TL;DR
- Small business owners need a transparent agency partner, not just a check-casher. Look for proven results, specific timelines, and clear communication about what you’re paying for and what you’ll get out of it.
- SEO must be the foundation, but diversification across channels is now non-negotiable. Local businesses that aren’t on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and sponsoring community events are ceding ground to competitors who are.
- LLMs are math, not magic. The best use of AI tools is accelerating genuine human content, not replacing the human who creates it. The computer between your ears still outranks every LLM.
- The industry needs to get back to fundamentals. Outdated contradictory content, broken internal links, oversized images: these basic problems are more damaging than whatever llms.txt debate is trending today. Fix the foundation before chasing the fancy stuff.
- SEOs are the quarterbacks of digital marketing; they should have visibility into paid ads, social, web, and email so nothing is siloed. That cross-channel awareness is where the biggest wins, like the pink pants story, live or die.
BEST QUOTES
“The large language models, all these tools are great computers, but nothing’s going to replace the computer between your ears. That should always be the main one you go with.”
Mike Ginley · Mike Ginley Digital Consulting
“You can do all this fancy work that we do, but if you don’t have anything original to say, it’s not going to matter either. You need to have both.”
Mike Ginley · Mike Ginley Digital Consulting
“Gone are the days of just focusing on one channel. You really need to start diversifying and making sure you have a presence in all these different channels.”
Mike Ginley · Mike Ginley Digital Consulting
Podcast
Video
Introduction
JEREMY RIVERA
Hello, I’m Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted SEO podcast host, and I’m here with Mike Ginley, who’s going to introduce himself and tell us why we should trust him as an SEO expert.
MIKE GINLEY
Hello everyone. My name is Mike Ginley. I am a digital consultant — I’ve been doing mostly SEO, digital marketing, paid ads, web development for the past 10 years. I work full time for Centerwell and then I also do side work under Mike Ginley Digital Consulting where I like to help a lot of the local mom and pop companies with their web and digital presence. I’ve experienced from all areas of the business, whether it’s the small mom and pops to large Fortune 500 companies. So everything under the sun, I’ve done it. I love doing this stuff. I can’t get enough of it.
Protecting Mom & Pop Businesses from Digital Snake Oil
JEREMY RIVERA
When it comes to mom and pops, what’s your feeling for that sub industry? What is it about that niche and area that needs specific focus and care?
MIKE GINLEY
Yeah, it’s something that unfortunately I’ve dealt with for a long time going back to my early agency days — a lot of them, unfortunately, have been scammed by some of the fly-by-night marketers, companies, whoever it may be, that will cash their checks, say they’re doing some fancy work, but nothing ever really moves the needle. And then they usually end up going through multiple agencies, multiple consultants. A lot of them, when they end up with me, I can already tell they’re very upset.
They don’t have a good representation of the digital marketing world as a whole, so they’re already angry with me and we haven’t even started talking yet. And unfortunately, it just comes with a lack of understanding on their end — they don’t know what they need. It’s a new world to them. A lot of them are from a different generation. So they’re really just kind of trusting people to do good work for them and get them the leads or the business that they want. And unfortunately, sometimes they’re paying the wrong people to do that and paying the costs.
JEREMY RIVERA
I have unfortunately seen my share of snake oil salesmen. It is a forever challenge of our industry to overcome that negative reputation.
MIKE GINLEY
Yes, 100%. It’s so difficult sometimes to really get people to trust you again after they’ve been burned so many times. Because a lot of these companies are operating on such thin margins — it’s like they don’t have that never-ending bank account. It’s like: we put a lot of time, money, and effort into this and are now in a worse-off position than when we started.
JEREMY RIVERA
It is hard because with small businesses there’s such heart behind it. But there’s also — they’re putting their heart on the line.
What Small Business Owners Should Look For in an Agency
JEREMY RIVERA
I have this question from Reddit: if you are a small business owner, what is it that you should be looking for in an agency to justify taking it over? What can they do that I can’t as a business owner?
