I’m Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted SEO podcast host. I’m here with Benas, who’s going to introduce himself. He’s a freelancer. Give us some of your background, some of your credentials and experience that should make you trustworthy.
Meet Benas: From Lithuanian Freelancer to Agency Builder
Benas
Sure. So I’m Benas, Benas Leonavicius from a small Lithuanian country in Europe. And I’ve been freelancing and doing SEO for the past 10 years now. So SEO is my bread and butter. I started with my own side projects—some random articles—and then worked with large e-commerce shops and SaaS companies. I kind of went full circle. And right now I’m actually transitioning from trying to be just a freelancer, since I feel I’ve reached all of my limits, to now building an actual marketing agency.
Jeremy Rivera
Fantastic. Which niche do you enjoy the most? I would say which you have the most experience in, but I know that just because you have a lot of experience optimizing one vertical doesn’t mean that you enjoy it as much.
Benas
Yeah, that is definitely true. I worked with, for example, a lot of SaaS companies, but I found that working with them, although it’s pretty interesting and rewarding, it’s very limiting in terms of my ability to scale. They usually have a lot of teams, the website and product are very complicated. So the whole SEO strategy requires a lot of my time and effort. And although I can provide a lot of value to them, at the end of the day, I might only have like one or two clients like that per month, and then I cannot scale.
So what I found is working with clients that I don’t need to spend a huge amount of time on, but can provide an outsized value. For example, right now, I’m trying to target keynote speakers, book authors, and coaches as the people that need SEO services.
The Cobbler’s Shoes: Why Coaches and Speakers Need SEO
Jeremy Rivera
It’s funny that, you know, often the cobbler has no shoes. If you’re a tailor, your kids are running around in rags. A lot of the coaches, a lot of the people that are out there—you know, out of the past five or six guests that I’ve had that have been keynote speakers or specifically business coaches—I go to their site and it’s not as robust or as thorough as it could be or should be when it comes to SEO. And I think that’s just maybe a different skill set, right?
Benas
I suppose so, yeah. As far as I found, they don’t really care about that stuff. They don’t really understand that stuff. Especially keynote speakers—they’re from another world of networking and maybe even social media, maybe LinkedIn. This is what gets them all of the leads and sales in my personal experience.
And the website is usually an afterthought. Some people do optimize for that a bit better than others. I mean, honestly, there is a huge opportunity for a lot of keynote speakers. And since they don’t have a lot of optimization, whenever I come in, it’s pretty easy to provide some really great results for their websites. Especially since the keywords they’re targeting are not usually that difficult. That’s also a big benefit.
The SaaS SEO Challenge: JIRA Tickets for Meta Descriptions
Jeremy Rivera
To swing back to what you said about SaaS earlier, I kind of had a mid-career jump when I joined Raven Tools, which is a very large SEO SaaS—kind of a competitor to the boss in those early days—and worked extensively with them. They got bought out by another company, ended up coming back and working again with that SaaS. And you’re right, there is kind of this intricate dance for SEO and optimization because a lot of it relies on future releases that are coming out and being attuned to their product management and marketing schedule.
And many of them are mostly doing their marketing by doing future releases. And that can take a lot of management. I’ve done my own level of freelance consulting for a number of different SaaS companies. And it is very hard to always get into the different teams and bring back the value and give that value add to a subscription-based SaaS program that has specific goals, particularly if it’s like a lower dollar subscription amount—almost has as many headaches as when you get into the enterprise-level SaaS world. At that level, then it’s an even bigger beast, because then it’s a lot of multi-team work and working with multiple departments.
I even had scenarios where I had to submit JIRA tickets to edit the website. Like, come on, how hard is it to edit a meta description? Well, you got to write a ticket, you got to wait in the development queue, and then not piss off the lead chief developer so that you actually get development time to do your 15-20 meta titles. And it’s like, how can I deliver on an expensive monthly retainer when I’m limited to, “Here’s 15 tickets”? Okay, you’re doing five of them? Great, I’ll just be out here writing 10 times more SEO tickets than we have the bandwidth to implement, right?
Benas
I had the same exact experience that you just described. I mean, they usually, in my experience, especially if they’re in their growth phase, they usually change a lot of things. So a lot of new features then require a lot of homepage changes, they change the copywriting, then they change how they actually market themselves. This is not a good way for SEO if you’re trying to build something long term—if you want to be known for a specific niche or for specific keywords, and then they change completely: “Now we’re kind of shifting towards another direction.” I found it to be very difficult.
