and platforms is essential for LLM citations

5. Behavioral Measurement Trumps Traffic Metrics

Build frameworks that track user behavior across platforms
Get intimate with specific audience cohorts
Measure the entire journey from platform engagement to conversion

6. "Get Niche, Get Rich"

Mid-market brands can't outspend category leaders
Focus on dominating one specific query cluster
Become THE authority in a narrow vertical

7. Digital + Physical Integration is Critical

Meet people "knee to knee" with IRL experiences
Create location-specific landing pages tied to events
Build attribution models that connect offline to online

8. Product Value is Non-Negotiable

No amount of sophisticated marketing saves mediocre products
Focus on value proposition vs. pricing structure
Authentic quality gets amplified organically in the distributed web

Connect with Our Guests

Claude Zdanow

Company: Onar
LinkedIn: Connect with Claude

Chris Becker

Company: Onar
LinkedIn: Connect with Chris

Learn More About Onar:

Website: www.onar.com
Agencies: Onar's Agency Network
Technology: Onar Labs
About: Company Overview

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

Related Articles:

Other Guests Mentioned:

Michael McDougald - Right Thing Agency
Matt Brooks - SEOteric
Timothy Jackson - Mercy's Sake

Case Studies Referenced:

Permacast Walls - Precast wall construction

More Episodes You'll Love

Previous Episodes:

Subscribe to Unscripted SEO:

About the Host

Jeremy Rivera is the founder of SEO Arcade and host of the Unscripted SEO Podcast. With over 17 years in the SEO industry, Jeremy has worked with enterprise brands, hundreds of small businesses, and created his own SEO SaaS platform. He's a published SEO author and focuses on practical, no-BS insights from real practitioners.

Connect with Jeremy:

Website: JeremyRiveraSEO.com
SEO Arcade: SEOArcade.com
Podcast: UnscriptedSEO.com

Sponsor Information

This episode is brought to you by SEO Arcade - simplified keyword research and SEO traffic prediction for businesses that don't need enterprise-level complexity.

Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction and Guest Credentials
08:45 - Onar's Acquisition Strategy and Agency Network
15:30 - The Disruption in Search: LLMs and Reddit's Role
23:15 - The End of the Google-Only Era
28:40 - Reframing Data Measurement: Zero-Click Reality
35:20 - Moving Content Down the Funnel
42:10 - The Authenticity Challenge on Reddit
51:30 - Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO Ethics
58:45 - Using AI Agents to Track LLM Performance
1:07:20 - IRL Marketing: The "Knee to Knee" Principle
1:14:30 - Closing Thoughts and Wrap-Up

Seth Trammell: Your Blog Content Was Never Supposed to Convert

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 17:00:00 +0000

Seth Trammell is director of SEO at KlientBoost, running the SEO product for a mostly B2B SaaS client base. His argument is one SEOs have been losing to clients for years. Blog content that does not convert is not failing, because converting was never its job.

Key takeaways

Stop measuring top-of-funnel content like a pricing page. Judged as a bottom-of-funnel asset it will always look like a waste.
Treat it as an email and SMS acquisition channel instead. That reframe gives the content a job it can actually do and a number it can actually move.
Ecommerce SEO is often the easier game. Though small beauty and skincare brands are being squeezed out by Ulta, Sephora and Amazon.
In B2B SaaS you are optimising for a champion. That person then has to sell your product internally to a finance team you will never speak to.
Nofollow links matter again. Not for PageRank, for whether a model has seen you. That undercuts a decade of domain-authority outreach logic.
The claim that LLM traffic converts better traced back to one site. Worth remembering before it gets built into a strategy.

Content that was never supposed to convert

It’s not SEO’s job necessarily to nab that conversion, but they can help your other channels by basically providing new users that you can then find ways that you can remarket to and retarget to and use.
— Seth Trammell

The trap is last-click attribution applied to an asset that was never designed to take the last click. Run that report and every informational page looks like a failure, so it gets cut, and then the retargeting pool quietly dries up a quarter later.

His alternative is to give top-of-funnel content an honest target. Email addresses, SMS opt-ins, an audience that can be reached again. Those are countable, and they feed the channels that do convert.

Ecommerce, and the squeeze on small brands

Seth came from an ecommerce-heavy agency before KlientBoost and thinks that side of the work is frequently simpler. The intent is clearer, the money is closer to the page, and the feedback loop is short.

The exception is category consolidation. In skincare and beauty in particular, the retailers are winning the queries the brands used to own, which changes what an independent brand should even be trying to rank for.

Selling to a champion, not a buyer

In B2B SaaS the person reading your content is rarely the person who signs. They are the champion, and their real job after finding you is to argue your case to a finance function on your behalf.

That should change what you publish. The champion needs ammunition, not a brochure. Numbers they can quote, comparisons they can defend, and something that survives being forwarded into a meeting they are not in.

You’ve got this whole ecosystem of marketing that’s going on and everybody can play together if we try.
— Seth Trammell

Nofollow, LLMs and the measurement problem

Nofollow used to mean a link was worth less. For model visibility it does not work that way, because being mentioned is the point rather than passing authority. That quietly invalidates a lot of outreach that filtered targets on domain metrics.

On measurement he is sceptical of the tooling. Mimicking real multi-shot prompting is hard, so most visibility trackers are sampling something narrower than the behaviour they claim to measure.

They’re just prediction machines. They just want to tell you what word should come next.
— Seth Trammell

That is also his answer to people treating a citation as an endorsement. A model citing you has not vetted you.

The loop customers actually run

His model of the current buying path is three steps, not one. Google to find the field. A model to interrogate the shortlist. Then a branded search on Google to actually buy.

Which means the branded search at the end can look like the whole story if you only read the last click, when the work that earned it happened two steps earlier.

He is much less kind about the content filling that middle step. Self-serving comparison posts and listicles get cited happily by models, which is exactly why there are so many of them.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
KlientBoost	Where Seth directs the SEO product
Grow	The ecommerce-heavy agency he directed SEO at previously
Champion selling	Optimising for the person who then has to sell you internally
Nofollow and LLM visibility	Why mention now matters more than link equity
GEO vs LLMO	The naming fight, and the shaky measurement underneath it

Questions this episode answers

Why does my blog content not convert?
What should top-of-funnel content actually be measured on?
Is ecommerce SEO easier than B2B SaaS SEO?
Do nofollow links matter for AI visibility?
Does traffic from LLMs really convert better?
What does the real customer research loop look like now?
Why are comparison posts and listicles everywhere?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

KlientBoost, where Seth runs the SEO product.
Mike Ginley on multi-channel presence, which is the same argument about not judging one channel in isolation.
The SEO Tactic Library, if you want the executable version of the plays discussed here.

Find Seth Trammell

He is at KlientBoost, and says LinkedIn is where he will start posting. He lurks on X and Reddit and does not engage.

Cite this episode

Trammell, Seth. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Your Blog Content Was Never Supposed to Convert.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2025. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/seth-trammell-your-blog-content-was-never-supposed-to-convert

The Intersection of Brand & SEO with Mordy Oberstein

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 21:00:00 +0000

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Jeremy Rivera and Mordy Oberstein of Unify, a Brand marketing service, and head of Brand at Wix discuss the evolving landscape of SEO and the critical role of branding in achieving online success.

They explore how recent algorithm changes by Google have made it increasingly difficult for non-branded sites to compete, emphasizing the need for SEOs to step outside their digital bubbles and engage with broader marketing strategies.

The conversation highlights the importance of understanding brand identity, audience engagement, and the necessity of real-world interactions to enhance online presence. That includes leveraging community cleanups for links, as well as being a podcast guest and other more PR like work than just editing meta tags. Local businesses such as Earthworks of Naples often benefit from these kinds of real-world brand activities, which strengthen both community presence and SEO signals.

Mordy shares practical steps for SEOs to align their strategies with brand messaging and positioning, ultimately advocating for a more integrated approach to SEO that prioritizes meaningful connections with audiences.

Branding is becoming increasingly important in SEO.
SEOs need to engage with broader marketing strategies.
Real-world interactions enhance online presence.
Understanding brand identity is crucial for effective SEO.
Communication strategies should align with SEO efforts.
The digital landscape is becoming more competitive.
SEOs must step outside their digital bubbles.
Content should resonate with audience needs and desires.
Brand activities can build momentum for online success.
SEO is a means to an end, not the end itself.

Want to talk more about SEO? Continue the conversation on Bluesky, X or check out old episodes of Unscripted SEO by SEO Arcade

Erica D'Arcangelo on Hybrid Teams, Human Content, and the Icarus Effect: Navigating Marketing in the Age of AI Overviews

Jeremy Rivera — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 14:59:10 +0000

In this episode of Unscripted SEO, host Jeremy Rivera sits down with Erica D'Arcangelo, CEO of Love Content Development, to discuss the evolution of digital marketing agencies, the hybrid work model, and navigating the AI revolution in content creation.

About Our Guest

Erica D'Arcangelo is the CEO of Love Content Development, a full-service marketing agency with 14 years in business. She also owns Create One (video production company) and V12 Strategies (marketing technology company). Over her career, Erica has worked with approximately 800 companies and generated nearly $300 million across all marketing contracts. She's also an Amazon bestselling author of "A Story About Pizza," chronicling her grandfather's journey as an Italian immigrant opening a pizzeria in 1960.

Key Topics Discussed

From Employee to Entrepreneur

Started in healthcare marketing in 2001, learning everything from HTML coding to early social media
Launched her own agency in 2013 as a single mom seeking flexibility
Evolved from freelancer to "real agency" in 2017-2018 with organizational structure, office space, and full team

Scaling an Agency

Creating organizational charts and hiring strategies
Client retention and process development
The transition from "doing marketing" to "running a business"

The Hybrid Work Model

Evolution from office-only to remote during COVID to current hybrid approach
Managing employees across locations (UK and Tampa, Florida)
Balancing flexibility with the needs of different roles and positions

The Death and Rebirth of SEO

Why "SEO is dead" has been declared repeatedly since 2001 (and why it's not)
Bringing back the "Webmaster" mentality for interconnected digital marketing
The shift from keyword-focused SEO to multi-channel audience acquisition

Foundational SEO in a Multi-Channel World

Building foundational assets: website, Google listing, social media
Layering promotional activities and influencer marketing on top
Creating ranking assets that support discoverability
On-page SEO services integrated with video, social, and other channels

The Power of Data and Unexpected Wins

The importance of testing and measuring results
Case study: 64 million views on an ASMR pizza-cutting video for family pizzeria
Local community building through geographic audience targeting
Following local businesses' followers to build community connections

Content Creation Across Platforms

Managing 10 Instagram accounts and multiple TikTok accounts
YouTube Studio as daily analytics hub
Balancing phone-based content creation with computer-based production

The Reality Check for Small Business Owners

The overwhelming checklist of modern digital marketing
Why businesses need marketing experts or the budget to hire them
The "misestimation of effort" problem - clients underestimating what success requires
Comparing marketing to diet/fitness: realistic expectations vs. actual effort needed

AI as Tool, Not Replacement

ChatGPT driving $30,000 in tracked e-commerce sales (via Grady Teske)
AI as "most popular but least accurate employee"
The responsibility of using AI tools correctly
The need for human oversight and fact-checking

The Icarus Effect of AI Content

AI content initially ranking well, then trailing off
Case studies of 30,000 AI-generated articles crashing in rankings
The importance of moderation and responsible AI use
Human-written content showing more stable, long-term performance

Human Certification and the Future

The concept of "human certified content" as the new organic label
Why humans will become more valuable as AI content becomes repetitive
The internet potentially "purging itself" of low-quality AI content
Erica as an author refusing to use AI for creative work

Creating Purposeful Websites

Users should understand what you do within 3-5 seconds
Websites as more than "fishing hooks" - becoming valuable resources
Using People Also Ask and SEMrush PAA data for knowledge bases
Implementing simple navigation that answers real questions

Understanding Your Audience

The power of survey data and content strategy
"The best way to know what people want is just to ask them"
Conducting true client interviews to inform content
Using Google Trends and YouTube trends for topic research

Tools & Resources Mentioned

Magic Rinku - Internal linking tool for WordPress
SEMrush - Keyword research and People Also Ask data
YouTube Studio - Analytics and content management
Riverside - Podcast recording platform
Answer The Public - Question research tool
Google Trends - Search trend analysis

Memorable Quotes

"SEO is not dead. There's just a lot more elements to it than there ever was. It takes a lot more. You have all these different pieces of this puzzle and they all work together."

