We’re excited to share that Steven Schneider, co-founder of TrioSEO, recently joined the Unscripted SEO Podcast to talk about where SEO is headed and how businesses can get the most out of their optimization efforts.
Steven shared some great insights about how SEO is changing, not just because of new tools like AI, but because it’s becoming more about understanding the bigger business picture. Drawing from his experience building and selling companies, he talked about how SEO teams need to think like entrepreneurs to really make a difference. He also highlighted how important it is for agencies to work closely with clients and be a true part of their teams.
Whether you’re an SEO pro or a business leader looking to improve your organic search, Steven’s straightforward advice and practical perspective offer plenty to think about.
Below you’ll find the full transcript of the episode so you can read through the conversation whenever you want.
Know Your Speaker
Jeremy Rivera: Hello, I’m Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted SEO Podcast host. I’m here with Steven Schneider, who’s going to give himself a killer introduction focusing on why we should trust him and what’s the most interesting thing he’s been working on this week.
Steven Schneider: Wow, what a great way to jump into it. I’ve been doing SEO for about 10 years. I got my introduction way back in college, building micro affiliate sites back in kind of the Amazon heydays. My first company, which I started in college, scaled to about 40 sites and published like three to 400 articles a month in the affiliate landscape. Scaled that to 1.4 million ARR. And that was kind of like my quick and dirty internship into SEO, I guess you can call it that.
Nowadays, I help B2B and SaaS CMOs leverage the same strategies that I’ve been employing in my own businesses and sites, and my partners have been leveraging the same thing for their own portfolio of companies. So, it’s a very entrepreneurial mindset when it comes to a bunch of the stuff that we’re working on nowadays.
And yeah, one exciting thing that I’ve been working on is creating a system that focuses on how calculators and digital assets like quizzes can be used in SEO to drive more meaningful inbound leads and traffic to businesses through SEO.
The Value of Digital Assets
Jeremy Rivera: I think that makes sense. I was working with a brand, Specialty Design Build, like two weeks ago, and they’re like, yeah, we got plenty of calculators and tools on our site. And I went to the page, and it was like, how much does adding a renovation to your house add to, you know, what’s the value? And I tried typing it in, and it basically said that I was going to make a million dollars by adding a single room to my building. And kind of pointed out to them that it’s been doing it wrong.
All I needed to do was add 250 square feet to my house, and I could make up, you know, $200,000. [Which is obviously wrong].
The lesson/factor of these digital assets is paying attention to the output and making sure that if you’re providing a free tool to the community or to your prospects that it’s not going to end up embarrassing you.
Steven Schneider: Yeah, that’s kind of the goal, too. I mean, we’ve been building a calculator for a client of ours who’s in the cost segregation space, and it’s been a two or three-month construction. I mean, it’s not like we’re spinning these things out in 20 minutes via ChatGPT and lovable.dev. I mean, it’s a very calculated process, and making sure that quality remains the priority. Cause kind of like what you saw, if the calculator doesn’t have any validity to it or any real use case, then there’s no trust.
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, and I think it’s interesting to think about these particular use cases in SEO because we are losing one quiver or several arrows in the quiver of, “let’s just write blog content,” “let’s just do the top of funnel stuff,” and do all of that stuff up there, instead of turning your eye to, “what are the unique value propositions of my business?”
You know, like, if [you have a business where] you’re doing something hands-on with your home, whether you’re doing painting or whether you’re putting in handrails, you have to think about what are those questions that your potential audience are going to have, and answer them more thoroughly, in unique different ways.
So, I like the idea of calculator assets. What are some of the pitfalls or danger areas that you have to be aware of when you go down that route, aside from the accuracy of the tool?
Steven Schneider: Yeah, accuracy is a big one. I think also important is the realism of “can a client rank for this keyword,” and can their users actually find value in the calculator? Because, you know, there are tons of calculator keywords out there. Some of them are very, very easy to rank for. Others are not. And so, if we are going to build something for a client, does it actually make sense at the end of the day? Like, if a finance company is not going to rank for EBITDA calculator or credit card points calculator, there’s no point.
So, I think it really just has to match when it comes to who the client is, what the asset is that we’re creating, and how those two actually live in unison.
Jeremy Rivera: So what you’re saying is you need to make a [keyword] calculator and release it, to analyze if the calculator keywords are worth targeting.
Steven Schneider: Exactly. That’s the only way to do it.
