Mike Ginley has spent a decade in digital marketing across agency, in-house, and freelance seats. He works full time for Centerwell and runs Mike Ginley Digital Consulting on the side, helping local mom-and-pop businesses build and hold onto a web presence. On this episode of The Unscripted SEO Interview he gives Jeremy Rivera a ground-level practitioner’s view of what actually works right now — and it is far less exotic than the LinkedIn discourse suggests.
Most small businesses arrive already burned
A lot of Mike’s clients show up frustrated. They have paid an agency before, the work never moved anything, and now every proposal reads like the last one. His answer is radical transparency: a documented plan, honest timelines, and a partnership posture instead of a vendor posture. He wrote an article on digital-eat.com about how to properly hire an agency or consultant, and now sends it to every prospect before they talk money.
SEO is the foundation, not the whole building
Mike is direct about the discovery landscape: SEO still underpins everything, but the days when it was sufficient on its own are gone. A local business that wins today shows up on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, sponsors things in its own community, and shows up offline where its customers already are. Zero-click impressions still matter in that model — they build the brand awareness that produces a branded Google search at the bottom of the funnel weeks later. His own client roster runs to companies like Accel Electrical Technologies and Welsh Windows Plus, which is exactly the kind of business that cannot afford to be invisible in a fifteen-mile radius.
What an LLM can’t do
Both of us pushed back on the idea that AI tools are replacing SEO expertise. An LLM is a calculation — it predicts the next word from training data. It has no experience. It has never run a wiring crew or replaced a window in February. It cannot produce the kind of insight Mike’s clients hand him for free out of decades in their trade.
Mike took Brittany Mueller’s course on actionable AI for marketers and came out more skeptical, not of AI’s usefulness but of how it is being positioned. He has built an internal linking agent and uses Notebook LM for content planning, and every output routes back through a human writer or the business owner. The LLM belongs earlier in the process, not at the end of it. The computer between your ears is still the best tool in the stack.
Fix the foundation before you argue about the fancy stuff
Mike’s soapbox moment is the most useful thing in the episode. While the SEO community debates llms.txt and serving markdown to AI crawlers, the actual sites in front of him have pre-COVID content contradicting the homepage, broken internal linking, and images over a megabyte on the hero. His audit process is built around getting the foundation right first — and that ordering is not a lack of ambition, it is where the return actually is.
The consultant problem nobody advertises
I passed along a question from business consultant Brandon Moon about the hardest part of running a freelance practice, and Mike gave the most refreshingly honest answer I have gotten: he forgets to bill. He gives away hours. His advice to every other consultant listening is unglamorous — use real software, track your time, and treat the work as the transaction it is.
Connect with Mike Ginley
Find Mike at mikeginley.com and on LinkedIn, and browse his free directory for digital marketers at digital-eat.com.
For more conversations like this, explore the topical hubs at Unscripted SEO or try the keyword research tools at SEO Arcade.