Also, there are so many stakeholders that it’s so difficult to please everyone. There are people that care about numbers, there are developers that care about a whole other thing. It’s just managing all of that. It’s a tough process. That’s why I kind of decided not to work with any other SaaS projects. As lucrative as they can be, they’re very time consuming. And I figured that my time can be better spent solving some other clients’ problems or even just doing something that is way more scalable than this.
Content, Links, or Technical? Choosing Your SEO Focus
Jeremy Rivera
Which of the three major domains do you gravitate towards in SEO? I kind of break it down towards technical SEO and infrastructure, content-focused SEO, content marketing, on-page strategy, and then link building and off-page strategy. Which of those three domains are you most attracted to?
Benas
Personally, I don’t know. It did change over time. So I believe right now it’s probably more the content side. That’s the on-page content side. That’s the one that is probably the most useful in my line of work with the clients that I work for these days.
Link building seems to be kind of solved to a point where—I mean, yes, you can come up with very unique ways of doing links, especially if you’re doing that for a very high level and stuff. But to be honest, that seems very basic to me these days.
And the technical aspect, although interesting, I also found that there are limits to what my interests are. So again, I’ve worked with some very complicated technical SEO projects, but for me that also didn’t really—it was not kind of my thing. So I think I landed in the middle here.
ChatGPT as Your “Least Trained Customer Support Rep”
Jeremy Rivera
Matt Brooks of SEOteric, a friend of mine, said, “ChatGPT is your most popular but least trained customer support representative.” When you’re approaching that content question, how do you bake in the technical capabilities and scale probabilities of leveraging LLM-based tools while not falling into that obvious pitfall of hallucination, lack of authority, lack of authenticity that can come out of over-reliance on it in generating your marketing materials?
Benas
Good question. I’m very still—I don’t use that much AI in my workflow. I try to always add things little by little. I’m not the one to jump in first and try things out because usually the first versions, the first things, you know, they change a lot, things break a lot. So I’m usually the one who steps back, looks at it, lets other people figure out some stuff, and then takes what works and implements it into my workflow.
Although I do use AI in some sense, in some workflows, it’s still like a more like a brainstorming tool, more like a first draft tool that you take in to basically make some things quicker or some edits faster. But it’s not the final—at least right now in the way I see AI working for my workflow. It’s never the—it does not yet provide the end result that I can copy-paste and implement. Maybe that will come later, but for now it’s more on the basic side.
Optimizing for AI Overviews: The New Frontier
Jeremy Rivera
Do you have any clients that are knocking on your door and talking about the opposite side of LLMs and AI overviews and saying, “How do I gain visibility in these platforms? What can you do to make sure we show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, in these various engines?” And what’s your common advice on that side?
Benas
Yeah, I mean, this is probably the most common questions from all the clients or potential clients that are coming up to me. Everyone wants to now rank and be on any type of AI overviews or AI search in general.
What I’ve found and what I see working right now—the biggest problem with AI is probably tracking. So the first thing I need to explain to clients is that there are some things we can do to actually improve your odds for you appearing on AI search, but the problem is that it’s very difficult to track. I feel that at some point, ChatGPT might release something similar to Google Search Console, where we will get some kind of clicks or impressions data as time goes on. It feels kind of inevitable at some point to have this sort of thing available to us. But for now, tracking is one of the major problems to actually monitoring what is happening. Yes, there are tools out there, but I mean, probably half of them are not really providing you with any real tangible results based on the way AI works. So that’s very difficult to track. That’s the first thing that I kind of explain to clients.
And then as part of what actually works for now, it seems to be quite basic: backlinks, PR, mentions, and social media. The more, for example, your name is out there, the more likely the AI is gonna just catch it and then use it in their answers. And it’s—at least right now—it seems to be kind of based on how Google worked like, you know, 10, 15 years ago, where if your site has one more backlink than your competitor, you’re gonna rank higher. It feels like—I mean, it’s not as simple as that—but it feels like it’s working in the same direction where if somebody’s mentioned just more times, AI is more likely just to catch that and reference you in their answers without giving much further thought if that’s the right person or company to be mentioned.
The 25% Problem: AI Search Consistency
Jeremy Rivera
I saw a study that looked at how frequently does ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, AI overviews actually provide the same answer to the query to different people. And it’s like 25% or less. So even if you do—there’s such a different math than the predictability of, “Hey, with rankings, you know, it may fluctuate to some small degree, but generally speaking, if you’re ranking number three, you’re generally ranking number three.” It’s not—you’re not—”60% of the time it works every time” from Anchorman.
