🎙️ Unscripted SEO Podcast
Benas Leonavicius on Freelancing, AI Search, and Building an SEO Agency
Why SaaS clients can’t scale, how to actually appear in ChatGPT, and the entity-centric shift that’s changing what digital visibility means.
I’m Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted SEO podcast host. I’m here with Benas, who’s going to introduce himself. He’s a freelancer. Give us some of your background, some of your credentials and experience that should make you trustworthy.
“Jeremy Yang on Paid Ads Strategy and the SEO-SEM Divide” — managing $450K/month in ad spend, why exact match is dead, and the bullets-in-the-chamber framework for picking the right ad platform.
— Jeremy Yang, Digital Goliath | Listen: Jeremy Yang on Paid Ads & the SEO-SEM Divide →
Meet Benas: From Lithuanian Freelancer to Agency Builder
Benas Leonavicius has spent 10 years in the SEO trenches — from working with large e-commerce sites to navigating enterprise SaaS SEO. Now he’s building an agency focused on keynote speakers, authors, and coaches, where basic SEO fundamentals deliver outsized results.
Key Takeaways
- SaaS companies are terrible clients for freelance scale. The JIRA ticket trap, multiple stakeholders, product changes disrupting strategy — you can only handle one or two at a time, which kills growth.
- 90% of keynote speakers have zero SEO optimization. They avoid their target keywords to sound unique — the differentiation trap. The highest-ROI fix is adding target keywords to meta titles.
- The 25% consistency problem with AI search. Ask ChatGPT the same question 100 times — you get consistent answers only 25% of the time. Tracking AI visibility is nearly impossible with current tools.
- To appear in ChatGPT, you need to be on speaker bureau sites and topical listicles. Those are the primary sources LLMs are drawing from for expert recommendations.
- Digital visibility is shifting from website-centric to entity-centric. Your brand across third-party sources, podcast appearances, and expert attributions matters as much as your own site’s rankings.
The SaaS SEO Nightmare
“Although I can provide a lot of value to SaaS companies, at the end of the day, I might only have one or two clients like that per month, and then I cannot scale.”
The core problem: SaaS companies require deep integration with product, engineering, and marketing teams. Every change goes through a ticket system. Priorities shift with product roadmaps. The SEO work is real — but the client relationship structure makes scaling a freelance practice nearly impossible.
Keynote Speaker SEO: The Overlooked Niche
Benas’s current focus: building Talk Thrive Agency, targeting keynote speakers who have strong websites, real expertise, and virtually no SEO optimization.
“Imagine you’re a speaker that wants to target keywords such as ‘leadership keynote speaker.’ They don’t even have ‘leadership’ anywhere mentioned on their website because they want to differentiate themselves.”
The fix is often as simple as adding the target keyword to the page title. For a speaker with an established domain and real credibility, that single change moves the needle significantly.
“Four weeks into a controlled experiment, we had our answer. Control group: down 5%. Test group: up 25%. The content we’d written specifically for LLM readability was outperforming legacy content across both traditional and AI-driven search.”
— Paul Baterina, SEO Lead at REVOLVE · Paul Baterina on the controlled experiment that proved LLM-optimized content outperforms legacy pages in both traditional and AI-driven search →
Connect with Benas Leonavicius
- Website: benasleo.com
- Keynote Speaker SEO: talkthriveagency.com
- Substack: benasleo.substack.com
The Unscripted SEO Podcast features candid, unscripted conversations with SEOs and digital marketers. Hosted by Jeremy Rivera.