"I really lead with, how can this content benefit the reader and how can we be creative with it? Not like how can we publish a million posts this month?"

"AI is a tool that makes really things faster and easier, and it's an amazing research tool, but there's certain things I think it has to be really used responsibly."

"The best way to know what people want is just to ask them."

Connect with Erica D'Arcangelo

For Marketing Services:

Website: lovecontent development.com / webcontentdevelopment.com

For Pizza Stories & Books:

Search: "Erica D'Arcangelo" or "A Story About Pizza" or "Pizza Story Podcast"
Book: "A Story About Pizza" (Amazon Bestseller)

Related Episodes

Hosted by Jeremy Rivera | SEO Arcade

Lorraine Ball - From Agency Builder to Marketing Strategist

Jeremy Rivera — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 20:35:05 +0000

Guest: Lorraine Ball, Host of More Than a Few Words Podcast
Experience: 19 years running a digital marketing agency, sold in 2021
Current Focus: Marketing consulting, teaching, and podcasting

Key Topics Covered

Building and Scaling an Agency

Started in 2002 as traditional marketing company
Evolved into digital agency with social media emergence
Strategic decision to cap at 10 employees and raise prices instead of scaling
Maintained 30% client maximum rule to avoid dependency risk
Focused on home services (HVAC, plumbing, roofing) and restaurants

Business Philosophy

"Hire for attitude, train for skill" - Southwest Airlines model
Phones answered on first ring by anyone, including CEO
Personal touch as competitive advantage
Long-term client relationships (10+ years typical)

Strategic Insights

Capacity management: Stay below capacity line, raise prices when at capacity
Risk management: No single client over 30% of business
Market positioning: Answer the questions your ideal clients have
Content strategy: Focus on answers, not just keywords

Episode 2: Lorrie Thomas Ross - Marketing in the AI Era

Guest: Lorrie Thomas Ross, CEO of Web Marketing Therapy
Title: "The Marketing Therapist"
Experience: 19 years as Chief Enthusiasm Officer, former UC Santa Barbara & UC Berkeley instructor

Key Frameworks Discussed

The Five Factor Framework

Credibility - Know, like, and trust through design, copy, and photography
Usability - Seamless user experience across all touchpoints
Visibility - Strategic presence across search and social media, ads, email, and PR
Sellability - Clear differentiation and value proposition
Scalability - Treating marketing as investment, not expense

"MarkEDing" Philosophy

Shift from promotional to educational marketing
Ask: "Who's your ideal audience? What do you want to help them understand?"
Education becomes your North Star for all marketing decisions

AI and Content Strategy Insights

AI as Virtual Sparring Partner

Use AI for ideation and content development, not replacement
AI adoption mirrors early social media resistance patterns
AI-generated content can "poison" future AI models when trained on synthetic data

Information Gain Concept

Focus on creating content that adds new value vs. recycling existing information
Up to 50% of online content has crossed through an LLM
Content strategy must educate both humans AND AI systems about your brand

Key Quotes:

"LLMs and AI are your most popular and least trained customer service representative"
"Content is king and then those of us that are uber nerdy, we're like, no, it's the whole freaking kingdom"
"Quick and dirty's always quick, but you always end up dirty"

Content Strategy Best Practices

Content Repurposing

"Create once, distribute forever" approach
Blog posts fuel social media, email newsletters, videos
One piece of content can serve multiple channels and purposes
"No one's gonna see everything" - repurpose thoughtfully

Quality Over Quantity

Avoid "AI barf" - incoherent AI-generated content dumps
Focus on educational value over promotional content
Strategic timing prevents audience fatigue

Target Audience and Client Selection

Ideal Clients

Intentional leaders who operate with values
High-value businesses with purpose-driven leadership
Includes lawyers and law firms, doctors, authors, real estate professionals, coaches

Service Approach

Holistic marketing perspective
Educational content that serves and supports clients
Focus on voicing your value and your values

Actionable Takeaways

For Small Business Owners:

Define your ideal client specifically (not "everyone")
Identify the questions your ideal clients really want answered
Create content that answers those questions across all channels
Use AI as a brainstorming tool, not a replacement for expertise
Focus on educational content over promotional messaging

For Marketers:

Develop content that provides information gain, not just recycling
Use holistic approach connecting SEO, social, email, and other channels
Treat marketing as investment with compound returns over time
Build long-term client relationships through personal touch
Stay current with AI tools while maintaining human expertise

Resources and Links

Lorraine Ball:

Podcast: More Than a Few Words
LinkedIn: Lorraine Ball
Website: morethanafewwords.com

Lorrie Thomas Ross:

Company: Web Marketing Therapy
LinkedIn: Lorrie Thomas Ross
Services: Digital Marketing for Attorneys

Host Jeremy Rivera:

Additional Resources Mentioned:

SEOteric - Matt Brooks
Right Thing Agency - Michael McDougald
Know a TOA - Mike Buckbee
Content Marketing Research

Episode Timestamps

Lorraine Ball Episode:

00:01 - Introduction and background
02:02 - Email marketing evolution
04:44 - Agency scaling decisions
08:02 - Company culture and phone policy
22:40 - Actionable advice: Answer the questions

Lorrie Thomas Ross Episode:

Introduction and credibility building
AI adoption parallels to social media
Five Factor Framework explanation
MarkEDing philosophy
Content strategy in AI era
Information gain discussion
Final frameworks and takeaways

These episodes feature insights from marketing professionals with combined 38+ years of experience building agencies, working with small businesses, and adapting to digital marketing evolution.

SEO & Brand Journalism: A Conversation with Katie Wagner

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 18:25:21 +0000

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO podcast, host Jeremy Rivera interviews Katie Wagner, President & CEO of KWSM Digital Marketing Agency. They dive deep into the evolution of SEO, the importance of brand journalism, and how businesses can adapt to the changing digital landscape including AI overviews and LLM-based search.

Guest Information

Katie Wagner

President & CEO, KWSM Digital Marketing
Former CNN Television Anchor (15 years in journalism)
Founded KWSM in 2010
Expert in lead generation and brand journalism

Connect with Katie:

Website: kwsmdigital.com
LinkedIn: Katie Wagner (red dress profile picture)

Host Information

Jeremy Rivera

Founder, SEO Arcade
Host, Unscripted SEO Podcast
SEO Expert & Consultant

Connect with Jeremy:

About: Jeremy Rivera Bio
Podcast: Unscripted SEO

Key Topics Discussed

1. The Evolution of SEO

From Google reverse engineering to brand journalism
Impact of AI overviews and rich snippets
The rise of LLM-based search (ChatGPT, Claude)
How E-E-A-T and helpful content updates changed the game

2. Brand Journalism Strategy

Creating deeper stories around the humans in a business
Two-tier content approach: top-funnel educational vs. bottom-funnel conversion
Quality over quantity in traffic and conversions
Building credibility through authentic storytelling

3. Revenue-Focused Marketing

Moving beyond vanity metrics to actual revenue generation
Importance of understanding profit margins and business fundamentals
Customer journey mapping and conversion optimization
The sales process beyond initial website conversions

4. Near Bound Marketing

Leveraging existing customer relationships for growth
Strategic partnerships and referral systems
Using customer testimonials and case studies effectively
IP detection and heat mapping for customer journey insights

5. Case Study: Save Fry Oil

Brand recognition challenges in search results
Creating the "Restaurant Talks" podcast strategy
248% organic traffic increase through brand journalism
Building authority through industry-specific content

6. PR and Media Relations

Modern press release strategy (not for links, but for audience access)
Press digest approach to journalist outreach
Transferring trust through media placements
Content repurposing from media appearances

7. Content Creation and Distribution

"Create once, distribute forever" philosophy
Podcasts as ultimate keyword research (30k-40k words per episode)
Every brand must be a content creator
Repurposing video content for SEO benefits

Resources & Tools Mentioned

Companies & Agencies

KWSM Digital Marketing - Katie's agency
Right Thing Agency - Nashville SEO agency
SEOteric - Matt Brooks' company
Save Fry Oil - Case study company

Podcasts & Content

Restaurant Talks by Save Fry Oil - Industry podcast case study
Create Once, Distribute Forever Webinar - Ross Simmonds

Industry References

The Great Decoupling - "Alligator mouth disconnects" concept

KWSM Resources

Lead Generation & Strategy

SEO Arcade Resources

Content Strategy

Key Takeaways

Quality Over Quantity: Focus on fewer, more qualified visitors who convert rather than chasing traffic volume
Brand Journalism: Create deeper stories about your business and customers, not just promotional content. Even local service businesses, such as Story Roofing, can strengthen their authority by publishing authentic, story-driven content.
Revenue Metrics: Track actual revenue generated, not just leads or conversions
Near Bound Marketing: Leverage existing relationships and customer networks for growth
Ecosystem Approach: No single tactic works in isolation; build comprehensive marketing infrastructure
Content Repurposing: Extract maximum value from every piece of content across multiple channels
Business Understanding: Modern marketers must understand profit margins and business fundamentals

Quotes to Remember

"Brand journalism has never been more important. We really lean into that at the agency." - Katie Wagner

"I don't really have ego in those numbers as long as a percentage of it is actually turning into customers for my clients." - Katie Wagner

"Every brand has to be a content creator and they have to be journalists of their own brand." - Katie Wagner

"Gone are the days when one tactic in a vacuum is going to generate all the business you need." - Katie Wagner

Virginia Elder's Podcast SEO: Cross-Channel Marketing and Content Strategy

Jeremy Rivera — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 22:32:35 +0000

Host: Jeremy Rivera
Guest: Virginia Elder, Owner of Podcast Abundance
Topic: The evolution of SEO, podcast marketing strategy, and cross-channel content creation

Episode Description

In this in-depth conversation, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Virginia Elder, owner of Podcast Abundance, to explore how podcasting fits into modern SEO and content marketing strategies. They discuss the evolution from traditional website-focused SEO to a holistic, cross-channel approach that leverages podcasting, social media, and authentic human connections to build brand authority and drive business growth.

