Unscripted Interview with Jeremy Yang:

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Best Quotes

“If you really want things to go fast, you got to go into paid ad space.” – Jeremy Yang

“Bots don’t have money to spend. If you want something to happen, you still got to make sure it works for the last person who’s going to be in the chain.” – Jeremy Rivera

“We’re managing currently about $450,000 a month in ad spend, which is respectable.” – Jeremy Yang

The SEO-SEM Divide: Why Teams Don’t Communicate

Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, it’s interesting to me that, you know, I’ve been doing this for 19 years personally, and ever from the beginning, there is a divide between SEO and SEM. What do you think maintains that divide? Why is it so often separate teams that don’t communicate with each other?

Jeremy Yang: Yeah. For me, I think that’s a good question. I think for me, it’s more on the ground intensity with SEO. It’s like a certain rhythm, right? Like you do something, you test it. For ads, the intensity is a lot higher. Like when your clients are doing ads, the stakes feel higher. They’re more demanding. You have to be like hovering around the computer kind of thing. Like things go wrong and things have to be fixed straight away.

Right. And I feel like another divide—and I don’t really treat it as a divide—another reason is I feel like Google will give you all the information when it comes to ads. They want you to spend, they want you to follow their whatever. And I know a lot of it is BS. It’s all made up because they own the whole house and they try to make each other beat against each other. Right. Like any intelligent person will see that, but at least they’re telling you like, where you’re ranking top, absolute top, you know, what are you doing wrong? How much—they used to give a lot more keyword data around that. You want to search for something? It’s right here, the platform tells you. The search data is there.

With SEO, I feel like you guys have it harder in the aspect where you guys are always listening to what’s out there, what’s coming up, what’s testing. You try to help each other out like a community kind of thing. Whereas paid ads is just like guns for hire. We’re gonna get this money, we’re gonna get this done. 

The Knowledge-Sharing Culture in Paid Ads vs. SEO

Jeremy Rivera: That is true. I have a friend, you know, she’s in the paid ad space and we were just kind of riffing about, you know, oh, hey, she wants to do conversations about the role of AI in digital marketing as a podcast series. And I’m like, well, I’d love to talk to more ads people, but a lot of the people I know won’t talk to me because they kind of want to keep their secrets safe. You know?

Jeremy Yang: Yeah. Really?

Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, well, you know, because it makes sense. We were kind of talking it through—if you’re in the digital ad space and you know something, you want to get paid for that, you know. And you can quickly apply it with somebody’s budget versus with SEO, you have to prove it out. You know, you have to have really solid examples of, okay, I did X, Y, and Z with this client over this amount of time and came out with this output.

Jeremy Yang: Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: And for a long time in the SEO space, publishing what you’re working on was the number one way to get clients. So the proof in the pudding versus somebody in the ad space, well, they’re going to run ads to get more people to sell ads to. So there is kind of that perspective.

Jeremy Yang: Instant. Yeah. From my experience, that’s interesting. Cause from my experience, like from the ads people that I’ve dealt with and the people in my cohort, they can’t wait to give it away. Cause they try to create courses, they try to create, you know, YouTube content. It’s like, because I feel like people are going to figure it out anyway, because ads—there’s Meta ads library, Google transparency center.

Like the words and keywords—from my experience, they can’t wait to give it away to, you know, so it’s so interesting listening from your side of town.

Jeremy Rivera: Interesting.

Common Google Ads Setup Mistakes

Jeremy Rivera: I’m curious, I personally have dipped into small campaigns here and there for clients who don’t have that much budget or they don’t want to hire a separate ads person and can I please set it up or can you check out my system and often I’ll audit and be like, “This is terrible, who set this up?” They’re like, “Google set it up for me.”

Jeremy Yang: Google set it up, yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: Well, that’s the fox guarding the hen house right there. What are some of the most egregious setup errors that you’ve seen coming into somebody’s ads account that you fixed and turned things around for them?

Jeremy Yang: So if Google’s setting it up, there’s two different types of Google support in my eyes, right? There’s the offshore ones where they have an agenda to switch everything to auto recommendation. So it doesn’t matter how they get you on the call, eventually the agenda will come up. They say, “Oh, why don’t you go here for a little while? What about this box? You want to check this box?” It’s like, no, dude, I don’t want to check that box. I know what that box does. So if that’s been set up, I think that’s going to have a lot of problems because they have a script and agenda. They’re not looking at your ad account at all. They’re just checking boxes so they can quickly move on.

But the onshore ones—it only comes to you when you start spending a lot of money. So when you’re at a certain amount and they don’t care anything about auto recommendation, they’re pretty good. They’re pretty good. They kind of know your business and they kind of know the industry so they can bring you stats, et cetera. Like general stats, not competitor stats, but general stats about, you know, how the bids are.

