Alyssa Evans thinks the marketing funnel is the wrong shape. On this episode of The Unscripted SEO Interview, the founder of Grow Your Strategy joins Jeremy Rivera with a replacement she calls the content ladder: show up at the most basic question someone in your niche asks, then at every rung of increasing complexity above it — including inside the LLMs that now answer those questions first.
Art major, science degree, growth strategist
Alyssa describes herself as both “a very creative and a very analytical person” — she started school as an art major and finished with a science degree, and she blends both worlds. She has always been in marketing in some form, whether for a large corporation, a small startup, or herself. Today she runs her own strategy company with a large content component, working as a growth strategist and meeting clients weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly depending on the engagement.
“Everyone will have an opinion, and they are valid in their world — but you have to stand your ground, and then the data will come later.” — Alyssa Evans
Break the silos: what product and sales already know
Most marketers stay segmented — the corporate “stay in your lane” reflex. Since going out on her own, Alyssa asks a different question on every campaign: what does the product team think, and what does sales think? Product knows the real constraints — what can ship now, what needs six months, what is trivial and would add a competitive edge. Sales knows how to communicate it. Pulling both in makes the work proactive instead of reactive, and she says results come faster because everyone has a say.
The first month is an audit, not a campaign
Alyssa spends the first month auditing rather than executing, because business owners arrive as archetypes. Some hate social media and think marketing is a waste of money. Some want to do everything and just need someone to go first. Some want to try all the things at once. You have to understand comfort levels before you can plan, then find out what actually matters to them — more demos, more membership signups, reaching an audience segment they have never touched. Only then do you audit what has worked and what has not. She is deliberate about setting expectations and being honest about what may not work.
Finding the niche — and why niches matter
Her work lands mostly in fintech and real estate tech, generally SaaS, with some cybersecurity. Often it is investors trying to bring people into syndications, raise money for investment properties, or adjacent opportunities like storage units and ATM investing — and her job is translating those big offers to an audience. Jeremy noted the pattern from other guests who fell into a vertical, from home-service specialists to the SEO work behind a manufacturer delivering precast concrete walls. Alyssa originally wanted health and wellness, ended up here, and likes it.
SaaS is a moving target
A SaaS product that stops changing dies, but the consumer moves at a snail’s pace compared to the release cycle. Alyssa’s fix is unglamorous: keep a change log on the website and keep customers updated on every change. Communicate what the product does and, more importantly, what it does to someone’s time. Video overviews on the homepage showing real workflows. Make it graphic and scannable, with the SEO and keywords layered in rather than bolted on.
Feedback loops that work — and the ones that burn brands
Talking to customers is the whole game. Some brands assign account managers who keep open communication with their best customers, and those star players become the MVP feedback source. Alyssa has also watched Slack and Reddit communities burn brands. A simple email poll works well. She points to an SEO brand called Searchable that runs a customer Slack where a product-team member replies directly to tech problems — they launched in November, built in public, and it feels hands-on.
“If you really start to talk to your customer like they’re building the product with you, you will just be much more successful.” — Alyssa Evans
Jeremy pushed on the natural extension: community becomes its own marketing channel. People who interact and get something positive out of it are word of mouth 2.0. Alyssa agreed — the internal feedback channel and the public community are the same asset viewed from two sides.
Auto-blogging is a liability, not an asset
Asked what worries her, Alyssa went straight at auto-blogging and anything AI-generated without human insight. It is not working for SEO, and much of the past eight months of her work has been fixing websites damaged by auto-generated content. There is simply too much copy-and-paste everywhere. If you want content that survives, that means real research, real social proof, and your own perspective — the case for human-certified, expert-sourced content.
Her read on what the models actually reward: LLMs favor content updated in roughly the last three months. Old content you have not touched is dead. Anything new needs to be formatted the way these tools structure their own research, so you are crawlable by AI and not just Google.
The content ladder
This is the frame worth stealing. Rather than top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel, Alyssa thinks in rungs: make sure there is always a base — someone’s initial question — and then track where it flows upward as the questions get more complex. You want to be found at that base level and all the way up. She found a niche market for one client this way; they now have six new clients in a segment they had never considered, purely through strategic blogging and organic traffic.
“You need to make sure that you’re found at that base level and working their way up — think of it as a content ladder.” — Alyssa Evans
Jeremy connected it to the end of the 2010–2020 playbook: publishing mountains of top-of-funnel content and hoping it trickled down. AI tools now filter most of that out. Publishing is not the problem — you just do not need the 500th article on how to stop a leaky faucet. Go deeper, and ask why thinking about the faucet in isolation was the wrong question.
Repeatability, and why you cannot chase one ranking
They dug into a wrinkle that breaks old reporting habits: ask an LLM the same question repeatedly and you get different results every time. That lower repeatability changes what you can promise a CEO who wants market potential measured in a single number. Alyssa’s answer loops back to fundamentals — create genuinely good content, not something posted because it is National Donut Day, and always add your own insight, research, and social proof.
Link building is quietly becoming networking
On authority, Alyssa sees community and networking growing precisely because it is no longer every person for themselves. Find the non-competitors in your space and affiliate with them. Cross-promote, integrate, start a referral program. Podcasts are a particularly good authority vehicle — you get ranked on YouTube, you have social, and it flows to a website or blog. The more you talk about a subject, the more crawlable you become. She has noticed more brands reaching out for guest blogging and sharing to build authority: you scratch their back, they scratch yours.
If you want the mechanics behind that, see the complete guide to link building and authority, or how Jeremy turns these interviews into podcast-powered link building.
Chapters
- 00:01 — Intro: continuous improvement as an operating principle
- 01:39 — From art major to growth strategist
- 03:51 — Her company today
- 05:52 — Cross-team collaboration
- 07:54 — First month is auditing, not acting
- 09:58 — The niche: fintech, real estate tech, SaaS
- 14:01 — SaaS’s moving target
- 16:20 — Change logs and communicating value
- 19:50 — Customer feedback loops that work
- 22:51 — Community as a marketing channel
- 23:30 — Auto-blogging and AI content
- 25:53 — The content ladder
- 27:17 — Top of funnel is dead; go deeper
- 29:39 — LLM repeatability
- 33:59 — Link building and authority in the AI era
- 35:28 — Community and networking as the new link building
- 37:31 — Where to find Alyssa
Connect with Alyssa
Find Alyssa at growyourstrategy.co, on LinkedIn, and as @growyourstrategy on Instagram and everywhere else. She is also launching a $9/month membership community for people building their own marketing — affiliate matchmaking between small companies, like-minded peers, and a monthly group coaching call.
Listen to the full episode on Castos or watch on YouTube. For more conversations like this, explore the Unscripted SEO topical hubs or try the keyword-research tool at SEO Arcade.
