The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

Erika Braeger, Director of Strategy at Ten Speed, is back on Unscripted SEO with a blunt answer to the question of what matters most in SEO right now: machine readability. If a machine can't easily parse and understand your site, it gets much harder to show up in AI Overviews, AI Mode, organic search and LLM search. For Erika, that starts with technical SEO.

Erika and Jeremy Rivera dig into the two pitfalls she runs into most - page speed that clients keep kicking down the road, and tech debt that balloons when URLs change without redirects. One client sunset a blog without redirecting it, and because it was linked all over the site it created a pile of 4xx errors. If you missed Erika's first episode, start there. Read the full recap of this one.

In this episode

Competitor page-speed comparisons against the two or three sites that pulled ahead, and the usual slowdowns: images sized wrong, third-party JavaScript firing before user-facing content, and autoplaying video. Ten Speed's list of common technical SEO issues and how to fix them covers more.

Lazy loading only below the fold - a lazy-loaded hero image scrambles things.

Two megabytes or less, ideally a lot less, and a replace, modify or remove decision tree for whatever is inflating the page.

Redirect debt from sunset and updated URLs, and how to properly redirect pages with 301 redirects.

Enterprise buy-in: ship the big global fixes first, then take each win to every team it touched. One client is cleaning up two years of tech debt in 90 days.

Claude as a second set of eyes on chunks of a Screaming Frog crawl, and for charts clients can actually read.

EEAT and schema for LLM visibility: real customer stories, and review schema that connects your site to G2 and Trustpilot. See Ten Speed's 12-week generative engine optimization rollout plan and its research on what AI cites for B2B evaluation-stage prompts.

Backlinks and AI visibility: Jeremy walks through Ben Wills' AI ranking factor research, and Erika ties it to showing up the same way across the web.

Chapters

(00:00) Erika's intro: Director of Strategy at Ten Speed

(00:39) Machine readability, the most consequential facet of SEO

(01:46) The top pitfalls: page speed and URL tech debt

(03:34) Proving page speed matters: competitor comparisons and the Walmart study

(07:26) Images, third-party JavaScript, video and lazy loading

(10:28) Page weight and the two-megabyte line

(11:58) PDFs and bottom-of-funnel content

(13:02) Two years of tech debt in 90 days

(13:55) Winning enterprise buy-in with global fixes first

(15:35) Claude, Screaming Frog crawls and the future of SEO SaaS

(20:03) Lower barriers and the learning-curve worry

(24:01) EEAT and schema for LLM visibility

(26:48) Ben Wills' research on backlinks and AI visibility

(30:17) Telling a consistent story across the web

(32:26) Key takeaway: sample page speed across your site

(33:11) Where to find Erika and Ten Speed

Notable quotes

"So it's not enough to say that we...

Fill the profile, mirror it to your website and citations, then pictures, posts and praise, every month. That is the GBP loop, and Mike Martin, founder of GBPly, says staying on it beats 95% of Google Business Profiles because nobody else stays consistent. He joins Jeremy Rivera on Unscripted SEO to explain why GBP work "doesn't have an end date."

Mike started as a locksmith and built his own websites when paid ads got too expensive. At one point he ran around 3,000 lead-gen sites. They kept ranking while the leads kept falling, so this year he let 2,500 domain names go and moved his business into Google Business Profiles. Read the full episode recap.

On verification, Mike starts with the website and citations, not the profile. A service area business that shows its address breaks Google's guidelines for representing your business, and video verification from home becomes near impossible. He would rather have 10 verified, manually created citations than 100 from a mass citation tool, because Google can now apply a suggested edit to your profile within four days if you miss the notice. Jeremy explains what the five data aggregators actually do, and SEO Arcade has a guide to building local citations that covers the rest.

They also get into independent practitioner profiles (a clinic with five physios now runs six profiles, and a law firm with 15 lawyers could run 16), why Mike thinks mirroring and the website as an entity matter more than its link profile, how listing his books on Google Books and setting up an IMDb profile made his AI overview fill in within 24 hours, Google's new Ask Maps, and why Gemini gets Google's own Business Profile documentation wrong.

Jeremy shares his dark clicks study: across 38 sites and four million Search Console clicks, the average site saw 64% of its clicks arrive with no query attached. Mike's rule for AI-written GBP posts is simple. Let AI draft, have a human edit and approve, and skip AI-generated images. Find his books at mikemartin.uk, his videos on his YouTube channel, and try GBPly for 10 free Google Maps rank scans a month.

"These are consensus engines. They're looking at what most people are saying." Josh Shankowsky of Snap SEO, an Edmonton SEO company, joins Jeremy Rivera on Unscripted SEO to explain why generic AI content loses, and what he does instead. Read the full episode recap.

