The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

What happens to your SEO when every paid channel bans your product? Marc Pitts, founder and CEO of DiscountVapePen.com, has run a vape e-commerce store since 2014, and after Google, Facebook and YouTube shut off ads for the category, organic search became the only channel left. His biggest lesson: content written for SEO is "not written for people to actually read."

This conversation first ran on Unscripted Small Business. Read the full episode recap.

Marc wrote his first years of posts like a conversation in a smoke shop. It ranked while the niche was new. As competition arrived, his partner rebuilt the content around headers and pro tips. Jeremy's framing: a human asks a bot, the bot evaluates your page, and only then does a human see it. Skip the headers and the People Also Ask research and you miss snippets in both classic search and LLM answers.

Marc's team tracks state and zip-code rules daily, keeps E-E-A-T signals clean. On black hat, he passed: it's like "standing on your toes for everywhere that you walk," and "once you get jammed up, it could be it."

Marc's question for future guests: "How do you pivot in an industry under fire?" DiscountVapePen.com holds real authority tied to one product. Jeremy shares how he got Cheeseburger.space onto page one for Nashville real estate queries with good links and content, proof that a domain matters less than people think, though not zero.

More SEO interviews at Unscripted SEO. Connect with Marc at discountvapepen.com.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The most useful operational point in the episode is about matching ambition to money. Pick the smallest area that can sustain the business, win it properly, then expand outward. Spreading a modest budget across a metropolitan area produces motion and no results.

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

EZ Marketing is in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. More interviews at Unscripted SEO.

Malesic, Tom. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Small Business Marketing, Local SEO and the AI Frontier.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/small-business-marketing-local-seo-the-ai-frontier

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.

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.

Mike gives owners a short set of things to press on before signing anything.

None of this requires the owner to understand SEO. It requires the agency to explain itself in plain language, which is the actual test.

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.

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.

The large language models, all these tools are great computers, but nothing’s going to replace the computer between your ears. That should always be the main one you go with.

He is not anti-tool. He is against outsourcing judgement to something that is optimising for a plausible next word. The models are fast at the parts that were always mechanical, and useless at deciding what is worth doing.

You can do all this fancy work that we do, but if you don’t have anything original to say, it’s not going to matter either. You need to have both.

Mike’s frustration with his own industry is the speed at which it abandons fundamentals for whatever was announced last week. Every cycle produces a new acronym and a fresh wave of people declaring the old work dead.

His counter is unfashionable and correct. The businesses that win locally are the ones with a fast, clear site, an accurate profile, honest reviews and something to say. That list has not changed in a decade.

He closes on the least glamorous problem in freelance consulting, which is invoicing. Delivery is the easy half.

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

His site is mikeginley.com, and he is on LinkedIn. Hosted by Jeremy Rivera. More interviews at Unscripted SEO.

Ginley, Mike. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Fundamentals, Trust and the Multi-Channel Reality of Modern SEO.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/mike-ginley-on-fundamentals-trust-the-multi-channel-reality-of-modern-seo

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.

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.

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 alongside SEO — the keyword strategy transfers almost directly."

On pin longevity vs. social media:

"Pins can live for months to even years. I've seen clients who have had pins from 2009 that are still bringing traffic to their website. Unlike social media where your content stops getting seen after a day or two."

On the Google + Pinterest double dip:

"When I do keyword research for SEO clients, I'll sometimes see Pinterest boards or individual pins ranking in Google for those terms. So you can get traffic from Pinterest itself, and directly from Google at the same time."

On AI search optimization:

"AI platforms only crawl part of a page. So making sure the most important information is towards the top of the page — that's one of the key shifts I'm helping clients make right now."

On the biggest SEO mistake she sees:

"Clients are writing for the bots crawling their site, not for the humans who are actually going to be hiring them and giving them money. Bots don't have any cash to spend."

