Laura Hoot has been doing this since 2007. She got in on a whim, writing SEO copy in college in the era when you could throw a pile of keywords into an article and rank for it, and she is candid that she was watching her keyword density like everybody else. Her first job out of school was an “SEO slash customer support” hybrid at the vacation rental company Vrbo, back when HomeAway was the flagship brand. Twenty years later she leads SEO and AIO work at the agency GPO, on national brands with large location footprints.
She joined Jeremy Rivera on The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast for what turned out to be her first SEO podcast appearance of any kind.
“This is the first work podcast I’ve ever done, related to SEO. So that’s a pretty exciting milestone for me.”
That is worth flagging, because the take she brought is one the industry mostly hears from people with a book to sell, and she had never been on a mic to make the argument before.
Laura’s strongest play from this episode is written up as a runnable procedure: SEO SOP: Audit Blog Topics Against the Product Catalog — eight steps to give every blog topic a destination page and a CTA, kill or re-aim the ones that can name neither, and re-seed the calendar from the catalog outward. The one-page PDF is free inside The Vault.
The hot take: the market is hiring, not firing
Asked for her hottest take, Hoot described going back to LinkedIn after a stretch away, expecting the usual, and finding that the feed did not match anything she could observe.
“I think my hot take is I don’t think the industry actually thinks that SEO is dying. And I personally don’t see anybody like mass firings. I see actually lots of hirings and postings.”
Her framing of the work is a naming change rather than a discipline change. At her agency it is called discoverability, and she argues the rename is retroactive rather than new — she has always advised clients on social presence alongside search, so the job was never confined to blue links in the first place.
“we call it discoverability where we are, which I think is really apt, and probably was always what it was”
She reads the current moment as a second boom that rhymes with her first one. In 2007 SEO felt new even though it was not, work felt like invention, and there was real revenue moving. She thinks that is happening again — and that the practitioners best placed for it already have the foundation, because the SEO expert in most organizations is now also the Claude expert, the ChatGPT expert and the Gemini expert, without having to go earn a new degree to get there.
Rivera’s contribution to that thread was less patient. He described a recurring cast of “LinkedIn bros” who live on the bleeding edge and are reliably first to bleed out — the people for whom mobile Armageddon was going to end SEO, then voice search was going to end SEO. He noted that C-suite budgets did briefly freeze in December under the thrall of AI promises, and then Q1 came and went, and Q2 came and went, and the people making those promises could not deliver. What did die, in his read, was a specific lazy business model: four blog posts and four bought links a month for five thousand dollars a month.
“That’s gone. But it never should have been the model anyways.”
Same best practices, different order of operations
Hoot’s operational claim is narrower than a hot take and more useful. The checklist has not been rewritten. Unique header tags, a meta title that earns the click and carries the keyword, an accessible site — that is all still the job.
“I don’t really feel like the best practices are changing or even necessarily the tactics, but I do think the order of operations, right, which ones you focus on more so than others have shifted a little bit.”
The item she names as having moved up the list is JavaScript. Google has had years of practice working around it and will generally find the meta title and the H1 even when they are not in the delivered HTML.
“But sometimes the AI bots are less patient with websites that have heavy JavaScript.”
She is careful to note this is not a new recommendation wearing a new hat — keeping JavaScript from slowing your site down has always been on the list. It has simply become expensive to ignore. She also expects it may not stay that way. The bots are running tests the public never sees and improving fast, and the industry spent years predicting Google would eventually solve JavaScript, which it broadly did. The same thing may happen here, and the recommendation may stop carrying weight.
The other number she offered is the one most likely to get quoted out of context, so here it is in full. AI is not yet the traffic story people talk about it as.
“If you look at GA4’s AI-assisted traffic, it’s still a really small percentage for all the clients I work with. For now. For now.”
Why keyword research matters more, not less
The LinkedIn line Hoot pushes back on hardest is that keyword research is over. Her counter is a data argument. The historical question data sitting in Search Console, Semrush and Ahrefs is a record of how people phrased what they wanted before an LLM existed to phrase it to — and those are the same people. She treats that archive as the predecessor to the prompt, and the closest available proxy for how someone talks to Claude or ChatGPT today, given that the AI platforms are not handing over query data. She raised the possibility that the data does arrive eventually, most likely through the paid side and most likely by paying for it.
“there’s probably a whole flow chart of different deeper topics that people are going to the LLMs for”
Where that research pays off is in what it disqualifies. Hoot’s example is the seasonal blog post that exists because it is eye-catching in a newsletter — Valentine’s Day gift ideas, Halloween costume ideas — published by a business with no connection to either.
“But you are never gonna rank for it. And if you do, it’s never gonna do anything for you. It has nothing to do with your product catalog.”