100%, I mean, you took the words out of my mouth. Everything should be backed by keyword data. I would say that creating a calculator just for the sake of it probably doesn’t have as much value unless there’s, you know, a thousand monthly searches tied to it.
Like we have another client who does mergers and acquisitions and they have a valuation calculator for their stuff. It’s one of the best valuation calculators, currently ranking top three or top five for that. And they came to us and they said, “Hey, we have this calculator. It crushes. Just give us as much traffic as possible.” So that was kind of like where we first started to see these sort of things come to life.
And then we have another client who has a similar process, but kind of in the law space where they do settlement tax calculators and stuff like that. So we’re starting to see this trend through our clients kind of accidentally. And we’re like, “I think there’s something here. Let’s actually start with a keyword first, make the asset, and then use content to drive awareness to it.”
Jeremy Rivera: So, I should tell these Atlanta law office guys, “Hey, we should look at potential calculators to put onto the site as a class of assets.” Is that what you’re saying?
Steven Schneider: Yeah, I think that if it makes sense for their ICP, a hundred percent, I mean, it’s such a great way to bring more leads in and actually deliver value. And then you can set up a nurture sequence on the backend that could potentially give them a three to five-day drip, or, you know, that’s connected to the sales team.
The Importance of Multi-channel SEO
Jeremy Rivera: See, that’s the ticket. That’s what I’ve been talking to Michael McDougald, of Right Think Agency.
We need to, as SEOs, be ready and willing and pushing towards multi-channel. And so it’s about developing a class of tool, a tool that you can then shop back to that email list that you developed by launching another asset previously. Then, also doing that next step of probably putting out social ads or finding a way to drive additional subscriptions based off it.
Use this calculator > capture those emails with that calculator > have a follow-up process that’s going to turn that into leads.
We can’t rely on Google alone anymore to be our sole traffic provider. It’s just suicide.
Steven Schneider: Yeah, I mean, that’s the secret sauce there. It’s like you exchange email in trade for the full report, or whatever they actually need. I think you should still give them the answer, but I also feel like there are other ways to gatekeep some of that information. Maybe it’s just the input or just the output, and then whatever gets sent to email is more or less an added value proposition that they can feed off of.
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, it’s like don’t gatekeep the answer. Give them the answer. But give them the option of gated content, you know, cause I know I’m forgetful. So, even just like, you know, a reminder – get a reminder on this. Or, you know, thinking about what the next step is.
This was something that you should be doing with your services anyway – clearly defining, “what are the steps for somebody to make that purchase?”
What are the decision-making steps?
It’s like if you’ve got an asphalt company, you need to have an idea of how big your driveway is and also have an idea of exactly how damaged it is because those are also questions that you have to know.
Is it already asphalt, or is it part pavement that’s going to need to be torn up? I didn’t know that before I got a quote for my driveway. And people aren’t going to know that unless they’re so focused on it. Well, I might not know what an asphalt contractor is or what the exact process is.
So, as SEOs, let’s try to be explanatory. Go back to basics. Like I was talking with Matt Brooks, the SEO Tarik of let’s have this view of our services and explaining them, not insultingly, but actually describing them thoroughly.
Steven Schneider: Yeah, well, a hundred percent. I think the other thing, too, is that many people who work with SEOs think that it’s their magic solution to more leads. And in many cases it is, but if their website looks like it was built in 2004, I can’t help that. I’m not a magic maker when it comes to conversion.
And so I think that part of our job as SEOs, as the game is evolving, has to be this evolution of how we give customers and visitors value, and thinking a couple of steps ahead because our clients are busy. They don’t have that hat on to think about. Their job is to hire us, and we figure out the rest. And so if AI is changing the game and SEO is just changing in general, like how do we kind of start to think outside the box to really ensure that quality doesn’t slip?
Interconnected Teams
Jeremy Rivera: I think it’s also being a little bit more proactive as an SEO and not just taking it on the chin of like, okay, I’m going to go off and do keyword research. But [it’s also about] pushing back and saying, okay, I’m going to be part of your business.
If I’m going to be helping you, I need to understand you. What is your sales process? How many sales guys do you have? It’s just a girl at the front desk who isn’t very trained? Or do you send all of your calls or good leads to Joe, who is always the killer closer? You’ve got to understand what happens after that person clicks ‘submit,’ clicks in email, or clicks to call. What exactly is that end backend process of following up on this stuff?