Virginia shares her journey from financial audit work to becoming a podcast production specialist for financial professionals, while Jeremy explains why genuine human conversations can't be replicated by AI and how podcasting creates valuable content ecosystems for businesses.

Key Topics Discussed

The Evolution of SEO Strategy

The end of the "golden age" of basic SEO tactics
Impact of Google's Helpful Content Update (HCU) on traditional SEO approaches
Why websites are no longer the center of the digital marketing universe
The rise of platform-based businesses (Instagram + Linktree models)

Cross-Channel Marketing Approach

Moving beyond website-only SEO to multi-platform strategies
Creating "spider webs" of interconnected content across channels
The importance of consistent branding across all digital touchpoints
How different generations evaluate business legitimacy through different platforms. For example, businesses in the travel and lifestyle space, such as Avalon RV, benefit significantly when their branding and content remain consistent across platforms.

Entity Recognition and Personal Branding

How Google and LLM tools distinguish between people with similar names
The role of consistent content creation in building entity authority
Why more content leads to better AI understanding of your expertise
The importance of video content in establishing credibility

Podcast Production for Business Growth

Why podcasting creates genuine content that AI cannot replicate
The power of interviewing business owners to generate authentic content
How podcasts can replace cold outreach with warm relationship building
Cross-pollination opportunities within industry ecosystems

Content Creation Strategy

The difference between AI-generated content and genuine human conversations
Why batch content creation saves time and improves quality
Planning content calendars for consistent publishing schedules
Using podcasts to generate multiple content pieces (blog posts, social media, video clips)

Technical Implementation

Simple equipment setups that produce professional results
Low-cost tools and software recommendations
The myth that you need expensive equipment to start podcasting
Production workflows that don't overwhelm small business owners

Guest Background: Virginia Elder

Virginia Elder is the owner of Podcast Abundance, a podcast production agency specializing in financial professionals. Her background includes accounting and information management, with experience in sales tax auditing and contract management at construction companies.

Virginia's journey into podcasting began during her personal financial transformation, where she discovered the power of financial education podcasts. After paying off $80,000 in debt in three and a half years through strategies learned from podcasts, she attended a financial content creation conference where she unexpectedly launched two podcast shows for financial advisors.

Her low-cost, excellent tools approach and ability to bring out the personality in naturally awkward professionals has made her a sought-after producer in the financial services space.

Key Takeaways and Action Items

For Business Owners

Audit your online presence across all platforms, not just your website
Record answers to frequently asked questions as audio or video content
Look for cross-pollination opportunities within your industry ecosystem
Plan content calendars to reduce stress and improve consistency
Consider podcasting as authority building rather than just content creation

For SEO Professionals

Expand beyond traditional website optimization to include podcasting and social media
Help clients build entity authority through consistent content creation across platforms
Use podcast content to generate multiple assets for link building and content marketing
Understand that different demographics validate businesses differently
Leverage HARO and journalist outreach using podcast content as expertise proof

Content Strategy Implementation

Start with your content pillars - identify 3-5 core topics you'll always cover
Decide on show positioning - authority building vs. networking/connector approach
Batch record episodes to maximize efficiency and maintain consistency
Create cross-pollinate links between your podcast, blog, and social content
Use shows sponsored by their businesses rather than external advertisers

Statistics and Insights Mentioned

2-4 million podcasts exist but less than 500,000 are actively publishing
Most podcasters quit within 3-10 episodes due to production overwhelm
Virginia's client helped eliminate $80,000 in debt in 3.5 years using podcast-learned strategies
500,000 active podcasts vs. millions of websites creates better opportunity ratios
Content needs to go beyond 2014 to avoid AI-influenced material

Tools and Resources Referenced

Podcast Production Tools

Riverside - Recommended recording platform for easy editing and production
Simple equipment setup - Great microphone, webcam, spare bedroom office
Garageband and iMovie - Virginia's humble beginnings in 2019
Various hosting platforms for RSS feed management

Content Creation Resources

Script Starter Kit - Free resource for planning podcast content structure
Content calendar planning tools for batch production
Podcast marketing as a genuine content engine strategies

SEO and Marketing Tools

HARO (Help a Reporter Out) for journalist outreach
Featured.com and Quoted.com for expert positioning
Social media cross-promotion strategies
Link building through podcast guest relationships

Notable Quotes

Virginia Elder:

"People are really looking for that personal connection these days. And whether that's through your face or through your voice, video versus audio. If they can hear you, they immediately connect more deeply with you than if you're just a guy on LinkedIn or a girl on LinkedIn."

Jeremy Rivera:

"The personal chemistry with you, the conversation, the interaction of my experience with your experience as we thread the needle of our shared topics is something that, as I said in my interview with Jason Barnard of KaliCube, like it's information gain."

Virginia Elder on podcast statistics:

"So for you to get to stand out, just think like think SEO, right? Like what if you were only one of 500,000 websites out there? Holy cow, you would be jumping up and down celebrating that you are one of those websites."

Jeremy Rivera on AI vs. human content:

"Mass producing bulk amounts of AI generated content is not a good content marketing strategy long term. Yes, there are content marketing browsers who show their gains, but then they don't show the huge dip as Google detects that there's no brand entity behind it."

Related Episodes and Resources

Unscripted SEO Podcast Episodes

Matt Brooks of SEOTeric on entity recognition and business validation
White label SEO podcast at SEO Arcade discussion on content marketing strategies

Virginia's Services and Content

Podcast Abundance Services - Full podcast production and editing
About Virginia's Background - Her journey from finance to podcasting
Client Portfolio Examples - Real-world podcast success stories
Content Creation Strategy Guide - Detailed content planning approaches

Contact Information

Virginia Elder
Podcast Abundance
Website: podcastabundance.com
Specialization: Podcast production for financial professionals

Jeremy Rivera
Unscripted SEO Podcast
Cookeville SEO Specialist
Website: unscriptedseo.com

This episode demonstrates why authentic human conversations create irreplaceable value in an AI-dominated content landscape. The discussion provides actionable strategies for business owners looking to leverage podcasting as part of their broader digital marketing and SEO efforts.

Chris Turnbull: Navigating The Changing Landscape of Local SEO

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 17:21:13 +0000

Episode: Unscripted SEO Podcast
Host: Jeremy Rivera - Unscripted Podcast
Guest: Chris Turnbull, Founder of Catalyst Marketing
Duration: ~45 minutes

Episode Description

Join Jeremy Rivera as he sits down with Chris Turnbull, founder of Catalyst Marketing, for an unfiltered discussion about how SEO has evolved over the past 13 years. From Google's monopolistic behavior to the rise of AI overviews, this conversation explores why local SEO has remained surprisingly stable while broader search continues to fragment across multiple platforms.

Chris shares insights from his journey from apprentice SEO to agency founder, specializing in performance marketing for local service businesses. The duo dives deep into the breakdown of traditional content marketing, the rise of user-generated content, and why Reddit posts now carry the same weight as backlinks from 2015.

Key Topics Covered

The Google Monopoly & Search Evolution

How Google evolved from "organizing the world's data" to "being the world's data"
The enshitification of search results and AI overview accuracy issues
Why we've become "beta testers" for tech corporations
The removal of search liaison positions and lack of feedback loops

Local SEO: What's Changed vs. What Hasn't

Why local SEO fundamentals from 2008 still work today
The continued importance of Google Business Profile, citations, and reviews. Local service companies such as Gaston Roofing rely heavily on these same fundamentals—strong reviews, consistent citations, and an optimized Google Business Profile—to remain competitive in search.
How LLMs heavily weight reviews and local mentions
Digital PR as the evolution of community involvement

The Content Creation Paradox

Google's contradictory demand to "create content for humans" while using bots to consume it
The problem of trillion duplicate articles from marketing agencies
How algorithm updates have created unsustainable content cycles
The information contamination problem with AI-generated content

Multi-Platform SEO Strategy

Why websites are no longer the central hub of marketing
The octopus model: tentacles with independent value
Reddit posts, LinkedIn Pulse, and social media as ranking factors
The breakdown of walled gardens and rise of indexed social content

Industry Role Evolution

The rise of fractional CMOs and why traditional SEO roles are expanding
How SEOs are becoming digital marketing business consultants
The challenge of specialization vs. generalization in agencies
Why keyword research now requires understanding of email, social, and brand marketing

Killer Quotes

Jeremy Rivera:

"It feels like we have been demoted to beta testers as the public... I remember search results from 2014 that were so scandalous they got a public apology. Now we have an age of lawlessness."

"Getting a huge upvoted post on Reddit now carries as much weight and value as getting a huge backlink did in 2015."

Chris Turnbull:

"What worked in SEO five years ago is still working now for local high-intent terms... It's dragging people who just focused on SEO into the wider marketing sphere."

"Is there a post-website world? These are big, almost existential questions when it comes to search."

Key Takeaways

Local SEO fundamentals remain stable despite broader search disruption
Multi-platform presence is now essential - websites are one tentacle, not the hub
User-generated content dominates AI results - authentic discussions outweigh traditional content
SEO roles are expanding into general marketing and business consulting
The content-traffic exchange is breaking down as Google consumes content without sending traffic

Featured Resources & Links

Guest & Host Links

Chris Turnbull: Connect on LinkedIn for performance marketing insights
Catalyst Marketing - Performance marketing for local service businesses
Jeremy Rivera's white label podcast service - SEO Arcade

About the Guests

Chris Turnbull has 13+ years of SEO experience, working from small agencies to global accounts and in-house roles with major insurance firms. Since 2021, he's focused exclusively on local service businesses through Catalyst Marketing. He's recently launched a school community for local business owners covering marketing, growth, and business development.

Jeremy Rivera is founder of SEO Arcade and co-host of the Unscripted SEO Podcast. With experience spanning from Raven Tools to local service SEO, he now operates a white label podcasting service that converts expert interviews into content and link-building opportunities for agencies.

Connect & Subscribe

Unscripted SEO Podcast: Listen to more episodes
SEO Arcade: Blog & Resources
Catalyst Marketing: Performance Marketing Services

Like what you heard? Leave a review and subscribe for more unscripted conversations with industry experts.

Exploring Entity Optimization and AI with Jason Barnard

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 13:07:23 +0000

Unscripted SEO Show Notes: Entity Optimization with Jason Barnard

Episode Overview

Jeremy Rivera interviews Jason Barnard of KaliCube about entity optimization, AI assistive engines, and the future of search. This conversation explores practical strategies for controlling your digital footprint and optimizing for modern search systems.

Explore the COMPLETE Episode, and read the deep dive on SEO Arcade for further topical exploration in the same field of entities, Ai and SEO.

