This is a recap of The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast with me, Flynn Zaiger, and host Jeremy Rivera. In this wide-ranging conversation, we dove deep into the evolution of SEO agencies.
I shared my journey from a one-person operation with a laptop to building a 20-person agency over 13 years, discussing everything from the challenges of niche specialization to adapting SEO strategies in the age of AI. Along with Jeremy, we explore how agencies need to evolve beyond traditional SEO tactics, the importance of understanding client business models, and why conversion optimization should be prioritized alongside search rankings.
This episode is packed with practical insights for agency owners, SEO professionals, and anyone looking to understand how the search landscape is changing in 2025.
Podcast Episode Highlights
Key Takeaways
- Diversify your client base – Agencies that focus too narrowly on one niche risk getting crushed when that industry faces challenges (like hospitality in 2020).
- Conversion optimization comes first – Understanding your client’s sales process and fixing conversion issues should precede traditional SEO tactics.
- Zero search volume keywords matter – Focus on addressing customer friction points that don’t show up in keyword research but prevent conversions.
- AI overviews need guidance – Treat LLMs like undertrained customer service reps who need clear, structured information to avoid hallucinations.
- Link building is evolving – Move beyond domain rating metrics and focus on building communities and audiences on platforms like Reddit and LinkedIn Pulse.
- Scope creep is the new normal – Modern SEO agencies need flexible service offerings as the tactics that work are constantly changing.
- Reddit presence is essential – Most brands should establish a presence on Reddit as a long-term diversification bet for 2025-2026.
- Cross-channel thinking is crucial – SEO success increasingly depends on understanding how different marketing channels interact and influence each other.
Full Interview Transcript
Introduction and Background
Jeremy Rivera: Hello, I’m Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I’m here with Flynn Zaiger. Why don’t you give yourself a quick introduction and focus on the credentials or experience that people should trust.
Flynn Zaiger: Yeah, it’s great to be with you, Jeremy. My name is Flynn Zaiger. I run an agency called Online Optimism. I started it 13 years ago, which seems like a pretty long time at this point in the SEO world.
It was just myself with a laptop. I figured I would try it out for a bit doing digital marketing until I got a real job. And 13 years later, thankfully, it hasn’t happened yet.
So we have 20 employees who are still headquartered in New Orleans where I started it, but I’m based in New York City. We’ve been able to grow through doing good work, consistent SEO marketing campaigns, and really a lot of word of mouth and referrals from people who know and trust our work and want to see us succeed.
Related: Learn more about our online marketing services
Agency Niches and Specialization
Jeremy Rivera: Fantastic. So in that time, has there been a particular dominant niche that you’ve focused in on? For example, I worked at one agency where the owner was a big outdoors guy. So everything was optimizing dead deer pictures and hunting and bows and arrows. And then another agency, the guy was a big surfer. So everything was beach related, travel related. What niches, is there a main niche that you have fallen into in terms of type of business or has it just been a scattershot?
Flynn Zaiger: Yeah, nothing as exciting as dead deer. We did once do a remediation service, which is crime scene cleanup. And we’d always bring our staff to networking events and I’d pop in to see how they’re doing. And they’re like, “Do you know how to get blood out of carpets? Because we do it.” I was like, “This is terrible networking.”
So we have two niches that we kind of fell into. We do a lot of healthcare clients. And then we also have some higher ed clients. Those are both pretty competitive. We’ve been able to build those again through word of mouth, people just kind of sharing our work with their colleagues.
But I try not to do a niche. I feel like a lot of people go into a niche because it makes your agency easier to sell, honestly. But I think there’s a lot to learn from when you have a variety of clients.
I think we see this in business and entrepreneurship – you can somewhat learn from other SEO agencies, but I learned the most from talking to bar owners and manufacturers and people really outside your world. And I feel that SEO and content is kind of the same thing in that if you stay in a niche and you only know healthcare, there’s probably fascinating things happening in B2B and you’re too far removed from that.
So we have some small niches, some collections of clients that are similar, but we purposefully try not to do that and try to get a variety so that we stay really on the leading edge of everything possible.
Jeremy Rivera: I definitely get that. I mean, I’ve been in weird niches too. Vanilla stuff like commercial real estate, but also a stair handrail site or a poop scooper in the tri-state area was fun. I actually spoke at their PAWS conference, which was a collection of poop scooper business owners.