There was a horrendous stat. And I wish I had kept the source of it. Somebody did, they spent a couple of weeks tracking contact forms from local business sites, and 80% of form submissions on local service sites got zero response. And it was something like 1% actually responded on the same day. And even a fraction of that responded within an hour. And that’s just horrendous. I was thinking of suggesting to my friends at Lead Truffle that they should do an official study and release it.
Steven Schneider: Yeah, it’s crazy. It’s brutal. Yeah, that’d be great. I’d love to see that too. I think that, and that’s kind of the ongoing meme nowadays, I think in B2B the sales process is so wonky in some industries and websites, too.
Like, there’s such a disconnect between teams that when an SEO comes in, we can bring you all the traffic in the world. But if all the other pieces of the puzzle are disjointed, it’s like we almost need to get back to square one and fix the foundation at that rate.
Challenging Niches
Jeremy Rivera: What’s the most challenging niche that you’ve worked in so far when it comes to SEO?
Steven Schneider: That’s a good one. I would say finance is always tough because if we don’t have a finance writer, it’s just impossible to try and, you know, bring that knowledge to the table. Same thing with health. We worked with a couple of them in the peptides space, with all the evolving kind of boom around peptides. And that’s really scientific. Like it’s just, you have to have somebody who understands that, you can’t really BS your way through a peptides article. I mean, anything that’s in your money, your lifestyle niche is always going to be super complex.
Jeremy Rivera: Okay, okay. So your money, your life. I was just talking about this again with McDougal. We just had this long conversation. So I’m interested in your take on it. Because we were looking back, your money and your life.
One of the biggest changes around that, of course, was the announcement of EEAT. But before that was the Medic update. And, you know, we have our own personal example of where we were. I worked with and did consulting with Dr. Axe, who was a huge chiropractor guy, and he was putting out legendary content, like he hired the team from Gantt. They had to cite like 10 scientific studies, and it’s like a 10,000 word article, and it was ranking and killing it. Then, overnight, the medic comes out. I shit you not a Healthline article with one paragraph replaced his magnum opus article that was 10,000 words long and had tons of links.
And so we were looking at what we know – Google put its thumb on the scale. How do you think that is? Because I have my own pet. We have our own pet theory of what’s the easiest, cheapest, quickest signal that Google could have changed to spike the ball when it comes to ‘your money, your life’ sites to bias towards those medical, truly medical sites like Healthline.
Steven Schneider: WebMD, et cetera, yeah. There’s one small name out there. Yeah, I think that they have to almost use brand recognition as a bigger umbrella definition or category weight in some term. Like this guy that you just mentioned, Dr. X, is probably a very well-known, very, very sharp guy. I’ve never heard of him, but I’ve heard of WebMD. So it’s almost like an appeal to the masses, and let the number of agreed yeses define the health space. If that makes sense, like someone could actually put in the work and do all the research and do all that sort of stuff. But we almost have to use branding as a social weight of trust to some degree.
And I think that that’s how Google looks at it in terms of those bigger conglomerate brands. It’s like WebMD, you trust the brand, you know the brand. Understand that. I think it’s just an easy, safe fallback for them when it comes to protecting their downside and user risk in that health space.
Jeremy Rivera: I think that dovetails with where we were going. We were looking at two concepts. One was that there’s a trust rank algorithm in addition to the page rank algorithm.
There’s a flow of trust from particular sites. So it’s like distance to speed. So if you are Dr. Axe and you’re a chiropractor, you know, yes, you may have a link from news articles. You probably have a very good backlink team, but most of those sites aren’t universities. Most of those sites aren’t hospitals. Most of those sites aren’t government-affiliated.
So our theory is that it was trust rank slash distance to speed in the medical niche. Like within the vector of this ‘your money your life’ of health and wellness, how far are you from those sites? Also, do you have a ton of those links? Obviously, you know WebMD and Mayoclinic have a lot more links from other sites because it’s repeating mainstream medical practice as opposed to the benefits of ashwagandha root, which you know, like they exist.
Steven Schneider: It’s also kind of an echo, like an echo chamber in a way for those things. They kind of all feed off each other. They all reinforce each other, too. It’s kind of like a flywheel within that niche or expertise of trust because I think that the more WebMD is used, the more Healthline is used, which just builds an association between who the top players are and if it is ranking.
At the same time, I think that those brands—I’m not saying that Dr. Axe doesn’t have a reputation to protect—put a lot of time, money, and resources into ensuring that every single piece of content is a hundred percent dialed in.
