The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

Jeremy Rivera
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Hosted by Jeremy Rivera: A 17 year career expert in the SEO industry and his cohost Keith Bresee. Get insights, action items and anecdotes from experts like Lilyray, Kevin Indig, Rand Fishkin, Matt Mellinger and more in the SEO industry, who are not only well-respected, but have really interesting stories to share. 100% unscripted, 100% unrehearsed, 100% unedited, and 100% real. Guaranteed to provide those golden nugget lightbulb moments.

  1. 3D AGO

    AI Visibility, Entity Engineering & the Podcast SEO Strategy No One's Using with Jason Wade of Ninja Ai

    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? 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 What We Cover in This Episode What 'AI visibility' means and why GEO/AEO is really just visibility engineering Entity optimization: how AI systems recognize authority — and how you train them The content multiplication math: one podcast → 50 assets Why most businesses have never actually said what they do on their website How Google's core algorithm updates have punished hacking and rewarded authenticity The Office Space test: 'What would you say you do here?' — applied to your homepage Why Reddit and podcasts rank instantly compared to traditional SEO timelines E-E-A-T in practice: showing up, speaking up, and having others verify it   Best Quotes from This 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   Resources & Links Mentioned Guest: Jason Wade —    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.

    42 min

  2. MAR 30

    Stephan Bajaio: SEO's Identity Crisis Is Entirely Our Own Fault

    Stephan Bajaio — CEO and co-founder of Vibe Logic, former co-founder of Conductor, and ex-CMO — joins Jeremy Rivera on the Unscripted SEO Podcast for one of the most candid conversations we've had about why the SEO industry keeps losing the narrative about itself — and what practitioners can actually do about it. Stephan built his career from the dot-com era through to co-founding one of the largest enterprise SEO platforms ever built. He's seen the industry from every angle — agency, platform, C-suite — and he doesn't pull punches about where we've gone wrong or how to fix it. What We Cover in This Episode Why the GEO / AIO naming debate is a symptom of a bigger identity problem — and why fixing it starts with SEOs, not executives What SEO actually is when you strip away the jargon: connecting organizational wisdom to the audience that needs it The lonely island problem — why even great SEOs fail when the content team, dev team, and CMO aren't aligned How conflicting KPIs create internal friction and a practical approach to working with — not against — the people who control execution Why the best keyword research is a conversation — Jeremy's concrete-wall installer example and how to build content from real expert interviews Content value beyond organic traffic — why reporting only on organic is leaving most of the story untold Vibe Logic's 'web presence intelligence' framework and the concept of being where decisions are formed, not just where they're made Why passion is the one trait in great SEOs you simply cannot teach

    55 min

  3. MAR 25

    Schema, AI Search & Holistic SEO — With Brandon Leibowitz of SEO Optimizers

    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.   Topics Covered How AI-powered search surfaces (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot) are — and aren’t — changing SEO workflow Why schema markup is the highest-leverage technical tactic for AI visibility The difference between informational and transactional AI search behavior A page-by-page schema architecture strategy for e-commerce and service sites How to use competitor schema analysis as a gap-finding tactic Why content + backlinks + technical SEO must all work together   Key Quotes “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   Resources Mentioned SEO Optimizers — Brandon’s agency Free Gift + Classes from Brandon Free Website SEO Analysis Google Search Console Ahrefs Brandon on LinkedIn Unscripted SEO Podcast Jeremy Rivera – About   Connect With Brandon Leibowitz Website: seooptimizers.com Free Gift: seooptimizers.com/gift LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/brandonleibowitz   About The Unscripted SEO Podcast 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.

    18 min

  4. MAR 24

    Why Your Pretty Website Is Costing You Customers — With Greg Merrilees

    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. Episode Highlights Do you really need a website in 2025? Greg’s nuanced take on social media vs. owned assets The cold / warm / hot traffic model and how to match your CTA to intent Why Microsoft Clarity should be on every website (and how it compares to Hotjar) Website design trends to avoid in 2026 — and what converts instead How to find your unique positioning in a commoditized niche Interactive lead magnets vs. PDF downloads — what actually converts today The AI sameness problem: why vibe-coded websites all look the same Key Resources Mentioned Studio1 Design — Greg’s agency Next Level Website Design (Book) Free Resources — Custom GPT + book companion Microsoft Clarity — Free heatmaps & session recording Enterprise Fitness (macro calculator example) Yoshua Law (case study) Greg’s email: greg@studio1design.com Connect with Jeremy Rivera SEO Arcade — Podcast-based content marketing & link building Studio1 Design Blog — Related Reading Don’t Chase Website Design Trends in 2026 The Hidden Cost of Fancy Website Effects: Lost Conversions How We Turned a Law Firm Redesign Into 60% More Conversions How We Boosted a Fitness Business’ Bookings By 64% AI Killed Your Website Strategy: Here’s What Works Now How to Create a Personal Brand That Attracts Dream Clients