MIKE GINLEY
Yeah, so I actually just wrote an article about this on my side website, digital-eat.com, where I highlight digital marketers — why they should be trusted, their expertise, authority, trust, all that stuff. That’s basically what I really wrote there: you need to find agencies or consultants that can prove they have done this before for other people. They have proven results that they’ve helped companies similar to yours or other local businesses, and that they have a plan ready to go — focused to you, with timelines — that will show you: this is what you’re paying for, this is what you’re gonna get out of it.
So that’s step one in finding a transparent agency — a partner. That’s the way I like to frame it. It’s like they’re a partner. They’re not just someone cashing a check for you. I’m not an electrician. I call somebody to go do that. An electrician should not be doing the web stuff. They should be focusing on their craft, their business, and let someone else that knows what they’re doing kind of handle the web and digital aspects — because they just don’t have the time to become very skilled in that.
EEAT, Experience, and the Limits of AI Tools
JEREMY RIVERA
It kind of ties into another subject — Matt Brooks of SEOteric said as much as ChatGPT will tell you information and give you a response, it has not done it. It does not have the E of the EEAT. It doesn’t have experience. It cannot experience things. Humans have experience and we can reference that and build expertise. You can look at data in SEMrush all day or Ahrefs or Zapdigital, whatever — but at the end of the day, it’s a tool, it’s displaying data and it still has to be done. And you need somebody with expertise to decide which of those suggestions has merit, which one’s going to move the needle, and which one fits all of those special criteria and flags for your business in your area, in your niche at this time.
MIKE GINLEY
Yep. I absolutely love when people come with ideas, but just being able to say: nah, that’s not going to do it. Let’s focus our time on this part as opposed to this random thing that looks pretty and is tangible, but just isn’t going to move the needle like you want it to. Ultimately, I feel like that is what we do — we do the not-pretty stuff, but it’s the things that really work. But everyone’s always looking for that silver bullet big splash.
Multi-Channel Digital Marketing & the End of the Google-Only Era
JEREMY RIVERA
What’s been your experience in connecting different channels of digital marketing in new and more interesting ways? I think that’s really changed since what I call the end of the golden age of Google SEO, where all we needed to do was reverse engineer Google’s algorithm. Now we can benefit more from diversifying channels — affiliate marketing, working more closely with PPC teams, working more closely with brands and email teams. Brand is more than just a logo. What’s your experience in understanding SEO in the context of the bigger picture of digital marketing?
MIKE GINLEY
Yeah, I think it all kind of comes into sort of building a base and then continuing on with that building. I always like to use SEO as the foundation. You’ve got to set up your website so it is discoverable in the old SEO 101 ways — you’ve got the right content, people can easily find you on Google, know what you do, how to get in contact with you.
But that was the olden days — that used to be enough. Now, a lot of the local businesses I specifically see, I could probably look out my door in the next hour and see a local plumber — they are everywhere. They’re on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, they’re sponsoring all the local 5Ks, little league baseball teams. You’ve got to be everywhere. Gone are the days of just focusing on one channel.
I know a lot of people I work with, especially in the mom-and-pop space, are kind of scared of the TikToks and the Instagrams. And I’m like: you need to be there, because these younger local companies are going to come in and just dominate, because that’s where people are right now.
JEREMY RIVERA
It is interesting seeing the trends on the age scale of discovery. Instagram and TikTok are up there for the younger demographic — TikTok is almost like a visual search engine for discovering information. It’s hard for me as an SEO to let go of the desire to slap a URL on everything everywhere I post. What’s your take on Rand Fishkin’s concept of the zero-click universe?
MIKE GINLEY
Yeah, and that’s something I need to get better with too. It’s learning these new metrics — understanding the AI overviews, ChatGPT brand mentions, as opposed to direct traffic to your website. Understanding that impressions across your social channels can be just as beneficial sometimes — getting your name out there, getting that brand developed. It’s definitely a skill set I need to learn and get better with.
