The Evolution of SEO: A Conversation with Josh Squires

Catch the key takeaways

Unscripted SEO Podcast Interview With Josh Squires

17 Years in SEO

Jeremy Rivera: Hello, I’m Jeremy Rivera, Unscripted SEO podcast host, and I’m very excited to be here with Josh Squires from Amsive. I have so many questions cooking in my brain. While you give yourself an introduction, Josh, give us a taste of some of your SEO experience and what you’ve been working on recently.

Josh Squires: Yeah, absolutely. Hi, Josh Squires. I’m an associate director of SEO at Amsive. I’ve been at Amsive coming up on six years. My first day of work was the day the offices closed for COVID. Great, exciting time to be an SEO agency.

I’ve been doing SEO for about 17 years in just about every capacity you can imagine. Started out as a freelancer, in-house, out-of-house, agency, freelancer, just sort of done it all. I had the privilege of starting the SEO practice at Tableau. Really fantastic time there. Still one of my favorite data analysis tools. Done direct to consumer, e-commerce, lot of Shopify, a lot of SaaS. Really breadth and depth across the board.

Key Takeaways

• Communication is SEO’s Hidden Superpower – The most effective SEOs function like UN diplomats, translating technical requirements into language that resonates with developers, executives, and stakeholders. Without implementation, even the smartest SEO strategy means nothing.
• Content Volume is Dead, Strategic Relevance is King – Google is actively rejecting low-quality blog content that doesn’t serve user intent. The winning strategy focuses on middle and bottom-funnel content that directly supports conversions, including brand comparisons and product use cases that audiences are already searching for in LLMs.
• Systems Thinking Separates Good SEOs from Great Ones – Modern SEO requires understanding how search engines, LLMs, social platforms, and email systems interconnect. Success comes from pulling levers that create ripple effects across multiple channels, not just optimizing for a single platform.
• Entity Building Requires Multi-Channel Brand Investment – Establishing a recognized entity goes far beyond on-page optimization. It demands consistent NAP data across directories, strategic backlink building from industry publications, social proof in relevant communities, and yes—actual ad spend and PR investment to get people talking about your brand.

The Many Faces of SEO: Freelance, In-House, Agency, Consultancy

Jeremy Rivera: Fantastic. What do you personally feel is the biggest difference between executing SEO in those different capacities? I’ve worked as a freelancer, I’ve worked in-house, I’ve worked as a consultant, and I’ve worked at an agency. They’re very different games. What makes those differences?

Josh Squires: That’s a really good question. Consultancy is my favorite, right? It is so much nicer to say, here’s your problem, here’s the recommended solution. If you hit a snag, I’ll offer what help I can, but it’s really on you guys to manage implementation. That’s the cleanest, that’s the best.

Honestly, I think in-house was probably the other end of the spectrum, right? Especially on smaller businesses that maybe don’t have really robust dev teams, don’t have a lot of extra hands to help out. The onus becomes on you to figure out implementation, right? And you have to go and learn all kinds of coding. I know more about Drupal sites than I ever wanted to know. And that is entirely from having to figure out implementation on the fly just to get something done.

And then I would say happy middle is agency work. Especially here at Amsive, I’m so happy that we have the amazing SEO team we have there. It’s effectively the hive mind, right? The amount of knowledge I have to maintain on a daily basis is minimized by a 40 person team of absolutely brilliant people who are on the ball on their particular topics. And I can just sort of say, hey, what’s the latest on this or my knowledge is here, did this get updated recently and I missed it.

You know, I don’t have to sweat bullets about is every decision I’m making the exact right one. Is it totally up to date? I’ve got a bunch of people to help that institutional memory be better managed than on my own, you know, sort of Swiss cheese spotty brain.

And then I think the last facet is corporate in-house, where timelines are long. Implementation is generally other people’s responsibility, but there’s a process there that’s pretty lengthy. I’ve worked in organizations where you submit the ticket, it disappears and it just gets done when it gets done. And I’ve been in places where you submit the ticket and then have 45 meetings before it ever reaches implementation. It’s a little different on every side.

The Underappreciated Skill: Communication

But I think across all of them, technical knowledge and figuring out implementation is really important, but there’s also a really strong communication component to that as well. I think that is where I see young SEOs struggle a little bit. That’s particularly where I coach my teams is the way you understand this is probably not the way we need to communicate it to the clients, the stakeholder, the dev, right?

