The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

Bridget Willard has marketed SaaS products on X and through blog posts for fifteen years, and her case for the platform is simple: "SEO is words, and words are SEO." A Twitter handle is a URL, Google shows tweets in its News tab, and LLMs only learn from what's public, so the conversations you have on X still feed Google and AI. Read the full recap of this episode, then see how Bridget Willard, LLC helps B2B software companies explain why their products matter.

Bridget and Jeremy Rivera start with what changed after X changed hands - analytics that kept coming and going, and brands that left on principle - and why she stayed anyway. Her test for whether social counts as SEO: do you want to be found? Yes or no? If you doubt X still matters, set up Google Alerts for your name and watch the tweets that mention you arrive every day. She lays out more of the thinking in her post on why X belongs in your SEO strategy.

In this episode

A Twitter handle is a URL. Why Bridget says B2B brands can't skip LinkedIn and X, should claim their profiles everywhere else, and should add YouTube if they can.

Tweets as news. Searching her own name for her media kit turned up tweets in Google's News tab.

Transcripts are gold. She sends her hot takes, PDFs and posts back into ChatGPT, then checks Google AI Overviews in incognito, because the machines only learn if we give them words. Related: how to get recommended by an LLM before you're in the training data.

Public conversation before DMs. X as a think tank where side conversations turn into meetings, the same way they do when someone overhears you at a Chamber of Commerce event.

Trust comes from vulnerability. Being public about something beyond your work - golf, homeschooling, the game last night - is why business relationships are built on small talk.

No post and ghost. The day a PHP vulnerability leaked, Bridget stayed on X until eleven at night for her client Rocket.net, answering replies and celebrating the WordPress community's wins.

Industry culture beats platform. Why a financial compliance panel was scripted, even though, as Bridget reads the FINRA rule on social media, it just has to be monitored.

Attribution is kind of a lie. Sales and marketing are siblings, lurkers don't show up in analytics, and last-touch reports miss the years of trust behind a sale. Jeremy brings in Keith Perhac's take on first touch vs. last touch attribution.

Saturday morning cartoons. A GiveWP team waving GIF sent to WordCamp hashtags, later run as a PPC campaign, lined up with two straight weeks of higher sales in those areas.

Chapters

(00:00) Why should we trust Bridget Willard?

(00:56) What changed on X after the ownership change

(03:22) A Twitter handle is a URL - SEO is words

(04:19) Google Alerts and tweets in the Google News tab

(07:04) X plus blog posts, and why transcripts are gold

(09:11) Feeding ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews

(11:53) AI agents, compliance and regulated industries

(12:44) Public conversation before DMs

(15:07) Trust comes from vulnerability

(17:00) Small talk is the social glue

(17:53) Town square vs. soapbox

(20:4...

Claude found $1,500 of retargeting spend running inside a Mahjong game in the Philippines, from a setting buried deep in an ad account that three agencies missed over eight years. Keith Perhac, founder of SegMetrics, tells Jeremy Rivera how he caught it by asking Claude instead of logging in. Read the full episode recap.

Keith ran a conversion rate optimization agency before SegMetrics became a SaaS, and he has spent about 15 years putting a dollar value on every piece of the funnel. His first rule of attribution: it is not a panopticon. With five devices on every desk, every touch point influences everything, so split the problem into two questions. First touch tells you where people found you. Last touch tells you what made them convert. The messy middle still matters, but only when you have a decision to make about one channel or one blog post.

Then the talk turns to chat as the new user interface for data-led SaaS. SegMetrics runs an MCP server, and Keith now asks Claude how his webinar is doing rather than opening a dashboard. The tradeoff is trust, so every answer shows the report it worked from. Keith calls it trust but verify. The second risk is confirm fatigue, the habit of pressing enter on every suggestion until you stop thinking.

Keith spent most of his adult life working in Japan, and he compares how Japanese and American companies adopt AI. He also argues that AI is an average machine, and marketing only moves on the idea that is not average.