The Unscripted SEO Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera, a veteran SEO consultant and founder of SEO Arcade. Each episode is an unscripted conversation with practitioners, founders, and specialists — no slide decks, no talking points, just real discussion about what's working in search. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

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.

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 Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast or the digital marketing and paid search guide.

New episodes land in the SEO Arcade newsletter.

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?

Free: the Podcasting for Business Toolkit - a field guide, episode SOP and checklists for turning podcast appearances into SEO.

Jason's "a podcast appearance is a citation" line anchors Podcasting Is the Fastest SEO Channel Right Now on SEO Arcade.

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

“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

  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.

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.

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 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.

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.

The example that carries this section is a concrete wall installer. A tool will give you the phrases people already know to type. It cannot give you the question the installer gets asked on every single site visit, because nobody has typed it yet.

So the research method is to interview the expert, capture the language they use with customers, and build from that. It also solves the originality problem, since a transcript of a real practitioner is not something a competitor can regenerate.

Vibe Logic’s framing is web presence intelligence, and the useful part of it is a distinction: be present where decisions are formed, not only where they are made.

Reporting on organic sessions alone tells you about the second place and nothing about the first. Which is how a content programme that is genuinely working can be cancelled for looking flat.

He closes on hiring. Curiosity and passion are the traits he cannot install in someone. The rest of the job is training.

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

Vibe Logic is the company. Hosted by Jeremy Rivera.

Bajaio, Stephan. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “SEO’s Identity Crisis Is Entirely Our Own Fault.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2026. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/stephan-bajaio-seos-identity-crisis-is-entirely-our-own-fault

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, host Jeremy Rivera sits down with Brandon Leibowitz, founder of SEO Optimizers — a full-service digital marketing agency based in Los Angeles. With nearly two decades of experience in SEO, paid ads, social media, and coaching, Brandon shares his grounded, practitioner-level take on the AI search landscape and what actually moves the needle.

“The AI overview is just a featured snippet — just a new way to rebrand it for Google. The old tactics, the old strategies already worked.” — Brandon Leibowitz

“The more touch points you have and more places people find you, the more likely they are to want your product or service in the future.” — Brandon Leibowitz

Website: seooptimizers.com

Free Gift: seooptimizers.com/gift

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/brandonleibowitz

The Unscripted SEO Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera, SEO consultant and founder of SEO Arcade. Each episode features candid, unscripted conversations with leading SEO practitioners, agency founders, and digital marketing veterans.

Greg Merrilees is the founder of Studio1 Design — a conversion-focused website agency that has designed for over 2,000 businesses worldwide, including Hollywood A-listers like Sylvester Stallone. He’s the author of Next Level Website Design and has been building websites since 2009.

In this episode, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Greg to tackle whether websites are still relevant, how to build for searcher intent, why copywriting beats design every time, and what the rise of AI vibe coding actually means for your brand.

Hosted by Jeremy Rivera

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Charlie Birch, Founder and Creative Director of Humaniz Collective, to explore the collision between brand strategy and modern SEO — and why treating them as separate disciplines is costing founders real revenue.

Humaniz Collective Website

Brand IdQ — Take the Free Integrity Snapshot

The Inner Circle — Apply for Free Monthly Networking (2nd Thursday each month, 1:30 PM ET — mention Unscripted SEO Podcast to get prioritized!)

On Raising Brands Newsletter

Breaking the Bottleneck — Founder Interviews

Charlie on LinkedIn

Humaniz Collective on Instagram

Spacebar Collective (Chris Tweeten) — 'Publishing more won't fix a weak SEO game. It's about leverage.'

Permacast Walls — The precast concrete walls example that revealed the "anti-dig" keyword opportunity

SEO Arcade — Content Gap Analysis & Forecasting Tools

Jeremy Rivera is an SEO strategist with 19+ years of experience and founder of SEO Arcade. He specializes in connecting SEO tactics to real business outcomes, helping brands turn podcast conversations into high-leverage content strategies.

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