Every one of those people needs a little bit different language, a little bit different detail on it. And it is our job to sort of bring that to that conversation.

Jeremy Rivera: I think that’s an underappreciated element to SEO as a position, definitely. Being able to facilitate the implementation process cross team to communicate goals within the proper context. Are you communicating that goal to a developer who’s like an S on, you know, not an intuitive person, but they’re a sensory person and they will not intuitive further than the exact specific set of words that you give.

And if you leave anything out, leave anything to question, it will not get done. Not only will it not get done, but it’ll probably get outright rejected. And then you’ll end up worse off than when you submitted in the first place because now they think you’re an idiot who can’t give them basic instructions, what they think are basic instructions.

So I have also worked in those communication silos where, okay, I need to communicate to my very business centric CFO, the cost I need to invest to get the content written on this need to convince the CEO that this is going to further his vision for how the SEO will support in this content will support his effort and get it into this part of it into the devs hands specific with the instructions and communicate with a designer to come up with the specific graphic design that are going to meet our brand criteria.

So meeting all of those separate notches, cross team, cross value is a very different game than, oh, what is keyword volume for keyword? Let’s write it. Can I get a link with that keyword phrase? There’s aspects of SEO that I think need to be nurtured more as a career as a career SEO nurtured as something to develop that ability to get what needs to be done, even if it’s not done by yourself at the keyboard at that moment, right?

Josh Squires: Absolutely. I think the most effective SEOs could probably just leave work and go work at the UN. Your job requires you to be part translator, part diplomat. You really have to know how to bring the right tone, the right information to all the different personalities, all the different stakeholders.

And you could be the smartest, most innovative SEO, but if you can’t get any of it implemented, none of it means anything. So that’s something we sort of foster with our teams at Amsive. Anywhere I’ve worked, we’ve really put emphasis on, like, OK, let’s spend a little time thinking about communication and who the audience is for this task request or this presentation. And let’s really make sure that we’re highlighting the things that matter to them and using that as a bridge to the thing we need to talk about.

Local SEO: The Power of Hyper-Local Content

Jeremy Rivera: I love that. I’m curious, kind of bringing it back to some of the institutional knowledge that you reference, that you have working at an agency, being able to double check some of your work or check some of your assumptions because SEO is a moving target. Things do change over time. And if you learned your skillset about SEO 17 years ago, the more that it changes, the more that it stays the same. But where it’s changed, it tends to do so dramatically.

And not being aware of a particular aspect of something for a particular type of client can leave you in the dark in spinning wheels. If you were stuck in 2010 mentality, you’d say, we cannot create location pages because Google will treat those as doorway pages and we’ll get actively penalized with the Panda algorithm. Not accurate anymore. Local SEO location pages are a thing. They’re de jour. Google is chewing them up and spitting them up and likes them quite a bit according to what I’m seeing.

I was talking about this with my friend Michael Mcdougald, the Right Thing agency last night. That seems to be the case, but what does Amsive’s take on local SEO look like right now?

Josh Squires: Local SEO, we have, our SEO team is broken out into sort of specialty teams. We have a local SEO team. We have a tech SEO team. Thank God, the less knowledge I have to hold and keep updated entirely on my own.

I will say if anyone listening has not seen Bambi Frazier talk, she is leading our local SEO team. She is outstanding, a fantastic speaker, adorable southern draw just she really draws you in she really makes you feel like you’re her best friend and she is just killer on the insights and exactly what you were saying right the location pages on site I think that is probably one of her most recommended opportunities for local SEO with an emphasis on those being hyper local, you know.

Images of the street surrounding landmarks, you know, detailed directions, hey, we’re right across from the McDonald’s, pictures of your front door, every little detail operating on the assumption that if someone were to try to get to your business that they have all of the necessary information to find you, right?

And then that sort of fans out into the way you do that touches other entities and you can touch relevant entities along the way, right? If I’m in Manhattan, you know, I can say, you know, we’re across the street from the Flatiron building, you know, or we’re, you know, right by the southeast entrance to Central Park, right?

Google knows what those places are. It understands direction. The things I’m mentioning, it’s going to associate those with the broader location I’m trying to communicate, right? We’re giving it more touch points to build and validate an entity. And I think that is another aspect of those location pages that really help out.