SEO and ChatGPT
Jeremy Rivera: So what else have you been working on? I mean, there are a lot of things happening in SEO. What’s a recent challenge that you’ve seen? A new development that you’ve been looking at that you have an opinion on, or have come up with something new?
Steven Schneider: Good question. I would say that what we’re starting to do is try to educate our clients around the importance of SEO and how it relates to the evolution toward AI ChatGPT searches. And I think that there’s a lot of ambiguity right now, and nobody is understanding how to rank in ChatGPT. And I love seeing on LinkedIn, everyone who’s adding their title is like, AI ChatGPT SEO expert. I’m like, no one knows. You don’t have any idea what’s going on, but being able to see that there is a minor correlation between quality content, authority, and strong SEO, and how those searches are appearing.
Like we’re starting to just search for primary high-intent keywords and ChatGPT using more conversational tones and questions, and seeing how our clients are appearing. And so kind of over time, that’s been fun to monitor and also share those wins with clients just to kind of show them like, “Hey, we’re not doing anything special. Like we’re not optimizing for ChatGPT, as people describe it, but you’re still ranking, and like the content we’re creating is still driving meaningful results.” So I think that there is a fun kind of exploration when you can go down that path and know that it’s all falling into place organically.
Jeremy Rivera: It is good. I’ve had several good conversations around it as well as, you know, the eventual doom and gloom conversation of, “My God, we’re all totally going to die.” But I think those who have been focused on the upside of it, the benefit of it, or the adjustment to it, like Mike Buckee of Knowatoa, he’s got an AI brand awareness type of tool. Patrick Stox just noted that Ahrefs added a kind of brand awareness search console.
Steven Schneider: Yeah, I did see a sponsored post for them on that, yeah.
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah. So I think being aware of how your brand is visible in it is important, but I think going back to our earlier conversation of what are the meat and potatoes, what can we offer on our site as part of our process that can’t be done in a general ChatGPT or that Gemini or AI Overviews is not going to be able to do? Because it’s not going to be able to execute a detailed square foot valuation for the California home market for your ADU. You’re not going to have a good ADU tool in the SERP itself yet.
I’m sure at some point, Google will decide that, the best way to curate information about ADUs in home calculators is to put our own feature into AI overviews to calculate these things eventually. But for this season, it does seem like that’s in the middle of the funnel. Focusing our efforts in that middle funnel, at the bottom of the funnel, truly comparative to other competitors, and kind of developing that middle belly.
Steven Schneider: Yeah, I think so too. I think that it has to kind of be this multi-prong approach in order to really tie it back to sort of what we were saying earlier. It’s like, how do SEOs come in and become more of a fractional partner than just the traditional SEO agency that you hire to get traffic? Like, I don’t think that the playbook is the same as it used to be 10, 15 years ago. I think that it’s almost a requirement now for people to think like what we are saying, and where it’s like, okay, what does your newsletter look like? Are you guys actually growing that? Where are we driving traffic? Where are we driving people? Why don’t you have lead magnets? How quickly can you make those? Like, if we bring you traffic, what’s the next step?
I think that it has to be this cohesive thought pattern process in order for it to be successful. Otherwise, you’re just gonna drive traffic and meaningless results.
Jeremy Rivera: And you’re going to, you know, slowly over time, drive less and less traffic off of the same results. We’ve got to do more with less or find, build, and develop alternate sources. You know, we’ve got to look at cross-channel marketing. I was talking with Melissa Popp of the Rickety Roo, and she was very much on board with that.
I guess, you know, that fractional development of our role, the way that we work within organizations, you know, you can have all the semantic arguments of what we are – AI, AIOs, GEOs, or SEOs. That doesn’t matter. I think calling it, you know, developing a fractional title, and understanding how we can deliver value in different aspects of the organization has more value, even if it’s harder to express.
So I always use the example of looking at what are you for your SaaS, and if you’re doing a lot of consulting for SaaS, one of the biggest expenses in human resources is customer support. Well, the best way to decrease your customer support human resources requirements is for you to spend the time developing your online digital assets before people have those questions.
The Entrepreneurial Mindset
Steven Schneider: I think that there’s going to be a lot of really positive changes in the next five to 10 years, and it’ll be really fun to see how teams utilize SEOs to drive more traffic, not only through AI, but also through organic search. But I think at the end of the day, that’s kind of the benefit that we’ve explored mostly at Trio. We spent the last 10 to 15 years kind of building businesses of our own and exiting businesses of our own.
