The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

Jake Melendy called five roofers to get his mom a quote, then five law firms to get himself a lawyer. Over half never called back, and of the ones that did, only 2% followed up more than once. He turned that into a study across roofing, HVAC, accounting and dental in competitive metros and got the same answer every time. Jake is the founder of Ignitvio (lead generation for home service and professional service businesses) and his background is on the Ignitvio about page.

Before Ignitvio, Jake spent 12 years in sales and marketing, from Oracle down to helping smaller companies like Confluent get to an IPO. Two years ago he watched his dad and his brother-in-law, both in home service businesses, hit the same problems from the inside, and built a company around three pillars: attract (organic, AEO, website strategy), direct outreach (cold calling and cold email), and the one most businesses skip: convert and retain.

Jeremy's full recap, with the quote cards and the local SEO stack written out, is at Jake Melendy on speed to lead for home services.

In this episode

Related on the network: Jon Henshaw on AI hype and Google's sources of truth and Cameron Tope on speed to lead in property management. The executable plays from this episode are filed in the SEO Tactic Library.

Unscripted SEO is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Want to be on the show? Apply to be a guest.

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.

"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

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

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.

Jeremy's takeaway from this one: Doors, Not Dashboards on SEO Arcade.

we measure success on them adding a door to their portfolio

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

they’re not looking for Orlando. They’re looking for Baldwin Park

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

He is at Zozimus. More interviews at Unscripted SEO.

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

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

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.

“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

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

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.

Christopher's line about podcast-centric link building is quoted in Every Interview Is a Link-Building Engine and Podcasts, Reddit, and the New Citation Map on SEO Arcade.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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