The Danger of Being Too Local

And then if you’re multi-location, you know, working with clients who, and we were just looking at a case this morning, there is such a thing as too local. We were looking at a company that doesn’t necessarily have brick and mortars everywhere. They do like the sales consultants and maybe a sales consultant has a local office and there’s a warehouse in a different part of the city or the state.

But their location pages would be for a city. And then the location pages were pulling in like every little neighborhood in the city. And when you look at search trends, nobody was searching by neighborhood. You know, I was looking, you know, I’m based in Minneapolis. I was looking at Minneapolis specifically and all of my neighborhood names are showing up there.

And I know as someone who lives here, I’m not searching for, you know, XYZ store in like my neighborhood’s name. My neighborhood is like 12 square blocks. The odds that the thing I’m looking for is in that perimeter, pretty low, maybe a bar, maybe a drug store, but you know, big service providers, I’m going to unreasonably narrow my scope by searching that small and search volume validates that the city is about the right level of detail.

So working with clients to say, well, there’s some value in hyper specificity, but you want to reel it back. You don’t want to go too far into that, right? We want to be very purpose driven and aligned to the user journey in that. Me telling you how to find the front door of my office is useful to just about everybody. Me trying to micro market to individual neighborhoods in a city outside of major cities?

Would I market to Brooklyn or maybe Dumbo, depending on my business? I’m local storage, little neighborhoods in a big city probably do have a need for micro marketing, but somebody in a mid-sized city, those neighborhoods are significantly smaller, fewer people, search volume goes down.

Jeremy Rivera: No, that makes sense. I was talking, my last interview was with a photographer, Jonathan Schüßler. And he was pointing out that, you know, all of the other photographers were focused on, you know, like one specific city that was really good, or like one region that where all of these weddings happen in Germany. But none of them had like niche down to find like the, there was no search volume for what he knows is the most beautiful. It’s like the capital is I think it’s Koenigsberg. It’s like the German wedding capital and none of the regional photographers had targeted it at all.

So I think there’s that careful balance of not approaching every you know everything with a hammer every single time and appreciating that nuance of okay. Well, what type of service am I providing? And how does that apply to locality and regionality? There’s a difference between there not being a volume because there’s only so many really expensive weddings in a small German town versus there’s literally nothing there. He said, I could eat for a year off of two weddings. So if a search volume of 10 gives me five weddings, then I’m rich.

Versus this other nearby city which has search volume of like 10,000 for that same term but has so many people at the table. That’s a consideration but also if you’re providing services that could be considered regional, you have to balance that investment time and the reality of are people actually searching for this at that local level or am I just, you know, creating, you know, creating a ton of work, creating micro niche specific location content that isn’t going to work.

And it also occurs to me that it’s also old style too, because I remember working with realtors in 2007 and their idea of local marketing was I’m going to create a Glendale page. In the Glendale page we’ll have some history and here’s the walkthrough and here’s more about the community. So how you’re going about that niching in micro area is going to determine whether it’s effective or not.

What Belongs in the SEO Dustbin?

What are some things that you at Amsive or you personally can squarely put into the dustbin of history as far as SEO practices?

Josh Squires: That’s a good one. I think, bear with me a moment, I’m gonna double back on something you said and come back and answer this. You’re speaking about identifying the correct audience relative to the service you provide, or relative to your conversion event, if we wanna be more broad.

The Death of Content Volume Strategy

We have gone probably 10 or 15 years of just creating content and creating content has been for the purpose of building traffic, right? And I think that is the thing that has probably changed the most over the last two to three years. And depending on your business, if you were a publisher, you really felt this over the last three years. Everybody else is just now starting to feel the pain.

But this idea that I can just publish blog posts ad nauseum and have them just be a thing that generates traffic and either I remarket to that traffic with ads or I cookie them and use that data through something like a segment.io or HubSpot and I add them to an email list later. You’re just using that like, I need you to touch the website mentality of marketing. Google’s not really rewarding that anymore.

The less relevant content is falling off. And for most businesses, and there’s exceptions to every rule, but for most businesses, gung-ho push of 100 blog posts a month or some arbitrary number is starting to not only have diminishing returns, it’s starting to actually hurt traffic.

Google is ceasing to rank these pages, ceasing to index them in some cases we’ve seen, Google just doesn’t want your junk traffic anymore.

Focus on Conversion-Aligned Content

I think it’s incredibly important to then look through the lens that you described and figure out what are our conversions and who is our audience and then marry those two things through the content strategy. And a lot of that needs to be more of the middle and bottom funnel content. That is the place to start.

