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Bridget Willard has spent the last fifteen years marketing SaaS products on X and with blog posts, and her whole case for it fits in four words: SEO is words. On this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, I asked the founder of Bridget Willard, LLC why we should trust her, and she walked me through why a tweet is a crawlable page, why Google now files her posts under News, and why the machines only learn what you feed them in public. Here’s the recap. Watch the full conversation on YouTube, listen to the episode, or subscribe to Unscripted SEO so the next one lands in your feed.
Why Bridget still treats a Twitter handle like a URL
When ownership of the platform changed, I assumed a Twitter-centric marketer had the roughest ride of anybody. Bridget said the worst part was the analytics, which kept going and coming and changing. Only three metrics carried over from before to after: replies, profile visits and engagement. That’s a real problem when you’re stitching together four and a half years of data for a long-standing client.
Among the web developers, SaaS founders and WordPress people she works with, she’d guess maybe 20% left. The split she saw ran along political leanings and brand alliances, not niches. She stayed, and her reason is pure search.
To me, I’ve always seen a Twitter handle as a URL. And for SEO, I mean SEO is words. — Bridget Willard
Her list of platforms that matter is short: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. For B2B, it’s LinkedIn and Twitter, hands down. Claim your profiles on the rest, and add YouTube if you can. She lays out the long version in her post on Twitter as an SEO strategy.
SEO is words, and words are SEO. The computer is still reading ones and zeros, no matter if it’s an LLM or human or Google indexing you. — Bridget Willard
Google files her tweets under News
If you doubt the value of X, Bridget’s test is cheap. Set up Google Alerts for your own name. She gets one every day, flagging a tweet that mentions her or a reply she wrote. Her point: it’s there and that’s what they’re learning from.
Then she found something stranger. Pulling news references for her media kit, she searched her own name and clicked the News tab.
I just typed Bridget Willard and then I went to the news tab and there were all these tweets. And I was like, This is news? Okay, Google. That makes me double down even more. — Bridget Willard
It makes a twisted kind of sense. Journalists at the Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic broke stories on Twitter for years, so Google treating it as a news channel isn’t a stretch. If you’ve filed social media under not-my-job, ask the same three questions you’d ask of any page. Is it crawlable? Is the link discoverable? Is the text digestible? The answer is yes, yes and yes.
Feed the machine, because LLMs only learn what’s public
Bridget runs her own loop. She posts a hot take, screenshots it and hands it to ChatGPT, along with PDFs and anything else she publishes. Then she asks Google’s AI Overviews a question in an incognito window to see what comes back.
They’re only gonna learn if we give it words. — Bridget Willard
Strip away the technical work on your own site and she sees everything else as off-page SEO. Her definition is the shortest one I’ve heard: do you want to be found? Yes or no? That’s SEO.
I pushed the money side of that on tape. There are robots running around with wallets now, and Matt Brooks of SEOteric put it to me as optimizing for the robot’s wallet, not just the human’s: give the agent the trust signals and details it needs to talk to your LLM and make a purchase.
That’s also why she pushes clients toward video. A lot of people hesitate to share their expertise because they’re afraid someone will steal it. She doesn’t buy it, and she points to a WordCamp US talk around 2016 that predicted AI would make websites irrelevant. It sounded like The Matrix then. Now we’re building browsers for LLMs and agents.
You can’t control it, so you might as well feed the PR that you want it to know. That’s why transcripts from videos are gold. — Bridget Willard
My take on the same race, getting named by a model before the training data closes, is in how to get recommended by an LLM.
Bridget’s off-page routine is now an eight-step procedure: SEO SOP: Run X as Off-Page SEO and Check What Google and AI Learned – the one-page PDF is free inside The Vault.
Keep the conversation public until somebody asks for the DM
I asked whether the game on Twitter is to earn trust and then slide into DMs. Bridget’s answer started with LinkedIn, where you connect and get pitched immediately, and that was true before agents started doing it for us.
It’s like I just met you, you wanna come to my house, look at all my childhood photos. It’s weird, okay? — Bridget Willard
She treats Twitter like a Chamber of Commerce mixer. Two people talk, somebody overhears and asks, “you do SEO services?”