But to answer your question, I think when they cram everything in one campaign, when they try to do it easy, you know, it’s so nuanced. There’s every single knob that’s in there. There’s a YouTube video on why you should turn it on and a YouTube video on why you shouldn’t turn it on. So it’s like so situational when you can’t just go and follow a script. It doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work. You have to do it slowly and really learn it, I think. Yeah. So just too many things to mention.

Modern Google Ads Best Practices: Theme-Based Campaigns

Jeremy Rivera: One thing that I would do, and I don’t know, maybe you can tell me if it’s still best practice, is to look to split your ad groups down to much smaller sets of keywords and have at least three ads for each of those small ad groups. Is that somewhere around best practice or what is some of the best setup advice for businesses these days?

Jeremy Yang: I respect that setup. I do. But Google has been favoring us moving on from that. So it’s more theme-based. So you know how back in the days it was exact match, phrase match, broad match. Right. So now everything is broad-ish. Doesn’t matter how you set it. Right.

So if you type in something to do with a specific service right now, competitor brands can sneak in, whereas that’s never happened before. Just because they do that service as well, right? So how crazy is that? Because before you used to have to type in like, “Jeremy Rivera SEO” for that search to show up. But now if it goes “SEO, you know, your local town”, like Jeremy’s stuff could come up too. And they could trigger their ads. So how crazy is that? So exact match is no longer exact match.

So as you probably know about Performance Max, you probably see a lot of that. That’s where everything is pushing towards. The good thing that Google has done recently is allowing negative lists again for Performance Max. Before it wasn’t allowed, so it was complete black box for about a year and a half. It’s crazy. It’s just putting money in and you have no idea.

But to answer your question, I probably wouldn’t segment it down to that granular level anymore. But if you do have e-commerce accounts, that’s when you treat the campaign level like the old ad group level. So you break down each ROAS group. So do it based on ROAS. Don’t base it on product name or anything—base it on ROAS levels. And then that way you can, because it’s a ROAS game, right? So you’re telling the machine to learn you want to convert at 4X, right? So if you have one product line that has 1.2X and 8X acceptable, that’s not going to work because it’s too scattered. Law of averages will kill you.

Jeremy Rivera: Yeah.

Jeremy Yang: So you gotta break it down to ROAS level. So that’s for e-commerce. I think there’s a game around splitting in terms of services businesses. Depends how much money they have. If they have a good amount of budget, I will still go search. If they don’t, you probably have to rely on PMAX for a while.

Display Ads: Remarketing Only

Jeremy Rivera: What’s the reality around using the display ad network within Google these days? Because whenever I would approach campaigns for my clients, mostly because I was coming from the SEO side, I almost always turned that off and didn’t push towards the display ad systems.

What is the best practice when you make that recommendation to combine both specific keyword searches and the display ad network augmenting? And is that based off of the return on investment? Is that based off of the profit margin that you’re looking for for that product or service? Or is it more about the nature of what it is that you’re selling where you expect your customer to potentially be browsing a whole bunch of different sites that you might catch their attention?

Jeremy Yang: Yep, so for display ads, since I started seven years ago, I only believe display ads for remarketing.

Jeremy Rivera: Okay.

Jeremy Yang: So I only believe, because there’s too many spammy sites. So back then there was a link where you can exclude all like spammy sites, right? Now you can still do it, but Google has made you jump through many hoops. And people still put out these 20,000 website links so you can quickly exclude and all that, but there’s a trick to it. So it’s not an instant button anymore. And you definitely want to exclude those sites because they’re spammy, they’re useless.

So definitely display is remarketing only. Best practice: have an offer on display just like social media ads—have an offer on there to get them back or, you know, some type of percentage off, cart abandonment.

In terms of audience, I think people are too focused on, you know, overlapping keywords with this and that audience. The stuff doesn’t work—it all gets expanded. So all you’re doing is giving Google initial signal, right? And then Google can do whatever they want. Same as Meta these days.

So display, and I think last point I would make is that when we’re doing Google ads management, what you want to do is you want to hit display, you want to hit YouTube, right? And you want to hit the discovery feed, but with very little money because the diminishing returns is very early on those platforms.

If that makes sense. So you should hit it because people will be visible. “Oh, cool. There’s a guy on video again. Oh, okay. There’s a guy on discovery feed. Oh, I see him on a news site. Okay. So he must be doing pretty well.” But all you’re doing is like $10, $20 display remarketing. I think there’s value in that for sure.