We are frequently surprised at the number of websites that are missing middle of funnel content, brand comparisons, product comparisons, use cases, when you would use one product versus another, or when you would use our product versus theirs, right?

Which necessitates a little bit of fearlessness in marketing, right? Everybody is afraid to pit their brand against the other brand. That’s been a long standing thing. But now with the introduction of LLMs, that’s happening whether you want it to or not.

In most cases, comparative prompts, comparative queries are generating these product comparisons that are incredibly direct, fairly insightful. I feel like Perplexity does a really good job of this. Gemini does as well. ChatGPT, I feel, is a little touch and go. I use them all the time for product comparisons.

I love Hi-Fi audio gear, one of my favorite hobbies. If I’m trying to compare one model versus another, I’m price concerned. I want the best value that I can get and nowhere is value misaligned to price like Hi-Fi audio equipment. You know, I can get two things that are identical with, you know, a $5,000 price difference between the two.

And I think knowing how people are comparing and who your target audience is, you know, if my audience is price concerned, but my business model is to create a high value, low cost product, I really need to be calling out that, we’re the cheapest, right? And here’s how we provide value, as opposed to pushing on features where you may or may not measure up and not talking about price because we’re scared to talk about price, right?

Figuring out who your audience is and what matters to them and then being fearless and speaking to those things, that’s what’s going to matter. And over time, that’s gonna have to evolve. You know, you’re never going to increase your footprint by speaking to only your best customers. At some point, you’re going to hit that ceiling.

You need to figure out how to take somebody who maybe isn’t value minded, maybe they’re performance minded. Okay, well, to what level can you speak to them? You know, and I think increasingly world economics are favoring price comparison. We’re not going to get out of the price comparison muck probably for the next decade. So knowing that that will perpetually be a factor in marketing, what content are you going to create to either convince or demonstrate that thing you are selling, whether it’s a service or a product, is aligned to your core focus consumer, the person that your product was invented to serve, and then the next ring out, your best prospects, people who check most of the boxes, but there’s some that they don’t.

How are you gonna convince them and always be chipping away at a larger portion of that audience? I think that is a major mind shift that we have to figure out. I still see blogs on products and services based websites that aren’t relevant, right? They’re not about the product. They’re not, some are tangentially relevant, a lot aren’t. And all of those sites are watching their traffic decline and leadership is freaking out.

So I think everybody sort of hitting pause on, is volume the answer? Is volume the metric? Is traffic even the metric anymore? Right? If I just let traffic go, if I focus on quality, what happens to conversions? What happens to revenue? If the answer is nothing, great, we’ve got room to build. If the answer is, it took a dip, where did it take a dip and how do you shore that up?

LLMs and the Human Sandwich

Jeremy Rivera: I love this quote from, I think it was Matt Brooks of SEO Tech. He said, ChatGPT is your least trained customer service representative. And my other guest said, you are dealing with a robot that has been sent from by somebody else to introduce your brand to them.

And that’s true whether or not it is in search results, because with BERT and with Hummingbird, multiple layers within Google’s algorithm, they are and have been using their own internal LLM systems for parts of the algorithm and processing it. Helpful content update was explicitly an LLM-based program to make some of these determinations for, you know, helpfulness.

Whether you think that that is like the sole thing or whether they’re putting their thumb on other things to come up with that. I personally think it’s almost more of a reflection of distance from seed when it comes to links and authority mixed with brand signals, but that’s HCU specific.

But when it comes to LLM based tools, consuming your content and using LLM tools yourself. It’s almost like it’s a human sandwich of like, I am going to use these tools to magnify my productivity, but you also have to appreciate the middle sandwich layer of how that’s going to come through the telephone on the other end.

And so often, SEOs have been so focused on, you know, Ahrefs search volumes, SEMrefs search volumes, that they’re not doing their own work to better understand the unique selling proposition of the brand, unique selling proposition of the product, understand the market positioning of the client, and how that should translate to the material that you’re putting out either in your knowledge base, putting out as PDFs, putting out as video, putting out as tutorials, putting out in distribution channels to echo that message elsewhere off of your site as well as support the business funnel of whatever product that you’re trying to sell.

You don’t just go to a store and buy a precast concrete wall to put around your Florida estate. There isn’t a precast wall store. You’d get, I want the soundproof one. No, it’s like you gotta get dummy drawings and then you gotta get it approved and you gotta get a contractor. The age of SEOs just thinking, the only thing I need is, you know, Ahrefs. No, it’s gone, man. Like that time, that age is gone.