JEREMY RIVERA
Part of it is thinking through: I can’t directly attribute it, but I can actually get a secondary benefit — if I do a good enough impression on this zero-click channel, they have to Google my brand to find more information. So it makes that bottom-of-funnel process of ensuring that word-plus-brand is bringing you up more important than ever.
MIKE GINLEY
Yeah, there’s this idea I keep thinking about — put into Data Studio overlays — this is when this big splash marketing campaign started, and we’re not expecting any clicks. Do we see any traction happening from the actual channels and website traffic from there? We can pretty safely interpret that that offline zero-click campaign resulted in clicks in a different way.
SEO as the Quarterback: Connecting All Digital Channels
JEREMY RIVERA
I find sometimes the best role of an SEO is just bringing awareness in a larger marketing context down to some fundamentals. A fantastic example: they hired influencers — a bunch of big influencers to all wear the same style of pink pants. The problem was they didn’t coordinate with the e-commerce side. They did not have the store fully stocked. After the first day, their listing that was ranked number one showed out of stock, dropped off, and their competitor took home all of the money and benefit from the entire campaign. So just being aware of these other marketing aspects — here’s the organic side of that, here’s how this is complementary, here’s how additional resources around a particular keyword can have a beneficial effect.
MIKE GINLEY
Yeah, and like you said with the supplemental aspects of being an SEO — I do see SEOs as that go-between, the quarterback of just knowing everything that’s going on. I like to know everything that’s going on with our paid ads campaign on Google and Bing. I like to know everything going on with our social media. And then also knowing closely with our web product team — anything going out soon, or do we have any issues affecting anything digital. A lot of messages I get are people flowing through me for the different channels. And I love that, because it helps everything in the long run when everyone’s aware and nothing is siloed off.
JEREMY RIVERA
A good example: I worked in the legal niche a couple of times — one with a guy in Atlanta, another was Raven Weissman in Nashville. We found out that he was actually the witness and lawyer for the last man electrocuted in the electric chair, and that he had an article written up as a PDF talking about his experience as the lawyer for the condemned. It was buried as a PDF 14 steps deep into the site. Transmogrifying that into something we could promote and get pinned to the front, then posted to Reddit — finding a picture of old Sparky, because the electric chair was actually made from the wood of the gallows in Tennessee — that image got like 10,000 upvotes. That just sent a huge amount of trust and traffic and changed the trajectory of their digital marketing for a good year.
MIKE GINLEY
That’s an amazing story. It’s just the power that SEO can hold that sometimes people just don’t understand. It’s not just adding the keywords, but at the same time, if you don’t have anything original to say, it’s not going to matter either. You need to have both.
Finding Your USP: Authentic Content Over Stock Everything
JEREMY RIVERA
There is something to say about finding that moment to be a genuine business coach and talking about the unique selling proposition. What is it that they’re bringing to the equation? If you don’t take the time to do more than just basic keyword research — yeah, you can find that ‘remodeler’ is more valuable as keyword value than ‘renovation,’ but it’s not the argument between which one of those two to use. It’s: what is it that is going to differentiate you from the five or six other home repair shops in the neighborhood?
MIKE GINLEY
Yep. And with that differentiator, your website as a whole — so many that I’ve worked with in the past have their pretty stock photos. But I know when I’m searching for an electrician, a painter, or whatever: I want real pictures. I want to see you or whoever’s going to show up at my house in these pictures. I don’t want the clean-cut picture of this smiling person. I want to see who’s working and have the real stuff there.
JEREMY RIVERA
There’s this trope of realtors — they’ve got two smiling people shaking hands over the table. Nobody actually takes a picture while they’re signing the paperwork. The stock image industry — I’m glad that AI is murdering that in the crib.
MIKE GINLEY
Yeah, and that’s one thing I try to coach a lot of my clients on — the iPhone has a great camera. Just take some pictures. Even if it’s slightly off-centered or just not picture-perfect, it’s going to be better than the random stock photo that everyone is either glazing over or finding just weird.