Choosing Your Ad Platform: Google vs. Meta vs. Others

Jeremy Rivera: What is the current economy like when it comes to choosing which ad platform to pursue? You know, there’s Meta, there’s Google, Bing, Yahoo—they have their ad platform. There may be others. So how do you go about talking through with the client which of those platforms to use and why?

Jeremy Yang: So in terms of platforms, what I do is, you know, just say you’re a client, I’m talking to you, right? And then what I’ll look at is how good are you on video? Right? What assets have you got? What power, what resources have you got to continually produce assets? Right?

Let’s just say you’re a service business or an e-commerce business because Meta is about burnout. So you got to refill and replenish the tank. So we’ve got to look at that, right?

So just say that you are a lawyer business, okay? And you don’t wanna be in front of camera, okay? You don’t have anyone in your office who wants to be in front of camera. Facebook, Instagram is useless to you. Because you’re probably already tired. So I’m going hard on search, going hardcore on search. Probably 80% Google, once that gets working, then 20% on Bing.

Right, so Bing’s search volume, I know I’ve watched your podcast, you’re glad that Bing’s coming back into the game and all that, but on ads dude, it’s so little, like so little interest. And then the thing with the client is that you still got to set up all the tagging, tracking, everything else, right? And the reporting. So that’s definitely that.

In terms of, just say you have something a bit more novel. Right, and you kind of like to, you don’t mind promoting it or you don’t mind getting some UGC stuff, then a lot of that money is gonna go on Facebook, Instagram.

Jeremy Rivera: Okay, that makes sense because so having if it’s basically your business marketing model and how much fuel you’re willing to pour into the fire.

Jeremy Yang: Fuel, great. Yeah, fuel, great. Yeah. So I call it, how many bullets you got in the chamber. Right. You know what I mean? Like if you go, “Let’s do this for three months” and then you got like four assets. I’m like, “Where’d you get these four assets?” You go, “We shot it a year ago and the guy’s gone now.” I say, “I don’t know if you’re going to last three months,” you know?

Unique Service Business Case Study: Bubble.com Casting

Jeremy Rivera: That definitely makes sense. When it comes to the service business side, what are some of the unique services that you’ve configured ads for that kind of stood out from your normal deployment, had some sort of kink or special feature that you had to adjust your campaign to address?

Jeremy Yang: Bubble.com Casting is a huge children’s modeling agency in Australia. It’s the biggest in Australia. I was lucky to get that—it was through a referral. I think that is a perfect example. And obviously this is unscripted, I didn’t think about this before. So it’s the perfect example of being floored with the distribution of the budget between Google and Meta.

I think that’s because when they’re doing—so search is a staple, right? People go, “Well, how to get my kids into modeling” or “modeling photo shoots” or whatever. Right. And that’s on the search side, the bottom funnel, they’re ready to go.

But then there’s the Meta side where you’re showing proof of people who’ve been successful in modeling in the past, which is massive. Right. So that kind of like, and when they have their drawers and their lead magnets, their competitions, their model searches. That’s all demand gen on the Meta side. Right, so that kind of has to move around.

When it comes to service businesses, you really want to look for things that’s a bit weird. So you don’t want to just look for the chiropractors and the physios and the lawyers, because that’s very competitive. It’s $30 a click. People always get a heart attack when they hear it. You know, tow truck, $200 a click, credit cards, $150 a click. There’s $150 a job—I said $150 a click. Emergency plumbing. So yeah, really hard.

If, actually, you know what? I would even love to talk to you, like just ask you how you deal with the smaller businesses. Cause I know you came from a huge branding industry. I’m always fascinated—how is SEO gonna survive? Because people are not waiting around for six to nine months, even if they tell you they will wait for six to nine months, they’re gonna get, you know, antsy after like two, three months, you know, they say, “Well, I’ve paid this money. I’m not seeing anything yet.”

The SEO Value Proposition for Small Businesses

Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, it is hard to do SEO campaigns for small businesses because there is a squeeze point of how much they’re willing to invest in the content and invest in the process of building links. The upside, the difference, the flip is that if you run out of ad budget, your campaign’s over.

Jeremy Yang: Yes.

Jeremy Rivera: But with SEO, you’re building appreciable assets that are continuing to increase over time. So, you know, there does come, usually, you know, it’s about getting the momentum going so that, you know, that small business, you can start, you know, increasing the number of calls and leads that they’re getting.