So I was actually leading the charge and introducing SEO to dozens of poop scooper businesses. So I think there is something to that cross channel because each niche does come with its own particular unique challenges. And I have gone broad myself, obviously breaking into different niches again and again.
Basically, almost every other client seems to be something new that I haven’t done before.
If you’ve got an interesting industry or niche, we’d love to see if we could help you too
Core SEO Pillars and Fundamentals
Which brings me to my question: what are the through lines that you’ve seen over the years, the core pillars that you always set up? Let’s talk about those core pillars and then the follow up question obviously is going to be let’s go into some rabbit holes of some weird stuff that you’ve seen.
Flynn Zaiger: Yeah, I mean, I think, and I will say to the point of you being in varieties and doing new clients, I think that’s pretty essential anyway to be a successful agency because it is rare that your niche that you pick will have an up-and-to-the-right career.
And I know that just from watching agencies that work in hospitality get crushed in 2020 and there’s no way to predict what the next industry is gonna break. So I do feel that the variety of clients also lends to a more stable agency, kind of consistency and just distributing, diversifying your revenues.
I will say what’s mostly worked for us over the years is – I think a lot of things that many SEOs forget is that at the end of the day, you need a human to make a decision. I’m sure you’ve had agents and a lot of AI that wants to take the humans out, but it’s 2025, there’s still humans clicking buy for the most part at the moment.
And so I think one of the things that we start off with in SEO is even if we’re going to eventually deal with algorithms and all that, we look at our client’s website, look at the conversion and make sure that that is a good process.
That’s a key step that I feel like a lot of SEOs forget – at the end of the day, your client is rarely going to measure you just on organic search traffic. They’re going to measure you on are you helping to grow the business. And so that’s important. Whether or not the client wants us to look at that, we do need to look at that.
Beyond that, good, engaging content was kind of the through line. I would say probably from 2012 through 2023, 2024, it’s not that good, engaging content isn’t useful anymore. It is that every AI tool has pilfered all of your good, engaging content and it is much harder to see quantifiable benefits from it.
I think that number one ranking that you used to fight so heavily for has become more of a vanity metric than ever, if it’s not directly tied to search traffic or more importantly, whatever the conversion is for the client.
So user experience still remains – is this going to look good in the end? Then you do some on-site technical elements and engaging content. And of course, there’s link building and other ways to move yourself up. But we’ve always really focused on creating engaging content. We do all of our content marketing in-house, we’ve been adding on more multimedia over the years, so like video.
But I think it comes back to getting more people onto the site and then making sure that they actually are well positioned to do what you want them to do once they get there.
Conversion Optimization and Business Understanding
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, I’ve had that conversation with Matt Brooks of SEOteric, another agency owner, about the value behind conversion optimization being first and foremost of looking at the ROI of what you’re doing. I think we often look at that funnel picture and we get so mad that AI is eating our lunch up here, while we still haven’t looked at the bottom – have you actually done blind shopping calls yourself to see what the experience is?
Because I was shocked. There’s a stat that something like 50% of forms on sites for local services are never replied to, and I think it was four or 5% that got an answer the same day. And so it’s insane the amount of meat left on the bone, the amount of process there of looking at the workflow as an agency.
The deliverable really at the end of the day is either a lead as qualified as possible because then it’s not in your hands anymore.
That’s as far as most SEO or digital marketing agencies will go – they usually don’t offer a salesman structure to go along with that to finish the process off. We’re usually tapping into an existing business process, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be ignorant of what comes after because, you know, I worked with an asphalt guy and I was super excited to send him over a lead, to see a lead come in.
And it’s like, “How’d that go?” And he’s like, “Oh, well, you know, they’re in the wrong city.” I’m like, “What do you mean the wrong city?” “Oh, they’re in Sparta and I’m only doing Cookeville.” I’m like, “Well, then why do we have a Sparta page on your site?”
These are some of the fundamental things because he said, “I do everywhere, my audience is everyone, anyone that will hand me money.” No, at the end of the day, if somebody is in Alaska, you cannot be a plumber in Tacoma and fix their plumbing, right?