Benas
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know, the interesting part—so I mean, I do mention the same thing to the clients that, you know, even if you type in something and you appear, doesn’t mean that the next person in the next location with a different history is going to type in and you’re going to appear. But they just say, “I don’t care. I still want to be there. Even if it’s like 25% of the time, I still want to be there 25% of the time.” For clients, they look very simply at this. Yeah, okay, that’s the limitation. I still want to appear in, you know, whatever times I can appear on the AI search.
Ranking for AI: It’s About Entity Authority, Not Just Website Rankings
Jeremy Rivera
Yeah, an interesting challenge for that was somebody was saying, “All of these answers for this niche are all referencing government resources. Do I have any chance of showing up in it?” And I said, “Well, it becomes a different game.” Because, you know, this came up in my conversation with Alejandro Mejia as we dug in on—he’s from Get Me Links. And so if you understand that LLMs have like a training database, right, for basic queries.
If they cannot get the answer from that, then they’ll do a Google search and look at the list of sites as like a first tier, second tier. If they can’t find it in the first tier of quality sites that are coming up in the citations, then they’ll dig even deeper. So it’s really about trying to get your own stuff as well as other stuff ranking for a set of queries and getting ranked and cited on sites that are either A tier or B tier.
So there’s kind of a behind-the-scenes ranking game at play of like, “Hey, what if we focused as much on getting not just articles out into the wind, but then trying to get them ranked, even though they’re not on our site?” Because if this article ranks and you’re number one—if it’s a listicle, and you’re the number one resource for home suppliers or sunroom builders in Cookeville—and that’s an article that’s not on your site, when somebody’s doing that research, it’s more likely to use that third-party citation as an augment. And if that site—if you get it placed on a trusted site—then that’s even better.
So it’s almost like thinking about digital visibility is less centric just to the website, but more towards the entity.
Benas
Yeah, to be honest, I think we’re moving into a world where it’s probably—you know, if AI really takes off as it does—we’re probably moving into a much different place where we might start to lose clicks. Impressions will start to matter a lot more. Basically the same way it does on social media if we take like Instagram and stuff like that. Nobody really tracks the amount that somebody goes to a website, it’s more like, “Oh, I know that person and I will DM them from any means possible.” And basically what people track is the amount of views or just impressions that they get on their profile.
I feel that we might move to a world where with websites that might also become more of a reality, where direct traffic is gonna increase a lot more since people are gonna find you with all of these places. They might not actually click through, so you might not get any referrals and stuff like that. But if you’re a brand, you might start seeing a lot more direct traffic.
And talking about the LLMs and what they look at—funny thing is, for example, in the keynote speaking business, like speaker bureaus and all of these different speaker-type articles where they have listicles—that is what ChatGPT and other AI searches seem to reference a lot. So for you to be on ChatGPT, you basically need to be on either the speaker bureau’s websites or you need to be on those listicles because that seems to be one of the primary sources. Well, in this particular niche.
So probably in every single niche, you need to find: What does ChatGPT reference the most? What does it trust? Is it the government websites? Is it some listicles? What is the most common thing? And you need to insert yourself. But that does change how we view link building. Because now it’s not necessary—as you said—it’s like you want to place something somewhere, but then you also want that page ranked since that is how LLMs catch it and that’s how you appear on AI search. So it does add some extra layer for the future of link building where it might be a bit more complicated than just getting a link on a certain site.
Ask ChatGPT for Its Sources: The New SEO Advantage
Jeremy Rivera
I think the benefit though is you can just ask ChatGPT, “What were your sources for this? Who did you cite?” If you try to get that out of Google, they’ll shoot you.
Benas
Yeah. I mean, yes. Yeah. That’s a cool little thing. You can basically ask AI anything and it will provide you with even its reasoning. I think it’s going to—you know, the more time passes—it’s going to get more and more accurate. So I think what we’re playing with is probably the worst version it will ever be. In that sense, it feels like—I mean, we might not get there very fast and might be very small incremental changes in terms of how good it is—but I feel like we’re still kind of going upwards not downwards.
Should You Freelance in SEO Today?
Jeremy Rivera
Random question: Do you think that somebody who’s looking at SEO—would you recommend that they try freelancing in SEO these days? Like if they were headed into it.
Benas
Yeah. I don’t know. It’s nowadays—since SEO is evolving and we’re not sure where it’s going. I mean, a year or two years ago, there was a lot more fear about “SEO is dead, AI is going to take over.” A few years past, we’ve seen that, okay, I mean, that hype not really realized. I mean, it’s still kind of same old, same old, but a bit new. But still we are moving through some kind of search engine transition and I’m not sure where that’s going to land.
