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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Semantic Links with Bradley Benner

Watch: https://youtu.be/AUf1U_klNCM

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

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

Connect with Bradley Benner:

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Website: theskyfloor.com

Blog: theskyfloor.com/ideas

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/joelelliottmiller

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

clientmagnetcrm.com.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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