Jeremy Rivera: Hello, I’m Jeremy Rivera, with the Unscripted SEO Podcast by Be Sharp Digital Marketing. I’m here with Tianna Mamalick, who’s going to introduce herself and give us a feeling of her experience and why we should trust her as an authority as we dive into things.

Tianna Mamalick: Hi, thank you for having me. My name is Tianna. I have been in SEO for coming on 12 years now. It’s been my entire career. I actually like to call myself a search marketer. I do Google Ads as well. And I have done everything from in-house nonprofit to software companies. I used to be a demand gen manager for a really big software company. And now I do SEO and lead generation for small businesses.

Best Quotes From The Interview

“When I increase revenue by 10K a month for a small business, that’s life changing for them. I get emails like, ‘Oh my gosh, I just hired my next person. I was able to take my first vacation.’ It’s not just a nice investment—it’s a business changing investment.” — Tianna Mamalick

“People want to work with people they like, know and trust. SEO is great because it’s this tactical way that we can get you higher up on Google. But we really want more people to purchase from you.” — Tianna Mamalick

“We can’t just give them cookie cutter content anymore. It really can’t. People want to see mistakes. They want to see people talking. They want to be connecting even in this content.” — Tianna Mamalick

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Key SEO & SMB Marketing Takeaways

• Small businesses need honest expectations: Always tell clients they need to have the budget to invest and be able to lose it completely over a minimum three-month commitment, as not every strategy works immediately in every market.
• Pair SEO with paid ads strategically: When done properly, ads can help prime new location pages and service pages by driving engagement that supports SEO growth, especially for businesses expanding to multiple locations.
• Service and product pages are the priority: Rather than focusing primarily on blog content, invest deeply in making service and product pages comprehensive with unique value propositions, specific use cases, and answers to actual customer questions gathered from sales calls and support tickets.
• AI-generated content isn’t ranking: After testing extensively with AI-written content, the harsh reality is that none of those articles are performing well. The solution is using AI for outlines while having humans write the actual content based on real conversations with clients.
• AI search adoption is still early: Despite the hype, less than 10% of traffic comes from ChatGPT for most small businesses. Focus on preparing for AI search by enriching About pages and author bios with certifications, speaking topics, and detailed expertise, but don’t panic about immediate massive shifts.
• Every service deserves its own page: Stop using menu-style service pages. Create individual, detailed pages for every service offering—even niche variations like “shoes for people with leather allergies”—because that’s how people actually search in the age of conversational queries.
• Mine customer conversations for gold: The best content comes from recording sales calls, reviewing customer support logs, and asking front-line staff to note the questions they answer daily. This real-world language converts better than anything a marketing team distills into corporate speak.
• Social media SEO is platform-agnostic: SEO principles apply across all platforms. Make sure you’re talking about your actual services consistently across social media, your website, and all distribution channels, not just displaying a keyword in your bio while posting unrelated content.

Why Small Businesses?

Jeremy Rivera: What is it about the small business niche that attracts you as opposed to, because I have that similar experience too. I worked in-house for a software company as an SEO. I worked at different agencies. I’ve done freelance, freelance consulting, everything from HCA and having to get drug tested to make minor edits on their copy to realtors and roofers. So what is it about SMBs that is attractive to you as a client?

Tianna Mamalick: I had trouble when posting for big, especially like the big businesses, like the software company, I would post articles that would convert at 20%. People cared, but they didn’t really, it was like, cool, you did that, that’s fun. And now if I did an article like that for a small business and we get a 20% conversion rate, or if their ads and SEO start performing really well together and we increase their revenue by 10K a month, which is happening for some—that’s life changing for them.

So it’s not just like, cool, you did that. I get emails like, “Oh my gosh, I just hired my next person. I just did this huge thing. I just invested in myself. I was able to take my first vacation.” These are the types of comments you get from small businesses. And there’s a lot of marketers out there that are really starting to get into this, especially as we get into this freelancer world.

When I first started doing this, a lot of people were like, well, they’re too small. They’re too small. I don’t need that. That’s too small. And I like to work with some pretty small businesses and I can do some pretty cool things with some pretty small budgets. And it’s because it changes things for them. It’s not just like, this is a nice investment. It’s a business changing investment.

