The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

In this episode, Jeremy Rivera welcomes Drew Dorenfest to explore practical strategies for small businesses to harness SEO, reviews, and community engagement to boost their online presence and sales. Drew shares his background from Hollywood video editing to digital marketing, highlighting actionable tactics for local SEO, review management, and bridging IRL community efforts with online authority...

Episode Highlights: Grant Simmons shares his unconventional journey from 1980s programming to becoming a top SEO strategist, emphasizing the importance of foundational practices. Recent SEO trends like entity SEO, entity maps, and Google's evolving understanding layers—comparing Google’s approach to Large Language Models (LLMs)—are discussed. The significance of schema markup: its role in groundin...

Join Jeremy Rivera as he chats with Joe Zeppelin, a former corporate leader turned full-time YouTuber, about navigating career transitions, leveraging AI tools, and building successful digital brands. Discover actionable insights on automation, content creation, and monetization strategies tailored for small business owners and aspiring creators. In this episode: Joe shares his background in indus...

The Future of SEO: Insights from Content & AI with Greg Daniel Join Jeremy Rivera as he chats with Greg Daniel of Content Cubby about the evolving landscape of SEO, brand visibility, and how AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT are reshaping content creation and outreach strategies. Greg shares invaluable insights into building relationships, leveraging AI for faster content production, and the im...

Explore practical frameworks and insights for agency owners and freelancers to scale sustainably, improve systems, and align their mindset with success. Colby Wegter shares actionable strategies from his experience helping six-figure agencies reach seven figures while working fewer hours. Key topics: The importance of self-scale and personal boundaries for agency growth Using calendar curation and...

Discover how AI is transforming digital marketing strategies, from SEO shifts to innovative data management, with Brittany Trafis, a leader in AI-native marketing. Learn practical tips, industry insights, and the future outlook for small businesses navigating this rapidly evolving landscape. Follow the in-depth episode recap here . Main topics covered: Brittany Trafis ’ journey from graphic design...

In this episode of the  Unscripted Small Business Podcast ,  Jeremy Rivera  sits down with  Nick Eubanks  — a 2007-vintage SEO who sold Traffic Think Tank to SEMrush, spent three years building their media program into an eight-figure-a-year operation, and is now Global CMO at  Digistore24 , the world's largest affiliate network with 950,000 vendors and 5 million users. This is a veteran-to-vetera...

"Stop putting AI gradients on every feature you have," says George Little , who runs BrandZap , a consultancy that builds brands and websites for B2B companies, mostly in SaaS. His point: say what the AI actually does for your users, or you sound like every other tool built on the same API. George came into marketing from architecture, moved into business-to-business graphic design, and now positi...

Discover practical insights for expanding your business globally through international SEO, translation strategies, and regional localization, guided by expert Christina Spalding . Main topics: Christina's international experience and expertise in multilingual SEO The evolution of SEO strategies from 2009 to today, including AI influence Language models (LLMs) in foreign languages: accuracy, hallu...

What happens to your SEO when every paid channel bans your product? Marc Pitts, founder and CEO of DiscountVapePen.com , has run a vape e-commerce store since 2014, and after Google, Facebook and YouTube shut off ads for the category, organic search became the only channel left. His biggest lesson: content written for SEO is "not written for people to actually read." This conversation first ran on...

In this episode, Jeremy Rivera chats with Tom Malesic, founder of EZ Marketing , to explore effective digital marketing strategies tailored specifically for small businesses. Tom shares his insights on website importance, local SEO tactics, content creation, and the impact of AI on marketing. Key Topics: The foundational role of a high-quality, trust-building website Authenticity through real phot...

The best tool in your stack is still the computer between your ears. Mike Ginley has ten years across agency, in-house and freelance work, from local shops to the Fortune 500. He works full time at Centerwell and runs a consultancy on the side, which means he sees the same trust problem from both ends. Key takeaways Small businesses keep getting burned, and they remember it. The next agency in the...

Julia Bocchese has spent nearly nine years helping small businesses in the creative and holistic space get found online — not through paid ads or social media grind, but through SEO, Pinterest strategy, and now AI search optimization . She also teaches SEO at the college level, which gives her a rare ability to break down the technical into the practical. In this conversation, Julia unpacks why Pi...

Ernesto Ortiz came to SEO from an engineering background and did not trust what he read, so he bought domains and ran single-variable tests until he had a short list of things that actually moved the needle. Five years later he runs Structural SEO on month-to-month contracts for e-commerce clients in Australia, the US and the UK — every client can walk at any time, which is exactly the point. You...

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...

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 lar...

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...

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 s...

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, psycholog...

Jeremy Moser co-founded uSERP , a link building and digital PR agency, eight or nine years ago after local SEO in Denver and a few years inside a content agency. His clients used to arrive already sold on links. Since the end of 2025 every conversation opens with AI search instead, and his answer is the same each time: "all the conversations, when we actually dig into it, boiled down to just a fun...

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...

Martin McGarry spent his first years in SEO building WordPress sites and hacking links, went clean about ten years ago, and now runs Search Assistance as a freelance consultant in the UK. His case is simple: SEO still boils down to words and links, and the one thing AI cannot reproduce is your perspective on the product you sell. Why links are getting scarcer, not cheaper: The Link Scarcity Thesis...

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 i...

Enterprise SEO, AI Integration & the Evolving SERP Landscape with Zack Kadish Episode Host: Jeremy Rivera Guest: Zack Kadish, Senior Director of SEO Strategy at Conductor Podcast: Unscripted SEO Podcast Episode Summary Jeremy Rivera sits down with Zack Kadish, who has spent over eight years at Conductor climbing from keyword research analyst to Senior Director of SEO Strategy. Zack shares how...

Laurent Cohen launched a brand new directory on September 18 with 1.6 million pages, and within about four months 300,000 of them were indexed and Google was serving it for broad terms like "chiropractor near me." His explanation isn't links. It's a voice agent on every page. Laurent builds GetOblic , a voice-first AI business directory, and writes at Laurent's Substack . He has been doing SEO sin...