So in a sense, it’s very difficult to suggest because it might be one of the best times to jump in. If you jump in and you start learning LLM optimization and in five, six, seven years’ time, you see that AI search is now—we are able to optimize it for the same way we used to do for Google and you can provide results to your clients—then this might be the perfect time to jump in. But I mean, the future is a bit uncertain.
Me and you, we’ve been in this industry for decades now. So it’s probably a lot easier for us since we have established case studies and we have established clients and we know what works in terms of the usual SEO. But if you’re just jumping in, I don’t know, I would be cautious recommending somebody to jump in at this point because it’s a lot riskier than doing something else. Because, you know, on the other hand, if AI works in a way where it does delete some part of search and optimization, and you cannot really optimize beyond a certain limit for AI search, then you’re learning a skill that is probably going to be very difficult to then make money from freelancing. So it’s a very tough one.
Common Mistakes and Quick Wins for Keynote Speakers
Jeremy Rivera
What are some common traps and mistakes that you see your consultees running into in the past five years?
Benas
Mistakes? I don’t know. It’s just—I don’t think I have any specific mistakes that they kind of make. It feels like just that the majority of them don’t really haven’t done any SEO at all. It’s like a lot of people that come to me—it’s either people that know SEO existed, they had their site for like a decade or something and they’ve wrote articles and it just naturally accumulated a lot of backlinks and they accidentally wrote a lot of articles and now everything just needs to be optimized in very simple terms and that produces an outstanding result because they already have a very strong website, they just don’t know it and don’t know what to do with it.
So it’s kind of, in most cases, just not knowing what to do or don’t have time to deal with that. So that’s why you want somebody else to take care of it. It’s mostly like a lot of little details that they don’t care about on their website that actually make a huge difference.
The First Thing to Fix: Meta Titles and Keywords
Jeremy Rivera
That makes sense. What would you say is your go-to element that you’re going to be fixing first? You know, somebody comes on board with you. What aspect of their campaign are you prioritizing? That will kind of wrap up this interview.
Benas
Yeah. So I’m going to talk from the perspective of keynote speakers, since this is the ones that I kind of now focus on. Because if we take different websites, you approach an e-commerce site way differently than you approach SaaS and you’d approach like a personal branding site differently.
So first thing—usually what I found is probably the biggest one—is all of the titles, meta titles of the website. Usually people don’t even have them. If they have them, they don’t have their name, they don’t have their main—imagine you’re like a speaker that wants to target keywords such as “leadership keynote speaker.” They don’t even have “leadership” anywhere mentioned on their website because they wanna differentiate themselves and it’s like “own your mind” or like—you don’t have the keywords.
And although for somebody that does SEO, that sounds like the most basic thing ever—this is why I kind of in a certain way enjoy working with keynote speakers since you do most basic SEO stuff and it works instantly. And then it provides them really good results and they start ranking for some keywords.
So the first thing I look at is just: Do you actually mention the keywords in the titles and the text? I mean, we don’t need a lot. If you want to rank for this keyword, we need to have a landing page for that keyword and we need to have it on your homepage and just a bit more branding in terms of that. So that’s the first thing. That’s probably the highest ROI thing that I do for my clients whenever they come on.
Fundamentals Win: Footwork in Karate, Title Tags in SEO
Jeremy Rivera
Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals. You know, if you’re learning karate and boxing, it’s footwork. If it’s SEO, then it’s headers, title tags, and you know, did you actually say what you do? And I could see the trap too of, “Oh, you know, I’m not just another keynote speaker. I’m re-envisioning your mind space for 2026.” You know, they want to—it’s kind of like an age-old battle of fighting with designers and salespeople to get the text on the homepage. They want to emphasize, “Oh, the customer support’s fantastic and we really deliver results.” And you’re like, “Dude, that’s the same sales catchphrase from a trash delivery truck to a major restaurant brand.” So if you’re saying the same thing, you’re not saying anything.
Benas
Yeah, exactly. And it’s just having this sort of fundamentals done is what can produce some good results for sure.
Connect with Benas
Jeremy Rivera
Well, thanks for your time. I know you’re freelance consulting, working on setting up that agency. Is there a particular social network people can find you on? Is it LinkedIn, I’m guessing?
Benas
It’s either LinkedIn or YouTube. I mean on LinkedIn, it’s more professionally geared towards keynote speakers and case studies and all that stuff. On YouTube, it’s more relaxed. I talk about my freelancing journey. I talk about how I’m building an agency. So just a lot of freelancing, entrepreneurship, and agency-type content. So whatever is your pick—that’s the social media you can go. You can also check out my website or read my thoughts on Substack.