Systems Thinking: The Future of SEO

You know, we see, thank God for Dan Petrovic. If you don’t follow him, follow him. Some of it will go over your head. Don’t worry. Someone in the comments will either explain it or he’ll come back around at a later date and tie it all together.

But I think understanding at a root level how the systems work and getting familiar with those terms, to your point, you have to look outside of the data, our historical platforms, whether it’s for research or analytics or tracking, looking outside of those for new sources of information.

Multi-Channel Research

One of the things that we’ve been doing a little differently at Amsive is hitting competitor research really hard across all channels, right? We’re looking at social, we’re looking at, you know, direct traffic, we’re looking at email, you know.

SEOs don’t do this enough. Go sign up for your, you know, your client or, you know, if you’re working in-house, your company’s, you know, email list, right? See what those emails look like. Go sign up for competitors, see what those look like.

Returning traffic matters. Contents of your Gmail inbox matters. Probably is starting to matter more now that Geminis is in Chrome. We’ve known that host names in Gmail inboxes influences the Google ecosystem.

Think about those things, right? And think about how what Google does is being copied by folks like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Look at the browsers they’re releasing. What is different, but what is the same? And then use that as sort of a way to scale your tactics to be impactful strategies.

What is consistent across all three? If I pull that lever, am I going to move on all of these surfaces? And inclusive of search, not just the LLMs. I think there is still a massive amount of things that you do for SEO that will also benefit you in LLMs. But truthfully, it should be done for SEO purposes. We should be still influencing Google in most cases.

Where LLMs Excel: SaaS Marketing

Definitely niche audiences out there where maybe the LLM is getting, if not higher volume traffic, maybe higher converting traffic. I see that a lot in the SaaS space. If you are a SaaS company, LLM is a really good place to focus your time. Its eagerness to suggest solutions tends to be a pipeline for people who have a problem, aren’t explicitly asking for what tool should I use to solve this. They’re asking, how do I solve this?

The LLM builds a process and recommends tools and things like APIs. Your audience is out there building things in most cases, if you’re a SaaS company, where do you plug into their process and reach them that way? Those folks definitely are getting the mileage out of LLMs.

Your local mechanic definitely is not, right? So thinking about all of the systems that I can influence, understanding kind of like the ripple effect, right? I’m going to do this for SEO. This is how it may show up in LLMs. Here’s how I can tweak performance in the different platforms.

We talk more to our social team. We talk more to our paid teams, figuring out how to, you know, again, going back to my preference for audio equipment, I think about the equalizer, right? Parabolic relationships. If I press down here, this piece goes up, or, you know, if I push both down, how is that changing the outcome?

I think SEOs need to bring that sort of system thinking, multi-channel thinking. We have the ability to make it easier. We have the ability to reduce the friction between us and search systems, search engines and LLMs and agents, but we gotta stop being so self-reliant and think more outside the box and give other channels their credit. Because that’s where you’re gonna see the amplitude.

Google Discover: The Search Engine Within the Search Engine

Jeremy Rivera: I’m curious about what I consider to be the search engine within the search engine. And I’m asking this unfairly because you work with Lily Ray and I want to. I think there are a lot of SEOs who do not touch, understand, or work with Google Discover traffic in any way, or form. From your experience, how should SEOs approach that portion of potential waterfall traffic? Are there specific specs or requirements? For whom is it worth the investment or consideration of time to try to get anything out of Google Discover. How large of a field is it and what are the potential ups and downs of considering that particular niche element of digital marketing results?

Josh Squires: Man, great question, heavy hitting question. I love Google Discover as a way to amplify visibility, but that said, the barrier to entry is high and it’s still pretty much a black box. We’ve been able to track down a number of the things that influence what gets shown there.

And I will say I’m a huge Google Discover user. That is part of my day every day. I have tuned my feed into something that I find incredibly useful, incredibly helpful. If you follow me on LinkedIn, I share a lot of this stuff. I haven’t quite got to like the Mark Williams cook level where I’m putting out a digest every day, but I do think that my feed has really been effective in surfacing some very fresh or very niche information that I’m not seeing shared on LinkedIn and I’m not seeing shared in the SEO Slack.