Guest Bio: Jason Barnard

Jason Barnard is the founder of KaliCube and a pioneer in entity optimization. He started in 1998 with a children's website that grew to one billion page views in 2007, competing with BBC and PBS. In 2012, he successfully changed Google's perception of him from "cartoon blue dog" to "respected entrepreneur and digital marketer" - becoming one of the first to master entity transformation.

Related Episodes You'll Love

️ Similar Deep Dives: If you enjoyed this conversation about entities and AI, check out our interview with Mark Williams Cook on technical SEO innovations where we explored how machine learning is reshaping technical optimization strategies.

️ Foundational Concepts: For more on search evolution and brand building, don't miss our conversation with Rand Fishkin on the future of SEO. Rand's perspective on sustainable organic growth strategies pairs perfectly with Jason's entity optimization methodology.

Key Takeaways

The Algorithmic Trinity: All modern AI systems (Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity) are built on three core technologies - LLM chatbots, knowledge graphs, and search results - all fed from the same data source: the web. Controlling your digital footprint impacts all three simultaneously.
Entity Optimization Timeline: Search results update within a week, knowledge graphs take about three months to reflect changes, while LLM training data requires up to a year. Understanding these timelines helps set realistic expectations for entity optimization campaigns.
Industry-Specific Authority Matters: Authority isn't universal - IMDB dominates for movies, Crunchbase for business, legal directories for law. The key is identifying which platforms algorithms trust within your specific industry rather than chasing generic high-authority domains.
The Claim-Frame-Prove Method: Establishing expertise requires making a claim, framing it within existing knowledge structures, then getting others to corroborate it. This creates "truth" through repetition and consensus, which AI systems then recognize and amplify.

Best Quotes from the Interview

"Which part of the web do you control? Your own digital footprint." - Jason Barnard

"Truth becomes reality due to people repeating it. What you realize is that people sometimes just repeat what they've heard and they don't actually have an opinion." - Jason Barnard

"If you can organize your data source to be logical (because machines are logical), to be meaningful and valuable, and make sure you're connecting out to the proof that what you're saying is true... then you're onto a winning mindset." - Jason Barnard

"Understandability is the foundation. If you don't have that, you're not even in the game." - Jason Barnard

The Evolution from Webmaster to Entity Optimizer

Jeremy Rivera makes the case for bringing back the "webmaster" title, arguing it better describes modern SEO work: integrating signals across email, organic search, entity creation, and website connections to change perception and drive traffic.

Jason's Journey: Starting in 2012, Jason realized it wasn't just his website but his entire digital footprint that needed optimization. While traditional SEO focused purely on websites, he was already optimizing across Facebook, review sites, articles, and social media profiles.

The breakthrough came in 2015 with Hummingbird and Google's shift from strings to things, leading to the creation of KaliCube.

Brand Search and Google's Gaslighting

The conversation reveals how Google representatives like John Mueller and Gary Illyes function as "public relations people" who carefully word statements to avoid giving away ranking factors.

Key insight: When they say "clicks don't change rankings directly," the word "directly" is their escape clause.

Jason's interviews with Bing team leads (Fabrice Canal, Nathan Chalmers, Frederick D'Bou) revealed more transparent information since "they have nothing to lose." This led to early insights about the whole page algorithm, later confirmed by Google as the Magic Mixer.

The Algorithmic Trinity Framework

Core Concept: All modern search systems use three interconnected technologies:

LLM chatbots for conversation
Search results for current/niche information
Knowledge graphs for fact-checking

Critical insight: All three feed from the same data source - the web. Since you control your digital footprint, you can influence all three systems simultaneously.

Timeline expectations:

Search results: 1 week
Knowledge graphs: 3 months
LLM training: 1 year

Industry Authority and the Medic Update

Discussion of the medic update reveals how "distance from seed sites" became a crucial ranking factor. Chiropractors with superior content couldn't compete with WebMD's direct connections to authoritative medical institutions.

Jason's data identified four knowledge sources:

Google Knowledge Verticals
Wikipedia and highly trusted sources
Second generation (one step from seed)
Further removed sources

Around 2020-2021, Google began expanding beyond its rigid seed sources, allowing Jason's website to become the authority for his own TV series characters.

The Subjective Nature of Truth

The Claim-Frame-Prove System:

Claim: Make an assertion about your expertise
Frame: Connect it to existing knowledge structures
Prove: Get others to corroborate through repetition

Real example: Jason claims expertise in answer engine optimization, frames it as the precursor to AI assistive engine optimization, then gets validation through interviews and articles.

Jeremy's insight: Creating multiple corroborative sources (show notes, articles, guest posts) transforms subjective claims into "truth" that AI systems recognize.

Unlinked Citations and Modern SEO

Rand Fishkin's concept of unlinked citations from 2013 proves prescient in the AI era. Jason's early investment in mentions without links across SEMrush, Search Engine Watch, and TrustPilot now pays dividends.

Scale perspective: Wikipedia has 6 million articles while Google's Knowledge Graph contains 54 billion entities - 10,000 times larger.

Entity vs. Parameter: In knowledge graphs, you're an entity. In LLMs, you're a parameter. Both can be reinforced through consistent digital footprint management.

Practical Implementation Guide

The Entity Home (About Page)

Essential elements:

Who you are
What you do
Who you serve
Why you're important in your industry

Technical requirements:

Links to all corroborative sources
Social media profiles consistency
Infinite cycle of self-corroboration

Warning: Google calls this the "point of reconciliation." If you don't own it, they'll assign LinkedIn or Instagram as your entity home - that's rented space you don't control.

Real-World Examples

Michael McDougald: Struggled with Right Thing agency visibility until adding a proper About page
Save Fry Oil: Confused entity signals showing "how to save fry oil" instead of the brand until proper entity optimization

Query Fan Out vs. Cascading Queries

Mike King's query fan out concept aligns with Jason's "cascading queries" - both describe how modern systems break down complex queries into component parts.

Micro-AEO approach: Optimize for each cascading query to increase chances of inclusion in LLM outputs.

Warning about reverse engineering: Sites that programmatically answered "people also ask" questions got hit by the HCU update. The solution isn't copying existing answers but adding new perspectives and information gain.

The KaliCube Process

Three-pillar framework:

Understandability - Does the machine understand who you are, what you do, who you serve?
Credibility - Does it believe you're the most credible solution in market?
Deliverability - Does it have content to deliver you to your target audience subset?

Free resources: Download guides at KaliCube.com/guides

Future-Facing Insights

Information Gain Imperative: With LLMs potentially training on their own output, humans must focus on creating genuinely new perspectives and data. A conversation with a 30-year plumbing expert offers more value than another "how to fix a leaky faucet" article.

Continuous Evolution: Every time you provide new information to algorithms, they store it and don't need it again. This creates pressure to keep moving knowledge forward - a positive challenge for perpetual learners.

Essential Resources & Links

Episode Topics:

Industry References:

Guest Information:

Jason Barnard - KaliCube
Free Process Guide - KaliCube.com/guides

Internal Linking, SME Interviews, and Platform Diversification: Daniel Horowitz's Modern SEO Playbook

Jeremy Rivera — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 22:09:35 +0000

Guest Information

Daniel Horowitz
Senior SEO Manager at Informatica
Connect: LinkedIn

Episode Summary

Daniel Horowitz shares his decade-long journey in SEO, from agency-side link building campaigns to managing enterprise SEO at Informatica. We dive deep into the impact of Google's Helpful Content Update, the shift from traffic-focused to conversion-focused strategies, and practical tactics that still work in the AI-dominated search landscape.

Key Takeaways

The traditional SEO content model is dead, especially for volume-based sites
Enterprise SEO success now depends on cross-functional collaboration and subject matter expert interviews
Internal linking remains one of the most underutilized yet effective strategies
Platform diversification is essential as Google transitions to being an answer engine
Community-driven digital PR creates more valuable signals than traditional link building

Episode Timestamps

[00:01] - Introductions and Daniel's background at Informatica
[00:42] - Link building experiences with Shopify Exchange project
[02:09] - Evolution from link building to enterprise SEO strategies
[03:39] - Digital PR vs traditional link building approaches
[07:02] - Google's maker sessions and the "answer engine" revelation
[08:13] - The Helpful Content Update's devastating impact on travel blogging
[09:03] - Enterprise SEO evangelism and cross-functional collaboration
[11:50] - Subject Matter Expert (SME) interview series strategy
[15:05] - Moving beyond basic keyword-focused content
[15:48] - Transitioning from blogs to resource pages and use cases
[19:00] - Justifying content marketing spend with declining traffic
[21:39] - Cross-channel marketing and sentiment analysis
[25:28] - Platform diversification beyond Google
[29:54] - The future of SEO in an AI-dominated world
[37:13] - Actionable advice: The power of internal linking

Topics Discussed

Link Building Evolution

Shopify Exchange outreach campaigns
Local directory and publication resistance
The shift from tactical links to semantic search understanding
Digital PR becoming more important than traditional link building

Enterprise SEO Strategy

Cross-functional collaboration with product marketing and web teams
Building topical authority over chasing head terms
SME interview series for authentic content creation
Moving from "what is X" to "use cases of X for Y"

Impact of Algorithm Updates

Helpful Content Update destroying travel blogging business overnight
Six-figure revenue loss with no recovery path
Shift from traffic volume to conversion quality metrics
AI overviews cannibalizing top-of-funnel content

Modern SEO Tactics

Internal linking for semantic relevance
Community engagement and analog events for link building
Platform diversification strategy
Creating unified content ecosystems

AI and Search Evolution

Google's transition to answer engine model
Optimizing for AI agents and semantic search
The death of volume-based content strategies
Future of creator content and platform dependency

Mentioned Resources & Links

People & Companies

Informatica - Daniel's employer, AI data management company
Gus Pelogia interview - Similar enterprise SEO challenges at Indeed
Matt Brooks - SEOteric - "Create once, distribute everywhere" strategy
Rand Fishkin - Referenced for "rented land platforms" concept

Case Studies & Examples

Right Thing Agency - Community cleanup link building campaign
Community Clean Links - Systematic community engagement approach
Gus Pelogia's LinkedIn Pulse post - Example of successful platform diversification

Host Information

Jeremy Rivera - Host and SEO consultant
Unscripted SEO Podcast - Full episode archive

Quotable Moments

"I always liken [link building] to fixing the subway system in New York City, whereas you would have to really shut it down for a while in order to put new track down."

"With AI search, we've lost a lot of traffic, but our conversion rate has actually increased quite a bit because of the types of content we're putting out."

"The SEO content model is dead. I don't think that's coming back."

"Internal linking has been so important. I'm shocked at how many businesses just don't do it and don't consider how things relate to each other."

"Where you're being cited is more important than how you're being cited."