    34 min

  5. MAR 24

    Charlie Birch on Where Brand Strategy Meets SEO: What Every Founder Needs to Know

    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. What You'll Learn in This Episode Why Charlie's background in performance, psychology, and crisis intervention makes her uniquely equipped to navigate brand identity How brand strategy and SEO have more in common than most agencies admit The danger of only measuring attraction — and why conversion and retention are the real metrics that matter Why copying your competitors' strategy only makes you more like them — not better than them How Charlie's Brand IdQ Framework turns founder instinct into a shared decision-making lens for the entire team A real-world example of how interviewing the installer — not just doing keyword research — uncovered an angle nobody was targeting How to evaluate whether a campaign is the right fit for your brand before you invest Guest Resources 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 Referenced in This Episode 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 About Your Host 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. Subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with a founder who needs to hear it.

    32 min

  6. MAR 16

    Enterprise E-Commerce SEO, Long-Tail Pages & AI Visibility with Paul Baterina of REVOLVE

    In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Paul Baterina, Senior SEO Manager at REVOLVE — a publicly traded fashion e-commerce brand with over 260,000 products. Paul has been at REVOLVE for 13 years, making him one of the rarest SEOs in the industry: a specialist who went deep on one brand instead of bouncing across industries. What We Cover Why long-tail category pages became REVOLVE's most provable SEO strategy — and how Paul sold it to C-suite The 3-product rule for deciding when a category page is worth creating vs. when to kill it Why luxury fashion brands resist text-heavy SEO content — and how to work with that, not against it The honest state of AI/LLM visibility for a major e-commerce brand: $58K/month in LLM-driven revenue and what that actually means How to reverse-engineer LLM citations to find the best places to get your brand mentioned Link context signals — why what's around a link matters as much as the link itself Bill Slawski's patent analysis work and how it connects to Koray Tugberk's topical authority framework A live SEO test showing a 25% lift in organic traffic from adding content to long-tail pages Resources & Links REVOLVE (revolve.com) — Paul's employer and the e-commerce brand discussed throughout Unscripted SEO Podcast — Subscribe for more unscripted SEO conversations Jeremy Rivera — Host — About your host Keyword Clusters Based on SERP Data — SEO Arcade — Understanding how Google groups related queries Opportunity Sizing in SEO — SEO Arcade — How to quantify SEO wins for C-suite White-Label Link Building Services — SEO Arcade — Community-based and podcast-based link building Podcast-Based Content & Link Building — SEO Arcade — The full PAASS service SEO By The Sea — Bill Slawski's Google patent research (search "Bill Slawski SEO By The Sea") Find Paul Baterina LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-baterina-079ab629/ Twitter: https://x.com/paulbaterina Slack: SEO Community & Asians In Search (run by George Nguyen) Conferences: SearchLove San Diego

    36 min

  7. FEB 27

    Timothy Malmros on Black Hat SEO, Drop Domains & the Canonical Trick

    Unscripted SEO Podcast ️ Listen: unscriptedseo.com Guest: Timothy Malmros on LinkedIn Full Episode dialog with Timothy Malmros exposing blackhat SEO on SEO Arcade Guest Bio Timothy Malmros is a former gambling affiliate SEO with nearly two decades in the industry. After retiring from active affiliation, he turned his focus to investigating and documenting black hat SEO techniques — particularly in the gambling and sweepstakes space — through detailed posts on LinkedIn. His work offers a rare, transparent look at how spam tactics actually function, why they succeed, and why Google takes so long to stop them. In his own words:  "Finished 12th grade. Got fired from Mcdonalds. Moved to Israel back in 2005. Applied to 20 jobs, got one reply and started working as a ”live person” human chatbot in an online casino. Promoted to affiliate manager 10 months later, did that for a bit over a year. Decided, lets try to become an affiliate, if I after a year can earn 3000 euro a month I wont go back to school. Sold my company in 2016 to gaming innovation group, joined as director of seo as employee nr 6 for gig media. Gig media grew to 200+ people and became a bit to pc for me, quit in 2018, rebuilt going hard on grey hat SEO then decided to take a break from the stress of SEO in November 2024 and basically retire but quickly got bored and started writing articles instead." Follow Timothy's ongoing research: linkedin.com/in/timothy-m-59a216b/ Episode Summary In this episode, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Timothy Malmros — a former gambling affiliate SEO turned black hat investigator — for a wide-ranging, candid conversation about how spam evolves, why Google keeps losing the spam war, and what the rise of AI really means for the internet's content ecosystem. Timothy shares his hands-on research into drop domains and the canonical trick, a modern black hat method that combines expired high-authority domains with spam link bombardment and canonical redirects to game Google's rankings in the gambling and sweepstakes space. The conversation expands into Trust Rank theory, click metric manipulation, the collapse of the anti-spam team, and the disturbing implications of AI-generated content replacing original human publishing. A refreshingly honest, technically deep episode for anyone who wants to understand what's actually happening beneath the surface of modern search. Key Topics Covered How black hat SEO evolved from hidden white-text links and site counter injection to the sophisticated drop domain / canonical trick What the canonical trick is and how it creates an infinite $10 ranking loop using expired high-authority domains Why gambling markets reveal emerging black hat techniques before any other niche Trust Rank theory and the Medic update — distance from seed sites and why Healthline beat Dr. Josh Axe overnight Why some drop domains work and others don't — the mixed signals Timothy is still investigating The dismantling of Google's anti-spam team and its connection to the ChatGPT competitive threat HCU as the reintroduction of Panda/Penguin — and whether it's algorithmic or hybrid Google creating then killing its own monsters — from recipe sites to AI overviews Click metric manipulation: Android bot farms with VPN rotation and what fake branding actually looks like Rank tracker visits inflating GSC impressions — and why Google finally cut off 100-page results Reddit as a...

