The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

"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...

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.