Josh borrowed a method from Howard Bloom, the publicist behind Prince and AC/DC, and turned it into a "cultural onboarding" for every client: the founder's story, the founding principles, the challenges and the communities growing around the business. That is his answer to the information gain problem and to the rabbit hole every LLM falls down.

He also shares how he builds local links by sponsoring nonprofits (one sponsorship turned into a Google Ads client), the Search Console "I am" filter that surfaces customers writing their life story into a query, and how he uses Bing results to find the directories and best-of lists ChatGPT cites. Jeremy adds how he triangulates Search Console, GA4, Microsoft Clarity and now Bing Webmaster Tools to separate people from bots.

Josh also answers the last guest's question on Google Discover from his northern lights forecast site, Aurora Admin: article start and end date schema, news-style titles, and putting the payoff mid-article so people keep reading.

More from the network: how Search Console compares to Clarity on 4 sites - Jeremy Rivera SEO - SEO Arcade.

Laura Iancu has watched listicle tricks move AI answers within the hour, and she thinks every one of those quick wins is a wave that is going to crash. The founder of Searchpedia joins Jeremy Rivera on Unscripted SEO to talk about honest AI search work while attribution is still "one more drip in a sea of dark clicks." Read the full episode recap.

Laura went solo in January after years in-house for big brands. She calls herself a search activist, takes clients by referral only, and tells some of them they don't need SEO at all. She compared synthetic AI visibility data from Ahrefs Brand Radar with what Search Console's generative AI report and Microsoft Clarity show now, and the two are very different.

Jeremy argues LLMs pick up site changes in minutes while Google keeps SEOs in the dark like mushrooms, and that the real job now is surfacing the human details clients never write down. Laura draws the line between AI-generated content and AI slop: slop adds nothing and only wants to be seen.

They close on publishers and Google Discover, with pointers to Barry Adams, The Audience Club and Lily Ray.

Catch Laura at Search 'n Stuff in Antalya (October 1-4) and at BrightonSEO (talk October 8, panel October 9). Follow her on Bluesky and TikTok.

More from the network: how Search Console compares to Clarity on 4 sites - Jeremy Rivera SEO - SEO Arcade.

Laura Smith, Head of Client Strategy at ICS-digital, has one rule for international work: localize the campaign, don't just translate it. She also walks through her team's white paper, The Human-Machine Memory Gap. Read the full episode recap.

ICS-digital works in over 100 languages across digital and translation, and Laura leads strategy across SEO, digital PR, creative and translation. She has spent 15+ years in marketing, starting in traditional PR with B2B work, press office and restaurant launches. She says she didn't know what a link was until she moved into digital PR in 2017. Her recent article, The New Shelf Space, carries the same thinking into retail visibility and AI retrieval.

In this episode

Translate vs. localize: why a campaign that lands in the UK won't land the same way in the US, Europe or Asia.

The German Twitter lesson: experts in that market told her the words were literally too long for the character limit.

Reporting and red tape: focused reporting frameworks, fractured local teams, and getting ahead of red tape in months one to six.

Expat audiences: going back to basics with GWI audience analysis when you target UK people living in Paris.

AI search across markets: long-term strategy over hacky tricks, even where ChatGPT or AI Overviews aren't available.

The top technical pitfall: hreflang that exists but isn't configured for the best outcome.

Authenticity takes reps: why she started a TikTok this year to get comfortable hearing her own voice.

Digital PR's moment: brand entity, citations and brand mentions in AI search. For more on brand distinctiveness, hear Ross Hudgens on GEO.

Chapters

(00:00) Why trust an international marketing expert

(01:17) Translating a campaign vs. localizing it

(02:46) The German Twitter lesson

(03:53) Reporting frameworks and fractured teams

(05:55) Red tape in multi-market enterprises

(08:32) Reaching expat audiences

(10:44) AI search when markets move at different speeds

(13:40) The most common international SEO pitfalls

(16:42) The cobbler's children: agency marketing

(17:41) The press release that got deleted

(19:49) Is meme culture global, and is it cringe?

(22:33) Authenticity at scale and getting the reps in

(26:08) Her first podcast

(28:07) Digital PR's moment with SEOs

(31:08) The Human-Machine Memory Gap white paper

Notable quotes

"The biggest pitfall is thinking, I've done this before, so I'll just do it the way I've always done it and not digging into the market." - Laura Smith
"I think you have to be very honest with yourself when you don't know if you're trying to make things work internationally." - Laura Smith
"...why a human is going to choose your brand, which is, you know, especially important when an AI might only recommend three brands compared to previously having the whole of the Google search to look through." - Laura Smith
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