    42 min

  8. FEB 9

    Benas Leonavicius on AI Search Optimization, Scaling Freelance SEO, and Why Keynote Speakers Need Basic SEO

    Benas Leonavicius Freelance SEO Consultant & Agency Builder Website | LinkedIn | Substack Benas Leonavicius has spent 10 years in the SEO trenches—from working with large e-commerce sites to navigating the bureaucratic nightmare of enterprise SaaS SEO. Now he's building an agency focused on keynote speakers, authors, and coaches, where basic SEO fundamentals deliver outsized results. In this conversation, we dive deep into: Why AI search optimization is the new frontier (and why tracking is nearly impossible) How to actually appear in ChatGPT and AI overviews The shift from website-centric to entity-centric SEO Why SaaS companies are terrible clients for freelance SEO scalability The #1 thing keynote speakers get wrong (hint: they don't mention their keywords) Whether new people should enter SEO in 2025 If you're a freelancer trying to scale, a speaker trying to get found, or anyone wondering how AI is changing search—this episode is for you. Key Topics Discussed AI Search Optimization (11:11 - 21:03) The biggest challenge with AI search: tracking is nearly impossible How ChatGPT and Perplexity source their answers (training data + tiered Google searches) Why speaker bureaus and listicles dominate AI search results for keynote speakers The 25% consistency problem: AI gives different answers to different users Backlinks, PR, mentions, and social media as the foundation of AI visibility How to reverse-engineer AI sources by simply asking ChatGPT what it referenced The SaaS SEO Nightmare (03:47 - 07:34) Why SaaS companies limit freelancer scalability (1-2 clients max per month) The JIRA ticket trap: submitting tickets just to edit meta descriptions Managing multiple stakeholders with competing priorities How product changes constantly disrupt long-term SEO strategy Why Benas stopped taking SaaS clients despite their lucrative budgets Keynote Speaker SEO Opportunities (02:14 - 03:47, 25:19 - 28:10) Why 90% of speakers have zero SEO optimization The differentiation trap: avoiding keywords to sound unique The highest ROI fix: adding proper meta titles with target keywords Why speakers already have strong websites—they just don't know it Talk Thrive Agency: Benas's keynote speaker SEO service Content vs. Links vs. Technical SEO (07:34 - 09:07) Why Benas focuses on on-page content optimization Link building feels "solved" and basic in 2025 Technical SEO's limitations for most businesses Finding the middle ground between all three domains AI Content Creation Reality Check (09:07 - 11:11) ChatGPT as "your most popular but least trained customer support rep" (Matt Brooks, SEOteric) Why Benas doesn't jump on new AI tools immediately Using AI as a brainstorming and first draft tool, not a final solution The hallucination and authenticity problem with over-reliance Entity SEO vs. Website SEO (15:21 - 20:08) How LLMs use training databases and tiered search results Getting third-party content ranked, even when it's not on your site Why digital visibility is shifting from website-centric to entity-centric Direct traffic increasing as people find brands through AI, not clicks Impressions mattering more than clicks (the Instagram-ification of search) Should You Freelance in SEO Today? (21:03 - 23:24) Why...

    28 min
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About

Hosted by Jeremy Rivera: A 17 year career expert in the SEO industry and his cohost Keith Bresee. Get insights, action items and anecdotes from experts like Lilyray, Kevin Indig, Rand Fishkin, Matt Mellinger and more in the SEO industry, who are not only well-respected, but have really interesting stories to share. 100% unscripted, 100% unrehearsed, 100% unedited, and 100% real. Guaranteed to provide those golden nugget lightbulb moments.

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