Managing Expectations vs. Delivering Results

Jeremy Rivera: There is something to that appreciation. It also, you know, does ramp up the pressure of the deliverables on the other side. How do you differentiate between providing a valuable service that’s going to provide some sort of outcome, an ROI on their investment of what they’re electing to spend with you versus being seen as a silver bullet that’s going to cure a broken business model or wildly unrealistic expectations?

You know, my friend Michael McDougald of Right Thing Agency, like, he’s, we’ve talked through a couple of his clients that have come and gone who had been burned by a previous partner and then had been, you know, sold the moon and half of the job was just mitigating their expectations. So what’s your mindset going into that of being confident in what you’re going to deliver in terms of revenue results for them?

Tianna Mamalick: Yeah, good question. I like to lead with very, very honest opinions and sometimes it might upset people because I am brutally honest at times. And I would say when I first started too, I took on a lot more businesses—I think as marketers we all do this—that I was like, I can definitely do this for them. And I think that’s where some businesses get burned because especially as bigger marketers, when you have like a $50,000 a month budget, you can do so many things. You think that the sky is the limit and then you get a $5,000 budget and you realize like the sky is really not the limit and your practices don’t necessarily convert over the same way.

So when I work with businesses, there are a lot of businesses I say no to. I have a pretty tried and true formula that I have started kind of not necessarily repeating but reusing. So we actually pair SEO and ads together and my agency only offers that. We don’t—we’re not doing any web development. We’ll make some landing pages for you but I got into this because I realized that the formula I was using was working really well for specific business types.

So we do a lot of boring businesses where people are already searching for them and the formula is pretty repeatable when it comes to those service-based businesses. So I definitely do not promise the world. I am very realistic. They have to sign for three months. I can’t promise anything. But I always say like you are in a prime spot that this will likely work for you based on these factors and we do have really in-depth conversations about that.

And then I do also say on—like if you’re not seeing results by the third month, we re-meet, we talk about like do you want to continue and keep trying because we’ve seen some positives and maybe we’re just not in the right place or do you want to cut it at the three months? So I always tell them you have to have the money to invest and be able to lose it completely because no matter what, sometimes there are certain areas—like I have a client in Pilates in Las Vegas right now and I have Pilates clients in a bunch of other places and they’re doing shockingly well. Vegas is busy. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Pilates, any sort of gym, anything. There’s just so much noise in that area that it’s much, much harder to get attention.

Scaling Service-Based Businesses

Jeremy Rivera: I’m curious on the service deliverable side, like if you’re doing hard, boring work, like you’re delivering precast concrete walls, that’s your service. How does that change when you are no longer just doing that in Florida, but you realize, we can distribute to other cities as well, other states as well? What’s your strategy for larger service scale businesses or are you focusing literally just on hey, you’re local, you’re small, you have one service area?

Tianna Mamalick: Yeah, so we do have a strategy. So as soon as you start adding more locations, we have a very specific SEO strategy that we launch. And then like I said before, we actually pair ads with SEO. So I prefer when clients do both. And I know a lot of people say like, ads do not help your SEO grow.

If you do it properly and you do it strategically, technically ads are not directly connecting to your SEO. But if you can pay for traffic to certain pages and you can get higher and better engagement on those pages and you are looking to improve them—say you’re doing a new location in a new city, you’ve got your Google Business Profile (I hate that they named that something different). But you launch your Google Business Profile, you launch your landing page with a specific service, and then you make sure that those are connected to ads that have already been running and you kind of pre-prime them and then you’re just giving it a little bit of a boost.

For those moving into medium businesses, because I have quite a lot of businesses that I start that have one to three and then start hiring—I’ve now got one business that I’ve been working with for eight years now and they’ve got like 18 people on their team. So we’ve had to add a few different locations for them and it’s kind of a bit of a like prime the location and then we don’t always run the ads in every single area but it works really really well to get their GMB moving faster, Google business profile, and to help get that location specific service page working better.

The Truth About Ads and SEO Synergy

Jeremy Rivera: There is, I hate the word, I haven’t found a replacement for it, synergy between a properly executed advertising campaign. Because we know that when Google said that they weren’t paying attention to clicks, they were lying. And it is part of the fundamental SEO equation. And the court documents show that not only is it part of their understanding, but it’s about a third of the metrics that they weigh and particularly for service area businesses.