Jeremy Yang: Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: You know, taking those actionable steps, you know, supporting their content and pushing them, you know, and augmenting their other marketing content at the same time. Work with the ads guys so that, you know, if you guys have an expensive keyword that you can’t afford to bid on, you can hit that with organic content, sometimes a little bit easier with a much smaller investment that’s going to last much longer. So it’s that trade-off of, you know…

Jeremy Yang: Yes. That’s so good. Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: Yes, ads, that starts, but then when you run out of that ad budget, you’re not advertising anymore. But with SEO, it does have this upscale effect. So it is a hard place to be as a consultant, as an agency. And sometimes you get squeezed out on the margins. And that’s why as a freelancer or as an agency, there is a bit of a revolving door as you move from client to client, you know, or you…

Jeremy Yang: Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: I often do smaller consultation type freelancing where I’m advising, “Hey, you should be doing this and this and this for SEO, tackle this,” and then their team is handling it versus…

Jeremy Yang: Yes. Like a roadmap, like you give a roadmap about the expertise. Cause I know you’re a huge pro in, like local link building stuff, right? Like the community stuff. Yeah, that’s massive.

And then you also have—you guys, especially in SEO space—have to combat the Cowboys who, you know, just sprout any type of crap together. You know, people got kids to feed, I guess, and they’ll make up whatever they make up to, I mean, I know me and you, we both got kids to feed as well, but like they’ll make up whatever to get the gig.

So it does sound like me and you are in the same boat when it comes to filtering our clients. So if there’s too much education at the start, they’ve never done it before. They have very small budget, very difficult to play that game.

Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, something that is a hard lesson to learn for freelancers, for marketers is that, and Dave Gulas, one of my previous guests, said, “Not every client is worth acquiring.” You know, it may sound good on paper, but you know, “Hey, I’ve got another client.” Well, you know what? This client is going to take three to four times as much attention.

Jeremy Yang: For sure.

Jeremy Rivera: The potential is very slim. There could be those difficulties. So having more discretion and setting yourself up as a freelancer or setting yourself up within your agency. I know there’s a number of, not even just the dodgy folk, yeah, there’s the Cowboys, but there’s also the agencies who over-promise and they’re going to deliver the same thing regardless.

Jeremy Yang: Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: And they’re expecting you to burn out within six months and then they’ve got a sales guy flogging it and they get another person. So that’s a hard thing to deal with too. It’s a tough game.

Jeremy Yang: Yeah, that’s the game. Tough game.

Yeah, it’s a tough game. And the way you guys have to sell like, cause it’s on-page, off-page, link building. And then, you know, one guy, sometimes one person favors one side of SEO because that’s all they got. And when all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? They’re like, “Well, let’s attack this,” you know, and then they, and then someone who’s not really into the SEO game, like most people aren’t. And they kind of expect everything to be finished. They go, “Aren’t you link building too? Aren’t you working on the website?”

Jeremy Rivera: Yes.

Jeremy Yang: Because, “No, that’s not our thing.” And they kind of, you know, get friction from there.

AI, ChatGPT Ads, and the Future of Search

Jeremy Rivera: That’s definitely true, and it reminds me of a quote from my friend Matt Brooks of SEOteric. He says, “Chat GPT is your most popular, but least knowledgeable customer support representative.” And I say that to kind of bring up the topic of one half of the AI picture, which is, hey, there’s now AI overviews. ChatGPT just released internal ads as a platform. Have you had a chance to play around with that? Is that on the horizon? Are you excited or dreading adding another platform to the mix? What are your thoughts on that side of the AI picture?

Jeremy Yang: I was very excited, right? But then it’s like, I was very excited because I felt like I was really positioned well to capture that big jump or whatever, right? But as I’m going more through LinkedIn, it feels like there’s thousands, thousands of people just like me who can’t wait to add that as a service.

And the way that the first set of ads that came out like two weeks ago that started beta testing was, it’s not very promising the way it looks. It’s like they were at the bottom of the scroll, premium people don’t have it. CPMs are 60 to 80. It’s just not very exciting. Like it doesn’t look like they want to make it like a nuanced platform, like Google ads or Facebook ads, cause they’re the parents of the ads world, right? Like Pinterest and everything else is just a cut-down version of that.

Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Yang: It feels like the model is like, charge and forget. Like, tell me what you want. Okay. All right, cool. We’ll place it and then, you know, leave it with us. That’s the feeling I’m getting. And they’re testing businesses that’s going to spend a million plus. Right at the moment. So it’s like, well, what about the rest of us? There’s no way to sneak in or whatever.

And I know Google AI overviews, they’re trying to, you know, play the game around there as well, because they lost a lot of money from, you know, having to reshuffle. The question is also, I’m interested in is how much inquiry are you getting? But like how much FOMO are you feeling in the market these days? Because they’re like, “Man, I need to be on this overview thing, right? This is the wild west again.”

