Chris Rodriguez spent roughly a decade marketing in music and entertainment before pivoting to tech in 2010. Today he’s a senior growth marketer at iExcel, a boutique demand-generation shop working across B2B SaaS, legal tech and e-discovery, ed tech, sports tech and real estate tech. On this episode of The Unscripted SEO Interview he gave the most disciplined answer we’ve had to the question everybody’s circling: what exactly is an SEO for, now that a chatbot will answer first?
His answer isn’t a defense of SEO. It’s a division of labor.
“Trust but verify” is the whole relationship with AI
Asked why anyone should trust him over a tool, Chris didn’t posture. The best outcome, he said, is working with a practitioner while trusting-but-verifying against AI, so you can tell which recommendation comes from seasoned experience and which is genuinely current cutting-edge information — and then decide for yourself which is the bolder move.
“I don’t perceive any of these types of tools as a threat, more so as the new tool for experts like yourself and myself to master.” — Chris Rodriguez
He built his SEO chops by brute force as a growth marketer, because growth marketers have to be at least above average in several channels at once. Everything from keyword research to meta fields, H1s and URL slugs was learned manually, pre-AI, on live accounts.
The number everyone misreads: search volume is an annual average
Before the strategy, a correction that costs agencies real money:
“That number is the monthly average. So if the number is 1,000, then what they’re saying is 12,000 searches have happened this year. That does not equate to 1,000 happened each month.” — Chris Rodriguez
In several of his verticals that annual total lands in a 75/25 split across a four-month window. He has a summer camp client — nobody is searching for summer camp in November. If you’re forecasting off a flat monthly figure, you are forecasting a year that never happens. Reading the seasonality chart, and interpreting whether you’re in a dip or ahead of a spike, is the marketer’s job, not the tool’s.
Keyword difficulty over volume — and a hard ceiling
The metric Chris ranks second, and often first, is difficulty.
“If your keyword difficulty from a scale of 0 to 100 is 75, in iExcel’s world, we exclude that from our strategy wholeheartedly. We are only playing in decent availability to rank, pretty good availability to rank, really good, excellent. We’re only playing with can this rank equals yes.” — Chris Rodriguez
Operationally that means a ceiling of 30. At 10 or below, he’s comfortable putting his reputation on the outcome — not on which specific term lands where, but on the fact that something in the matrix will reach page one. The whole point, in his framing, is ranking in the top three, ideally the top slot; anything you can’t realistically get there is noise.
“Keyword difficulty is the second, and I would argue often more important than the volume, especially in the B2B space.” — Chris Rodriguez
Jeremy pushed on the modeling side — volume to expected click-through rate to conversion rate to revenue — and Chris runs the same spreadsheets off published CTR benchmarks, with the honest caveat that no one can promise slot one, and that something moving from 26th to 5th is a real win even when the model wanted better.
Then he named what’s broken about the benchmarks themselves: a ChatGPT-style answer now sits above the organic first result and above the ads, and it’s become a genuine referral source in Analytics. Whether you treat that as organic or as its own channel is, in his words, all gray area right now.
The links argument: what he won’t do, and what he does first
Jeremy brought a real anecdote to test the orthodoxy — a menswear client who bought 25 comment-spam links from bad sites, changed nothing else, and gained rankings and traffic. Chris didn’t dispute the result. He declined it anyway:
“No matter that it works, to never entertain that arena of sketchiness. I just firmly believe that Google continues to update its algorithm, and just because it’s working right now, they’ll figure it out soon, and you’ll get docked or penalized.” — Chris Rodriguez
(The punchline Jeremy added: the target keyword was “banana hammock,” the link sat immediately after a casino link and immediately before a Viagra link, on a client who had specifically said he didn’t want adult-content association. Co-occurrence matters.)
