What I Learned Talking SEO with Jeremy Rivera on the Unscripted SEO Podcast
I recently had the chance to sit down with Jeremy Rivera on the Unscripted SEO Podcast — and honestly, it was one of the more fun conversations I’ve had about this stuff. Jeremy is a seasoned SEO pro and he asked really sharp questions that pushed me to articulate things I usually just do instinctively.
Here’s my recap of the conversation and the ideas that stuck with me most.
Conversions Are the Only Metric That Matters
I said it on the show and I’ll say it here: traffic is nice, but conversions are what a business owner can actually feel. More calls. More emails. More sales. If your SEO strategy isn’t pointed at those outcomes, you’re optimizing for vanity.
That’s always been my north star with clients. Not rankings for their own sake, but rankings that lead somewhere.
The Trailer Editor Mindset
Jeremy asked what my background in Hollywood trailer editing brought to SEO and digital marketing, and I think the honest answer is: everything.
When you’re cutting a trailer, you have roughly two minutes to take something complicated, a full movie, and distill it into its most compelling, watchable version. You’re designing for the person who’s half-paying attention. You have to earn every second.
A website is the same. People are going to scan it for 30 seconds and bounce. Most business owners treat their site like a museum exhibit. It’s something beautiful behind glass that no one should touch. But a website should be constantly evolving, always tightening, always making it easier for someone to take the next step.
That’s the mindset I bring to every client engagement.
Cite Your Sources — Especially for AI
This came up when Jeremy and I were talking about entity SEO and AI visibility, and it’s something I’ve been doing instinctively that I now have language for.
When you cite authoritative sources like IRS.gov, peer-reviewed research, and government data you’re not just giving readers more context. You’re giving crawlers a verification path. They can follow your sources, confirm the accuracy, and start treating your content as a reliable node in the web.
The result? Ranking velocity. One of my tax clients published a blog post on student loan interest deductions, properly cited and reviewed by their actual tax professionals. Within two weeks it was ranking page one above IRS.gov, above H&R Block, above TurboTax. For a small firm in LA. That’s what content depth combined with source credibility can do.
IRL and Digital Belong Together
One of my favorite moments in the conversation was when Jeremy brought up real-world community building as part of an SEO strategy. It’s something I’ve seen play out with one of my clients, a health food brand called The Sprouted Nut Company.
He used to do farmers markets every weekend. When he paused them to focus on his two young toddlers, and went full e-commerce, sales dropped. It’s because people couldn’t get the free sample. The sample was the conversion point.
When he came back to farmers markets (two a week now), we made sure the online infrastructure was ready to capture that IRL energy: email capture, QR codes, automated follow-ups, a functioning abandoned cart sequence. Now there’s a real flywheel. Someone tastes a sprouted almond at the market on Saturday, follows the QR code, gets a welcome email, and reorders online two weeks later.
The digital and the physical feed each other. Don’t forget that.
Have an About Page. Make It Good.
Jeremy shared a story about a client who literally could not get Google to understand what their business was. The fix wasn’t technical wizardry. They just didn’t have an about page.
My number one piece of free advice for any small business: have an about page, and actually put effort into it. Tell Google who you are, where you operate, how long you’ve been in business, what you do and for whom. Internal links, clean navigation, a well-built about page… these are still the most underrated wins out there.
If you’re starting from scratch or your site is a mess, the basics will move the needle more than you think.
Don’t Rebrand Just to Rank
We got into a great tangent about branded search and a mistake I see small business owners make: rebranding because they’re not ranking for the keywords they want.
I had a client who wanted to change his brand name because there was another company with a similar name in a different state selling a different product. My advice: don’t do it. You’ll lose whatever equity you’ve built and start from zero with a name Google doesn’t recognize yet either.
Own your brand. Improve it. Expand it. The equity compounds.
Listen to the Full Episode
This is just my take on the highlights. Jeremy’s questions went deep and the full conversation covers a lot more ground, including conversion rate optimization, regulated industry content, and how I’ve been building Client Magnet CRM alongside my video production work.
Listen to the full episode on Unscripted SEO →
And if you’re a small business owner who wants to talk about what any of this could look like for your business, reach out here.
