Jeremy Rivera: Hello and welcome to the Unscripted SEO Podcast. I'm Jeremy Rivera, your host. I'm here with Jonathan Schüßler. Why don't you give yourself an introduction and focus on your bona fides, your experience that should make people trust you when you're talking about this subject.
Jonathan Schüßler: Hi, yeah, I'm Jonathan. I come from a background of studying sports and mathematics, and I photographed on the side for a long time. I started doing wedding photography about 10 years ago. Over this time, I had to promote myself starting out, and then I switched to agency life about five years ago and really got into the SEO stuff.
I think I kind of understand the basics of how algorithms work from my study of mathematics. It's really interesting trying to figure out how this stuff is evolving and seeing new stuff coming up—sometimes stuff that's not good for you in the long run, but kind of works as well. It feels like everyone's trying to solve this puzzle, and I've been into puzzles all my life. So I really like SEO right now.
Also, building trust with your audience was my main thing over the past few years, which kind of resonates with SEO as well, because you're really trying to gain trust with Google and LLMs now.
Jeremy Rivera: I want people who listen to this podcast to hear from people who are in the trenches, who are executing on this and not just the front man of an organization. It's always different—SEO and how it's viewed or understood—based off of whether you're in-house, whether you're a freelancer, whether you're a fractional CMO or CFO, or even a PPC person. They have different perspectives on it.
If you haven't been at that agency life before and you've only done in-house for somebody and you grew entirely in-house that entire career, or if you've been freelance and you've never been in-house on the opposite side, then you might not have as much clarity about the pressure to convince a boss to execute on budget. You might be scrapping for $80 a month for Ahrefs versus coming in as a consultant where you've got your tools and you can convince the client super easily. The in-house guy is sitting there like, "Can I get any of this money to do this stuff?"
SEO is an interesting industry that has developed in the past 25-ish years that didn't exist on the face of the planet before, as the internet gained its preeminence in our culture and discovery.
Jeremy Rivera: So I'm curious, where are you at now with your career? I understand that you're doing freelance—how has that experience been different from agency life and where you started learning SEO?
Jonathan Schüßler: In the agency, we were basically a web-based agency, building new experiences for either existing companies or helping new companies come up in the space. We've not only done SEO, we've built the whole brand—the socials, the web design.
That was really tough because I got to face a lot of gray old men that either had a real existing website from 2004 that looked exactly like Windows XP and had no sense of content on it, to other companies barely just starting out and they were like, "We need to get on Google page one." I'm like, you have no domain, you have no backlinks, you have nothing to show for that we can work with. So we really had to start scrapping from each side.
It was sometimes tough because it was in a smaller city in Germany. We had to do a lot of local SEO, but some of the companies really wanted to go nationwide. They didn't really get what is needed to do that, and they didn't have a marketing team behind it. They maybe had one person sitting there trying to gain some newsletter followers.
As a freelancer now, I'm not the boss of the agency who goes to someone being like, "Yeah, we can do all that for you. We can get you on Google page one, whatever," and then I have to deliver with a company that's not prepared. They don't have people, they don't have statistics that I can work with.
Now as a freelancer, I can approach companies and tell them, "This, this, this, this is what I need." I can get into a conversation with their boss pretty much, which is way easier than what it used to be in the agency. It was very separated. You would always have just your one little project. I would maybe do the SEO for the website and also do some Instagram content where their target audience wasn't on Instagram, but they wanted Instagram because Instagram is new and hip and cool and young—which it already wasn't at the time anymore.
The switch up was different. I'm mainly doing SEO for service-based businesses now, which is very much closer to what I do in my own company as well. So that really helped me focus down on a few certain spots. It's not that any client who walked through the door is just a fit for what I offer.
Jeremy Rivera: I'm curious, because I haven't had the opportunity to do local SEO in an international sense for another country. Have you had cross-country local SEO experience like doing something in America, Australia, as well as Germany or Britain? And have you seen—is there a common line or is there a big difference between the local SEO game for service-based businesses based off of the country you're in?
Jonathan Schüßler: I haven't done any cross international SEO work, but from what I've heard from different podcasts, the game is pretty similar in a lot of ways. So I've listened to this one Danish guy (I forgot his name right now) and also Edward Storm. They've talked a lot about different local SEO tactics that I kind of didn't know I couldn't phrase the rule behind, but that I also really acknowledged here.