Flynn Zaiger: Yeah. And I think that’s like, when we do the onboarding process now, we have a lot more questions about the sales process. And a lot of times when people come from other SEO vendors, they’re honestly annoyed because they’re like, “My last guy just asked for the logins. Why are you asking me about my CRM and asking for demos of sales calls?”
I’m like, “Well, this is part of SEO. They’re going to end up in there.” And we need to have that sort of understanding of the business. It’s definitely a much slower process and it’s, for a lot of clients, a fundamental difference in how they see their SEO agency. But I think it’s really essential to growth and to a good partnership between you and your SEO team.
Keyword Research and Understanding Customer Friction
Jeremy Rivera: I agree and I think it’s also better alignment of keyword research if it comes after a client conversation where you’re kind of connecting the dots of who – because you can do it on the outside. You can guesstimate what type of frictions or challenges might be googled and need to be solved.
But you might not have as clear a picture as to what the frictions are that are keeping people from buying that product or service, what the frictions are from people scheduling for them to show up.
Maybe they need to be assured that the product is going to be shipped within a particular time or the type of packaging that it’s shipped in. Or if it’s an e-commerce and you’re sending CBD through the mail, do they know if that’s – are they going to be afraid that that’s illegal? Are they going to be comfortable with tinctures? Is this going to break?
There are all these little minutiae that, you know, there’s no keyword volume for “will my CBD tincture break in the mail?” There’s no volume for that. That is a concern and that is a friction that would prevent somebody from making that purchase, but it’s not something that’s going to have a search volume behind it that you would traditionally associate with that keyword research process.
Flynn Zaiger: Yeah, and I think that zero search volume is really important, particularly since Google seems to not want to give us any data on the AI overviews, is putting more of the sales information, these FAQs, on your website. It is absolutely a leap of faith that that is getting picked up by these LLMs. But I would imagine it is. And if not, they’re going to hallucinate an answer to that question. So you might as well give it something to try to make it up.
AI and Search Evolution
Jeremy Rivera: That is, yeah, give it some meat so that when it gets it wrong, at least you tried. You know, it’s kind of like, if it’s going to get – I just saw something on Lily Ray, the question was, “Is it 2025?” And it said, “No, it’s not 2025, the year is 2025.” In the same answer.
Flynn Zaiger: Yeah.
Jeremy Rivera: But you’re right. I was talking to Michael Buckbee on his interview and he does his tools, Noa Toa, and they do brand sentiment analysis on AI tools. And he said this thing which stood out, was that AI overviews and LLMs, they’re your least trained customer support representative.
Flynn Zaiger: I like saying that they’re drunk personally, but that’s because I feel like even a least trained person would remember what they said four words ago. And I just feel like you need the shepherding, you need to be guiding them by the shoulder. And when they turn around to go back to the bar, you got to pull them back. But that’s again, we’re a New Orleans company. So that might be the source of the metaphor.
Jeremy Rivera: I love it. No, it’s definitely true. There’s very much a need for a guiding hand, which I guess is the answer to that question that’s on different agencies’ minds, that’s on SEOs’ minds of like, “Well, what now?”
You know, I can’t sell a content marketing campaign at anything like the price that would sustain itself. I mean, if you paid for humans to create the same volume of content for everything, it’s prohibitively expensive now compared to how much volume output goes out.
But I think the answer is that we need to come down the funnel and we need to connect ourselves more strongly to the business and understand the revenue model better, understand the frictions that are preventing purchasing. As much as we were concerned before about creating the same top-of-funnel content that now LLMs can create or steal and combine and drunkenly regurgitate. That’s my take on it.
Adapting Agency Models
Flynn Zaiger: Yeah, it’s a challenge for sure for agency owners. It’s just you are pushed price downwards so heavily recently. And for good reason, I understand. And that’s why we’re trying to diversify for more high-end SEO on video, which might honestly only give us a year or two runway until the video generators are able to do that at a production quality that’s acceptable and able to create clips that are longer than six seconds. But I do think that it’s very much a challenge.
That’s, going back to that niche thing, you need to be diversifying your knowledge and you need to be talking to as many people as possible. Because I think if you told me in 2022 that most agencies would still be kind of fluttering around and trying to throw things at the wall, I would think – we figured out Google, figured out search engines in 95, 96 so quickly.
