The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

SEO Is the Batter to Your AI | Stephanie Long

August 18
39 mins

Episode Description

Stephanie Long, founder and CEO of Mrs. SEO, has been doing SEO for almost two decades, and her verdict on AI is blunt: it did not replace the fundamentals, it raised the price of skipping them. "SEO is like the batter to your AI. You have to have it together or you're going to fail."

She joins Jeremy Rivera to explain why she built Junction Jack, a human-vetted SEO marketplace aimed squarely at the gig platforms whose "vetted" section turns out to mean vetted by AI. "None of mine are vetted by AI. It is me, or I know them."

Along the way: the broken links AI cites that were never real, the freelancer-versus-agency shift and why clients now want to talk to the owner, a San Francisco IVF clinic that took a year to earn the machines' trust, link building you can actually explain to a nervous client, and whether Google's Helpful Content Update was ever really about helping readers.

More episodes at Unscripted SEO.

In this episode

  • Why a $20/mo chatbot is not an SEO strategy, and why owners keep believing it is, because they cannot "see" SEO the way they can see an ad.
  • Freelancer vs. agency vs. in-house. Stephanie's newest client had never spoken to anyone but an account executive who could not read the reports either.
  • LLMs have no opinions, and now they lie. Not hallucination. Choosing to lie, unless a second model is set up to watch.
  • Trust but verify. She clicked every link in one AI answer and every one was broken. Then mine your own 404s for the pages ChatGPT invented and build them.
  • "SEO is the batter to your AI." The traditional fundamentals are the base layer, and entry-level on its own no longer clears the bar.
  • Content spinners in 2008, LLMs now. Twenty city pages for a realtor then, hundreds of thousands of pages today. Same move, expanded.
  • Getting niche enough to earn trust. A San Francisco IVF clinic took over a year to surface in the chat tools, fixed with real success-rate data and hyper-local FAQs.
  • Link building you can explain in one sentence. Two-way Q&As instead of guest-post begging, roundup quotes turned into graphics, and asking for "attribution" instead of a "link."
  • New scams to sift through. An agency that bought bad backlinks and, it turned out, bought fake traffic on top of them.
  • Junction Jack. Fiverr and Upwork's fine print says "vetted by AI." Hers says vetted by a human.

Chapters

  • (00:00) Meet Stephanie Long, and why SEO is a black hole
  • (04:10) Why owners still think $20 a month will do their SEO
  • (05:53) Freelancer, agency, or in-house: who actually talks to the client
  • (09:18) LLMs have no opinions, and now they lie
  • (10:51) Trust but verify: broken links and imagineered 404s
  • (13:52) "SEO is the batter to your AI"
  • (14:18) Content spinners in 2008, LLMs now
  • (17:01) Is Google intentionally killing the publisher deal?
  • (22:42) The IVF clinic: getting niche enough to earn AI's trust
  • (25:51) You have to actually talk to your client now
  • (27:35) Why clients are finally interested in SEO
  • (31:14) Link building you can explain in one sentence
  • (36:07) Bought backlinks, bought traffic, and who gets hurt
  • (37:15) Junction Jack: vetted by a human, not by AI

Notable quotes

"SEO is like the batter to your AI. You have to have it together, or you're going to fail."
— Stephanie Long
"SEO is kind of like a black hole. You believe what you believe online unless somebody is good enough to really explain it to you."
— Stephanie Long
"None of mine are vetted by AI. It is me, or I know them."
— Stephanie Long

Resources & links

Read the full recap

SEO Is the Batter to Your AI: Stephanie Long on Vetting Humans and Verifying Machines

About the show

Unscripted SEO is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Full archive at unscriptedseo.com.

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