For me, my other business is mainly wedding photography and videography. I'm a specialist in doing both at the same time as one person. So I'm kind of local, but at the same time, I'm not region-based like a plumber. I can travel two hours to a wedding—that's no problem. So I have this net of cities.
Jonathan Schüßler: The first time I heard of Programmatic SEO, I was like, this is exactly where my programming background and my marketing knowledge come together.
I moved cities—I moved two and a half hours down south—and I was like, "I need to be present in that area without having any backlinks in that area, without having any newspaper articles about me." The area I'm in is very, very competitive because we have the best wine region with the nicest venues for weddings around.
I was like, well, I can't target "Hochzeitsfotograf Heidelberg" (wedding photographer Heidelberg) because it has a very high difficulty score. So I was like, well, we have so many tiny cities around. I literally targeted every city in two and a half hours of surroundings. I have a list of like 80 cities that I'm targeting, and I'm ranking top four for like 50 of them—which are the ones that no one's targeting because everyone, even the guys that live there, target my city.
Jeremy Rivera: There is an inverse pressure. If you're getting hired to do SEO in a competitive market like Nashville—I'm in Cookeville here, an hour away in a completely different market—most people who live in the city don't want to drive to Nashville. But if you are in this region, they're like, "Yeah, you need to conquer the Nashville Metro."
But there's hundreds of literal cities, and you're right, there is an opportunity. I was talking with one of my SEO friends, Michael McDougald of Right Thing Agency. Google used to—and this may be ancient history to you—in 2005 to 2012, they had a distinct rule: you can't have a doorway page that is a region, just the same thing for a different region, and they cracked down on it.
But it really seems like that's the inverse of if you do want to rank locally, you need to actually make multiple different service pages, location pages, service and location page hybrids to differentiate and even have a chance of generating local search.
Jonathan Schüßler: I have experienced that a tiny bit. There's definitely a limit to this where they crack down on you. But for some of the pages, they are so desperate finding someone to cater that keyword that they will allow it anyways.
One of my favorite keywords—and I'm pretty sure your podcast listeners will not cross me on this one, I hope—is "wedding photographer Kronberg." Kronberg is the richest area in Germany. It's a tiny town near Frankfurt, and all the high finance people live there. It has this magical castle that's been used for tons of Bridgerton-level TV shows, which is one of the most prestigious five-star hotels in the world.
No one's targeting this keyword. It has like 10 clicks per month, but those 10 clicks per month could—you could live off those 10 clicks in one month. It's crazy to me that no one's targeting this. I know people don't care because it's only 10 clicks per month, but why not target it? Why target a thousand clicks for Heidelberg if you're ranking place five and you get maybe 10, 15 clicks? Why not target the one where all the most expensive stuff is happening, but there's not many clicks?
Jeremy Rivera: I think that comes down to one of the weaknesses of the SEO industry when it comes to over-reliance on data—thinking that SEO is popping open SEMrush or Ahrefs and just finding the highest volume term or city and just targeting sheerly based off of volume.
I've been in consulting situations where I have to show them, "Here's the search volumes, but let's sort it based off of where do you actually make money the most." Maybe some of these smaller towns or this region where it's a lot cheaper—you know, working with a precast wall company right now, there's much higher volume in Atlanta, but their main center is in Florida, so the shipping cost is half. They can deliver locally for half of the cost, so they're winning three times as much business.
I think making sure that you don't get shoved into a corner as an SEO, as a consultant of, "Hey, can you come do SEO for our site?" No, no, no, I don't do SEO for your site. I help develop your business's digital footprint.
Understand your cross-channel. Are you trying to drive more conversions through your email? Well, your email list doesn't grow by itself. You have to do things, and the best way to do that is with your website and figure out what offering, what content you can put out. Then that becomes a hybrid social media/organic thing where the content you're putting out—maybe it ranks, maybe it doesn't—but you want to coordinate with the social media person if they exist, and the email management person if they exist, or it's you.
What I'm seeing, and you can tell me if this is true, is that the bigger success for freelancers and SEO consultants lies in expressing domain experience of knowledge in SEO, but interacting with, coordinating with, or literally executing non-SEO items as well for the company.