And it does feel like a lot of people are getting better at programmatic. They’re trying new things, but it definitely is way less of a roadmap that people are following for AI, which is exciting. It makes the game more exciting, but it’s definitely a challenge for SEOs.
Google’s Evolution and Competition
Jeremy Rivera: It is a challenge, but I think it’s also nice. It’s a good challenge for us to have as an industry because for a minute we weren’t SEOs. We were just Google optimizers. Let’s be honest. There was a day when SEOs never thought of any other search tool because Bing was a joke. Yahoo, that’s a joke. Any other – that’s where the meat and potatoes was, but it was also part of the devil’s bargain, right?
You know, Google was awarding traffic to sites that created tons of content. We had a renaissance of food bloggers and travel bloggers and content creators of all stripes and varieties coming down to Earth. Icarus flew too high. And, but we didn’t realize what a hungry god Apollo was and he singed Icarus’s wings out of jealousy for his flights. It just feels like every turn, you know, the farther we go from Google’s original maxim of “don’t be evil,” we get… No, they got rid of it purposefully, and now we can see behind the veneer that they don’t care. And they’re going to maximize their profit and they feel, obviously feel confident enough that they’ve stolen enough content to become the answer engine.
Flynn Zaiger: Yeah, I mean, their confidence is wild to me. I think it’s somewhat confidence, but it really feels to me like Sears, which I know is such a weird metaphor, but they are so – when Amazon came around in the 90s, Sears could have used its dominance. It could have been that company like it had been that company in America for like 80 years or whatever.
And it’s a struggle to me to think of what innovation in this new AI, even with TikTok. You hear less about TikTok as a search engine now than we do, because I think AI is a much sexier thing to talk about. But Google never really solved that. And you have Gen Z and Alpha are still using TikTok as search. And Google was just like, “OK, so we were at 92%. Now we’ll be at 90% search share. We’re just going to keep going. We’re not trying Google Circles again.” And I feel that way about AI. They are just chasing the leaders as opposed to leading.
That’s definitely going to work. I mean, it’s going to take a long time to drop from 90% search share. But if search share doesn’t matter anymore, I don’t think it will be a problem for them for five years or 10 years. But 15 years down the line, it’s interesting to think of if optimizing for Google will even be a part of our strategy.
Jeremy Rivera: I think eventually it’s definitely getting a little bit less priority and that’ll only ramp up. Talking to Melissa Popp at Rickety Roo, she’s pointing out, “Hey, you need to be more cross channel and understand the different ways that people are discovering your client and finding ways to optimize for it.”
Whether that’s AI, whether that’s thinking of how does your optimization on your site impact email capture? How does your email campaign impact your SEO? How does your video influencer outreach impact your branded quick click query ratio?
Because it used to be in 2010, “We don’t use clicks. No, we don’t use on-site behavior. No, we don’t do that.” And then lawsuit reveals the man behind the mask, “Yes we absolutely do.” It’s the links, content, and behavior. So they lied, again.
Link Building in the Modern Era
Flynn Zaiger: Yeah.
Jeremy Rivera: So let’s talk about link building in this age. I think, and I was talking this through a lot of permutations with Michael McDougald, Right Thing Agency, on how we should be viewing link building now. I think that is becoming more important. But I think that we’ve overcomplicated it as SEOs.
I think there’s a couple of fundamental things that we should take into account: anchor text, I think has been way more important, but also embeddings of what’s the text before and after the link, and are they relevant, as well as the concept of trust and seeds.
And I think we haven’t had a good discussion in SEO about the concept of distance from authority sites. You know, whether it’s the White House or whether it’s an industry site that’s seen or perceived as an authority. I’m sure that you probably came across this in your EDU work and the educational field. There are entities that are freaking SEO bulletproof.
You know, they literally – what was it? The Vatican had an injection where they had a page selling CBD gummies and it popped to the top the day that they did it, and I’m sure they sold a ton of very confused Catholics a lot of really good gummies. But that was a reflection in my mind of, hey, even in 2025, authority is paramount.