Jeremy Rivera: Yeah. It is very unsettled. There was a period, I’d say, from August until December, it felt really hard to be an SEO. Everything was like, once again, like, “SEO is dead again,” and, you know, like, “AI overviews is here,” and, you know, people aren’t using it and you got ChatGPT, Claude. You know everybody’s on these platforms and you know search is totally changed. Is it going to be AI SEO? GEO? You know, there’s this alphabet soup moment of all of these spammers trying to attention-grab of “SEO is dead. You gotta do this instead.”

Jeremy Yang: Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: But the good news is around December people like CEOs seem to start waking up of, you know what, all of these hype, you know, LinkedIn profile people, you know, we still need a foundation in SEO. We just need our SEO to also address how to show up in basic visibility terms. You know, like for publisher sites, it is dire. There’s 25 to 40 percent traffic loss on publisher sites, you know, working with a radio station network. Even with massive improvements in their SEO campaign, they’re still seeing Google decrease the amount of traffic that they’re sending over. So that’s on top of what happened two to three years ago of the helpful content update.

Jeremy Yang: Hmm.

Jeremy Rivera: Which was supposed to address spam, but largely just hit a bunch of content producers and publishers in different niches. So you have that double whammy effect knocking down a bunch of industries. And then you get AI overviews over everything starting to replace, you know, rich snippets. There’s now more of a balance of, it’s no longer, “Hey, we need to abandon SEO for AI,” you know, because people are figuring out, you know, that there’s just not there yet. Like there’s a lot of promise in these tools and a lot of, you know, there’s a lot of fuel there and there are some people making out like bandits, but for the most part, it’s like trying to quantify, you know, how visible is your brand is a really difficult task.

Jeremy Yang: Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: With my last interview with Benas. He was saying we were talking about how out of 100 searches, you redo the same search 100 times, you only get the same answer about 20% of that time. The other 80% of the time, it’s giving you different answers. So if you’re a brand and you’re trying to show up in that search, maybe you’d be satisfied with, “Well, we’ve done the work and you’ll show up 20% of the time versus zero.”

Jeremy Yang: Yeah. Yeah. But there’s no tool though, right? Is there like a tool because Ahrefs and SEMrush has always been like a staple. Good luck to them. You know, they built it that way and there’s other ones, but what’s a tool for AI right now? There’s so many, it’s divergent.

The Challenge of Measuring AI Visibility

Jeremy Rivera: The problem is really that there are so many and this is going to become a—it’s like, what is that principle in science that to observe something is to change it? And we have that problem with this. So what’s happening, what happened for a minute—and this is related. I’ll come back to your direct question.

Jeremy Yang: Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: What happened for a minute was that Google changed its platform and search result tools were no longer able to change the modifier to see the first 100 results. The outcome, it was frightening. The outcome of it was that suddenly the level of impressions dropped by 20% across the board. The reality though, after a month or three…

Jeremy Yang: I remember that. I remember that day. That was like reckoning, yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: We realized that wasn’t real traffic. Those impressions were search bots from SEO tools scraping results. So the loss of that 20% had zero impact on clicks across the board. So that is a real-world statement of observing something changes the nature of it.

So we’re going to have that same moment with the attempt to monitor or predict or come out with some sort of measurement because you’re going to have these third-party tools buying GPT accounts, putting in queries to try to measure how visible is it, which then contaminates the pool of genuine interest. How many people genuinely are asking about it and how much is the LLM then…

Jeremy Yang: Hmm.

Jeremy Rivera: …adding to its database of information versus, you know, these tools that are, you know, there’s a very different influx. If LLMs learn and they add to their database based off of the queries that they’re given, if it’s a genuine human pool putting in queries, that’s going to be one process. But if then we add in machine tools, directed…

Jeremy Yang: Different story. Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: …at scale by companies to try to measure these brands, then that’s going to change the way that the LLMs learn and add to their knowledge pool and database about it. So it’s not clear at this point how robust the LLM functionality is going to be towards that reality of, there’s tons of programs now inputting queries. How much is that going to impact…

Jeremy Yang: Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: …output of an LLM and how much do they want it to impact that output because they might not be able to tell the difference between a genuine GPT user and a GPT user that’s fed by an API that’s intentionally being set up just to fuel these tools. So it’s a very murky space. There’s, I don’t know, a hundred or so different tools.

Jeremy Yang: I never had it explained to me that way. So that’s really interesting. I never had it explained to me that way. But if you look at the SEO or ads game or whatever, there has to be, when we’re working for bigger businesses, there has to be an authority report, right? People are like, “Well, based on this, you know, your rankings gone up by six points” or whatever. So with you guys, you especially still have to come up with that. “Hey, you know, based on this tool.” Yeah. So, but is everyone trying to create that tool?

