The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

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.

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: [email protected]

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

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.

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

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...