Flynn Zaiger: Yeah, I think people that talk about the death of link building and the death of SEO are just hopeful. They just find it too hard. It does feel like it’s part of the algorithm as somewhat easily gamified. You could just hack the Vatican, which I’m not recommending. I think what still works for the most part…
I will say what still works long-term, I think, is the unscalable strategy. So we think of it a lot more like digital PR. We think of it as trying to work more in your niche now. I mean, when I first started, we were just, any link anywhere would be great. And now we really, and this is somewhat from SEO, but somewhat just we’re thinking about this in terms of how LLMs are likely scraping the web – identifying, making sure that similar sites and topics and pillar content on our site, but also on the sites linking to us is relevant to our brands and our companies.
I don’t have an exact science for that, but we do think about these things and try to work toward, do we want to be a leader in this region, in this industry, in this topic, making significant content from us and on other sites is what we work toward.
Learn more about sustainable SEO and long-term link building strategies
I will say we’re also diversifying our link building efforts to where we used to do it mostly on other, more general sites, but now we’re working more towards forums, Reddit as well, and trying to think about how those links, as the pages themselves are getting higher ranking on Google and being more trusted, how do we build our authority links and awareness on those forum sites, which isn’t something we used to do. We have really started doing it a lot more in the last two years.
Platform Diversification Strategy
Jeremy Rivera: No, I think it makes sense because you’ve got Lily Ray pointing out there are LinkedIn Pulse pages ranking for high value keywords over sites and domains that have worked really hard to be there. Instead, there’s a LinkedIn Pulse or a Substack or a Medium post or a forum popup for Reddit.
So I agree that there’s definitely, I think it’s those two layers. One is looking at link building as a horizontal effort of creating more places where you can magnify your brand reach. So that’s creating and populating content into a Substack where you’re accumulating readers, but also publishing, which have links to your other stuff. So kind of barnacle – I think that was the term from 2010 – create these entities on other smaller sites so that you kind of amass that value.
But I think there’s value in that distribution of brand signal of like, “Hey, we are here, this exists here,” thinking about it in the Ross Simmons kind of way. Create once and distribute forever, but distribute not as a primary channel to your site.
Now the primary thought of, “We’re going to make content for your business. We’re not making blogs. We’re making a LinkedIn Pulse. We’re posting to Substack. We’ve got a Medium page. We turned it into a slide deck, which went on Slideshare. We used AI to take that statement and make a little video. And that went up on these video platform sites.” So it’s much more distributed, right?
Flynn Zaiger: Yeah, and I think it’s hard for anyone who’s only an SEO agency, right? Because now to do this strategy successfully, you need access to everything. I do think for in-house teams, or I say this as an agency person, so jealous of in-house teams because you just have that access and ability. And I think a lot of agencies, even including us, there were so many things we could do, but oops, the client doesn’t want to pay for it. It’s not in the scope of service.
See our guide: “Do I Need An SEO Agency?” for more on agency value and expectations
And so our scope of service at our agency used to be so much more defined, I feel. And now our proposals are forced to be blurrier. And that’s not so that clients don’t know what to expect, but it’s like, what will work for you could be a thousand things as opposed to just, “We’re gonna get you some links, we’re gonna make some content, we’re gonna make sure the onsite SEO foundation is built.” There’s like three things done, great, that’ll be your contract.
And now it’s like, we are just gonna give you hours, because our time could be used to – we could be doing programmatic SEO, we could be updating some of the onsite stuff, we could be building links, we could be posting on forums, we could be making new profiles. So there’s just so much more you can do.
And I think you have to think if you’re an agency person, how do I write a scope of service? How do I report back on all of this work and make sure that a client appreciates it and sees the value of it, which is a really tricky thing to do.
Content Strategy Evolution
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, I mean it’s like I did this for a brand, Save Fry Oil – they’re in the commercial kitchen space and technically they were writing a lot of content but it was like “how to change your dirty fry oil” type articles. And it’s like, “Let’s make a podcast and we’ll find a restaurant host and they’ll talk to other restaurant owners about the challenges of keeping a cost-effective kitchen.”
Because they’re selling – that’s what they’re selling. They’re selling a device that saves 50% on fry oil. Cost-saving devices in the kitchen is their jam.