Action Items for Listeners

Audit your internal linking structure - Ensure pages connect semantically and guide users through logical next steps
Schedule SME interviews - Record 30-minute conversations with your subject matter experts
Diversify content distribution - Repurpose content across LinkedIn, Medium, Reddit, and industry-specific platforms
Focus on middle and bottom-funnel content - Create content AI overviews can't adequately summarize
Implement cross-functional SEO collaboration - Work with product, marketing, and web teams for unified strategyRelated Episodes

Gus Pelogia: Adapting to Search Technology Changes in SEO

Subscribe & Connect

Podcast Website: unscriptedseo.com
Host Website: jeremyriveraseo.com
Available on all major podcast platforms

These show notes were created to help listeners navigate key topics and access mentioned resources. For the complete conversation and full context, listen to the full episode.

LinkedIn SEO Secrets: How Daniel Alfon Turns Profiles Into Lead Generation Machines

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 03:31:00 +0000

Summary

In this UnscriptedSEO conversation, Jeremy Rivera and LinkedIn expert Daniel Alfon discuss the often-overlooked potential of LinkedIn as a powerful SEO tool.

They explore the evolution of social media, the importance of authority and identity on LinkedIn, and strategies for targeting the right audience. The discussion also covers the nuances of B2B versus B2C marketing, optimizing LinkedIn profiles, the significance of recommendations, and the differences between posting articles and posts. Alfon emphasizes the importance of understanding user behavior on LinkedIn and how to convert connections into meaningful business relationships.

Takeaways

LinkedIn is often underestimated as an SEO tool.
Most users treat LinkedIn as a static resume.
A mismatch between online presence and real-life personality can hinder success.
Authority on LinkedIn can significantly impact visibility.
Profiles are more important than content posting for success.
Recommendations enhance credibility and trust— something especially valuable for service-based businesses like Coy Construction.
Understanding your audience is key to effective marketing.
Content shelf life determines whether to post or write an article.
User-generated content can boost SEO visibility.
Conversion strategies should focus on moving users to your own domain.

Video SEO & WordPress Technical Optimization: Expert Insights from Anthony Prichard and Paritosh Pareek

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:20:00 +0000

Summary

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO podcast, Keith Breseé hosts Paritosh Pareek and Anthony Prichard from WP Sprints to discuss the critical aspects of SEO, particularly focusing on technical SEO and video strategies for local businesses. They explore the importance of optimizing video content for search engines, common mistakes made in WordPress SEO, and the role of AI in content creation. The conversation emphasizes the need for businesses to adapt to changing SEO landscapes and leverage video as a powerful tool for building trust and visibility online.

Takeaways

Video SEO is crucial for local businesses, especially those in service industries like Stonedepot MI, where showcasing products and installations can significantly boost trust and visibility.
Optimizing video titles and descriptions can enhance search visibility.
Technical SEO mistakes can severely impact website performance.
AI tools can assist in content creation but should not replace human oversight.
Building trust through video content is essential for conversions.
Local businesses should utilize video to engage their audience effectively.
WordPress users often overlook basic SEO settings that hinder performance.
Choosing the right hosting can affect website speed and SEO rankings.
Content that answers user questions is more likely to convert.
AI can streamline content creation but requires careful implementation.

Zeke Camusio: 36 Cents of Every Ad Dollar Is Wasted, and Pixels Are Why

Jeremy Rivera — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 17:00:00 +0000

Zeke Camusio founded Data Speaks, a measurement platform for brands spending a hundred thousand dollars a month or more on ads. His claim comes with arithmetic behind it. Thirty-six cents of every advertising pound is wasted, and the pixels most marketers navigate by are the reason.

Key takeaways

Three pillars of unified marketing measurement. Attribution, media mix modelling and incrementality testing. Google, Meta and TikTok each renamed the same standard.
The pixel failure rates are the whole argument. Forty-two per cent of conversions blocked by browsers and ad blockers, fifty-three per cent claimed by more than one platform, fifty-eight per cent falling outside the attribution window.
The skew has a direction. Retargeting and brand search get over-credited. Top-of-funnel YouTube and Meta get under-credited. Budgets then follow the wrong signal.
Ecommerce suits media mix modelling. B2B still needs user-level attribution and an expected value per lead.
Price the lead before you know what it is worth. Closing rate multiplied by deal value, and do not count the same person twice for hitting both the webinar and the quote form.
You are already sitting on the training data. Support email, recorded calls, reviews, product copy. Zeke tells clients to record every meeting.

How pixels break

The core problem we solve is that for every dollar marketers spend in advertising, 36 cents go to waste.
— Zeke Camusio

The failure is not subtle and it is not new. Browsers and ad blockers stop a large slice of conversions being recorded at all. A larger slice gets claimed by two or three platforms simultaneously, because none of them are talking to each other. A third slice happens outside whatever window the platform decided to look through.

These pixels don’t talk to each other. So 53% of all conversions are claimed by more than one platform.
— Zeke Camusio

Add those together and the dashboard you are steering by is not a measurement. It is three vendors each marking their own homework.

Which channels get robbed

The distortion is systematic rather than random, which is what makes it expensive. Anything close to the purchase gets credit it did not earn on its own. Retargeting and brand search look extraordinary because they are standing next to the till.

Anything that created the demand in the first place looks poor by comparison. Top-of-funnel video is the usual victim. Cut it, and the retargeting numbers hold up for a while, then quietly deteriorate with nothing in the report to explain why.

Media mix modelling without tracking people

The alternative is to stop tracking individuals and start reading the aggregate. Zeke describes measuring TikTok traffic campaigns against revenue across fifty states a day for three years, which is over fifty thousand data points and no personal identifiers at all.

It suits ecommerce well, because the volume is there and the purchase is immediate. It is a bad fit for a business doing forty deals a year, where the model has nothing to chew on.

Pricing a lead you have not closed yet

For B2B the answer is user-level attribution plus an expected value per lead. Closing rate multiplied by deal value gives you a number to optimise against long before the deal itself lands.

The double-counting trap

One person attending the webinar and then filling in the quote form is one lead, not two. Counting both inflates the top of the funnel and makes every downstream conversion rate look worse than it is.

The unstructured data you already own

The data that you’re going to need one day to make the AI really good, you’ve been creating that for years.
— Zeke Camusio

Support email, recorded calls, reviews, product copy. None of it is in a warehouse, all of it describes how your customers actually talk. His practical instruction to clients is simply to record every meeting, on the grounds that the cost of keeping it is nothing and the cost of not having it is a year of catching up.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Entity	What it is
Data Speaks	Zeke Camusio’s marketing measurement platform
Unified marketing measurement	Attribution, media mix modelling and incrementality testing together
Incrementality testing	Measuring what would have happened anyway
Expected value per lead	Closing rate multiplied by deal value, used before the deal closes
Attribution window	The reason 58 per cent of conversions fall outside the count

Questions this episode answers

How much advertising spend is actually wasted?
Why do my ad platforms all report different conversion numbers?
What is unified marketing measurement?
When should I use media mix modelling instead of attribution?
How do I value a lead before it closes?
How do I avoid double-counting leads across forms?
What data should I be keeping for future AI use?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

Data Speaks, where the measurement work lives.
Marcus Smith on running a business off four numbers, for the opposite end of the measurement spectrum.
The complete Google Search Console resource guide, if the attribution problem has you wanting cleaner organic data first.

Find Zeke Camusio

He is on LinkedIn, and Data Speaks is the company.

Cite this episode

Camusio, Zeke. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “36 Cents of Every Ad Dollar Is Wasted, and Pixels Are Why.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2025. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/zeke-camusio-36-cents-of-every-ad-dollar-is-wasted-and-pixels-are-why

Stop Reverse Engineering Google & Approach ALL Search Equally: Melissa Popp

Jeremy Rivera — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 14:36:54 +0000

Host: Jeremy Rivera - Founder, SEO Arcade
Guest: Melissa Popp - Founder, Rickety Roo | @poppupwriter
Episode Length: 60 minutes

Episode Overview

In this deep-dive conversation, Jeremy Rivera and Melissa Popp explore the seismic shifts happening in SEO and digital marketing. From AI overviews decimating organic click-through rates to the fundamental question of whether SEO as we know it still exists, this episode tackles the industry's biggest challenges and opportunities.

Key Discussion Points:

Why SEO was just "Google reverse engineering" from 2010-2021
The impact of AI overviews on organic traffic (down to 1% CTR)
How to adapt SEO strategies for LLMs and multi-platform search
The death of top-funnel content and what replaces it
Why the industry needs a value proposition beyond Google rankings

Best Quotes from This Episode

"We should be more in the ecosystem... our value could be so much more than Google. Why are we tying ourselves to Google?" - Melissa Popp

"From 2010 to 2021 SEO was merely reverse engineering Google. That was it. That was our job. We can't ignore other methods or other ways that search occurs." - Jeremy Rivera

"Chat GPT is now your most popular and least knowledgeable customer representative." - Referenced insight from Mike Buckby

"I question whether we actually see the death of the top of the funnel... we relied so much on top of the funnel to drive people in and guide them to the right place on our websites." - Melissa Popp

Key Takeaways & Action Items

✅ For SEO Professionals

Expand beyond Google optimization - Start incorporating LLM visibility strategies into your workflows
Learn automation tools - If you're not using tools like N8n for workflow automation, you're falling behind
Shift metrics focus - Move from clicks/impressions to user capture and email acquisition
Test LLM strategies - Start experimenting with content approaches for different AI platforms

✅ For Agency Owners

Reposition your value proposition - Stop selling "Google rankings" and start selling comprehensive digital visibility
Invest in multi-channel capabilities - Build expertise across social platforms, LLMs, and emerging search technologies
Update client education - Help clients understand the new search landscape beyond traditional SEO

✅ For Content Creators

Prepare for longer queries - Optimize for 30-40 word conversational searches, not just 2-4 word keywords
Create bot-friendly content - Write with the understanding that AI will be reading and summarizing your content
Focus on comprehensive coverage - Address topics thoroughly since users may get answers without clicking

Detailed Show Notes

[00:00 - 05:00] The Longest Year in Marketing

Jeremy opens discussing how much the SEO world has changed since their last conversation in December. Melissa describes this as "the longest year of marketing in a decade" due to:

Integration of AI overviews in Google search results
Every client asking about LLM visibility
ChatGPT now using UTM codes (visible in GA4)
The challenge of figuring out what still works vs. what's new

Key Resources Mentioned:

Lily Ray's social media for AI overview fail examples

[05:00 - 12:00] Industry Response: Two Extremes

Discussion of how the SEO industry is responding with two distinct approaches:

The Deep End: People claiming to have cracked LLM optimization
The Practical Approach: Building on existing best practices while adapting

Melissa emphasizes that we still don't understand how LLMs work - "if you put 10 people side by side with the same query in an LLM, you're going to get 10 different answers."

Jeremy references Mike King's recent episode about SEO being "deprecated" but questions whether the complex solutions are just "make more different content in more places."

[12:00 - 18:00] The 90/10 Split: Enterprise vs Local SEO

Melissa breaks down the industry reality:

10% of SEOs work with enterprise clients where complex query fan-out strategies might be relevant
90% work with clients in local space where content quality is still poor and basic optimization wins

For local businesses in "Cheyenne, Wyoming," complex LLM strategies aren't necessary - foundational SEO still works because competition is weak.