Jonathan Schüßler: 100%. We know that Google is growing to know way more than just our title, H1, first sentence, and alt tags. They really start pulling everything together, especially if you're doing local SEO. They have this great source of pulling all the data that your company gives out together, which is in the Google Business Profile. If you're linking all your socials there, they will start understanding what your business is about, what kind of users are interacting with your business on those social accounts.
Since Instagram allowed their posts to be indexed, I increasingly saw that people who saw me on Instagram also found me on Google. The same happened with TikTok. Instagram got pressured because TikTok already did it—they were like, "Yeah, take our content, get us more people on the site."
Jeremy Rivera: I love having a case study. It's fine. I'm not offended. If your domain experience—I consulted for a poop scooping company and a lot of my examples for a while were around scooping poop, but it was very actionable. It was funny because the poopy lessons apply elsewhere. Use the example that you have. I'm not going to turn up my nose at your photography example when my example is poop-scooping!
Jonathan Schüßler: About five years ago, I started watching some YouTube videos from this Canadian wedding photographer who started doing photo and video hybrid. In just one sentence on the side note, he was like, "Yeah, when I was practicing video, I started doing some videos about some wedding venues that I visited."
He was already huge—he has like 600,000 on YouTube. He's been around the block. He's kind of old for a wedding photographer because most of us can't deal with it at 40 anymore. He's around 45, 50-ish. He said this and it sparked the idea. I was like, "Yeah, I'm good at video. I could show wedding venues to potential clients."
I see a big market of couples that get married not in the same region where they live. They don't want to drive four hours every time to visit a venue. So I recorded those videos, put them on YouTube. Some of them outranked the location itself because they had so little good material about their venue on their website.
I was like, "This is great." I get 500 views per video per year. They're never slowing down, they're never fast. Then this year I got the idea: might as well try repurposing them on TikTok. Out of nowhere, I got 1.5 million accounts viewing those videos. I linked those videos to the YouTube videos.
So I get my 1.5 million people scrolling through my stuff—it's accounts, not views, which is better in my opinion. It's all my target audience, all women between 20 and 35. They click on my YouTube videos, from my YouTube videos they click on the blog to get a few more impressions. Then I have hub pages of those blogs in different cities, different styles of them organized.
Those hub pages sometimes rank for the locations now, or at least place two, three, four for some of the most prestigious wedding venues in Europe. I have this one venue that I've never been to, I don't have a video about it—it's in Tuscany, one of the top 10 venues in Europe. I'm ranking place four for that.
That helps me, and this is linking to my "wedding photographer Tuscany" page. I have like four clicks on it this year and I have three inquiries for German couples because I targeted the German keyword for the Italian place. If they travel for the wedding two countries apart, they probably have a decent budget wedding, right? They wouldn't do that if they didn't have budget.
I have four clicks, three inquiries. One of the couples literally just—I saw the email pop up while we were recording—they messaged me two months ago being like, "Yeah, we really want you. We don't have the venue yet." Now they're coming back and they found me on TikTok, moved over to YouTube, moved over to my blog, moved over to my wedding photographer Tuscany page.
Jeremy Rivera: And you said you didn't have any international SEO experience!
Jonathan Schüßler: Sorry, sorry, I forgot about that! Yes, I'm doing that for me and my brother, but that's German though, that's not English. I feel like that could be different.
Jeremy Rivera: I think it's interesting because as monolinguists, we kind of forget or get biased when we're consulting and there is multi-region and crossover languages. Trying to show up in Italian search or French search or Greek search for Tuscany is different than being an authority in Germany because you've tackled all of these similar venues.
I love that development of thinking about the market and not directly just the one single thing. It's not just focusing on, "I'm going to say I'm a photographer in these 50 cities," but where do you do that photography? How does that tie in?
If you've got a mobile photo booth rental company, you should talk about the venues as much as you do about your own photography rental option. SEOs kind of get so tied in and locked in just on their own specific service pages. They think, "I need to go top of funnel, so I'm just going to talk about photography in general, wedding stuff in general."
There are different categories and types of content to explore and create and craft that LLMs are going to chew up. They're going to chew on that and spit you out. You can find citation, get traffic that way. Even though we know LLM-based search is just 2-3-ish percent of the total market, it's huge on the mind of CEOs. The messaging for the past six months has been, "SEO is dead again."