So if you don’t have a local area name, you’re just launching, you know, Upper Cumberland notary service. Nobody knows that you exist. Nobody’s searching for that, not generically. So if you want to capture that and say that that is your business, then yeah, you do need to run some ads so that people—what was that?—there was an Instagram and they Google it and they like there’s an organic follow-up component to both social ads and Google paid ads.

What’s been your experience in the trade-off between—because I’ve seen, I personally have only invested my time, attention and focus and capability in the past on search only ads, both through Google. I got to play around with Boat Locker, they did boats and so that was playing around with Instagram ads for a while. But with that mix of saying, hey, doing these ads, are you talking about doing keyword search ads or using the display network to show ads on relevant, quote, relevant websites? And/or are you talking about social media placement ads on X, on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok?

Tianna Mamalick: Yeah, so my experience with ads is only on Meta and Google, so I don’t want to talk too much about like X or TikTok. I haven’t done those ones before. I’d love to get into TikTok. It’s definitely on my radar. But when it comes to those ones, like you have to have a really good video editor. So we’ve been kind of careful—like we do Meta, Instagram and Facebook ads and I love those but it was a very, very big learning curve. I took it on I like to say later in my career but about four years ago.

When it comes to that, I think it really depends on what is the budget. And I know a lot of people, we love this question, everybody’s always like, well, you tell me what the budget is. And I find when it comes down to it for SMBs, there’s so much I can do with big budgets and there is quite a lot I can do with a little budget, but it’s more about what you actually feel comfortable spending.

So if I’m going to recommend, say, the search only ads, that’s probably because they have a really low budget. If they have extremely low budget, I’d actually look at only retargeting or some form of mixed between retargeting and a slight bit of search ads because you only have so much budget. You want to get as many people as possible.

I’ve played with display ads too. That’s worked for certain industries. It depends on if the industry is really visual or not. Med spas are really good for display ads because they have that beauty aspect to it. But it really comes down to budget. Because if they had a big budget, I would definitely recommend both. Pair it. You do the Meta ads and then you retarget on Google ads and then you also have the search ads going and that is going to absolutely just rock how much traffic you’re getting.

The Evolution of Content Distribution

Jeremy Rivera: My friend, Matt Brooks from SEOteric has a view that there’s a transition moment right now where businesses are—there’s a lot of their business that happens on their website, but they also need to take care to cultivate where they distribute and their distribution points. How would you approach that conversation of owned media, owned marketing outside of the website as well as trying to nurture that attention and focus to ensure that the site has what it needs down the funnel and at the top of the funnel in order to be a useful tool for turning visitors into clients. But also, does your social media spread have what it needs to turn visitors into interested prospects to turn into clients?

Tianna Mamalick: Yeah, so this one’s an interesting one because it keeps changing too and I think that’s the important thing. I have this—I have a weird feeling, but I’m pretty sure that in 10 years time we’re gonna have pretty much just AI scan pages. We’re not really gonna have websites. We’re gonna have like places where we drop information that these search platforms can find.

And one of the things I believe too is like SEO is platform agnostic. I have never believed SEO is a Google specific tactic. It is dependent on the platform you’re using. I have actually started talking about social media SEO. This is something that I’ve been talking about for a while. I was just waiting for Instagram to finally like, you know, get on the trend. TikTok’s been doing it for a while.

But people need to be talking about the same things and when it comes to like the smaller businesses—so the businesses that really don’t have as much to invest in say SEO. We’ve been focusing pretty heavy hardcore on those service-based pages. I mean three years ago you would really, really recommend a lot of blog posts. People were still actively searching. You know, in comes AI, in comes the extreme increase in social media usage. Like younger generations are definitely—they’re searching right on Instagram. They’re not even coming off anymore.

So my advice is always kind of like pick your platforms, pick your poison. Be super consistent, create your audiences there, and then make sure that those audiences are also being given the opportunity to get onto your email list, to get back to your website, but then have your hub really, really explain what you do. Because a lot of businesses, especially small businesses, seem to—we seem to still be leaning on this menu style service page where it’s like, here are the five services I offer.