Jeremy Rivera: We still have to, yeah, we do. Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, everybody is creating those tools. I know Ahrefs has some sort of metric like that. SEMrush folded it in. SE Rankings has one. You know, I know Notota—my friend Michael Buckby made one. Actually, I think I have three friends, SEO friends who have made some sort of AI visibility tool either vibe coded or actually paid for. You know some are legit.

Jeremy Yang: Yeah. Okay, trying to get in the game. Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: You know, and trying to fold in other things. It’s this weird moment of, you know…

Jeremy Yang: It is a weird moment. You’re right. It’s a very weird moment right now for this. I still think I put the notes here as you were talking about as well. I think that, you know, SEO should recognize that this is an essential game now. It’s not even optional anymore. Right. They should come up to that. It goes, “Well, this person, whoever we get has to be able to build the scope of a year SEO. They can’t be working in silos. They’ve got to be a communicator.”

Jeremy Rivera: Yes. Yes.

Jeremy Yang: Right. And they should be talking to my ads people or whatever, and then try to figure this whole thing out together. Cause one of the things I have a firm belief in is the, you know how people always try to figure out the customer journey. Like with all these tools and all these fancy tools, I’ve never believed in that because I don’t think it’s accurate. I think we should look at everything as a blended ROAS—you know, like how much we spend on ads all together, what about this email thing, and then just work out, you know, did it elevate or didn’t it elevate?

Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, I think that’s true. It does have to come down to better integration of an SEO role across it because, you know, if you need materials to kick off a Meta ad campaign, if you’re only running that ad for like three weeks and then that video is burnt, then that’s a huge expense. But if I had…

Jeremy Yang: Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: You know, if I was in that position, I’d move that video over and put it into a blog post. And then I, you know, talk to the email person and have them feature that video over here and make it a much more robust system that isn’t so much, you know, depleting or, you know, disposable ad content. You know, you can repurpose, reuse it, refold it, you know.

Jeremy Yang: That’s it. Holistic. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: Combine those videos together. There’s so many clever things that you could do with that if you were positioned well, had somebody positioned with that knowledge of how to, you know, take that asset and reuse it somewhere else, you know.

Jeremy Yang: Yeah.

Content Strategy: Keyword Research vs. Authentic Conversations

Jeremy Yang: And in terms of content, you are big on that as well. Cause I think you do the content still, you just do the old school keyword research, find the gaps, little bit of keyword cramming, you still do a bit of that.

Jeremy Rivera: Actually, I do, I have two processes now, so one process is along those lines of like, hey, I’ve got—I mean, I made a tool on seoarcade.com of like you put in your primary query. It looks at the top 10 ranking URLs for that keyword, then looks at the top 100 keywords for those pages and gives you a cluster of…

Jeremy Yang: Yep.

Jeremy Rivera: …overlapping and then sorts it by how many of those pages ranked for the same phrase, which is an interesting way to kind of divine, “Hey, this is how Google understands it.” Now there’s positives and negatives to that. There’s positives of knowing what are the odd ducks, like, you know, what are the non-sequiturs? What are the things that don’t fit, that Google thinks are the same thing? That’s great…

Jeremy Yang: Yeah. Yes.

Jeremy Rivera: …to hand over to an ad person, then you can add that to the negative list. At the same time, it’s great because you can sort and see, you know what? All 10 of these pages, they say, you know, Cookeville sunrooms. They don’t talk about sunroom additions. You know, it’s not addition services. It’s not renovations. You know, like, you can sort out and see, OK, well, this is how these sites co-rank for this. And…

Jeremy Yang: Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: That’s probably how Google best understands it. So that’s one approach. The other side is having a genuine conversation with another person in the industry or doing an interview with an expert or having two experts talk about it, whatever they talk about. If you then turn that over to Claude and say, “What are the major themes?” then you can extract…

Jeremy Yang: Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: You can extract topics, challenges, friction points. So the other side is turning it on its head—like one is going for the data. The other is trying to get the data out of hooking up and having a subject matter expert talk to another subject matter expert. Like if you wanted to know what was going on in SEO right now, have an interview between two SEOers going at it.

Jeremy Yang: Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: They’re going to talk on the hot button issues. They’re going to talk about the friction points. If you want to know about, you know, what’s happening in the renovation space, I was at my karate dojo and I was listening to two plumbers sitting next to each other and they were talking about their business. And I learned so much about, you know, using this tile and avoiding mold and, you know, what challenges they face. Like the expert to expert conversation.

Jeremy Yang: Yeah, right.

Jeremy Rivera: …is the other side of it where you can get so much value and learn so much more about the targeting versus just the raw number and volume side. If you marry those two processes, then you’re going to be sitting pretty.

Jeremy Yang: That’s interesting. But the second part, the talking part, I mean, having a genuine organic coming out of that, that’s, I’m just thinking commercially, that’s harder to convince a client, right? That’s harder to orchestrate.