But really, when it comes to the fundamentals, it's just stupid SEO that's on the ropes. The fundamentals are still there. Creative marketing is still there. Understanding the business perspective and tying it into those values is still there.
Jeremy Rivera: What's your take on what's the fast food right now in SEO? What's the junk food that's being sold versus the meat and potatoes that we've been talking about? What do you think will be giving us a stomach ache very shortly?
Jonathan Schüßler: 100%—overusing ChatGPT in your content. So many people I come across are like, "Oh yeah, I can do my own website with Lovable and I can do all the texts with ChatGPT." It's just all plagiarized content, which kind of works sometimes because it's fresh data. Even Google doesn't have much old data about you, so you're not getting flagged for reusing content. But it's not great content.
I feel like the most important piece right now is getting stuff that actually—we've always had EAT is important, we've always had "make great content that serves the intent." There's so much stuff being thrown out where people think it is good for the intent, but it's actually just a five out of ten, maybe, because ChatGPT doesn't give great answers. It gives good enough answers that it's not bad if it's not hallucinating, which it did so much.
When I set up the page for all the different venues about a year and a half ago, it sometimes completely lied the whole way through. I was like, "I've been at this venue, you can't get 300 people in this room. That's a 40-people venue. What are you talking about?" Even if I said "you're lying," it starts thinking for two minutes—still lies.
If you're spreading misinformation, I think that will in the long run always bite you, especially for LLMs. If they keep learning, they will start to get better at differentiating what's actually good information and what's bad information. If you're bloating your site with so much bad information, that's going to haunt you in the long run, I think. If 80% of your website is bad content, I wouldn't rate the other 20%.
Jeremy Rivera: You're basically describing the knock-on impact of the HCU (Helpful Content Update). Google leveraged LLMs and machine learning to re-drop the Penguin bomb. There was an age of SEOs where we didn't have a site-wide penalty option. Panda and Penguin were no longer nuking sites left and right for content or scammy links. But then HCU comes back up.
Part of that was to address overuse of AI. Part of it was to address people overusing programmatic, but also to address the creep of sites that were literally just getting thrown up, throw AdSense on them, and didn't really add new unique content. That's just accelerated with the popularity of GPT, the popularity of Claude, the popularity of these tools.
They're like my dad. You can ask my dad, "Why did Slobodan Milošević get ousted in Yugoslavia in the 90s?" And he'll go on this 10-minute tirade about the impact of the Mongol invasion into the region. It sounds good, but then you dig into it, you're like, "You made half of that up. You don't actually know what you're talking about. You've connected A to B to C, but really, it was kind of like A, but not really."
The problem is the tool itself is based off of probability and it's math. It's guessing what is most likely the right word that's going to kind of pass muster, that's going to kind of be real. People are digesting and accepting output from GPT as fact, like a human speaks it, but it's not a human. It's just from its lexicon, from its knowledge base and from third-party citations. Sometimes those citations get mutated as it tries to generate a sentence that makes sense.
There is a huge proclivity for lying. I often process my interviews with Claude afterwards, but there's an error rate of like one in five or one in ten where I'll ask it—just on a strict dialogue, back and forth, not adding new content—I'll read through it like, "We did not talk about that at all. This section of text, back and forth, that is completely fictional. I never said that, he never replied that. In fact, we made the opposite points."
I'm like, "Okay, I gotta restart this over. Strictly don't add new words. Just act as a careful editor." I know that a lot of shops, a lot of SEOs and laymen that are using this tool are not—they're not going to be that careful. If they don't have a good knowledge base and didn't just come off of the conversation, maybe they didn't listen to the whole interview—"Yeah, this looks like SEO gibberish. Yeah, they totally said that."
Jonathan Schüßler: My brother, for example, keeps asking—we keep having this conversation where he has this new idea. He's like, "Yeah, I'm going to ask ChatGPT about what should I do to improve my SEO? How can I climb in the ranks?" It will give him some answers that I'm like, "Sometimes, but not really anymore," or "This could have worked maybe 10 years ago, but it doesn't anymore." It's really just getting the stuff that it heard most about, which is usually the stuff that's not used anymore.
Jeremy Rivera: That's a big problem because you also have an oblivious eye to the modus operandi. Why did this content get created in the first place?