Highly do not recommend that, obviously. For SEO, we want a service page for every—so when it comes to the very small businesses, especially the ones I usually start working with, we’re doing as simple as making sure that their pages are all there and exist, and then actually explaining to them, if you have these five services, that’s what you should be talking about on social media, not just like, hey, here I am.

E-Commerce Content Strategy

Jeremy Rivera: When it comes to something that’s more like e-commerce and as a small business, like, you can order our stair handrails, you know, off of our site and they come in these colors. How do you approach content marketing, creating content that isn’t a collection page or isn’t an e-commerce page itself? How do you approach logically, like how far do you go? You know, do you dive into, hey, 13 ways to beautify your home. And then one of those, you know, number two is adding stair handrails that are customized or something like that. Like basically like creating your own product placement blog posts versus getting those product placement blog posts posted elsewhere.

Tianna Mamalick: Yeah, so I do still do backlinking. I do still genuinely believe in backlinking. I do think you have to be very careful with how you do it now. Like the spammy ones can be quite—it’s gotten really bad. So we tend to do like, I’ll partner with a PR specialist who will get them actual like proper PR placements.

I usually follow the Andy Crestodina is one of my favorite, obviously hands down one of my favorites, but he has a really good—the textbook is so old now. I think it’s called Content Chemistry. In that, he actually talked about how you would do collaboration posts.

When it comes to not all e-com businesses like doing this. I really have pushed them into this, but I think it’s really important to look for supplementary style products and start writing lists based on those, just doing what you explained with the whole listicle of essentially creating your own product placement thing. It’s really about, and this is the thing with SEO, the way it’s moving, is I think we used to always do what is the best content for me and my reader? And now it’s really more like what is the best content for the reader and how do you get in there? Because it’s not about the company anymore.

So I really like to do those collaborative posts. We don’t expect the other business to publish the post or even say anything about it, but we always email them when we highlight them. So I work with a lot of like gifting, makeup and product like quick buy product based businesses. So we’ll do like if you’re gifting this, like these are great supplementary products to go with it or like a makeup company that has everything except for like lotions like what are the top five lotions that go well with your product? Those are the types of articles that we’re really leaning into and it’s about higher quality content because you know those zero clicks are like taking over all of that kind of organic traffic, so it’s really about like this needs to be high quality, it needs to be super useful for people, how are we directly relating and then pulling from other people’s audiences. So that’s what we’re doing with the collaboration posts.

The Nexus of Care: Strategic Partnerships

Jeremy Rivera: I 100% agree with that. I have a workflow process. I call it the nexus of care. So if you are a realtor, then your nexus is the home and off of that hub, you have home inspectors, you have painters, you have landscapers on one level. Those are like the service providers, but then you also have the people who make the molding that the designer is going to use. You have the home goods designer, you have the rug people, you know, who make custom rugs that would make that home more beautiful.

So there’s actually this huge diaspora of marketers who are really talking to the same audience and they’re not going to cross wires with a realtor. Like they’re not trying to sell a home too. So if you look at it from that perspective, you have so much more gameplay and so much more potential to interact with somebody on a one-to-one basis of somebody else who’s trying to market their business. And you don’t have to explain to them the value of a blog post. You don’t have to explain to them the value of a backlink that it’s unspoken.

But I think that a lot of SEOs just got so used to just exploiting people with like mass outreach of like I’m going to spam every blogger that’s ever blogged about this with “dear sir/madam I have written a guest post please would you post it and give links to my client” like really. And I mean you still see it on LinkedIn like—it’s yesterday I got five new LinkedIn friends and like “hi I’m trading guest posts.” Like, dude, like you don’t, you’re not even attached to a business. You’re just like, this is just pointless. So I think there’s kind of a blindness to maybe the partnership or biz dev aspect of digital marketing that can drive so much more success.

Tianna Mamalick: Mm-hmm. I like to think of it—a lot of people don’t realize how much we can pull from—like we are obsessed with social media. So really looking at why we are so obsessed with social media. Like it is engaging, it is entertaining, it feels like we’re connecting even though we aren’t. It’s so funny because we’re so unconnected but we feel so connected. And if you take the parts of social media that are working so well to make us like obscenely obsessed with these platforms—how do we take some of those practices and bring them into things like SEO and really start kind of like integrating them into that tactic?

