Episode Interview: Greg Merrilees, Founder, Studio1 Design
Host: Jeremy Rivera | unscriptedseo.com
This is an edited excerpt — approximately 65% of the full conversation. Read the complete interview here.
Jeremy Rivera: Hello, I’m Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted podcast host. I’m here with Greg Merrilees, who’s going to introduce himself. And as usual, I’m going to ask him: why we should trust him.
Greg Merrilees: Greg Merrilees here — founder of Studio1 Design. We’re a website agency. We do conversion optimization, branding, and website design. We have a dev team as well, but we’re mainly a design business. I’ve had my business since the year 2000, and we’ve been doing websites for about 15 years. We’ve designed for over 2,000 small and medium-sized businesses — and even some Hollywood A-listers like Gary Goldstein, the director of Pretty Woman, and Sylvester Stallone. Why should you trust us? Only if you follow us, love our content, look at our folio, see the results we get for similar businesses, and reach out. Then you can decide if you trust us or not.
🗣️ Best Quotes
“The most important thing on your website is actually the copywriting — and this is coming from a designer.” — Greg Merrilees
“Clarity trumps everything else. Here’s what we do, here’s why you should choose us, here’s how you’re going to benefit.” — Greg Merrilees
“Social media is renting. You don’t own that asset. If you really want a serious business, you have to build an email list — and to do that, you need a website.” — Greg Merrilees
Do You Even Need a Website Anymore?
Jeremy Rivera: Controversial — I’ve heard some people say it. Why do we even need websites? We’ve got social media now, so do I really have to bother building a whole website?
Greg Merrilees: It depends on your business model. If you’re just starting out, you probably could vibe code a website and get away with it, and just do some things on social media to drive leads. But if you’re a serious business that’s been running for ten years — an online coach, a service business, an e-commerce brand — you’ve built SEO equity and brand equity. If you just decide to put everything on social media, that’s renting. You don’t own that asset. To build a serious business, you have to build an email list. And to do that, you need lead magnets. And to do that, you need a website — and a whole ecosystem of funnels off the back of it.
Jeremy Rivera: And to point out — ChatGPT is checking the SERPs and looking at your website for information about you. So you’ve got to have somewhere to put more information out, right?
Greg Merrilees: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. SEO is not dead — I don’t know why people keep saying that — because obviously AI gets all its information from Google and the search engines. If anything, amp up your content and you’ll keep getting great results. But the thing that’s shifted is that you also have to do more social media, YouTube, or LinkedIn to bring traffic to your website, rather than just relying on SEO.
The Cold / Warm / Hot Intent Framework
Jeremy Rivera: What do you bring to the table when it comes to understanding the intent of the searcher when you’re discussing building out a site for a new company?
Greg Merrilees: Intent is everything — because it’s pointless taking people to a website and expecting them to buy. 97% of people are just not ready. You have to think about their intent, whichever page they came in on, and ask: what is the most logical next step for them? We say there are three different levels of intent: cold, warm, and hot.
Cold Traffic
Greg Merrilees: If they’re cold and coming through a content page, don’t offer a sales call. Give them something of value in return for an email address. We put lead magnets inside the content — on desktop, a quick-links nav on the left and a sticky lead magnet CTA on the right, social proof on the page, and a second lead magnet at the very bottom.
Warm Traffic
Greg Merrilees: Warm traffic has been following your content on social or YouTube — they trust you a little more. So offer the cold lead magnet, but also offer something that takes more of their time: a free video, a free trial, a ten-step challenge. That builds more trust, and they’re more likely to take action.
Hot Traffic
Greg Merrilees: For hot leads, you don’t want to take them through a funnel. You just want to give them one thing to do — buy, or book a call. Remove navigation. Stack social proof. Give them that single action and nothing else.
Jeremy Rivera: A lot of people don’t take the time to think about their website beyond: you’re here, I’m going to hit you with a stick.
Greg Merrilees: Yeah — and a lot of people don’t look at their analytics at all. There’s a free tool called Microsoft Clarity that every website should have. It has heat maps, user recordings, and AI built in to give you recommendations. Pair it with Google Analytics, review it once a month, see where people exit — and then hypothesize what to test next.
Stop Chasing Website Design Trends
Jeremy Rivera: What is the du jour of web design right now? What are people saying ‘my website needs to do this’ about?
Greg Merrilees: Every year I used to put out content about website design trends. Now I did a video on ‘do not follow design trends’ — because nothing’s changed. The problem is designers get bored. The majority of these trends — parallax effects, immersive design, animations flying in as you scroll — they don’t convert. They distract people. Full breakdown here: Don’t Chase Website Design Trends in 2026.
Greg Merrilees: The most important thing on your website is actually the copywriting — and this is coming from a designer. Video backgrounds are the biggest conversion killer: they slow down the website and they take your eyes off the copy. You might win a design award with a fancy website — but have a look at your conversions. 90% of the time it won’t convert as well as a static website with strong copy. The data is in Studio1’s post: The Hidden Cost of Fancy Website Effects: Lost Conversions.
Copywriting & Positioning: Writing for the Hero, Not About Yourself
Jeremy Rivera: What is it about the sales mentality that is so opposed to literally saying what it is that you do?
Greg Merrilees: I have no idea — and they’re going to lose every time, because clarity trumps everything else. I love the book Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller — you’re meant to position your business as the guide and your prospects as the hero. Every bit of wording needs to reflect that. Here’s a simple test: count how many times you use ‘I’ or ‘we’ versus ‘you’ or ‘your.’ If you’re using more ‘I’ or ‘we’ — it’s about you, and you need to flip it.
