The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

Gisele Navarro is the managing editor of HouseFresh, an independent air-quality review site that buys every unit it tests, runs no ads and takes no sponsorships. In September 2023 Google started taking their traffic away. By March 2024 it was nearly all gone. This is what happened next, told from inside it. HouseFresh started publishing properly in 2021 and had three good years. Then the late-2023 updates landed, and Gisele found herself comparing notes with independent publishers from every other niche who were all losing to the same handful of huge sites. The February 2024 article her team wrote about it got Nieman Lab's attention, and Nieman Lab got Google's. Her own writing on the whole run sits on her HouseFresh author page. Full transcript and recap: https://unscriptedseo.com/gisele-navarro-housefresh-ai-traffic/ In this episode Why they buy every unit they review, and what they do when a US-only product cannot be bought from the UK. The article, Nieman Lab, and the day at Google's HQ with 19 other publishers and a room of engineers. What actually changed in August 2024 and March 2025, and why Gisele stopped opening analytics entirely. The great decoupling in her own numbers: impressions through the roof, clicks falling, positions holding. Two minutes from ChatGPT, six to eight from Reddit. Her on-site data contradicts the "AI traffic is more engaged" claim outright, and it rebuilt how every page and every HouseFresh video is structured. Why they have not blocked the AI bots, and the wildfire story behind that call. How the community got built: opening r/HouseFresh because the site could not rank, posting the critical reviews nobody else would run, the manufacturer that tried to sue them, and the Linus Tech Tips video that reached millions. What is next: new product categories, an app, and getting air-quality workshops into schools. Jeremy and Gisele also get into the AI slop narrative and what the pace of it did to reader trust, which is exactly why an audience that wants human, expert-sourced content turned out to be the asset worth protecting. Gisele posts the data side of the work on X. Chapters (01:38) No ads, no sponsorships, every unit bought (03:39) The 2023 collapse, and competing with Forbes (05:09) The article that called it out (07:24) The call with Google, then the Googleplex (08:43) August 2024, site reputation abuse, March 2025 (13:28) AI Overviews and the great decoupling (19:16) Two minutes from AI, six to eight from Reddit (23:38) When the AI Overview sells the product for you (26:49) Walled gardens, and why the subreddit exists (31:11) The lawsuit and the Linus Tech Tips video (35:24) "We are the human LLMs" (37:47) New categories, an app, and air quality in schools Notable quotes "How can it be that I'm reviewing an air purifier, and you are reviewing a pair of trainers, and you are reviewing a Star Trek show, and we are all competing with Forbes?"— Gisele Navarro "Right now they are all walled gardens. And tomorrow, from Reddit to YouTube to X, all of them can turn ar...

Nick LeRoy has been an SEO for sixteen years and now runs SEOjobs.com, the job board he built because searching "SEO" on LinkedIn still returns a Java developer role with "SEO knowledge, nice to have" buried in the bullets. His read on the hiring market is one word: ugly. For the first time, the supply of SEO talent outstrips demand, which is how, in his words, "a lot of C-plus SEOs were getting six-figure A-plus salaries." AI removed the entry-level rung, and the people most exposed are the ones who built a career on executing the checklist rather than explaining the reasoning. The line that should worry you: "If you can summarize what you're doing in bullet points, you're replaceable." Nick argues for what he calls human-led AI, and asks the question nobody in the C-suite wants: when did 25% efficiency stop being good enough? He has been pulled into meetings about who to cut and refuses them, countering with a better question - instead of halving the team, why not stop hiring until the same team's output doubles? He also thinks Google's results are the best they have been, because a good business should now be reflected by good rankings. He talks through the client who insisted a technical silver bullet explained his fall from #1, until Nick opened an incognito window and showed him competitors who were cheaper, shipped free and had no restocking fee. He writes weekly at SEO for Lunch. Hosted by Jeremy Rivera on The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast. Watch the full interview on YouTube: Nick Leroy: SEO Job Market in one word? Ugly.

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.

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.

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...

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 RadeticResources & 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 & authori...

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 high...