And one of those things is like can we entertain? Can we engage? Can we connect? And that’s the thing—like a lot of—and I’ve had conversations with SEOs before and they’re always like well you know it’s as long as we have that backlink like that’s a connection. And I always tell the businesses I work with it’s not just about the backlink because you have to like remember people want to work with people they like, know and trust.

And SEO is great because it’s this tactical way that we can get you higher up on Google. But like we really want more people to purchase from you. So it’s not just about—and I’m really kind of against that idea of like if someone asks me like how many keywords can you get me number one on Google—like that is—we will not do that for you. We’re really looking at like the conversions. How can we get SEO to convert for you? So if that means that not all of your keywords are number one, our focus is more on the engagement on page, how many people are getting there.

And then we do help. I will never help anybody with social media. That’s not my specialty. But we’ll help a little bit with the idea that you need to be writing these things on your social and bring people back to your website. Let’s figure out how to start integrating these pieces. So yes, we’re only SEO, but pull in your other—I love working with other marketers. And it’s so disjointed nowadays too. Everybody’s got their own agency. Everybody’s working in their silos.

I have clients that are like, this is my social media person. This is my website developer. I’m like, yes, now we have a team. So I think we need to work a bit more on those teams, both on the tactics and on the content. Because that content that you can create together, just like you said with the realtors, those are the blogs people actually need and care about. And truly, that’s what’s going to help people. And I got into SEO because I personally believe it’s the best tactic for what is truly going to help. People are searching for that all the time. They need that information. So we’re just trying to help them get that information.

SEO: The Universal Superpower

Jeremy Rivera: Absolutely. When I was talking to Gus Pelogia over at Indeed, his biggest thing was that the superpower of an SEO is that there’s an SEO component to all of these channels. And so if you can speak to the social media team and help them deliver further value, if they aren’t measured just on, hey, I made a social media post and this many of those Instagram people made it to the site. If you’re actively creating additional assets that they can promote, additional conversations that they can tap into, you know, if they’re a good social media person, then they would be thrilled to have more organic content that they can reference.

The AI Content Dilemma

Jeremy Rivera: So in the age of mass AI creation tools, how do you maintain the human elements, human controls or interest levels when there’s the temptation for SMB owners to be like I don’t need an SEO. I can just ask Claude. I don’t need a consultant. I’ve got The GPT right here—gave me a business plan.

Tianna Mamalick: Yeah, so I’ve talked to several of my industry friends and I think we’re all feeling the same kind of squeeze and it’s from both sides too. The clients don’t want to pay for you to write because Claude can write. The problem is that everybody is using the same thing and we’re creating the same content and content is getting—like even social media content. Like if you look on anybody who looks on LinkedIn right now and you see those—like they are just so bad. They are so bad and we know it’s bad and we’re using it because a lot of the times clients are like well now that you have AI it has to be better so just use that because I’d much rather that.

And it’s really talking people into—I do a lot of partnership based content creation. I work with a lot of people who have very, very unique businesses. I do licensed insolvency trustees, so bankruptcy partners, weird finance. Those are the type of things. I can use AI, although I do have to say the hallucinations are getting worse, so the content’s actually decreasing as well. Yeah, the hallucinations got so bad.

What we do is we actually use AI to create the outline. So I take the top three—the original way that you do the blog. We still do that. So you take the top three ranking articles, you take all of those outlines, you pop them into AI, you get a really good outline for the client. I send the outline to the client. They do the bullets of what they want to do, and then we still actually write it.

There was a few months in there where we tried a lot of GPT prompts, and we definitely were writing content with AI—any agency that says they weren’t, we all tried it. I’ve just realized like none of those articles are ranking. None of them are doing very well. So we’ve actually gone back. We have SOPs, updated all the SOPs—we bought prompts even and we’ve gone 100% back. So it’s just not working.

People want to see mistakes. They want to see people talking like—they want—we want to be connecting even in this content and no matter how much people say like I love those people on—it’s on social media that are like yeah, I can make the prompt so close it sounds like me. It’s like, but we know.