JEREMY RIVERA
I think it’s actually going to be rewarded. It enters that uncanny valley of: is this an AI photo? And if it’s not the best photo, it’s almost better, because you know somebody real took it. Not being afraid to say things in a way that isn’t totally polished is almost kind of rewarded now.
MIKE GINLEY
Yeah, I think about that a lot. I have Grammarly set up and it tries to polish things up. It’s like: no, I like my weird way of speaking better than this polished version, because it seems more legit to me and less AI-polished.
LLMs, Hive Mind Thinking, and the Importance of Original Thought
JEREMY RIVERA
There’s a study about the hive mind effect of LLMs. They gave it three human writing prompts that generally create drastically different stories for humans. And what they found — studying over a couple hundred prompts across different models — even different models came back with the same story, or nearly the same touch points, revealing the weakness of the training material upon which our LLM delusions are all based.
MIKE GINLEY
Yeah. I took an awesome course on actionable AI for marketers through Brittany Mueller — highly recommended to everyone. She really debunked so many ways that AI says it’s changing the game, when really it’s just a large language model — it’s a calculation of what it thinks the next word or series of words will be. So it’s not thinking for itself, it’s not creating something brand new and unique. It’s all just a compilation of everything it’s been trained on. Nothing original. And that’s something we just have to get across to people.
JEREMY RIVERA
I came across that with my last guest — talking about the article by Wolfram Alpha, one of the original LLM pioneers. He has a fantastic blog post that breaks down what is ChatGPT actually doing behind the scenes. What is the basis of these LLM tools? As time progresses and these models layer deeper and add more complicated interfaces, the implications are amazing and terrifying. But at the end of the day, it’s math.
MIKE GINLEY
Yeah, and so many people have shown how they can hack it, spoof it, do all these things — what I’ll call parasite SEO, putting things on trusted sources and tricking the large language models to say what they want. Absolutely terrifying what that’s going to be.
JEREMY RIVERA
One of the superpowers that’s ignored though is the ability to quickly take genuine human content and make it more easy to process. I did an interview with the VP of a precast concrete wall company — using Claude, I was able to extract quotes and massage them. His context uncovered a feature of these walls: people don’t want these big expensive walls to be dug under. And they do that, and people ask for it. So ‘anti-dig technology’ couldn’t be found in any keyword research — there’s no search volume for it. But from his personal perspective, he knew of 10 deals, representing hundreds of thousands of dollars of business, and all of them asked for it in the sales process. Not everything is keyword research. Not everything is search volume.
MIKE GINLEY
Yeah, and how many posts we see online of people saying: you can get rid of SEMrush, Ahrefs, and just use ChatGPT for your keyword research. Go nuts. Our job will be much easier then.
JEREMY RIVERA
It’s the appropriate usage of the tools at hand — not thinking that any one tool is the end-all be-all. No tool is going to do the entire job.
MIKE GINLEY
And that’s really where I’m at right now. I just built an internal linking agent that will give suggestions with a confidence score based on the page library I fed it. I’ve seen people saying there’s one that will automatically add internal links for you through a WordPress plugin. I don’t like that — I don’t like it doing the work for me like that.
Same with my content process. I use Notebook LM, feed it tons of information based on keyword research, looking at the SERPs, looking at the GPT response, query fan-outs. Then Notebook LM develops a template for me, but then I feed it to my content writers or to the business owners to be like: now you write the article. This is still human intervention. The large language models are great computers, but nothing’s going to replace the computer between your ears.
JEREMY RIVERA
Nick Eubanks, when I interviewed him, said we’ve got LLMs in the wrong part of the process. They shouldn’t be writing the briefs and us cleaning up and executing the briefs. We need to give the creative briefs — we’re swapping where that human intervention needs to sit.
The Soapbox: Get Back to SEO Fundamentals
JEREMY RIVERA
I’m going to give you a soapbox to stand on and shout at our fellow SEOs. What are we doing wrong that we need to get better at?