This is also true for many local service providers like Aloha Marine, where strong fundamentals and clear multi-channel visibility still outperform overly complex AI-centric approaches.

[18:00 - 25:00] Historical Context: The Google Reverse Engineering Era

Jeremy makes the case that "from 2010 to 2021 SEO was merely reverse engineering Google" and that era is over.

Key points:

SEO success was directly tied to understanding Google's algorithm
The industry forgot other search engines existed during Google's dominance
Now we need to think like digital marketers, not just Google reverse engineers
The challenge is redefining our unique selling proposition beyond Google rankings

[25:00 - 32:00] The Click-Through Crisis & Google's Gaslighting

Jeremy calls out Google's claims about sending "more clicks to the ecosystem" as gaslighting, noting:

AI overviews showing 1% organic click-through rates
This is on top of HCU (Helpful Content Update) damage
Search liaison position on Twitter has been deactivated
SEO professionals who believe Google's traffic claims "should not be calling themselves SEO professionals"

Melissa adds context about Google being a for-profit company whose mission "is no longer to make the world better - it's to make as much money as possible."

[32:00 - 38:00] Multi-Platform Search Reality

Discussion of search beyond Google:

Bing integration in Windows systems and Co-Pilot
TikTok SEO explosion and the territorial disputes between SEOs and social media marketing professionals
Amazon SEO as an untapped opportunity
The need to meet audiences where they are, not just where we're comfortable

Key insight: "Search exists in so many different places, not just this myopic view we have that it's just Google that matters."

[38:00 - 45:00] Repositioning Our Value & The Midlife Crisis

Melissa: "Our value could be so much more than Google. Why are we tying ourselves to Google?"

The conversation explores how to bake in other parts of marketing into SEO work and how "we're having a midlife identity crisis as marketers."

AI has the potential to:

Change workflows and efficiency
Give more time for strategic thinking
Allow for more creativity beyond the "limited SEO box"

[45:00 - 50:00] The Death of Top-Funnel Content?

Melissa poses a provocative question: Are we seeing "the death of the top of the funnel?"

Key observations:

Users getting answers directly from AI overviews without clicking
Same pattern happening across social media and video platforms
If users get "correct" answers from AI, why click through to read informational articles?
The fundamental shift in how people interact with information sources

[50:00 - 55:00] Testing, Experimentation & The Black Hat Silence

Discussion of the need for proper testing in the LLM era:

Melissa: "I see a lot of people claiming XYZ works for AI optimization. How does anybody know?"
Need for more data, more case studies before making claims
The surprising silence from black hat SEO communities
Ray Martinez's work at Archer as an example of proper testing methodology

Jeremy notes the rapid iteration of LLM models makes testing challenging - "GPT just changed from four to five and Claude moved from Sonic to Knuckles."

[55:00 - 60:00] The Bot Sandwich & Future Skills

Jeremy introduces the concept of the "double bot sandwich" - humans using bots to create content that other bots read and summarize for other humans.

Critical skill gaps identified:

If you're "not learning how to use N8n to daisy chain multiple commands"
Still stuck "in the mode of I need to log in and edit this WordPress post"
"You're probably going to lose in the arms race"

Melissa discusses the personalization and bias issues in LLM platforms that we can't optimize for.

Nonprofit & Multi-Channel Applications

Special segment on how these changes impact organizations without direct sales:

Nonprofits, news sites, and content-driven businesses
Importance of branding, multi-channel marketing, and distribution
Need to be on TikTok, Instagram, email marketing, etc.
"Multi-channel is more important than ever. Get on the truck, everybody."

The New Value Metric: Capture Over Clicks

Jeremy: "The value in SEO is no longer the click. It is the capture of that user."

New success frameworks:

Focus on email capture, retargeting, and multi-touch conversions
Understanding 6-month nurturing cycles vs. immediate conversions
Coordinating with e-commerce teams for inventory management
Building comprehensive user journey optimization

Traditional vs Modern SEO Comparison

Aspect Traditional SEO (2010-2021) Modern Digital Marketing (2024+) Primary Focus Google algorithm reverse engineering Multi-platform search optimization Success Metrics Rankings, clicks, impressions User capture, email acquisition, multi-touch conversions Content Strategy Keyword-focused articles Conversational, comprehensive content for 30-40 word queries Platform Coverage Google-centric Google, LLMs, social platforms, voice search, emerging tech Skill Requirements On-page optimization, link building Automation workflows, AI integration, multi-channel coordination Value Proposition "We'll get you ranked and drive traffic" "We'll capture and nurture your ideal customers across all digital touchpoints" Forecasting Ability Confident traffic projections Directional insights with adaptation strategies

Important Resources & Links

Guest Resources

Host Resources

Specialized Content Areas

Upcoming Events & Announcements

Melissa Popp Speaking Events:

September 2024: Local SEO for Good with Bright Local (raising funds for Human Rights Campaign)
October 2024: Women in Tech Fest, Philadelphia - "AI Workflow for Writing Content in Your Own Voice" (full workflow will be shared publicly after the event)

Continue the Conversation

Connect with the Hosts:

Tweet us your thoughts using #UnscriptedSEO
Share your own LLM optimization experiments
Let us know how you're adapting your value proposition

Related Episodes:

Chuck McHenry on Modern Local SEO: Location Pages, TikTok Marketing, and Competing with AI Search Engines

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 04:12:49 +0000

Summary

In this episode, Jeremy Rivera interviews Chuck McHenry, who shares his extensive journey in the marketing and SEO industry. Chuck discusses the evolution of SEO, the importance of location pages, and how AI and LLMs are changing the landscape of digital marketing. He emphasizes the significance of social media in local services and the need for marketers to diversify their strategies to stay relevant in a rapidly changing environment.

Takeaways

Chuck McHenry started his journey in marketing in 2004 with a focus on SEO.
Location pages are crucial for local SEO success.
How he's now using SEO for his Southern California powerwashing company
The basics of SEO are making a comeback in effectiveness.
AI and LLMs are influencing how customers find service providers.
Social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram are vital for local service marketing.
Video content on platforms like YouTube can significantly enhance visibility.
Marketers need to embrace a multi-channel approach to reach their audience.
Google is indexing social media content, which can impact search results.
Understanding customer needs and providing detailed service information is essential.
The future of SEO requires adapting to new technologies and marketing methods.

Justin Oberman: SEO & Transition From Ranking Into Participation In The Attention Economy

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 19:31:24 +0000

In this fascinating conversation, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Justin Oberman, a seasoned advertising professional turned modern publicist, to explore how the attention economy is reshaping digital marketing. Justin shares his journey from running a seven-figure agency to becoming a specialist in "manufacturing attention" for clients in the advertising and marketing space.

The discussion covers the evolution from traditional SEO tactics to attention-based strategies, the power of showmanship in marketing, and why Justin believes every industry needs its own "Dogecoin" - that disruptive, attention-grabbing player that changes the game.

Key Topics Discussed

The Shift from SEO to Attention Economy: How AI and LLM-based search tools are changing the game from keyword optimization to consensus-based visibility
Showmanship Over Persuasion: Why Justin believes marketing is fundamentally about putting on a show rather than traditional persuasion techniques
The Publicity Approach: Moving beyond personal branding to manufactured attention and strategic controversy
Fame as the Ultimate Marketing Goal: How attention beats traditional marketing metrics and makes everything else easier
Social-Centric Marketing: Using organic social media as a springboard for broader publicity efforts

Notable Quotes

"I do not believe that advertising or marketing is about persuasion. I don't think it's about selling. I don't think it's about even storytelling. I think those are all techniques for what the main thing that advertising and marketing and branding is, which is showmanship." - Justin Oberman

"All advertising is guesswork, nobody really understands how it works. It's all a gamble. And the only thing that really matters is fame. The more famous you are, the easier everything becomes." - Bob Hoffman (as quoted by Justin)

Resources & Links

Guest Information

Justin Oberman on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/justinoberman
Oberman and Partners: Done-for-you publicity services https://www.obermanpartners.com/
Genius Scouts: geniusscouts.com - Educational platform and free monthly masterclasses
Instagram/X: @OBERCREATIVE8

Books, Services & References Mentioned

"Phantom Fame" by Harry Reichenbach - The foundational book that shaped Justin's publicity philosophy
"Propaganda" by Edward Bernays - Classic text on public relations and influence
Price Intelligently by SBI - The importance of understanding pricing perceptions on your marketing choices
Howard Luck Gossage - The advertising innovator who invented interactive advertising in the 1960s

Podcast & Host Information

Unscripted SEO Podcast: unscriptedseo.com
SEO Arcade (Jeremy's Agency): seoarcade.com
Host: Jeremy Rivera

Additional Networks Mentioned

Jumpsuit Network - Marketing and advertising professional network

Key Takeaways for SEO & Digital Marketing Professionals

Rethink Link Building: Instead of cold outreach, focus on becoming visible to industry publishers and journalists through consistent public discourse
Attention Drives Authority: In an AI-driven search landscape, consensus matters more than traditional SEO tactics
Personal Brands Need Shows: Move beyond content creation to strategic attention manufacturing
Fame Amplifies Everything: Strong personal/company recognition makes all other marketing efforts more effective
Boring Industries Have Advantages: Less competition for attention means smaller efforts can yield bigger results. Even traditionally low-attention businesses like Mondragon Milling
can generate an outsized impact when they apply attention-based marketing strategies.

Connect with the Show

Have questions about this episode or want to suggest future topics? Reach out to Jeremy Rivera through SEO Arcade or connect on the platforms mentioned above.

Subscribe to Unscripted SEO: unscriptedseo.com

This episode challenges traditional digital marketing thinking and offers a fresh perspective on building authority and visibility in an increasingly crowded online landscape. Whether you're an SEO professional, content creator, or business owner, Justin's insights on manufactured attention provide actionable strategies for standing out in your industry.

Jason Berkowitz is Breaking Silos: How Cross Channel Collaboration Enhances Marketing and SEO

Jeremy Rivera — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 11:12:36 +0000

Join us as we dive into the world of SEO with Jason Berkowitz, founder and SEO director of Break the Web. In this episode, your Cookeville SEO expert, Jeremy Rivera explores the evolving landscape of SEO, the challenges posed by search engines, and the importance of collaboration between marketing and SEO teams.

Key Topics Discussed:

The current state of SEO and its transformation over the years Strategies for focusing on middle and bottom-of-the-funnel content The impact of AI on consumer behavior and search patterns The role of collaboration in enhancing marketing and SEO efforts Practical tips for achieving quick wins in SEO. Local service businesses such as Wayne Tile rely heavily on these SEO strategies to capture high-intent customers.

Guest Bio: Jason Berkowitz is an SEO expert with over a decade of experience. As the founder of Break the Web, he helps brands make SEO more measurable and accessible.

