From the Host: Jeremy Rivera on Digital Marketing, Growth & Paid Search
SEO doesn’t exist in a vacuum — and the most effective practitioners I’ve interviewed understand the full digital marketing stack: paid search, conversion optimization, audience research, international expansion, and the industry intelligence that helps you anticipate what’s coming next. The guests on this page bring perspectives from paid media, growth strategy, website conversion, and the business of digital marketing that complement and sharpen everything on the SEO side. The best organic programs I’ve seen are run by people who understand the full funnel — not just the traffic acquisition piece.
“Traffic is a proxy. It always has been. If you see the graphs looking bad, ask: are you actually losing sales or are you just losing traffic? People still need to go and buy your thing.”
— Ernesto Ortiz, SEO practitioner
Why Full-Funnel Thinking Separates Good SEOs from Great Ones
The SEOs who build the most business value are the ones who understand what happens after the click. Conversion rate, user intent alignment, paid search dynamics, and the behavioral psychology behind purchase decisions all shape whether organic traffic actually turns into revenue. The practitioners on this page have spent careers at the intersection of these disciplines — and their perspectives on the full digital marketing picture are essential context for any serious SEO practitioner.
Episodes on Digital Marketing, Growth & Paid Search
Hot, Warm, Cold: Greg Merrilees’ Intent Framework That Turns Visitors Into Actual Leads
Greg Merrilees — Founder, Studio1 Design
Greg’s cold/warm/hot traffic intent model is one of the most practically useful website conversion frameworks I’ve encountered. His case that pretty websites lose conversions — and that design decisions must be made with traffic temperature in mind — fundamentally changes how you think about landing pages, homepages, and the relationship between organic traffic source and on-page conversion design.
Jeremy Yang on Paid Ads Strategy and the SEO-SEM Divide
Jeremy Yang — PPC Specialist | Managing $450K/month in ad spend
Jeremy manages nearly half a million dollars in monthly ad spend — which gives him a perspective on paid search dynamics that most SEOs never develop. His take on why exact match is dead, the “bullets in the chamber” platform diversification framework, and what seven years of PPC teaches you that no certification will is one of the most practically useful paid search episodes I’ve recorded.
International SEO: Unlocking Global Markets with Christina Spaulding
Christina Spaulding — International SEO Specialist
Christina’s work on multilingual SEO and international market expansion covers the technical and strategic reality of global search — hreflang implementation, translation quality (DeepL vs. ChatGPT), and why targeting Spanish-speaking customers doesn’t require international shipping infrastructure. Her statistic — that 85% of buyers prefer to purchase in their first language — is one of the most compelling business cases for international SEO investment in the library.
The Captivating Fortune 500 Growth Advisor Story of Kevin Indig
Kevin Indig — Growth Advisor & Author of Growth Memo Newsletter
Kevin’s work advising Fortune 500 companies on growth strategy gives him one of the highest-altitude perspectives in the library on how large organizations think about organic and paid growth together. His frameworks for growth strategy at scale — and his newsletter, which is one of the most read in the growth space — make him one of the most useful guests for anyone managing significant organic programs alongside paid investment.
Barry Schwartz: The SEO News Editor with 40,000 Stories to Tell
Barry Schwartz — CEO, RustyBrick & Founder, Search Engine Roundtable | 20+ years covering Google updates
Barry has covered more Google algorithm updates, industry news, and search industry moments from the front row than anyone alive. His perspective on the patterns in Google’s behavior — and what two decades of real-time coverage has revealed about how the industry actually evolves versus how it’s perceived to evolve — is essential context for any serious SEO practitioner.
From SEO Pioneer to Audience Research Champ: Rand Fishkin’s Epic Journey
Rand Fishkin — Founder, Moz & SparkToro
Rand built Moz into the defining SEO tool of a generation — and then left to build SparkToro, a tool for audience research. His journey is one of the defining entrepreneurial arcs in digital marketing, and his current thinking on why understanding where your audience actually spends time changes everything about how you approach content and distribution strategy is one of the most strategically important conversations in the library.
Why Communication Skills Trump Technical Knowledge: Lessons from Josh Squires of Amsive
Josh Squires — Associate Director, Amsive | 17 years in SEO
Josh’s 17-year career at major agencies has given him one of the most grounded perspectives on what actually gets SEO programs unstuck inside large organizations: communication. His case that the best technical SEOs are also the best communicators — and that communication skill is the ceiling on what technical expertise can accomplish — is one of the most consistent themes across every agency episode in the library.
An Insider View of Profit-Led Money Hat SEO with Jamie I.F.
Jamie I.F. — SEO Affiliate & SaaS Marketer
Jamie’s profit-led SEO approach evaluates every channel decision against direct revenue contribution. His grey-hat perspective on monetization models and what the profit-led approach to organic search looks like in practice sits at the intersection of affiliate marketing, paid growth thinking, and channel-agnostic revenue optimization that most brand-first marketers avoid examining.
Jeremy’s Key Takeaways: Digital Marketing, Growth & Paid Search
- Traffic without conversion strategy is waste. The single most common gap in organic search programs is that the traffic acquisition is strong and the post-click experience is broken. Fix the funnel before scaling the top of it.
- Design for traffic temperature, not just aesthetics. A homepage that converts cold organic traffic perfectly will fail for warm paid traffic — and vice versa. Greg Merrilees’ hot/warm/cold framework should inform every landing page decision.
- Paid and organic are complementary, not competitive. The businesses that grow fastest use paid search data to identify organic opportunities, and organic rankings to reduce paid costs on proven keywords. Integrate the two strategies.
- Audience research precedes channel selection. Rand Fishkin’s contribution: before deciding which channels to invest in, understand where your audience actually spends time. SparkToro exists because most marketers skip this step.
- International opportunity is consistently underinvested. The 85% of buyers who prefer to purchase in their native language represent a reachable audience that most English-first businesses completely ignore. International SEO ROI is often higher than domestic for businesses with global product-market fit.
- Platform diversification is now table stakes. Relying on a single paid or organic channel is a business risk. Jeremy Yang’s “bullets in the chamber” framework applies to organic as much as it does to paid.
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