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 Jac...

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 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. 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 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 de...

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. 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 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...

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. 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 and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper 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 do...

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. On this page Why consensus beats your canonical page Against a second URL, for serving by user agent Fan-outs as a placement map Manipulation surfaces and AI-content guardrails Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper 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...

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. On this page Patents as principles, not blueprints What agent traffic does to your data The sceptic’s case on markdown companions The cannibalisation reversal, and access logs Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper 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...

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. On this page The argument: bots as a customer segment What the crawl data actually shows The agentic flywheel Why he refuses deliverable-based retainers Chapters and timestamps People, tools and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper 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....

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. On this page Thirty-five seconds Core values are the culture The tail cannot wag the dog Firing the customer Remote, on a cadence One agent per client, and the demand letters People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper 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

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 

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. On this page Doors, not vanity metrics Owners, not tenants The three owner buying stages Speed to lead Baldwin Park, not Orlando The twelve to twenty-four month window Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper 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 b...

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. On this page Search everywhere optimisation The expected-CTR model Internal linking and digital PR The multi-model competitor teardown Moats, faces and the About page People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper 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 Claud...

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. On this page What brand optimisation means The masterclass that went from a hundred to a thousand The local goldmine online providers ignore The follow-up gap How to vet an SEO People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper 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 ma...

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!

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 podc...

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

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. On this page The audience that existed before the product Number one is the fifth link What still counts as a visitor Why a tool earns the link a post cannot Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper 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.

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. On this page Ranking entities, not pages Coherence across the nodes Prompt depth and source tiers The accidental discovery Why Google publishes advice at all Speaking the machines’ language People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper 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 wh...

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. On this page Kill the pre-work, keep the thinking Coaching a team out of the gut check Where the quality is actually decided Never rush a website migration Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper 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...

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. On this page Do not optimise for the platforms The fear of going backwards Humble experts Report the data, focus on the money Digital PR with an actual human in it People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper 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 beh...

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. On this page Becoming the developer How the topical authority system is built Ducks, funnels, and the pages worth fixing Authority is the new PageRank Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper 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,...

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. On this page What a fractional operator actually does The return-to-office counter-take Proving operations pays Death by tools Operations at ecommerce scale Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper 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 checkou...

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. On this page The C plus problem A reputation that mirrors real life Degenerative engineering Old school, on purpose Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper 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 represent...

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.

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. On this page Why SEO is a subset of GEO The forgiveness nobody has granted yet Retrieved is not cited Information gain, and the experts you already employ Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper 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...

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: Semantic Mastery Semantic Links Cursor AI Platform Claude AI Google Search Traffic & AI Insights

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 t...

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.

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: Call Rail What Converts Slaymaker Marketing SEO Arcade Podcast Royal (Content Repurposing Tool) Google My Business Connect with Matt Slaymaker: LinkedIn Website

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. On this page Cite your sources to earn citations Depth beats authority on narrow queries The only metric an owner can feel The about page, and not rebranding to escape Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper 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 abo...

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 Resources & Links:

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 - 

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: contentguppy.com Greg Digneo on LinkedIn

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:

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. On this page A new channel, not a new version What schema is for now Monitoring is a signal, not a measurement Why small businesses are actually in this race Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper 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 citatio...

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 Mention...

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: Manzanita Marketing DeepL Translator Weglot translation plugin Baidu SEO insights Google hreflang documentation Connect with Christina Spalding: LinkedIn Instagram Facebook

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. On this page The website as the trust test Real photos, real voice The local mechanics What AI actually changed Scaling geography to budget People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper 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 busin...

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. On this page The mom-and-pop trust problem How to vet an SEO agency SEO as the quarterback of digital Where LLMs actually belong The shiny object problem Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper 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

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 alon...

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 Unscript...

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 More from SEO Arcade: Podcast-Based Link Building Service | Entity Optimization with Jason Barnard   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 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. On this page The identity crisis, and whose fault it is What SEO is once you remove the jargon The lonely island problem Conflicting KPIs and how to work with them Keyword research as an interview Where decisions are formed People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper 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 exampl...