On search, Keith explains why AI tools now hide the referrer so visits look like direct traffic, one more way your analytics are lying to you. He agrees with Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad on zero-click marketing: the website is now the conversion end of the funnel, and awareness happens on social, ads, Reddit and in LLM answers. SparkToro digs into whether your website still matters in the zero-click era.

He also walks through 30 ads built in 50 to 60 sizes each, motion and static, in about 20 minutes with a contact sheet to approve them, and 150 programmatic integration-combo pages that rank because each one is worded differently. Next is SegMetrics.ai, the doing layer that launches ads and edits contacts instead of only answering questions. More interviews like this live at Unscripted SEO.

"GEO is basically what the web is saying about you," says Lum Kamishi, the Kosovo-based SEO consultant behind LumKamishi LLC and founder of Assertio.ai. His take: GEO is SEO plus digital PR, and niche-relevant links matter more now than they did five years ago. Listen in, then read the full recap for the quotes and frameworks.

Lum has been in SEO for 11+ years. His first project was a Penguin recovery, he spent eight years in-house at marketplaces, and he started taking clients in 2025. He explains why LLMs are more primitive than Google and easier to manipulate, why ChatGPT pulled back on Reddit as a source, and why the citations that count are mentions from niche-relevant publications, not local directory listings. Jeremy brings in the Ben Wills backlink data: 20,000 positive matches and zero negative ones for links from sites in the same vector embedding space.

On content, Lum walks through what he calls topical proximity - the semantic distance between a blog post and the service page it supports. He builds mini clusters of two or three posts per service page and watches for topic cannibalization, where a blog post ranks for a money query the service page should own. For one home services client that meant killing 60% of the blog and promising at least 30 new articles. "I don't care about budgets, I care about results."

You'll also hear why the four-blogs-and-two-links agency retainer has stopped working outside low-competition local niches, why a topical map from Claude comes back as garbage, how the SEO community scattered across Slack, Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads, and what Jeremy found in his anchor text study: exact-match anchors did nothing, while token-match anchors showed a real effect.

Lum wants Google to stop lying, become a human-first search engine and stop picking fights with SEOs - and he admits that is wishful thinking. He closes with Assertio.ai, a multi-agent, answer-first content pipeline still in beta, built on featured-snippet formats like lists, tables and paragraphs. He runs it as a white-label service for marketplaces, e-commerce, local and SaaS sites.

Hosted by Jeremy Rivera. More interviews at Unscripted SEO.

Ann Carden is a business growth strategist and the CEO of Expert in You, a marketing and media agency. She works with professional service entrepreneurs who are excellent at what they do but whose pricing, positioning and brand don't show it. Her rule of thumb: most experts can charge three to ten times what they make per client.

Ann and Jeremy Rivera get into why high-end clients are easier to work with, how she moved an interior designer from bathroom remodels into six-figure commercial and luxury projects, and why paying for SEO and Google Ads can be the wrong play when your buyers only arrive through relationships. Read the full recap on Unscripted SEO.

In this episode

The stumbling block for experts: they get better at the work but never change the business model

Moving from B2C to B2B, and why the buyer has to see the investment and the value

Why clients who value time over money are less stress, not more

Company brand vs personal brand, and what you can actually sell one day

Credibility is not identity: "we've been in business 45 years" is not why anyone buys

When SEO is the wrong channel: buyers who never search for a business coach

Specializing in a commoditized market

Premium as your first scale strategy, before new cities or new markets

Quote

"If you can sell $20,000, $50,000 packages or clients, right? You've got a million dollar business. It's a lot easier to manage 20 clients than it would be to manage a million clients at a dollar." - Ann Carden

Read more

When SEO is the wrong channel on SEO Arcade

You're undercharging: the premium pricing case on Jeremy Rivera SEO

Connect with Ann Carden

The Expert in You podcast

Ann's books

YouTube

Recorded June 2025. Host: Jeremy Rivera.

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...