It’s a really cool tool. And I think that is an opportunity for a lot of brands, you know, and that goes back to knowing who your audience is and what their digital footprints look like. Because again, this feed is based on triangulation of interests, right? It’s entity based, it’s pattern based and it’s NLP powered, right? It’s machine learning at its core.

The summaries you see showing up in there now, if anyone listening is using Google discover, you used to just get your standard article cards and now those article cards are showing up with little summaries above them pulled from all of the multiple places the story appeared on the internet and just sort of mashes them together. If you’re a publisher, that sucks. That is absolutely going to be stealing your clicks.

Not a lot you can do about that without also removing yourself from Discover, possibly from Search. Google hasn’t kindly disentangled those things for us. It’s kind of an all or nothing deal.

But that said, would, and Amsive does actively caution people that Discover can’t be counted on, right? Anything you get from that, any traffic you get from that, count it as a happy accident. We do and have been successful in driving Discover traffic on a pretty regular basis. It will fluctuate. It is dependent on topics outside of your control.

Understanding Discover’s Content Priorities

We find that when major world events start happening, entertainment, for example, will drop off in feeds because hard news takes over. Hard news tends to sit at the top. Hard news is the largest category in Discover. So knowing where you fit and having reasonable expectations around that is pretty important.

It’s also highly susceptible to spam. It’s better than it was, but we still see some categories, particularly finance, getting disrupted by high volumes for short periods of just, you know, absolute spam content. Similar to what we see with NLP’s, know, LLMs, freshness does matter a lot. And so if you’re a spammer, super easy to do the bad version of programmatic SEO and flood the internet with content.

And if you have most of the right touch points, if you have your technical components properly in place, the odds that you show up in Discover are pretty high. And I think there’s probably some amount of proportions by topic that Discover relies on. We only show X percent of finance relative to this amount of hard news and everything’s elastic. But if hard news suddenly grows in volume, everything else gets scaled down to accommodate, right? There’s some amount of shifting for the individual user.

If I actively avoid hard news, if I only follow industry feeds, I’ll still get hard news. You can’t escape it, but it might be one post out of every 10 instead of like nine out of 10.

The Discover Strategy

And so you can take all of that information as a brand. And what we recommend is let’s meet the minimum criteria, right? We can’t force Google to include us, but we can provide Google everything it says it needs and start there.

And then the next step would be, okay, well, how does Google know when to include us? Are we sending the right signals? Do we have a clear entity? Are all of our topics clearly demarked? Can Google understand what those topics are?

SaaS has a problem with this. SaaS uses a lot of language that search engines still struggle with because a lot of their terminology is new. There’s not a lot of historical precedence for terms in the SAS world. And so getting Google to understand your topic, you have to map it to something it knows. You have to send all of those signals. It’s a lot of knowledge, graph, and entity.

Entity Building: The Foundation

Jeremy Rivera: That’s interesting and a good kind of winding down. I did an interview with Jason Barnard of KaliCube, who also is a very big entity optimization guy, and I’ll link to that interview in the show notes. But I’m curious, is there a foundational SOP, what is it out of the box when you get a client that on boards with you? What are your go-to steps to confirm your entity with Google?

Building blocks, are the child’s toys, what are those core things that you need to make sure Google understands because, you know, I have… I’ve come across brands that have struggled. One was Save Fry Oil, like their brand is obviously, like all the queries for that were, how to save fry oil? And so establishing that they are an entity, I did a certain X, Y, and Z. I’m curious what are your X, Y, and Z foundational SOPs for entity building?

Josh Squires: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the first and easiest one is just do a branded search and see if you get a knowledge graph entity. If you don’t, boy, you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you.

Using and Jason Bernard actually has really good content on his website about this. Finding your machine ID, your M-read, getting a sense of what Google already knows about you, how much information is there, going and scanning all of the places your business is listed, right? All of the directories, Google business profiles, Yelp, whatever it may be, whatever’s relevant to your business, looking that, you know.

One, all of the information about your business is there, that it’s consistent, that it’s correct, and that your business descriptions, your product descriptions, all of those listings are mentioning proper entities.

And that sounds like kind of a no-brainer if you stop and think about it, like how would you even manage to not mention the proper entities? If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t suggest it. People somehow manage to talk around what they do.

In the agency world, I think we’re kind of famous for that. Lots of verbs, lots of adjectives, not a whole lot of what we’re actually doing. I’ve seen an agency website that I thought was a home builder. It was quite confusing.