The AI Search Reality Check

Jeremy Rivera: I’m curious what you see on the flip side. There’s two sides to the GPT coin. One is the usage side. And then there is the shiny object syndrome side, I call it. Like, hey, I can get all of this audience. Am I showing up in GPT? Am I showing up in Claude? I just saw Ross Simmons point out that if you are logged in and you’re not seeing your own brand, it could be because the GPT model itself by default understands that it knows who you are and is not going to show you your own stuff because you’re asking it to look at for other people.

So there’s so many gaps in the concept model of treating, you know, GPT like a 1 to 10 Google rank result. But that doesn’t mean that people aren’t out there with their GEO, AI, SEO, rainbow, unicorn bag of, look at these magical fields of results. I’m going to get you millions of results. So much traffic is just here for your taking if you buy my package of 99.99.99, 99 payments of it. So what I know that there is a reasonable level of, you know, understanding, like ignoring it bad. But how do you fold it in again with proper expectations?

Tianna Mamalick: Yeah. So that’s a lot of clients who am I showing up on ChatGPT? And I don’t know if you’re seeing the same thing with your clients, but less than 10%. Some clients are like 2% on GPT. It depends on the industry. I do find too, like as business owners, we’re sitting here thinking like everybody’s using ChatGPT, but as business owners ourselves, and especially in the tech industry, we actually tend to be on the further end of adoption when it comes to tech.

So we’re sitting here thinking, everybody’s using ChatGPT. And I beg to differ. I think a lot of business owners are using ChatGPT, and some large corporations are starting to integrate it. But it’s not like the layman is walking in and being like, I’m on ChatGPT. That is not happening yet. We’re still in the early adoption phase of that.

I do always tell people like, let’s prepare, but we don’t need to like obviously AI is integrated into Google now. So we do kind of want to get into that. Like, okay, people are changing the way they search. They are searching questions. We all know that we all see it. And they’re also searching these obscure questions. Like it’s not just like, you know, hey, who is this person? It’s like, I—this is for a counseling practice that I work with, but someone would actually search something like, “I am a female looking for another female counselor who specializes in postpartum depression and also, you know, went to this school and lives in this city.”

Like, these are things that we’re actually starting to think of. So to connect the dots, because I don’t think it needs to be an immediate change, but to start connecting those dots for AI, we make sure that the website is talking about the things that people could potentially search for. So your about page. People used to I don’t know why we sleep on these things, but like for a long time, or that author page that your blog automatically creates. Those are places where you can put all of the certifications you’ve ever had, special training. If you’ve talked on podcasts about specific things, you’ve been the expert in speaking topics for off-site things, put them in these places so that when those searches do come up, you are starting to connect the dots.

But I agree with you. I think that the AI whole idea is a very shiny object. I’ll get a client who’s like, oh my gosh, someone found me on AI. And it’s like, that’s really cool. You get 40 leads a month. One of them was from AI. And that was one month out of the last six. So let’s look at this logically. We’re just getting really excited about this one thing. And it’s just not producing the type of results that the conversation is currently making it look like it is.

The Future of Search: Beyond Keywords

Jeremy Rivera: I agree. I just interviewed Alejandro Meyehans of Get Me Links and had this kind of dive of, you know, Alpha kids are saying that’s AI as shorthand for that’s not trustworthy. And at the same time we you know we can look to how hard Google worked to train us to use the keyword model to find data, which was brilliant on their behalf because that was the limitation and the capability of the system.

But the LLM based system isn’t limited like that. You’re going to get poor returns if you put in one or two words into your GPT into Claude. By design, it’s meant to be far more expansive and responsive to you know that niche focus and capability and the one-to-one nature of it too is totally different from, you know, it’s giving you a generated response and you can accept or reject or re-query. That’s a total different process than, you know, a RAG retrieval system of, well, for this query, this is most likely related, correctly related to what I’m actually looking for, then these are the most relevant document/pages to that.

Those are two totally different search outcome ecosystems. I think there’s a lot of work that SEOs have to start doing to look at, did I actually communicate the value of this business appropriately at the bottom of the funnel? Did I talk about how it compares to these two? Can I overcome the objection of their team so that I can mention another person’s brand in a not disparaging but in a comparative way because that’s necessary and at some points in marketing that was a big no-no. You couldn’t do that but you must now.