MIKE GINLEY
SEO fundamentals — it sounds so weird, but I see so many people. Just this morning, so many arguing about the llms.txt file. So many people arguing about serving markdown to AI crawlers versus a regular website to the search engine crawlers. But so many websites I work on — you have content from pre-COVID that is completely contradictory to what you say on your homepage. Your internal linking is messed up. You have broken links everywhere. Your images are over a megabyte large.
I feel like sometimes we’re going too far into being fancy and technological — a little too developer-refocused — when we have so much that we need to figure out for the baseline. Getting all these websites and companies set up properly before we can really dive into some of that advanced stuff. All the arguing we do on social media just sets us back too far. Just kind of working on being a little bit better at determining what real SEO is, and then what advanced SEO is, and going from there.
JEREMY RIVERA
Yeah, fundamentals, fundamentals, the basics. I just did a karate tournament. The people that were in the ring at the end — the guy that won had the best footwork. He was staying out of range of the guys throwing the heavy punches, dancing back in and throwing a tornado kick at the right moment. The fancy stuff came because he had the fundamentals of movement. We get shiny.
There’s such a mint to be made off CEOs’ attention through LinkedIn — this season’s AI, AI, AI — from the attention spammers who’ve spent the last year trying to convince CEOs they don’t need SEO. The market as a discovery channel is still in its infancy. Let’s go back to fundamentals and work on our base. Focus on holistic campaigns and making the biggest change.
MIKE GINLEY
Exactly. I’ve been really fortunate that I’ve had some awesome leaders and coworkers who’ve never forced me to dive into shiny object syndrome just because they say so. I think a lot of that comes back to building that foundation and the transparency I like to pride myself on. If they ask me: do we need this fancy new AI tool? I say no. They’re like, cool. Then they move on. So it’s all about developing stuff they can trust you with.
Pain Points as a Consultant: Billing, Trust, and Brandon Moon’s Question
JEREMY RIVERA
This is from Brandon Moon — he does business consulting helping business owners look toward the end of life of the business. His question for you was: as a consultant, what’s your biggest pain point and how are you overcoming it?
MIKE GINLEY
Biggest one as a consultant? I stink at billing. I do not track it enough. And I’m kind of like: you get these couple hours for free because I forgot to write it down and don’t fully remember what I did, when I did it. And sometimes I’m just kind of like: we didn’t have the best month this month. I’m just not going to charge you for this.
Luckily, I do this on the side, so it’s not my main source of income. But if it was, I would need to fix that ASAP. We are not in the business of doing favors. This is a transaction. Find proper software or processes to track your work, your time, bill people correctly. Do not fall into the trap of giving things away for free.
Mike’s Question for the Next Guest
MIKE GINLEY
My biggest thing right now is: how much are you diving into the LLM AI reporting? What tools are you using? How much do you care about it? Right now, zero for me. I have what comes out of the box with Ahrefs, but I do manual searches — see which terms we’re consistently showing for — little spreadsheet. But I’m not sold on any of these big tools that are thousands of dollars a month to track a never-ending list of long-tail search terms that are searched maybe once. So I’m just curious: what are people doing? Because on LinkedIn, everyone’s apparently buying it. But I’m just not sold.
Where to Find Mike Ginley
MIKE GINLEY
Yeah, so I’m mostly on LinkedIn just under Mike Ginley. Then I have my personal website, mikeginley.com, where I just write a lot of my processes, how-to’s — very transparent on there. I also have a side website, digital-eat.com, where I highlight digital marketers. Anyone can get a free profile — you’re really just highlighting who you are, what you do, past work, past results.
Articles section is open to everybody on the site too. I just wrote a new article there about how to properly hire an agency or consultant. I also have two main local clients listed there: an electrician in Chicago, Excel Electrical Technologies Inc., and then a window company, Welsh Windows Plus — my two main ones that I’m testing new strategies on to improve local SEO. That’s where I post a lot of their information of what I’ve been doing and some of the results.
JEREMY RIVERA
Fantastic. Thanks for stopping by.
MIKE GINLEY
Thank you for having me. This was fun.