You can step back, invite other people into the conversation. And as those side conversations go, somebody might say, Hey, I really need you for this. Can we set up a meeting? That’s when it goes into the DMs, the same way you would do in person, right? — Bridget Willard
Her phrase for what the screen does to us is “just me and 18 inches.” We forget there’s a human on the other side. So she says please and thank you to the LLMs, on purpose, because she’s training them on how she’d behave. An AI meeting tool she uses made small talk with her before a call, slipped a typo into it, and followed up by email: “whoops, sorry about the typo.” Her takeaway: trust comes from vulnerability. Pick some part of your life to be public about, golf or homeschooling or whatever it is, so you’re more than what you sell.
Small talk builds the trust before the sale
I brought up the insurance guy who can only talk about whole life policies. Nobody wants to hang out with him. Bridget’s fix is the game last night.
Small talk is the social glue. And the great thing about something like Twitter is that we get all that done. — Bridget Willard
By the time you get to the video call or the meetup, the trust has already been built. “You’re recognized, you’re trusted, and that’s what leads to the sale.” She’s written about the same sequence in recognition comes before trust, and trust comes before sales and in her piece on small talk in business relationships.
She used my wife’s tattoo apprenticeship as the example. Get-ready-with-me videos work because you spend hours with your tattoo artist and trust them with the design. Watch enough of them and you feel like you know her. “And because you’re recognizable and I’ve been following you, now I trust you.”
A brand needs a human voice, and somebody at the keyboard
I set this one up with something I’d been talking through with my friend Michael McDougald of Right Thing SEO: once you understand the behavioral levers, there’s a pull to use them to manipulate people instead of for good, and corporate speak gets so rigid it loses its connection to humanity. Bridget’s answer was the brand voice.
The day before we recorded, PHP vulnerabilities leaked. One of Bridget’s clients is Rocket.net, and she was on Twitter until eleven at night.
You can’t just post and ghost. — Bridget Willard
Filling a Buffer queue isn’t the work. You have to be there for the replies, and for what other people are saying. When WordPress folks posted that their host had already patched it, she sent high-five GIFs, because in that community you can celebrate each other’s wins without it being weird. Her general manager told her it was the right call. You can’t hire somebody off the street to make it, because they don’t know the community. Her post on why the reply is the power move covers this in more depth.
Industry culture beats the platform
A financial compliance client of hers scripts conference panels, which baffled her until she saw why. Compliance people are used to submitting their answers before they’re approved to publish. The FINRA guidance on social media mostly asks that it be monitored, but the fear sets the behavior.
They’re still gonna behave the same way regardless of the platform they’re on. — Bridget Willard
An HR contact told her the same thing: he says nothing because he’s monitored. “There’s a lot of lurkers and lurkers don’t show up in analytics.”
Attribution is kind of a lie
Big companies pit sales and marketing against each other for budget, then argue over whether a lead is marketing qualified or sales qualified. Bridget’s answer is yes, because a lead is a lead.
Does it really matter which child brought the lead to the parent? No. — Bridget Willard
Sales and marketing are siblings working toward the same goal. Attribution, at best, shows you the last thing that happened, not the years of trust that led up to it, when the customer can’t remember how they first heard about you. I’d talked with Keith Perhac of SegMetrics the day before, and he said much the same: pick your poison between first touch and last touch instead of trying to thread the whole path.
The waving GIF that moved sales for two weeks
Her favorite campaign came from her time as director of marketing at GiveWP. She called it Saturday morning cartoons. When the team couldn’t attend a WordCamp, she watched the conference hashtag and sent a team photo wishing everyone a great event, so they were present even though they weren’t there. Devin Walker suggested a GIF of the whole team waving, Brady Bunch style. A colleague then ran it as a PPC campaign to different geographic areas and tracked the sales that came from them.
And the sales were up for two weeks straight during those periods. — Bridget Willard
Her explanation: “Because we made the brand human.” The full story is in her GiveWP SaaS case study.
If you want the practitioner checklist version of this episode, read the SEO Arcade breakdown of Bridget’s off-page playbook. For my own take on what this changed in how I think about trust, see my reflection on jeremyriveraseo.com.
Connect with Bridget Willard
- Website: bridgetwillard.com
- X: @BridgetMWillard
- LinkedIn: Bridget Willard
- Read: Yes, X (Twitter) is still relevant
The Unscripted SEO Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and find every episode at unscriptedseo.com.