And for the first time, we’re kind of flipping the script and are able to step into a business and wear that entrepreneurial hat that allows us to know how to pull different levers of different pieces of the business and the site in order to really bring it to life.
Jeremy Rivera: I agree. There has to be more awareness of business and how these markets and industries work, and less awareness of how SEMrush works and less awareness of how Ahrefs works. So, if you want to upskill in SEO or develop your career, you really need to be developing those business skills.
Steven Schneider: Yeah, I think so. And I think that that’s one of the things that many people aren’t really thinking about nowadays, at least from what I’ve seen from the content creators on LinkedIn. I’ve shifted myself away from trying to talk about, like, what is SEO and kind of the fundamentals of that sense, and really shifting more toward an agency perspective of ‘what’s it like working with us?’ ‘What’s it like for the teams?’
I think that a lot of the value that we’re hearing from CMOs and founders is that they’re looking for somebody who can come up and almost be an extension of their team. So I think over time, like collaboration is going to be a really successful medium in that front. And the teams who can step in with more of a collaborative process and kind of come up with forward-thinking ideas are definitely going to reap the dividends down the road.
Understanding Client Goals
Jeremy Rivera: Love it. That’s exactly where my head’s at. As we kind of round the corner here on the closing up, what’s the top action item as you bring somebody on board as a new client? Where’s the meat? Where’s the biggest thing that you’re looking at to make an impact? Because you do have to lay out that, “Hey, this is a long-term thing.” But where do you go for that first win to develop their confidence in your capabilities?
Steven Schneider: Yeah, most of our onboarding process is built around mastering their brand and understanding the tonality, the messaging, what’s their ideal call to action, where are we directing people, what’s the links, all that sort of stuff. Creating content, definitely, I think, is a micro win outside of getting the results that they’re looking for, just so that they can know that there’s a trusted team in place to spearhead a lot of that ongoing work.
The other thing that I think is really important is that one of my favorite questions to ask clients is, “How are you currently tracking success on your website?” And it’s so odd how many people cannot answer that question correctly, whether it’s this is what we’re doing. This is what we’ve faced in the past. You know, we’ll work with a client, and I say, “How are you guys currently tracking leads? What’s the success metric?” Cause they say, “Okay, great. We can’t wait for this to start working.” And I say, “Well, how do you define what works? How do you define how success even looks at the end of the day?”
And if they can’t answer that, we kind of have to rip it apart from square one and say, “Okay, well, let’s start thinking about that. What actually moves the needle in the company? Where are we signing people up? Is it demos? Is it free trials? Is it webinars?”
Like I think that the lack of clarity when onboarding somebody can actually dig yourself a deeper hole because you look back at the end of three, four, five months and they’re like, “Great, is this working?” But have you guys actually agreed upon what was supposed to work from the get-go?
Jeremy Rivera: Yes, yeah, that is solid gold. And it’s also an opportunity, too, because it allows you to reset expectations, like once you’ve gone through the process. Okay, let’s look at these things, tear them down. Okay, now we start. And then we can compare going forward, you know, how we’re doing versus something vague. I had one client where I got a bunch of leads, and it seemed like things were going really well. And then he gets back and says, “No, none of those leads.” I said, “Okay.” We had multiple conversations. But they said it was the wrong type of project. So, what type of project did you want? How are you disqualifying them that we needed to qualify them on the front end?
Then we realized, “Hey, we need to split off and put up a whole separate site for the residential asphalt driveways versus the regional commercial asphalt project stuff.” Like it was nice to have both on one site because it’s authority, but you know, he doesn’t want to do driveways everywhere. He just wants that within this range of his geographic location, while also doing geo, you know, wanting multiple states for his commercial. Those are incompatible desires, like you can’t filter that out.
Steven Schneider: Yeah, no way. Yeah, I even had a client I was talking to, I think it was like last Thursday. And I sent the end of report for May, and it was looking at, you know, free trial signups and demos booked. And they were saying how the number looked higher than usual.
I was like, I mean, isn’t that what you want?
[They replied] we forgot to tell you that people are actually using the demo button as a contact form for existing clients or existing customers. So I’m like, okay, so now that data is somewhat messy. We got to clean that up. Like we can’t have returning customers use your primary lead magnet offer. Like, so I think just communication is key throughout all that.
