The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

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.

Greg's point about prospects who "heard us on a podcast" anchors Podcasting Is the Fastest SEO Channel Right Now on SEO Arcade.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look at your web analytics as your final source.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Jeremy has since shipped a weight-tracking app of his own, The Body Arcade: one person, one weekend, no calorie counting, the same collapsed bar to build that Nick describes.

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.

"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

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

"Stop putting AI gradients on every feature you have," says George Little, who runs BrandZap, a consultancy that builds brands and websites for B2B companies, mostly in SaaS. His point: say what the AI actually does for your users, or you sound like every other tool built on the same API.

George came into marketing from architecture, moved into business-to-business graphic design, and now positions BrandZap between the freelancer you know and the big agency. On this episode of The Unscripted SEO Interview, he and Jeremy Rivera talk about writing for one buyer inside a buying committee, how he uses AI in three buckets, and why he runs open-source models on Mac minis he bought on eBay. Read the full recap for the quotes and frameworks.

Jeremy references his conversation with Ernesto Ortiz, who calls AI in SEO table stakes.

Find George at brandzap.xyz or on LinkedIn. Hosted by Jeremy Rivera. More episodes at Unscripted SEO.

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

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

Connect with Christina Spalding: