Unscripted SEO · Host: Jeremy Rivera · Guest: Stephanie Long, founder and CEO of Mrs. SEO and founder of Junction Jack · Recorded July 3, 2026
Stephanie Long has been doing SEO for almost two decades, and she has landed on the least fashionable position available right now: the fundamentals did not go away, and skipping them got more expensive.
She put it in one line, which is also the title of this episode.
“SEO is like the batter to your AI. You have to have it together, or you’re going to fail.”
She is not anti-AI. She uses the tools every day and says anyone who does not is being weird about it. She just checks them, out loud, in public, and she has receipts.
Listen to the full conversation on your podcast app of choice, or hit play above and follow along.
Two decades in, and the trust problem is the whole problem
Stephanie owns Mrs. SEO. She came up through an agency, then large companies, and now works directly with the CEOs and CMOs of woman-owned businesses. She is also building Junction Jack, a vetted SEO marketplace.
Her reason for building it is the sentence I keep coming back to.
“SEO is kind of like a black hole. You believe what you believe online unless somebody is good enough to really explain it to you.”
That is the buyer’s experience of our industry, described accurately. You reach into the box and you pull out a snake or you pull out gold, and there is no way to tell which from the outside.
“I really want people to get the right SEO help, and not all these bad actors I see out there.”
Vetted by AI, or vetted by a human
Here is the detail that makes her marketplace an actual argument and not just another directory.
She went and read the fine print on the big gig platforms.
“I do want to say about Fiverr and Upwork, because I did my research, they have a vetted section. But I went through it, and there’s a little tiny disclaimer at the bottom saying ‘vetted by AI.'”
Then the line that should be on the homepage:
“None of mine are vetted by AI. It is me, or I know them.”
Either she knows you from her SEO communities, or you apply and sit an interview with her. Years of experience is a requirement. And she was clear about the scope of what she is building:
“These are not full-time jobs. Everyone has a job. So these are projects, one-offs. If you’re looking for an audit, keyword research, that’s what it is.”
Not a job board. A project marketplace where the vetting was done by a person who has been in the field for twenty years.
Why $20 a month keeps winning the argument
I asked whether CEOs are still enamored with AI or starting to question it. Stephanie works with the decision makers directly, so she gets the honest version.
“People still think AI is going to do it for them.”
“I’m definitely not $20 a month.”
The problem is not that the chatbot is better. It is that the chatbot is visible and the SEO is not.
“Because they can’t see it, quote unquote, they don’t see the value. They wanna do ads.”
She has a media buying background, so she is not dismissing ads. She is describing the difference in what you own at the end:
“While you’re paying for the expert, you’re paying in knowledge to Google and the AI tools. You’re building your authority, versus just putting it in someone’s face.”
And her own behavior as a searcher: “I don’t click on ads. I have not clicked on ads for years.”
Her read is that the gap is education, not resistance. Once she gets in a room with an owner she can fix it. There are just far more owners than rooms.
Freelance is winning because clients want to talk to the owner
I asked about the three career paths this industry offers. Freelancer, in-house, agency. Stephanie answered with the client she had just taken on.
“They weren’t optimizing every page, because at agencies, my experience is you pay per page, and they were not paying for the whole website.”
Then the part that actually explains the referral:
“He never talked to anyone but his account executive. So he didn’t understand anything, because the SEO person was never on the calls. And he didn’t understand the reports, and the account executive didn’t understand the reports.”
She has been the SEO on the other side of that wall.
“I never talked to the clients. I just sent my report to the account executive, and that was that.”
Which is why her forecast is what it is:
“I’m seeing more people want to come to individuals, because what I’ve been told, and I totally agree, is you talk to me. You don’t talk to the account executive.”
I have worked at half a dozen agencies and fallen into the exact same pit. Five minutes with the client would have solved it. That was not how the shop was built.
The problem is not agencies as such, it is how the fulfillment is wired. When the specialist doing the work can actually get on the call, the wall disappears. That is the whole argument for agency SEO fulfillment that keeps the practitioner in the room instead of behind an account manager.
There is a second, more surprising shift underneath this one. Stephanie says clients are more interested in SEO now than at any point in her career. When she was the in-house solo SEO reporting to a CEO, nobody cared, they wanted open rates and post likes. Now her slot on a marketing call runs thirty minutes and there are still other channels waiting.
“People are really, really interested, and I think that’s great. So people weren’t, and now they are.”
Her theory: AI made the whole thing legible enough that people finally want in.
Trust but verify, because they have started lying
I brought up a conversation with Martin McGarry about LLMs having no opinions. They are built as the ultimate yes-man. And there is now published work showing these systems have been caught choosing to lie, not hallucinating, lying, unless you run a second model to observe the first one.
Stephanie did not need convincing.
“I use them too for information, right? I mean, who doesn’t, really? If you don’t, I think that’s weird at this point. But you need to verify.”
“Like, I click through the links. I actually ask: give me the data behind this. I am very suspect of these tools, but I love them at the same time.”
Then the test she ran and wrote up:
“I wrote a whole post about how I clicked through every single link on a query I did, and they were all broken links. So I don’t even know where that came from.”
The flip side of this turns into traffic. Tim Soulo and Patrick Stox at Ahrefs have both made the point: go check your 404s. Not because your site broke, but because ChatGPT imagineered a page you never published and started sending people to it. The machine decided that resource should exist. Build it and catch the traffic.
Chris Tweeten of Spacebar Collective has the cleanest framing of where that leaves us. SEO is not being replaced by AI. Your SEO job is being replaced by somebody who is properly using AI.
SEO is the batter to your AI
Stephanie’s position on entry-level talent follows from all of it.
“When I learned SEO almost 20 years ago, I was entry level, right? I think that was fine at that time. I don’t think that’s fine anymore.”
Not because newcomers cannot learn. Because they should learn next to someone who has been in it long enough to catch the tools lying.
“I’m still about traditional SEO. You have to have your bottom line.”
Michael McDougald made a related point to me recently, that the processes we run through ChatGPT are not new, just slightly expanded. In 2008 I used a content spinner to build twenty city pages for a realtor who was not going to write twenty city pages. Stephanie did the same thing at her agency job for car dealerships, swapping a couple of words to call it unique.
The tools got enormously better. The judgment requirement did not go away.
“It’s only as good as the person using it, right? It’s going to have to guess if you don’t tell it exactly what you want, or as precise as you want.”
Where she does like them: she is a writer, she gets writer’s block, and a chat tool gets her unstuck. Give me another word for this. Help me start this. Melissa Popp of RicketyRoo makes the adjacent case on LinkedIn, that using AI to discover vetted resources and hard-number data sources is a genuinely rich vein, because that data was never worth anybody’s time to publish and index properly.
Is Google killing the publisher deal on purpose
I asked whether Google is intentionally or unintentionally breaking the old push-pull between publishers and search.
“Intentionally. I do.”
Her evidence is what she watches happen in the results. Google has a relationship with Reddit, she saw the Reddit founder speak at Possible in Miami, and she thinks the push toward forums is deliberate. Layer on AI Overviews, featured snippets and sponsored posts.
“It’s really a push to stay above the fold, which we’ve always talked about as SEO people. But I think it’s a push to really fund these other types of forums and chat tools.”
She also flagged the money angle from the client side: “Reddit ads are now becoming pretty big for my clients.”
My version of this, worked out with Martin, is that the Helpful Content Update was never really asking whether content is helpful to a reader. If every plumber in the country publishes a “how to plug a leak” page, that index is enormous and mostly unmonetizable. The question the update answered was whether the content is helpful to Google’s ability to make money on search. So the rewards got narrowed to what monetizes.
Reddit is a disproportionate organic winner. The relationship is recursive. And the ongoing lawsuits keep surfacing the internal detail that the page was designed to squeeze margin on PPC, deliberately, past the point earlier generations of the company would have tolerated.
The IVF clinic that took a year to earn the machines’ trust
Stephanie has worked construction, ecommerce, car dealerships, tire dealerships. The client she calls her most challenging, in a good way, is a San Francisco IVF clinic.
“They’re an IVF clinic, and they’re very unique. It’s about trust.”
“I noticed, with the chat tools, they are very reluctant. It’s taken them over a year to serve up my client. And I think it’s because it’s medical, and they’re very wary of it, wanting to give users the right experience.”
Over a year. Which meant the content had to be sharper than anything she had done before.
“We’ve had to be very intentional with our content, more so than I’ve ever been. Very, very specific.”
What worked: her client publishes real IVF success rate data. Not marketing claims, actual numbers. Plus what her care looks like, why her, and a lot of FAQs pitched at the chat tools specifically. Hyper-local, because the clinic is in San Francisco and that constraint is the entire point. Compare that to her maternity-abroad client, where the correct answer is that we are everywhere.
For demand research she runs SEMrush and People Also Ask together. She got into a friendly argument with an Ahrefs-only colleague who said PAA is not exact query data. Stephanie’s answer was that it has worked for her, so it stays in the process.
Talk to the client. Then build the link.
I spent thirty minutes that same morning on a call about precast concrete walls, learning that the client’s real pitch is protection against direct weapons and EMPs, delivered fast, to spec, and adjustable in a way poured concrete cannot be. None of that was on the website. No tool was going to hand it to me.
There was a time I did SEO without ever talking to a client and got away with it. Search volume covered a lot of sins. It does not anymore.
The same gap opens up after the click. Ignitvio’s Lead Response Study mystery-shopped 1,824 local businesses across five metros and five trades, and reports that 68% never replied within 24 hours, a median response of 68 minutes, and only 5% inside five minutes. You can earn the ranking and still lose the lead to a phone nobody answers, which is why inbound lead response is worth auditing if you are the one delivering the traffic.
Stephanie is not worried about the economy for good SEO.
“Once you can give your value and demystify things, people do understand why it’s so important.”
The same shift made link building easier to explain. You can skip the algorithm lecture entirely. We need to show up elsewhere to prove that we are worthy. That is the whole pitch, and it is true for Google and the LLMs both.
Clients are now the ones bringing it up. “What other links have you got? Where else can we go? I’ve got to hire a PR person, can you give me what she should pitch?”
Two plays from the episode worth stealing:
The two-way Q&A. For clients who will not pitch a guest post because it feels self-serving, Stephanie suggests a Q&A swap with someone else in the industry. Both sides get a link. “That’s been pretty successful, because people are hesitant to ask to only be, I’m just trying to serve me.”
Ask for attribution, not a link. An old play of mine from the expert-roundup era. Take the contributor quotes, turn them into a graphic, send it back with the collateral, and point at the post they wrote six months ago where it would fit. Say attribution instead of link and it lands about eight times out of ten. Considerably better than the broken-link email people are somehow still sending.
Bought backlinks, and then bought traffic
The new client with the bad backlink profile had a second layer to it.
“I didn’t actually know this, so if you know this, I guess I’m behind: I didn’t know you can buy traffic to your website. And they were doing that as well.”
The PPC person surfaced it. Nobody had flagged it before that.
It works like steroids. Stop boosting and you super tank, and the longer you run it, the likelier the hit lands.
“All these scams, people don’t know what to sift through.”
Which loops the whole conversation back to where it started. The sifting is the service. That is what she is selling, and that is what the marketplace exists to guarantee.
Where to find Stephanie Long
- Junction Jack: junctionjack.co – her human-vetted SEO marketplace for projects, audits and keyword research. Note the .co, not .com.
- Mrs. SEO: mrsseo.co – her consultancy. Also .co, not .com.
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/steph-l
- Instagram: @mrs_seo_
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