Connect with Jason on Linkedin:

Karina Baldwin: The Mental Performance Coach Breaking Entrepreneurial Self-Sabotage Cycles

Jeremy Rivera — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Summary

In this Unscripted SEO conversation, Keith Breseé and Karina Baldwin, founder of True Adventure Collective, explore the critical role of mental performance in achieving business success. They discuss how mindset influences outcomes, the importance of breaking negative cycles, and the need for self-worth and belonging in personal and professional growth. Karina emphasizes the significance of resourcefulness and identity in motivation, providing practical strategies for setting up external if-then statements to foster success. The discussion highlights the necessity of self-trust and integrity in entrepreneurship, ultimately framing business challenges as universal experiences tied to human psychology.

Takeaways

Mental performance is crucial for business success.
Breaking negative cycles requires recognizing patterns.
Self-worth and belonging are foundational to growth.
Resourcefulness is key to overcoming obstacles.
Identity influences motivation and actions.
Keeping promises to oneself builds self-trust.
Business success is not solely defined by financial metrics.
Everyone faces similar challenges in their entrepreneurial journey.
External factors can be leveraged to create success.
Emotional decisions drive logical reasoning in business.

What's ACTUALLY Working In SEO? Ryan Jones Is Testing The Waters For Us All

Jeremy Rivera — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 21:44:16 +0000

Host: Jeremy Rivera
Guest: Ryan Jones, Marketing Manager at SEO Testing

About the Host

Jeremy Rivera is an SEO expert and podcast host who helps businesses navigate the evolving landscape of search engine optimization.

Connect with Jeremy:

About the Guest

Ryan Jones is the Marketing Manager at SEO Testing, bringing nearly 10 years of experience across agency, client-side, in-house, and freelance SEO work. He's passionate about data-driven SEO strategies and testing methodologies.

Connect with Ryan:

SEO Testing - 14-day free trial available
LinkedIn: @Ryan Jones SEO
Twitter/X: @Ryan Jones SEO
Blue Sky: @Ryan Jones SEO

Key Topics Discussed

The Evolution of SEO Roles

Moving beyond traditional keyword research limitations
Creating demand vs. finding existing demand
Multi-channel marketing integration

Impact of AI and Google's Changes

AI Overviews reducing informational traffic
The shift from traffic volume to traffic quality
Google's changing relationship with publishers

SEO Testing Strategies

Internal linking optimization (their biggest win: 1000% increase)
Content refresh strategies
Schema markup implementation
Cross-channel content distribution

Actionable Takeaways

Test schema markup implementation on videos, about pages, and other content
Use social media engagement as a gauge for content topics
Focus on horizontal content distribution across multiple platforms
Implement structured testing to prove SEO value to clients

Notable Quotes

"I think SEO is becoming now and it will become more multi-disciplined... we're gonna get more and more people using LLMs to search for what they need." - Ryan Jones

"The traffic that we do get from LLMs... seems to be really high intent and it is actually converting at a much higher rate than the organic traffic." - Ryan Jones

Resources Mentioned

SEO Testing platform with 14-day free trial
Various schema markup types (video, site name, about page)
Cross-platform content distribution strategies

Marisa Cali on Leveraging Events, Branding & Long-Term ROI

Jeremy Rivera — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 11:52:14 +0000

In this conversation, Jeremy Rivera with his podcast based content marketing experience and Marisa Cali and her event marketing experience, explore the evolving landscape of event marketing, emphasizing the importance of personal branding and community engagement. Marisa shares insights on how to create meaningful experiences at events, the significance of aligning online presence with real-world branding, and the challenges faced by freelancers.

They also discuss innovative marketing strategies for traditionally boring industries and the importance of leveraging super fans for authentic promotion. The conversation concludes with Marisa's upcoming retreat for women entrepreneurs, highlighting the need for support and resources in business development.

Mastering Video SEO: Anthony Prichard's Proven YouTube Optimization Strategy

Jeremy Rivera — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 04:24:37 +0000

Summary

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Keith Bresee and Anthony Prichard, a video marketing expert, discuss the intricacies of video SEO, emphasizing its importance in digital marketing. They explore strategies for optimizing video content for both Google and YouTube, the significance of engaging thumbnails, and the role of consistency in building an audience. Anthony shares practical tips for creating effective video content, utilizing Google My Business, and the technical aspects of video SEO. The conversation highlights the need for businesses to embrace video as a powerful tool for growth and connection with their audience.

Takeaways

Video is a powerful tool for SEO and marketing.
Engaging video content can significantly increase traffic.
Utilizing Google My Business with video can enhance visibility.
Consistency in posting videos is crucial for audience growth.
Thumbnails play a vital role in attracting viewers.
Crafting a compelling hook is essential for viewer retention.
Understanding your audience is key to effective content creation.
Technical SEO elements are important for video optimization.
Building engagement through comments and likes boosts visibility.
Keep video content simple and authentic to connect with viewers.

Nick Jain & Leveraging Ai Content Intelligently

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 18:05:18 +0000

Guest: Nick Jane, CEO & Founder of Content Hurricane
Host: Jeremy Rivera, Unscripted Podcast
Episode Topic: AI-Powered Content Creation and SEO Strategy

About the Guest

Nick Jane brings a unique background combining Wall Street investment experience with tech entrepreneurship. After 10 years as a professional investor and leadership roles at companies generating over $100M in revenue, Nick recently left his position as CEO of Ideascale (the world's largest innovation software company) to launch Content Hurricane.

Key Discussion Points

Content Hurricane Overview: AI-powered blog writing platform designed for SEO optimization
Technical Approach: Using Gemini AI with proprietary enhancement frameworks
SEO Philosophy: Focus on creating genuinely useful content rather than gaming Google's algorithm
E-E-A-T Standards: How AI can meet Google's Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust requirements
Hallucination Prevention: Multi-layer fact-checking and temperature control systems
Speed vs Quality: Delivering content in under 60 seconds without sacrificing quality

Tools & Platforms Mentioned

Content Hurricane
ChatGPT
Claude
Perplexity
Gemini
Jasper
Copy.ai
WordPress
Webflow
Shopify

Resources & Links

Content Hurricane: https://contenthurricane.com/
Free Trial: 5 articles free, no credit card required
Contact: nickj@contenthurricane.com
Jeremy Rivera's Services: SEO Arcade

Drewbie Wilson Breaks Down How Most Businesses Fail To Convert Leads

Jeremy Rivera — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 13:05:40 +0000

Show Notes: Call the Damn Leads with Drewbie Wilson

Unscripted SEO Podcast Episode

Read the in-depth recap "Why 90% of Businesses Can't Convert Leads (And How to Fix It)"

Episode Description

Drewbie Wilson, the self-proclaimed "Meme Lord" and founder of Call the Damn Leads, joins Jeremy Rivera to discuss the massive disconnect between marketing and sales teams. From his tattooed knuckles to his no-nonsense approach to lead follow-up, Drewbie shares why 90% of business owners can't explain what happens to their leads and how to fix the broken system that's costing businesses millions.

Guest Bio

Drewbie Wilson - Founder of Call the Damn Leads

Self-proclaimed "Meme Lord" (literally tattooed on his knuckles)
Sales and marketing expert with street-smart background
E-commerce business owner selling sales motivation apparel
Sales coach and mentor specializing in lead conversion
Author of sales training courses including "Closing the Loop"

Key Topics Covered

The Lead Follow-Up Crisis (5:30)

Why only 1% of businesses call leads back same day
The shocking reality: only 10% ever call back at all
Case study: Real estate leads sitting untouched for weeks
The $1 trillion cost of sales and marketing misalignment

⚡ Speed-to-Lead Statistics (12:45)

80% of people buy from the first person they contact
391% higher conversion rates when calling within 1 minute
Why most sales reps quit after 2-3 calls
The psychology behind immediate response

The 30-Day Follow-Up System (18:20)

Drewbie's proven touch-point sequence
Day 1: Call + Text
Strategic follow-ups on days 8, 10, 15, 21, 28, 31
Why persistence beats perfection

Sales & Marketing Alignment (25:15)

Why 90% of business owners can't explain their lead process
The front-end promise vs. back-end delivery problem
How misalignment costs 10% of revenue annually
Creating cohesion between teams

Marketing "Unsexy" Industries (32:40)

Using dark humor for serious topics (CPR classes example)
The toilet partition Reddit case study
Creating problem awareness without shame
Memes as marketing tools

Content Strategy Reality Check (38:50)

Why the "ultimate guide" approach fails
Microwave directions: Simple, sequential instructions
Interview your experts vs. 10 hours of keyword research
"Did you talk to anybody?" - The expert interview strategy

Trust in the Digital Age (45:30)

Why certificates matter less than conversation quality
Authentic expertise vs. degrees
Google's AI summaries changing search behavior
Building trust through helpful content

⏰ Time Management Mastery (52:10)

Time, energy, effort: The only unrecoverable resources
ROI measurement on every activity
1 hour conversation > 10 hours keyword research
Where most marketers waste time

Best Quotes

"90 some percent of business owners can't give you a distinct answer" when asked what happens to their leads.

"Time, energy, and effort are the only resources we cannot get back."

"People don't want to be sold something. They want to make a decision to buy."

"If you're not problem aware you don't know what you don't know until you know."

"Did you talk to anybody? Did you talk to anybody?"

"Sales and marketing, they have to work in cohesion."

Key Statistics Mentioned

1% of businesses call leads back same day
10% of businesses ever call leads back
80% of people buy from first person they talk to
391% higher conversion calling within 1 minute
8-12 touchpoints used to convert (now 500+)
90% of business owners can't explain lead process
60-70% of B2B marketing content goes unused
$1 trillion lost annually to sales/marketing misalignment

Resources & Links

Drewbie Wilson / Call the Damn Leads

Website: CalltheDamnLeads.com
T-shirts & Apparel: Collections
Sales Training: Damn Closer Bundle
Book: Signed Paperback
Social: @CalltheDamnLeads (all platforms)

Jeremy Rivera / Host

Unscripted SEO Podcast: UnscriptedSEO.com
SEO Forecasting Tool: SEOArcade.com
More Episodes: Recent Podcasts

Supporting Research

Action Items for Listeners

Immediate (This Week)

Audit your lead response time - How long until first contact?
Map your current follow-up process - Document what actually happens
Set a 5-minute response goal - Create alerts and workflows
Ask the question: "What happens when a lead comes in today?"

Short-term (This Month)

Create a 30-day follow-up sequence - Don't quit after 2 calls
Interview your top expert - Record 1 hour conversation
Align sales and marketing metrics - Shared goals, shared success
Implement "microwave directions" - Simplify all instructions

Long-term (Next Quarter)

Measure time ROI on all activities - Track what drives results
Create problem awareness content - Use humor appropriately
Build conversation-based trust - Focus on expertise over credentials
Develop authentic content strategy - Stop keyword stuffing

Cauveé: Engineering Inspiration Through Strategic Personal Branding

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 08:10:31 +0000

Summary

In this UnscriptedSEO conversation, Jeremy Rivera and Cauveé (also known as Cauvee) the "Inspiration Engineer®” discuss the concept of personal branding, the importance of SEO, and the evolving landscape of marketing in the age of AI.