Jeremy Rivera: It’s a little harder to orchestrate, but you can achieve it in a couple of different ways. It doesn’t have to be external. It can be an internal conversation where you arrange and say, “Hey, I need the C-suite person in charge of this aspect. I need to interview the sales guy.”

For one of my clients, they do precast concrete firewalls. I just interviewed the guy that does the installation process and talked to him. “How does this actually work when you haul up to the site? How does this layout like on the ground, you know, you’ve got these massive walls. What do you start with?” Well, we need this much space. The trucks pull in. We put in the piers. We have to measure. We have them measure three times—and out of that came a document. I turned it into a transcript. Then I turned that into three or four articles. Just focused on…

Jeremy Yang: It’s so interesting. Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: …hey, here’s how we do installations. The next was talking about, you know, we talked about materials and how important it is to measure three times and setting up the site before, you know, that type of information is the type of things that, you know, “Oh, hey, we need this permit, this permit, and this permit from the city.” I’m like, you didn’t say that anywhere on your site, but somebody thinking about putting these massive walls around their data center or around their HOA…

Jeremy Yang: Yes.

Jeremy Rivera: They’re going to have these questions. They’re going to be Googling that. You put that as content out there. So it can be an internal conversation. I’ve also spun up a white label service to actually set up a podcast. Like I did one for a commercial restaurant space. I had two chefs talk to each other about entrepreneurship and launching new restaurants because…

Jeremy Yang: Yes. That’s very good. I’m learning. I’m learning a lot from this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: They were just doing articles about how to change your fry oil. But that’s going to a line cook who just wants to know how to change it. What you need to have is a conversation between two entrepreneurs about smart purchasing decisions for their restaurant. That’s the conversation. Those are the people making the purchase.

Jeremy Yang: And that’s it done. Yeah. Yes. Yes. That’s commercially viable. Yeah. That’s commercially viable. There’s people with money reading that stuff. Right. And now it’s like things are moving down the line. Yeah. It’s very smart. I think you need to go there, man. Like I haven’t touched it. But yeah, it’s really, really smart way of doing it. Yeah. Cool. Very interesting, man. Very knowledgeable on that topic. You’ve thought about this a lot.

The Human-Bot Sandwich: Writing for AI While Serving Humans

Jeremy Rivera: I kind of flipped the interview onto myself, but to kind of come…

Jeremy Yang: No, no, no, that’s good. I’m really interested in also, because I’ve been writing articles about just my own thoughts, not like research or keyword, whatever. And one of the things that always fascinated me was about people going, “Are we writing for AI?” Right. So now you’re just writing stuff for AI and then where’s it go? Like where’s the human thing? Cause people want to fire off bullet points, little snippets, quick FAQs. Like that’s the game now. Right. And then what’s your view on that?

Jeremy Rivera: My view is it’s a human-bot sandwich. Alright, so you at the end of the day, bots don’t have money. Bots don’t buy anything, right? So you still have a seller and a buyer. You got two humans, but in between you have layers of bots. It could be one, two, or three, or maybe four layers, because you’ve got, you know, the buyer uses ChatGPT. ChatGPT uses Google.

Jeremy Yang: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: Google uses bots to access the website. The website is partially made by LLM content by the marketing company. And so you have this sandwich of stuff. But remember that each of those bots, Google and ChatGPT are designed with rules about content that they want you to make content for humans, not for bots. So think about Google. They have…

Jeremy Yang: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: UX, UI rules, they have content writing rules, an algorithm that rewards expertise, experience, authority, trust. So the content that is rewarded that shows up that marketers and LLM tools are designed to write, like look at why Claude is better than GPT, it’s because it writes more naturally and writes better and more thoroughly based off of the sources…

Jeremy Yang: Sure.

Jeremy Rivera: …than GPT’s hackneyed writing. And so even though there are bots in between, they are rewarded for the more human sounding and the more human relatable the content can be. So yes, there is a downside to overusing LLMs and there will be an Ouroboros effect of the snake eating its own tail at some point.

Jeremy Yang: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: It’s already happening to a certain degree. But the reality is that in the human-bot sandwich, the bots are still incentivized to reward content that’s made for humans. And so that’s why my default is to creating systems around genuine conversations, creating systems based off of podcasts, creating systems based off of interviews.

Jeremy Yang: Yeah. Yes, yeah.

Jeremy Rivera: And subject matter expertise cannot come out of LLM tools. You can get baseline information, but it’s always a general pool and you have to enrich it to make it unique.