Standing Out in Commoditized Local Markets
Jeremy Rivera: Local service businesses — lawyers, construction, remodeling — they’re kind of commoditized. How do you approach making those unique?
Greg Merrilees: It’s what we call brand positioning. We interview the client and their clients to figure out why people choose them over competitors. But anybody can do this: take your reviews and testimonials, put them into ChatGPT, and look for recurring themes. Not many businesses actually know themselves what is unique about them. We did this for Yoshua Law in Indiana. We built individual case studies with a before-and-after story — here’s what happened before they came to us, here’s what we achieved — backed up by video to get that emotional hook. Don’t just say ‘we’re the best.’ Talk about whatever that uniqueness actually is. It’s hard to find, but it’s in there somewhere. See how that approach drove results in Studio1’s post: How We Turned a Law Firm Redesign Into 60% More Conversions.
Lead Magnets in 2025: Interactive Tools Beat PDF Downloads
Jeremy Rivera: Lead magnets — what are they in this day and age?
Greg Merrilees: Gone are the days where people want to download a PDF and put it in the PDF graveyard. People want quick results. So we do a lot of vibe coding for lead magnets — interactive tools that ask questions and give people a score or a result instantly. For example, we built a macro calculator for Enterprise Fitness. It converts dramatically better than any PDF or free book excerpt they had before. See the full approach in Studio1’s post: How We Boosted a Fitness Business’ Bookings By 64%.
Jeremy Rivera: In 2015 a basic interactive widget would have been out of reach for anyone other than a very large brand. Now you can throw something together in Claude and host it on a domain. I love that concept.
The AI Sameness Problem: Why Vibe-Coded Brands All Look the Same
Greg Merrilees: Small businesses in general: sure, you can vibe code a website — but I believe it will negatively affect your brand. If you look at any vibe-coded website, they all look the same. They all look super boring. We’re using vibe coding ourselves to turn Figma designs into coded WordPress or Webflow pages — but it still requires a proper developer to get in there and tweak things. Just be careful. You can ruin your reputation if you get a vibe-coded website without putting real design behind it. My book — Next Level Website Design — and the free resources at nextlevelwebsitedesign.com/free — including a custom GPT trained on the whole book — can give you a solid blueprint to hand to a designer.
Jeremy Rivera: Stanford University did a study showing that all of the major chat models returned a tyranny of sameness — the same cultural references, the same uniform answers. That’s one of the flaws of using a prediction engine for creative purposes. It can only be as creative as its baseline training material. Since 2015, LLMs have been polluting the internet with more and more sameness. That snake eating its own tail effect is starting to take hold — the same factoid gets republished, crawled, republished again. Anybody in digital marketing should read Wolfram Alpha’s breakdown of how ChatGPT actually works — it is literally just predicting the next word in the sentence every single time.
Greg Merrilees: The thing that annoys me is that people can’t see the patterns ChatGPT produces in their scripts or emails. There’s always a section: ‘it’s not this, it’s not this, but it’s that.’ Look for that pattern — it’s a dead giveaway. I believe there’s always going to be room for a decent design business with decent clients. There are always going to be brands that need proper custom branding. The full take on what this means is in Studio1’s post: AI Killed Your Website Strategy: Here’s What Works Now.
Jeremy Rivera: Branding is the key. Google has turned up the requirements for brand signals — on your site and in third-party references. You need branded anchor text. You need links that represent your brand. Everybody can get a $20 subscription to Claude or ChatGPT. So if you’re going at that basic level, you don’t want to do the same thing as your competitor. That’s exactly what these tools are going to produce.
Greg Merrilees: Yeah, so true. Any niche now — if you look at an LLM website, you can spot them a mile away. There really is no differentiator. Just be careful: you ruin your brand unless you try not to be like anybody else in your niche.
Closing
Jeremy Rivera: Well, I appreciate your time and you being somebody who isn’t exactly like everyone else in your niche. Thanks for coming on. Last shout out to your business and any resources you want to mention.
Greg Merrilees: Thank you. Studio1 Design — the numeral one. Email me at greg@studio1design.com. The main resource is nextlevelwebsitedesign.com/free — get all the free stuff there.
Jeremy Rivera: Fantastic. Thanks so much, Greg.
Greg Merrilees: Thank you so much, Jeremy.
➤ Read the full interview transcript: https://www.gregmerrilees.com/podcast/unscripted-seo-interview-with-greg-merrilees
✅ Key Takeaways
- Your website is the only digital asset you truly own — social media is rented land. ChatGPT is reading your website right now to form answers about your brand.
- Intent determines everything on a page. Cold traffic gets a lead magnet. Warm traffic gets a deeper trust-builder. Hot traffic gets a stripped-down page with one clear action and no nav distractions.
- The most important element on any website is the copywriting — not the animations, not the video background, not the parallax. Clarity wins every time. Write for the hero (your prospect), not about yourself.
- Interactive lead magnets dramatically outperform PDFs in 2025. Tools that give prospects an instant result convert at a far higher rate than static downloads that end up in the PDF graveyard.
- AI-generated websites all look and feel the same. Google rewards brand signals and genuine differentiation. Looking like every other vibe-coded site in your niche is a brand liability, not a shortcut.