And you must now—you’re not selling sneakers or you’re not selling yeah you’re not selling sneakers you’re selling men’s active wear for hot climate conditions if you have sensitivity to wheat or you know, or you have a leather allergy. Like that’s what the product actually really has been all along, but you had condensed it down to men’s footwear for the keyword research side of things, because that’s how Google classified search volume. That wasn’t truly how people thought about things. It’s just the representation of the concept of search was represented by these condensed fragments. It’s not as true anymore.

Tianna Mamalick: And that’s why it was so easy for AI to change. The adoption of AI search was so fast because it’s more how we feel. It’s an actual thought process. You can word vomit your question and the system will give you pretty good results. It has a very good—I love that it’s taking from—

Gosh, I don’t even remember who said this but I was at a conference recently and they were talking about like how much information the system is taking from Reddit because Reddit has such good and in-depth conversations especially of like product listings and like actual reviews and how people—it’s not just the reviews of like you got paid for this review. It’s the review of like did this work six months later?

So people are really getting like some very, very, very good in-depth information. So I love that and I do think we need to speak more on the unique people that are going to use our products and people are still thinking of their stuff as like well you know I sell black shoes and not the like non-leather—maybe you have the leather allergy or you can’t use cotton and there’s no cotton in the shoe. Those all need to be there.

And I’ve actually started to move away from using—it’s not that we don’t do blog posts, but we really are focusing more on the sales pages because we are seeing more clicks from those. So we’ll do key blog posts, but it’s really, really about getting super in-depth on the product pages, on the service pages, and making sure that we’re not just explaining—it used to be like eight bullets. It’s now really like what are the benefits for different types of people?

Content That Actually Converts

Jeremy Rivera: It’s all in its own page. Yeah, it’s kind of like exploding the amount of content, but in a much more thorough—you know, I have, cannot tell you how many audits I have done where I’m literally asking myself, or sometimes literally asking the client, look at this text on this page. What would you say you do here based off of what you’ve actually said? “We’re fantastic at delivering results.” “We’re fantastic or incredible at customer service.” Okay, well you described both a, you know, a sign recreation service, you know, like rebranding for restaurants, and you’ve also described the restaurant, and you’ve also described a server, and you’ve also described, you know, literally any service-based business. Did you actually say what you did in a meaningful way, support it with any sort of evidence, citation, quote, testimonial, or did you just go with your, you know, I’ve got a picture and a blurb of success?

Tianna Mamalick: Like I’m asking my clients to start leaving notes on their desk or if they’re like front-facing service based, have a little notebook. What are the questions people are asking you that you are answering every day or when you have like a sales call, what are the five things that you say every single sales call that you’re like this is going to convert them? Because a lot of the times when I ask them just point blank they’re like there’s these five things because that’s what they have in their head as like these are the important things we’re supposed to do. But I really want that like when you’re talking to someone, how do you sell this service?

And I find the notes really help because then all of sudden they’re getting out of their head, out of their sales training into the like what’s actually going to convert them and those pieces are going to give me better content than anything else that they could—you know, the company is going to give me as like a cut and dry. Yeah, these are the five things we do that could be for anybody else. Like Google needs more than that. All of the systems need more than that. We can’t just give them—it can’t be cookie cutter anymore. It really can’t.

And I’ve also started kind of working in some opinion based content which I think is going to become really important. Like that like hard stand that you have. You know, go back to the shoe example for a second. Like we make our shoes recyclable because we’re tired of X, Y, and Z. Like those are things we’ve always kind of put in marketing material but now you really need to come ahead—like why do you believe that? What’s the ethos of that whole idea? And then use that as further content because if someone’s looking for like sustainable X, Y, and Z, it can’t just say sustainable anymore. It needs to be like because—I had a client who was like we’re sustainable. I was like well how? And they’re like well we use less cotton or I think they used like 2% recycled material and I was like we need more than that. Like we need to explain—like what are you doing next? Are you also working on your packaging? Like those are the things that when people are gonna be asking ChatGPT or even the long-winded questions, they want better responses like that.