What Chris does instead is invert the usual order. Rather than starting with outreach — which he estimates converts at roughly 1 in 100 even when your content is good — he starts with the 20% of link acquisition you fully control: do-follow, non-spammy profile and directory placements. Pinterest is the example he gives, and he’ll insist a client build a profile there even if Pinterest is irrelevant to the brand. Ten, fifteen, twenty solid backlinks exist purely as a function of hustle before you ever ask a stranger for anything.
Jeremy’s version of the same idea is the mirror: your business has a reflection in the digital world, and much of link building is just filling in the parts of the reflection that haven’t been drawn yet — business profiles, Wikipedia entries, social handles, industry associations, partners, suppliers. The hard part isn’t the digital half. It’s getting the organization to do something real that’s worth reflecting.
Physical meets digital — chosen by keyword first
Chris is emphatic about real-world activity, with one sequencing rule that most people get backwards: pick the keywords before you pick the project.
Choose webinar topics against highly rankable terms and you get something current and non-salesy that also earns ranking opportunities. Run a real event and the press release — on sites that are actually crawled and do-follow — can be titled with those same terms, then re-cut as a blog post on your own domain for a double effect.
Jeremy’s addition is the syndication layer most SEOs never look at: Eventbrite feeds not just other event aggregators but data partnerships with local news and radio “this weekend” segments. After running a community trash cleanup for a local driveway company, he checked Gemini and Copilot for upcoming events — nothing before, and a week later the cleanup was there by name. The Reddit post that drove it was seen by more than 10,000 people, and one of the handful who showed up in person turned out to need driveway work.
Chris’s extension: keyword difficulty makes that work for organizations nobody searches for. A nonprofit wondering whether local businesses even know it exists can own something like “Queens community partnerships” at a difficulty of five or ten. Ten or twenty searches a month, but they are exactly the right ten or twenty.
The hyper-summary: dominate the third you control
Pressed for the single thing worth taking away, Chris gave a split rather than a tip:
“There’s things you control and things you don’t control as an SEO. So my recommendation is to fully understand every last aspect of what you control.” — Chris Rodriguez
Keyword research, word choice, every title, description and H1, every slug, every self-made profile and directory link — that bucket is maybe 33%, at best 50%, of SEO.
“Rather than seeing that as glass half empty, just crush it. Just dominate what you control.” — Chris Rodriguez
The remaining 50–66% is backlinks you don’t control, and he’s blunt about what actually earns them:
“The backlinks today, in my opinion, the ones that you don’t control, are based almost overwhelmingly on relationships. The only exception is if you have an absolute killer piece of content where it’s undeniable who wouldn’t want to link this.” — Chris Rodriguez
Which makes the discipline, in his phrase, glorified PR — and makes PR reps who never claim the SEO title some of the most effective link builders working. If you have neither a genuinely undeniable asset nor a well-connected PR partner, the honest move is to set client expectations accordingly.
He also refused to let technical SEO go unmentioned: crawl budget, sitemap structure, error hygiene, the health score nobody brags about. It’s incremental in both directions — death by a thousand cuts, or, as he put it, winning by a thousand baby steps.
The challenge he left everyone with
Asked for a tip, Chris gave a problem instead:
“We’ve all worked so hard to get something on the fourth slot, third slot, second slot, first slot. Well, now the first slot is the seventh slot. You have to scroll twice on your mouse to get to the first organic slot. That’s crazy.” — Chris Rodriguez
Getting your content into the generated answer is the open question, and he’s refreshingly unwilling to pretend it’s solved. Plenty of people claim a best practice; his position is that it’s still the wild west, that you should experiment against whatever framework you find credible, and that there is no master solution yet. When his team solves their version of it, he says he’ll share the tactics.
Connect with Chris
Chris Rodriguez works with iExcel — the site carries detailed case studies, several of them SEO-specific. He’s been committed to LinkedIn for twenty years, since before his tech career, and that’s where he’s easiest to reach.
Listen to the full episode on Castos. For more conversations like this one, explore the Unscripted SEO archive, or try the keyword difficulty and clustering tools at SEO Arcade.