Cauvee shares his journey as an 'Inspiration Engineer' and emphasizes the need for individuals to build their personal brands while navigating the complexities of social media platforms. They explore the impact of AI and LLMs on marketing strategies and the necessity of securing one's online presence.

The discussion culminates in strategies for monetizing content effectively.

Code: UNSCRIPTED https://www.inspirationengineer.com/unscripted-seo-bundle

Takeaways

Cauvee defines himself as an 'Inspiration Engineer' to awaken dreamers.
Personal branding is essential in today's marketplace.
The more skills you have, the more valuable you are.
Your personal brand is shaped by how others perceive you.
AI is a tool that can be used for both good and bad.
Collecting emails is crucial when using rented platforms.
Engagement and conversation are key in social media.
AI can assist in various tasks, but it requires careful use.
Content must be indexable for better visibility.
Monetizing content requires a strategic approach.

Linkedin Expert Strategies For Success With Al Kushner

Jeremy Rivera — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 19:25:38 +0000

Host: Jeremy Rivera - Unscripted SEO Podcast
Guest: Al Kushner - Author of "The LinkedIn Advantage"
Website: linkedvantage.com

Episode Overview

LinkedIn expert Al Kushner shares 20+ years of experience on how to leverage LinkedIn for business growth, combining traditional networking strategies with modern AI tools. From profile optimization to video content creation, this episode covers everything professionals need to know about building meaningful connections and driving business results on LinkedIn.

Key Topics Discussed

Profile Optimization Fundamentals

Why your headshot is critical for first impressions
The importance of 5-10 recommendations before outreach
How to optimize your profile for professional credibility

Video Content Strategy

Native video uploads vs. external links
60-90 second educational content guidelines
Why videos get automatically accepted in groups

AI-Enhanced LinkedIn Strategy

Using ChatGPT to enhance influencer engagement
Balancing automation with authentic communication
Why primitive automation tools should be avoided

LinkedIn Newsletter Power

How LinkedIn newsletters bypass corporate spam filters
Creating up to 5 targeted newsletters by industry
Reaching audiences both on and off LinkedIn

Sales Navigator Deep Dive

$99/month investment breakdown and ROI
312% ROI over 3 years according to Forrester study
Advanced filtering and 50 InMail credits
Dynamic background images and activity tracking

Content Best Practices

750-1000 word article guidelines
Strategic emoji usage by demographic
Image inclusion for better engagement
Industry-specific newsletter segmentation

Quotable Moments

"You don't get a second chance to make a first impression. If you're going to do any type of outreach, make sure your profile looks as professional as possible."

"The way to approach professionals on LinkedIn is to really provide value to them - educate them on topics that are particularly pain points for them."

"LinkedIn has such high authority that it usually bypasses spam filters in corporate emails."

"I find my organic method more effective than ads because when I post, it's educational and informative, not an ad."

Maintaining Control in an AI-Driven Marketing World With Lisa Raehsler

Jeremy Rivera — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 18:44:55 +0000

In this conversation, Lisa Raehsler discusses the evolving landscape of PPC advertising, particularly in light of recent AI advancements. She emphasizes the importance of understanding user intent, the role of keywords and copy in targeting, and the foundational principles that underpin successful PPC campaigns.

The discussion also touches on the interplay between paid and organic strategies, highlighting how they can complement each other for better results. Lisa shares insights on how marketers can leverage AI tools while maintaining a human touch in their strategies.

Calculators and Digital Assets Value For SEO with Steven Schneider

Jeremy Rivera — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 15:36:57 +0000

Steven Schneider - 10+ years in SEO, scaled affiliate portfolio to 40 sites and 1.4M ARR. Now helps B2B and SaaS CMOs leverage proven SEO strategies. Co-founder of TrioSEO.

Key Topics Discussed

The Calculator SEO Strategy

Steven's latest focus: calculators and digital assets for driving meaningful leads through SEO, moving beyond traditional blog content strategies.

Key Success Factors:

Quality over speed - 2-3 month development process, not 20-minute ChatGPT builds
Keyword validation - Need 1,000+ monthly searches minimum
Client-keyword fit - Can they realistically rank? (Skip EBITDA/credit card calculators)

Real Examples:

M&A valuation calculator (ranking top 3-5)
Legal settlement tax calculators
Cost segregation calculators

Multi-Channel Lead Generation

The Process:

Build valuable calculator
Capture emails with nurture sequence on the backend
Follow up with 3-5 day drip campaigns
Connect to sales team

Key Insight: "We can't rely on Google alone anymore - it's suicide"

The Fractional SEO Approach

Modern SEOs must become fractional partners, not just traffic drivers.

Essential Questions:

What's your sales process?
How many sales people do you have?
What happens after form submission?
What are your success metrics?

Shocking Stat: 80% of local business form submissions get zero response

YMYL & Algorithm Changes

Discussion on Google's Medic Update impact - brand recognition as trust signal. Finance is always rough without specialized writers.

Trust Rank Theory: Distance from authoritative "seed sites" (universities, hospitals, gov sites) affects medical niche rankings.

AI & Search Evolution

Current approach: Monitor client appearances in ChatGPT for high-intent keywords. Quality content, authority and strong SEO still correlates with AI search visibility.

Strategy: Focus on middle/bottom funnel content that AI can't replicate (specific calculators, detailed valuations).

Client Onboarding Best Practices

Steven's Favorite Question: How are you currently tracking success on your website?

Common Problem: Most clients can't define what "success" looks like, leading to misaligned expectations.

Solution: Establish clear metrics upfront - demos, trials, webinars, etc.

Key Takeaways

Calculator SEO requires significant investment but drives high-quality leads
Multi-channel approach essential for sustainable growth
Business understanding more important than tool expertise
Clear success metrics critical for client relationships
Fractional partnership model replacing traditional SEO agencies

Flynn Zaiger on SEO Agency Evolution

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 29 May 2025 20:57:34 +0000

SEO Agency Evolution: From Content Mills to Business Consultants

Guest: Flynn Zaiger, Founder & CEO of Online Optimism
Host: Jeremy Rivera, Unscripted Podcast

Read the full detailed recap blogpost of the interview

Key Takeaways

Bottom Line Up Front: Modern SEO agencies must evolve beyond traditional tactics to become true business consultants who understand conversion funnels, sales processes, and cross-channel marketing strategies to survive the AI disruption.

Guest Background

Flynn Zaiger runs Online Optimism, a 13-year-old SEO agency
Started solo in New Orleans, now 20 employees with Flynn based in NYC
Specializes in healthcare and higher education but maintains diverse client portfolio
Built through word-of-mouth and referrals rather than niche specialization

Core Discussion Points

The Conversion-First Approach

SEO agencies must examine client conversion processes before focusing on traffic
Many agencies skip analyzing what happens after the click
Success metrics should tie to business growth, not just rankings or traffic
Example: 50% of local service forms never get responses, only 4-5% get same-day replies

Content Strategy in the AI Era

Traditional "good, engaging content" worked from 2012-2024
AI tools have "pilfered" most existing content, making differentiation harder
#1 rankings becoming vanity metrics unless tied to actual conversions
Focus shifting to multimedia content (video) and unique, unscalable content

Link Building Evolution

Moving from quantity-focused to quality, niche-relevant link building
Treating link building more like digital PR
Diversifying to forums, Reddit, and community platforms
Authority and trust signals remain paramount (Vatican CBD example)
Distance from authority sites still matters significantly

The New SEO Landscape

SEO agencies forced to become more generalist and flexible
Scope of services becoming blurrier as tactics multiply
Need for cross-channel thinking: email, social, video, forums
In-house teams have advantages due to broader access and integration

Platform Diversification Strategy

Create content for LinkedIn Pulse, Substack, Medium, SlideShare
Build presence on Reddit, forums, and emerging platforms
"Create once, distribute forever" across multiple channels
Focus on platforms with actual audiences, not just DR scores

Actionable Advice

Primary Recommendation: Invest in Reddit

Create brand accounts and subreddits
Claim profiles early before competitors
Engage authentically in relevant communities
Long-term play as Google currently rewards Reddit content
Use multiple accounts (personal vs. professional) as allowed by ToS

Secondary Strategies

Audit your conversion funnel before optimizing for more traffic
Understand client sales processes through demos and CRM access
Create FAQ content for zero-search-volume questions that AI might answer
Build relationships in your industry for natural link opportunities
Think like a business consultant, not just an SEO tactician

Industry Insights

AI Overview Impact: LLMs are "drunk" and need guidance, making on-site FAQs more important
Google's Vulnerability: Compared to Sears missing the Amazon opportunity
Agency Challenges: Pricing pressure from AI tools, need for service diversification
Future Outlook: Google optimization may be less relevant in 10-15 years

Notable Quotes

"At the end of the day, you need a human to make a decision."

"Your client is rarely going to measure you just on organic search traffic. They're going to measure you on are you helping to grow the business."

"I think what still works long-term is the unscalable strategy."

Connect with Flynn Zaiger:

Company: Online Optimism
Reddit: @online-optimism

The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

SEO SaaS Panel: Patrick Stox, Ben Wills, Ben Senescu

Laura Hoot: SEO Isn't Dying, It's Hitting Another Boom

AI Max: Now Google Picks Your Landing Page | Lisa Raehsler

In this episode

Chapters

Notable quotes

Why a 5% Close-Rate Lift Beats 20% More Leads | Alex Radetic, Nuvo Agency

In this episode

Notable quotes

Resources & links

About the show

One Word Changed Every Answer: Ben Wills on Testing LLMs Directly

In this episode

Chapters

Notable quotes

Resources & links

About the show

SEO Is the Batter to Your AI | Stephanie Long

In this episode

Chapters

Notable quotes

Resources & links

Read the full recap

About the show

Gert Mellak: Bot Impressions and the SEO ROI Myth

Isaac Justesen on Local SEO for Healthcare Clinics

Key takeaways

On this page

Why a clinic ranks like a plumber

What you are allowed to say

The first two things he fixes

The leak behind the marketing

From curation to selection

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

Go deeper

Find Isaac Justesen

Cite this episode

Ben Senescu on Open Source SEO and the $99 Ceiling

Key takeaways

On this page

A week from Reddit post to product

Why open source still costs ten dollars

Who actually pays

Declaring bankruptcy on the pull requests

I can do anything. What is the one thing?

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

Go deeper

Find Ben Senescu

Cite this episode

Ann Smarty on LLM Consensus, Reddit and Brand Search

Key takeaways

On this page

Losing control of your own brand name

What an LLM consensus audit actually is

Six months on Reddit, and how to lose the account

The blocker is internal, not tactical

Chapters

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

Go deeper

Watch the interview

Find Ann Smarty

Cite this episode

You Rank Consensus, Not Pages: Malte Landwehr on LLMs

Key takeaways

On this page

Why consensus beats your canonical page

Against a second URL, for serving by user agent

Fan-outs as a placement map

The terms you did not prompt

Manipulation surfaces and AI-content guardrails

When AI content is worth publishing

Chapters

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

Go deeper

Watch the interview