Mining Gold from Customer Conversations

Jeremy Rivera: There’s a treasure trove in every customer support log. If you have those emails from your sales team, mine them. So send them into GPT and find out what were the objections and how did the salesperson overcome them or not. You can even find product or service errors that you can help fix your business by taking the marketing model of what worked, or what went wrong, that’s the customer support tickets or customer support emails or the complaints, or what were the friction points in the sales conversation.

It’s just we, a lot of SEOs are like, I can do SEO, let me pull up SEMrush. No, no, bad, bad, bad, bad SEO. No, start with the conversation. See if you can get an interview. Record that passionate, you know, team leader. Record the CEO talking about it. Record the salesperson who’s really good at pitching and delivering. Record those because those human conversations are always far more in depth than that email of where they spent four weeks. Okay, I gotta get Jeremy some information to put on our About page. They went through that and then they distilled it and gave you crap. They gave you nothing to really work with. So yeah, go have a conversation, record it, or go mine the actual emails. There’s so much there’s gold in them thar hills.

The Needle Mover: Strategic Content Planning

Jeremy Rivera: So to kind of wrap up the conversation, what do you think is the biggest needle mover right now? What’s the blockbuster? Is there, you know, like a linchpin element of your campaign that you’re always super focused on when you kick off? What’s the deliverable you’re looking to first bring home first?

Tianna Mamalick: So my personal favorite, and this is something we do for everyone, and I know most people kind of do this, but we do a very I call it a strategy, but it’s essentially like a content plan. And when we do our content plan, we really integrate the other pieces. So when I interview my new client and say like, what platforms are you on? When we’re doing the content plan, we also think of those other platforms. So if we’re doing the categories for the blog, if we’re doing like the next steps of content, we also put into place like, what are you going to need? How do we kind of make sure that you’re talking about the same thing in every area of your business?

Because when it comes to SEO, it’s gonna get more and more important and it’s not just about the LLM it’s about social media, it’s about like where you’re showing up, how are you talking about your services, are you actually saying that you have these services? Because a lot of  like I’ve seen so many where you go to their social media and it’s like you know they have that one main keyword at the top but like none of their posts have ever said their service ever. So it’s really about connecting those pieces.

And then we always do how can we make the service pages better first? Or when it comes to e-comm, how do we make the product pages better first? We always start there because if you’re going to get a click and it’s going to be worth money, that’s where it’s going. So it’s really great to add more there’s a lot of content gapping that I could go through. I love all that stuff. I love going to competitor research. It’s my absolute favorite task out of all of the strategies that we do. I love stealing or different industry ideas too, supplementary industries, stealing their ideas. Those are great, but when it comes down to like when we’re done the strategy and we’ve connected all the pieces, we always go to product pages and service pages first.

I’ve never seen a business where there isn’t room to improve and a lot of them really are doing exactly what you said. That whole cookie cutter, like giving you the most basic information and there is so much you can add there. And then are we missing service pages? Because every single service should have a page and there’s a lot of like I love floating service pages and a lot of businesses are like, no, no, we can’t do that. But like if you have you know back to your leather allergy like shoes for people who have leather allergies. That can be a page too. We don’t have to just sit in this, it should only have this one line here. You’re right, they should all be their own pages. So we really, really focus on that.

And I do think that’s where the needle movers are. As we get less content coming off of search platforms, it’s really just like, once they found you and they know what they want, how do you convert that sale? Or make sure that when they come off of one platform and go to another, how do they find the information that they need?

Connect with Tianna

Jeremy Rivera: I love it. Give a shout out where people can find you if you’re on a particular social media channel and if you’re doing—have any downloadable, deliverables, ebooks, conferences or giveaways that you’re working on right now.

Tianna Mamalick: Yes. So you can always find me on Instagram. I’m millennial. I’m pretty heavy on Instagram at @smbmarketingschool. You can also find us at smbmarketingschool.com. I do have a very, very cool summit coming up in January. It’s January 28th. It is called the Funnel Summit. It is going to be pretty epic. And it’s essentially eight speakers talking on different parts of the funnel to help small businesses figure out how to kind of take the next step on each part of their especially with the new like merry-go-round style funnel we’ve got going on in the digital space right now.