Jeremy Yang: Yeah, got you. Yes. Yeah, got you, got you. Yeah, no, I didn’t even have a follow up. It’s just very, very interesting the way you broke it down. And I still go back to the first thing you said, which was like bots don’t have money to spend. You know what I mean? Like if you want something to happen, like you still got to make sure it works for the last person who’s going to be in the chain. Yeah. I’m gonna have to think about that later. Yeah. I’ll think about that one later. Yeah. Cool. Amazing. Yeah. Got all my questions answered.

Future-Proofing: Building a Better Playbook

Jeremy Rivera: As we kind of wrap up the interview, last question is, what are you preparing for in the next six months to a year as you try to go to market, as you work with your clients? What are you thinking about that horizon? How are you future-proofing campaigns or, you know, battening down the hatches, improving processes as we live in unprecedented times?

Jeremy Yang: Yeah. For sure. I mean, I haven’t thought about this fully, but I feel like in the last six months, what I’ve been doing is bolstering up my playbook. Like using AI—it’s so wide variety available now, right? Just like, you know, how you do a little bit as when people can’t afford it. So we use what we know to do the little bit of SEO stuff for them. We can say, “Hey, you know, if you wanted to, we can help you do some research around keywords about what to write.”

For example, right? Which we’ve never done before and things around tracking, things around competitive analysis, things around, if you want to build a YouTube clip, now we’ve got AI. We can analyze someone else’s YouTube channel, right? And figure out exactly like what is it they’re making, how are they making it? Whatever I say, if you want to be one of the big boys, this is probably, you could start trying something like this. So all these services, all these playbooks.

It really helps because if you look at seven years ago, it was just button clicking, just spamming, I call it playing Street Fighter, right? Oh, you know, build a campaign like this for four ads and add 10% every day. Like, how’d you know it was 10%? How’d you know it wasn’t 12%? You know what I mean? So, you know, they’re algorithm whisperers. That’s what I call them. Like, you’re not working on Facebook. How’d you know it was 10%? But I guess they did whatever they did, but now we’ve completely moved away from that model. No one’s talking like that anymore.

Right. So now I’m just boxing my playbook to make sure that the clients are getting more out of the same engagement. So that way, and for me, I am not somebody who hides behind emails. I want to be there talking to them about stuff. And then that differentiates me. And then when they see that it’s harder to lose—the churn is very hard. The churn becomes a lot less. That’s my differentiator, I guess. And that’s why I’m trying to double down on that.

Conclusion

Jeremy Rivera: Fantastic. Well, give a shout out again to your company and anything that’s coming out as a kind of wrap up here.

Jeremy Yang: Yeah, sure thing. So Jeremy, Digital Goliath Marketing, digitalgoliath.com—I use the website. And currently I’m just, you know, talking to people. So if you have podcasts to do with small business marketing in general, I’d love to be more part of that. Yeah. That’s the go. Thanks for having me. Cool. Cheers.

Jeremy Rivera: Fantastic. Thanks for your time.

Key Takeaways

• The SEO-SEM divide persists largely due to operational intensity differences—paid ads require constant monitoring and rapid response, while SEO operates on longer timelines with more methodical testing and community knowledge-sharing.

• Google’s ad platform has shifted from granular keyword control to theme-based, broad-match campaigns, with Performance Max becoming the dominant model, requiring advertisers to focus on ROAS-based campaign structuring rather than traditional keyword segmentation—making tools like the ROAS calculator essential for proper campaign planning.

• Display advertising should be reserved exclusively for remarketing with clear offers, as the diminishing returns come very quickly on display, YouTube, and discovery feeds—smart advertisers allocate minimal budgets ($10-20) to maintain brand presence across touchpoints.

• Platform selection depends on your content fuel supply—if you can’t consistently produce fresh video and creative assets, Meta will burn you out quickly; service businesses without video capabilities should focus 80% on Google Search with 20% on Bing once search is optimized, utilizing Google Ads management services for optimal results.

• The future of marketing requires breaking down silos between SEO and paid ads teams, viewing performance through blended ROAS rather than isolated channel metrics, and creating content systems that repurpose assets across multiple platforms rather than treating ad creative as disposable—this includes leveraging social media ads alongside search campaigns.

• In the emerging AI-driven search landscape, the “human-bot sandwich” principle matters most—bots don’t have money, so content must ultimately serve humans even as it passes through multiple algorithmic layers, with genuine subject-matter-expert conversations producing far richer content than keyword-optimized articles alone, especially as AI transforms the marketing landscape.

Connect with Jeremy Yang on LinkedIn or visit Digital Goliath to learn more about paid advertising strategies for small to mid-sized businesses. Explore their landing page creation services to optimize your ad conversion funnel.

This conversation is from the Unscripted SEO Podcast, where we explore the intersection of search marketing, paid advertising, and emerging AI technologies with industry experts.