But they were talking about, you know, “top five things to do with your dirty fry oil.” It’s like, okay, that could have worked five years ago, but now we need to talk to people. We need to deliver some sort of unique value and we get to tap into other people’s audiences, which I think is the undervalued part of link building – looking at these systems, these places, not dryly for, “Is it a DR75? Is it a DR50? A DR32?”
No, it’s not a doctor. I don’t care what the number is on the site. Is it useful? Is there an audience there? Is it spam? If it’s not spam, okay, great. Even better, does it have some sort of audience mechanism attached?
Like, if I do outreach and reverse HARO style and get somebody to post my article onto their social because I included a quote from them, I just tapped into their entire social media audience, which could be follows, it could be likes, could be maybe there’s a blogger that notices it and links to my resource because I did that legwork to make that resource happen.
Flynn Zaiger: Yeah, I think people feel that SEO is just a bunch of tricks. And if you want to be someone who is always on the leading edge and you’re in Discord, talking and chatting and changing strategies every week or two, those tricks can work. But in the end, the thing that has worked for a long, long time and will likely still work is the engaging content and building that with others.
Five tips, I mean, we obviously do a ton of those. We’ve done a ton of those. That was what you did for many years. But if we just didn’t do that and we would just made interesting content with restaurant owners or whoever has fry oil – I assume it’s only restaurant owners. I think if we had done that for the last five years, you would be able to work much better in this new world where those sorts of listicles are no longer as effective or where all of our short content is just taken by the AI overviews.
Discover what SEO looks like in 2025 and how content strategies are evolving
If we had made more engaging pieces that answered questions that couldn’t be answered in a two paragraph summary, that would have paid off in the long run. It’s really hard to get clients and even yourself to invest in those, to put so much money and resources into content production, but long-term it does seem like a good investment and something that has proven itself time and time again to pay off if you could just be patient enough for it to do so.
Final Advice and Reddit Strategy
Jeremy Rivera: That’s kind of wrap up here. What would be your number one actionable piece of advice in today’s economy?
Flynn Zaiger: Today’s economy, diversify your stocks is what I’m – if not the economy in the SEO world, I actually think your brand should have a presence on Reddit. And I say that most brands don’t, ours is one of the few that do. I think a lot of brands are scared of it. I think it makes sense from, it is a diversification bet, right?
The reason that Reddit’s talked about so much in 2024, 2025 for SEO is that Google’s rewarded it and Google could flip that switch and turn it off and all that investment will be for naught.
But I think we’ve seen, like we just talked about it, the power of SEO comes from building on other communities. And I think you can build a pretty sizable community on Reddit. And at least at the moment, they’ve not taken that audience away like other social channels have. And so I think if I was going to say, what is the one thing that I think most of your listeners haven’t done that they could easily do? I just don’t see the purpose of it at the moment.
Make an account for your brand, make a subreddit for your brand, which seems even sillier, but claim all those profiles and post and engage.
It will not be a short-term win. The new threads are barely ranking. It usually takes a couple months for threads to rank on Google, but that’s my safest long-term bet really – invest in that platform and see how it works for you. That’s what we’re doing. And I think it’s a good strategy for 2025 and 2026 at least.
Closing
Jeremy Rivera: You heard it here, folks. Flynn Zaiger says the narwhal beckons at midnight.
Flynn Zaiger: I would like to go on record and say that I did not say that. If you check the transcript, we are normal people, but I do get the reference. But I would never say that out loud. And you can see on the transcript in the minutes that I did not. But I appreciate you taking a bullet for me, Jeremy, and saying it yourself.
Jeremy Rivera: Thanks so much for your time. Shout out to people on social channels aside from Reddit, or on Reddit if you’re brave enough. Because that was my problem with Reddit. I have a handle there and another handle. There’s one that I use where I do everything, and the other where I post stuff that I know will want to be associated with my entity online. So if you have a public Reddit handle, if you want to be brave enough to dox yourself there.
Flynn Zaiger: Yeah, you can find us at online-optimism. It is absolutely in Reddit’s terms of service. You can have multiple Reddit accounts, not breaking any rules. So by all means, make a few, make one that you share on podcasts like this and make one that you wouldn’t want your best friend to see.
Jeremy Rivera: Make a sock puppet. Thanks so much for your time. I’ll see you around.
Flynn Zaiger: Thank you, Jeremy.