In SEO, there was an incentive from 2002 to 2012—a very pure, culture-driven, "Hey we're figuring this out, I'm publishing as I go, I'm digging in deep, this is what I figured out." But after 2012, there came a really big change as Google rewarded less of who was actually doing the publishing in SEO. It moved more towards just the SaaS companies who had a big enough budget to keep publishing and fewer individual blogs and bloggers and SEOs and hardcore enthusiasts. They moved off to forums and then to Slack channels, and really the best discussions were on Twitter. Twitter went down the tubes.
Now there's a ghost in the shell effect—the people that are creating the most content about SEO are the teams of famous SEOs but not actually written by the SEOs anymore. It's just content mill production for SEO agencies and for SaaS companies. The quality, the depth, the care, the really niche, weird, bizarre abstracts—it's not there anymore.
Anything true like that is in the big SEO Slack channel on Reddit (not subreddit because the subreddit's spammed out now), or a back Slack channel or Discord. That's where the true experimentation is happening and people really discussing real stuff.
If you have a true powerful thing in SEO that can make you a bunch of money, why are you going to blog about that? What is the incentive for you to put out that insanely brilliant approach, strategy, tactic? Only if you can harvest that, turn that into enough organic traffic to turn around to get clients to make it worthwhile, then you've got an incentive to publish it.
That may be specific to SEO, but I think that does apply to other industries as well—insights, industry secrets. Why would they put their industry secrets out there if there's not AdSense money enough? With sites getting choked off by HCU now, what's the incentive to publish? It's diminishing, especially as competition comes up from LLMs and why would anyone search for that? Because they can just get their answer from the AI overviews.
Jonathan Schüßler: 100%. I feel like that's in a lot of different categories. It's not just SEO. But in SEO, we have the problem that if you publish something and it goes viral, there's so many developers that are like, "Yeah, this is not intended. Let's patch that by tomorrow." So that's a huge problem in SEO.
It's less of a problem in other categories, but I still feel like we started off the internet being like, "Yeah, we can share everything." It's becoming more gatekeeping—it's definitely a thing, especially on social media. Unless you have the saying as well: "If you can't do it, teach it."
I definitely feel that is the case in photography as well and in social media marketing 100%. The guys that are talking on social media about "this is how you get views, this is how you hook people"—they just repeat what they've learned somewhere else and it's not always working. It's definitely not working most of the time. They only get the views because they're talking about how to get more views. That's a pretty big topic on social media because it's somehow this self-sustaining machine of people thinking "I can do this better."
Jeremy Rivera: There is the entropy. I believe it was A.J. Kohn who said it's the "enshittification" of Google results. It's changing the word from "it's good enough" to "it's Goog enough."
This acceptance of, "Wow, this AI overview just told me to pour gasoline on my sandwich." We would have culturally—in my opinion—a lot of the companies that have put forward this type of product, for Microsoft in 2010, if they had released something that would have gotten a diver killed because the data was inaccurate about how deep you could go, that would not just have been a scandal, it would have damaged them. They wouldn't have gone to market with what is essentially a live beta test.
We're living in the age where for some reason, the appetite for this AI capability is so—I don't know whether it's C-suite, whether it's investors, whether it's cultural or programmers or developers—there's such an interest in it that there's a live beta test happening right now. Every new version that we release is a new live mass cultural beta test of these programs, and it's accepted. The error rate is just accepted, and what would be a company-destroying disaster is maybe a few headlines that are not great—but who even believes the headlines? They're AI-generated too.
Jonathan Schüßler: Everything right now—I've been to a few entrepreneur summits in the area—everything is AI, AI, AI, AI. Every company wants to use AI, and everyone is interested in what's the newest AI. It's just the biggest, most talked about topic ever right now. It's been for a while and it's only getting bigger.
So many companies that are starting are GPT wrappers. I heard this interview with Altman and it was like, if you're building something that is really cool with GPT-5, but it's not getting better every time there's a new version coming out, your company is instantly just going to drop at some point. When the new version comes out, it will be so much better than the previous one.
If you're building something—the example he used was if you're building something like a tutoring program that with GPT-4 was able to teach class years one to three students, with GPT-5 it might be doing one to five. With GPT-6, it could do up to ninth grade. Then maybe GPT-7 or 8, you will be able to do your full high school degree being tutored by this chatbot. This is the kind of company that you should be starting to build right now if you're interested in AI.
