Guest: Tianna Mamalick, SMB Marketing School

Tianna Mamalick brings 12 years of SEO expertise focused exclusively on small businesses. In this conversation, she reveals why working with SMBs is more rewarding than enterprise clients, how to honestly manage expectations while delivering real results, and why she went back to human-written content after testing AI extensively. If you're a small business owner wondering what actually works in SEO right now, this episode cuts through the hype with practical, proven strategies.

Running a small business means every marketing dollar counts. Tianna specializes in helping businesses with limited budgets compete effectively by focusing on what drives actual revenue—not just traffic or rankings. She shares her formula for pairing SEO and paid ads that works specifically for service-based businesses, and explains why your service pages matter more than blog posts right now.

The Small Business Advantage Unlike enterprise clients where a 20% conversion increase gets a polite "that's nice," small business owners email about life-changing results: hiring their first employee, taking their first vacation, or investing in business growth. For Tianna, this feedback makes the work meaningful.

Honest Expectations Setting

The SEO + Ads Formula While ads don't directly boost SEO, they strategically help prime new pages through engagement. When expanding to multiple locations, running targeted ads on new service pages helps get Google Business Profiles moving faster and improves location-specific performance.

What's Actually Working in Content

The AI Content Experiment Tianna's agency tested AI-generated content extensively—and none of those articles ranked well. They've gone 100% back to human-written content, using AI only for creating outlines based on top-ranking competitors. The reality: people want authentic mistakes and real human voice.

AI Search Reality Check Less than 10% of traffic comes from ChatGPT for most small businesses. While you should prepare by enriching About pages with certifications and expertise, this isn't the urgent crisis some marketers claim. Most people aren't using ChatGPT for business searches yet—we're still in early adoption.

Mining Your Best Content Stop using SEMrush as your starting point. Instead:

Platform-Agnostic SEO SEO principles work across all platforms, not just Google. Younger generations search directly on Instagram. Make sure you're consistently talking about your actual services across social media, not just listing a keyword in your bio while posting unrelated content.

"When I increase revenue by 10K a month for a small business, I get emails like, 'I just hired my next person. I was able to take my first vacation.' It's not just a nice investment—it's a business changing investment."

"People want to work with people they like, know and trust. It's not just about the backlink. We're really looking at conversions—how can we get SEO to convert for you?"

"We can't give them cookie cutter content anymore. People want to see mistakes. They want to see people talking. They want to be connecting even in this content."

The SEO landscape is shifting from keyword-focused blog content to comprehensive service pages that answer real questions. Small businesses with limited budgets can't afford to waste money on tactics that don't convert. Tianna's approach focuses on the fundamentals that drive actual business growth: clear service descriptions, strategic local targeting, and content based on real customer conversations—not AI-generated fluff.