So making sure that we’re using good entity names that Google knows and understands in our descriptions and then more and more, I think it’s important to focus on building a backlink profile, not just from the directories, but from related websites, industry publications.

Honestly, even like relevant social media, like I think like Facebook groups, subreddits, where people are discussing things that are relevant to your business that are inside that industry, having brand presence in those places, both linked and unlinked, really invaluable.

The Challenge of New Brands

One of the biggest challenges to establishing a new entity is getting people to talk about your entity, right? Getting people to talk about your brand. And, you know, I’ve, and again, I feel like I always come back to SaaS. It always feels like it’s SaaS that does this. You know, we launch a brand, we run in stealth, and then we wonder why we don’t get searches, right?

Well, your brand name is like a fully made up word or is an exact copy of a thing that already exists and does something completely different for a completely different audience. And then we have to sort of reconcile that. And that takes brand spend.

And so I think one of the things and a good place for SEOs to speak up a little bit more than maybe we have in the past is, as part of an entity building plan, know that you’re going to have to spend some ad dollars. You’re going to have to do some PR. You’re going to have to do some pretty heavy hitting audience research in order to know where you need to be and where you need to be talked about.

Jeremy Rivera: I think that’s where we’ll end of the journey of SEO being beyond just the SERP and being about the optimization, whether that’s the nurturing the middle funnel content across the site, whether that’s partnering with the PR department, partnering with the email sands to try to get people that are on the list to actually do branded searches, you know, maybe talking to somebody that’s doing direct mail for you guys or you know consider you know doing a local trash cleanup you know something involved with the community you know interact with nonprofits which are fantastically connected to the heartbeat of a city you know a lot of really good nonprofits are have links from City Hall so you know connecting with the community.

These are all things that don’t have to do with keyword volume. They don’t have to do with anchor text. Well, some of them kind of have to do with anchor text, and the end. But it’s not just, you can’t pop open an SEO tool and do it. You can’t just pop open your WordPress and do it. You gotta optimize beyond. See you beyond.

Be a Brand: The Coca-Cola Philosophy

Josh Squires: Exactly that. I have been saying for years, the teams that report to me are, I know, so sick of hearing me say this. The best advice to clients is be a brand. Right. And when you think about brands, I always think of Coca-Cola.

Coca-Cola has done an enormously fantastic job of branding. Right. One of the world’s most recognizable logos, one the most recognizable fonts. Right. Colors, all of it. They’re just woven into the fabric definitely of America, but arguably the world.

And I tell people there’s a reason that a Coca-Cola truck is so heavily branded, right? They don’t move Coca-Cola in unbranded, unmarked trucks. And that is because they want to be omnipresent. And that is a message that serves marketers now more than ever, is being omnipresent, being a part of the everyday life of your customer.

You don’t have to get the touch, right? And then I know this is a huge debate in the SEO world. What is the value of visibility? There’s always value in visibility, right? Coca-Cola wouldn’t spend the insane amount of money it costs to paint those trucks if there wasn’t value in visibility. Billboards wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t value in visibility.

How well we can attribute it, that’s, you know, a constant problem, but the value’s there. And so I think keeping that in mind as an SEO, you know, being real close buddies with your brand team, you know, all the other channels, talking through things, through the lens of brand.

How are we being visible? How are we showing up? How are we, you know, working our way into the fabric of the customer’s life in a way that whenever they’re ready for us, we’re just right there. We’re top of mind. They know us. We’re a known quantity. And the friction to reach out to us and engage us for the solution we provide is minimized relative to our competition.

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Where to Find Josh and Amsive

Jeremy Rivera: Fantastic. I just kind of wrap up here, let people know where they can find you, if they want to connect, where you hang out, share information, anything new happening at Amsive, guys going to be anywhere specifically, or you guys have an interesting release case study or something like that coming up.

Josh Squires: Well, you can catch Lily Ray on tour basically all of the time. Her speaking engagements are around the globe. She just did a really fantastic talk at MozCon. I think Moz releases the videos still. When they release that, definitely be sure to catch it. Really engaging, really relevant for the situations we’re all in. Figuring out where SEO and GEO and AEO and the alphabet soup all belong in our lives, putting some perspective on that.

Me personally, I’m on LinkedIn far too much. I’m not really on other channels. I am in the SEO Slack, No Learners SEO Slack channel. Definitely feel free to reach out to me there. Always game for making friends in the industry. Love helping out other people.