Jonathan Schüßler: What is really important right now is, same as in SEO, you really need to find your niche. Before, it was good to have a niche and branch out a little, but with AI, you need to find the AI to help with doing your bookings as a plumber—something super niched out. Similar to what I said about all the little towns that I'm targeting with my pages.
You need to really find your niche that has a proper market fit. If you have that proper market fit, you will automatically gain a little bit of traction. You will need to surround it by a proper repurposed content structure that helps you generate this stream where Google really wants you to branch out and have a bigger company.
I feel like beforehand, you could have only an Instagram, an active Instagram, and it would be fine because I'm a photographer. Maybe a Pinterest. I have these two channels that are mainly photo-related. But now it feels like, okay, I need some press releases. I need some LinkedIn posts. I need a whole bunch of stuff because that's what a bigger company would do. So we put more trust in them if we think they're more like a good company.
Whereas before it would only be the one channel that has been shown. I feel like comparing yourself to the biggest company in your niche really helps figuring out what you should be doing.
Jeremy Rivera: I think Matt Brooks of SEOteric and I were talking about this. You need to understand: Are you the 800-pound franchise gorilla in your industry, or are there a bunch of 800-pound gorillas and you need to find out how to survive? There is space, but you still have to make a name for yourself. You need to understand the market that you're playing in and your role in it and the potential.
That comes back to again, understanding the bigger market view, and not just "add H1, edit meta title, include internal links." There's fundamentals, but there's also more value by connecting both cross-channel and understanding the bigger market picture.
Jeremy Rivera: I love this conversation. Let's go ahead and wrap it up with what's your hottest take right now? What's your spicy take for the SEO industry? What's a big win? What's a big loss? What's happening?
Jonathan Schüßler: One thing that I heard the other day that really caught me off guard was this guy—I can't remember where I heard it—but it was like 30-minute videos might be the next best thing.
Because as soon as LLMs start tracking the whole transcripts of YouTube videos, right now the only people doing 30-minute videos are huge companies that have the time and money to invest in very long-form content. This might get put out as the next most influential EAT-type content, which is crazy to me because it's exactly counterintuitive to what people are focusing on right now with short-form content.
Jeremy Rivera: I think you're right, and that's where my heart is. My brand, SEO Arcade, is focused on podcasts as an SEO service because I realized this interview—it's 45, 46 minutes now—that's 4,000 to 6,000 words of written content.
That's easily—you can break that into—we've dove into three or four very specific niche conversations. That's three or four specialty blog posts with direct quotes that aren't pulling from LLMs between two subject matter experts. Then you get the links out of the ecosystem for publishing it on podcasts, publish it elsewhere, post it on LinkedIn Pulse.
Lily Ray was complaining the other month: "Hey, content I take from my site and post to LinkedIn Pulse—Google is ranking the LinkedIn Pulse above the exact same content on my own site." There's some weird distortions going on, but if you have that subject matter expertise, it makes sense that a company that can do longer-form content, can do interviews—
LLMs, you know, there's Llama or whatever that purports to create podcasts, but you can feel it. I've listened to a podcast that was made by them. It's that weird uncanny valley experience, like watching CGI from 2003 and you're like, "That's not how a body moves. That's not how a conversation works." It's a little too chipper, a little too on the nose. There's not enough detours.
I totally agree with you. I see value in the respect for the rush to the five-second attention span, but you're right—maybe some of that is snippets off of the bigger thing. Those are bites off of the elephant.
Jonathan Schüßler: That's literally what I was going to say because it offers you so much potential for clipping. Right now in streaming, clipping is the biggest thing and the most underrated and good-earning job. If you have bigger streamers and you're clipping them, if you're a professional clipper, you can make bank.
But this could also—you could use this for your company. You're doing a podcast, you have your podcasts, you get your blogs out of it, you get your LinkedIn posts out of it, and you get your clips to send to everything—to Shorts, to—the Shorts might all rank on your LinkedIn posts as well. Google loves the Shorts.
I'm literally just re-releasing—I know my TikToks are ranking really high right now, but I'm re-releasing everything on Shorts this winter. I will sit down for two weeks and I'll plan out and I'll have all my content re-released on Shorts. It's great. It's so fun.