Her fix is to redirect blog topics until they connect to the actual CTA. At her current agency the SEO team works directly with the blog and content team to curate topics, and she is blunt about the result: those blogs convert. She also thinks the quality-over-quantity slogan gets misapplied to catalogs. If a site sells across many categories, the number of genuine in-depth articles that catalog can support is close to limitless, and a real article beats an FAQ block stapled to the bottom of a product page. Those articles catch people in the ready-to-buy phase, not only the research phase. The conversion rate will not match the product landing page, but with volume and rankings behind it, she says, you can make a blog work hard for you.
Ten visits that convert beat thousands that don’t
The through-line of the episode arrived as an aside and became its thesis.
“I’d rather have 10 visits with two converting than thousands and thousands with nobody converting.”
Rivera had just walked through the case that produced it. He was working on a counseling site where one article’s organic traffic went three or four times up while the client was simultaneously reporting that they had lost half their keyword traffic and their rankings. Both things were true. The article was about detoxing your liver, and it had started surfacing for health-and-wellness detox queries — cod liver oil, mushrooms, colon cleanse, salt water baths — because it read as a medically supported answer to “how do I detox my liver.” None of that traffic was looking for medical detox for drugs and alcohol. The rankings were real, the traffic was real, and none of it converted.
His broader point was that the industry keeps treating a ranking as a proxy for a match. It is not. A ranking tells you a document was judged relevant to a query. It tells you nothing about whether the person behind the query had commercial intent, or was even in your market.
Local versus national is the biggest divider in the job
Hoot named this as the factor that has separated her projects more than anything else across twenty years, and the one she thinks is missing from most strategy conversations.
A national e-commerce brand can write one lifestyle article and route anyone in the country to buy the couch. A single-location business ranking nationally has a different problem. Google, asked what to do about a dog that barks too much, is not going to answer with map listings — it is going to find the best article. That is good for a national veterinary chain and much less useful for one clinic in one city.
“You actually might get somebody showing up from the wrong city and calling you. Which I’ve seen happen. I’ve seen that happen before.”
“Where your strategy gets in the way, pisses your customer service team off, or leads to incomplete or bad leads.”
The same split decides whether global search volume is even a real number. At Vrbo the global view was the correct one, with hreflang and canonicalization strategy built around multiple languages, because a European traveler booking a rental is a genuine customer. At H-E-B, the Texas grocery chain she worked on for several years, she did not care about global volume for grocery terms at all. The state was the market. Rivera pushed the question further and said he is no longer convinced global traffic for a keyword exists as a concept, since People Also Ask queries are always narrower — cut down by geography or by intent — than the headline volume number suggests.
Her preference, for what it is worth, runs the other way from where she works now. She finds small-business work more rewarding, because you get your hands dirty being tactical and you talk directly to the people involved, where national work is necessarily templated and aggregate.
Paid and organic were never supposed to be siloed
Hoot ran paid search and SEO simultaneously for more than half her career and calls the arrangement efficient and elegant, because the two overlap almost completely. The split is structural rather than sensible — separate teams at agencies, separate teams and support structures at Google itself. She grants that paid has become genuinely more complicated and that specialization is defensible. But the intent and the volume underneath both, she says, are identical.
Rivera brought a live reason to revisit that. On her own episode of the show, Lisa Raehsler had described AI Max scanning a site for its own pages to use as landing pages, which undoes the old PPC reflex of building a separate page in Unbounce and makes the paid team a stakeholder in organic page quality. His argument: that is a budget conversation you can actually win, because two departments need the same fix.
The intent point got its own demonstration from Ben Wills on the show’s SEO SaaS panel alongside Patrick Stox and Ben Senescu. Wills held an LLM prompt constant — flying into Los Angeles, need a hotel, picking up a rental car — and changed only the car. The hotel recommendations changed with it. Same stated intent, different person underneath it.
Two more things worth stealing
Rivera made a case for internal linking as indexability infrastructure, using a t-shirt company as the example: products stranded on page three and four of pagination, rescued by pulling them into contexts a person might actually search for, like a cat-themed set tied to cat adoption day rather than the flat category. He blames WordPress for making SEOs suspicious of that idea.
“I think we did ourselves dirty as SEOs, fighting so hard. WordPress added the tag system, and it added it so poorly that everybody got biased against the concept of having a second cut of a page that might surface multiple things.”
Hoot’s version of the same point is about SERP real estate rather than architecture. AI Overviews produce a zero-click effect, and you are not going to stop Google from showing one.
“So you better be the brand that’s showing up.”
The overview does not lock you out of the organic results underneath it.
“And you can still show up more than once on a single search result page.”
The B2B upside: you finally get to learn the product
The episode closed on what Rivera thinks is the most underrated part of B2B work right now, which is that stakeholders will actually talk to you. Get the meeting notes, get the subject matter expert on a call, and you surface the applications that genuinely sell, rather than the ones a keyword list can see.
His example was oxygen monitoring. Once you understand who buys a combustible gas monitor, you understand why it matters to sailors, because a battery housing can build up hydrogen and the monitor is the thing telling you the boat is not about to blow up. No search volume export contains that. It comes from someone who knows the product.
“Those are things that you, from the outside, when we were writing keyword articles, we didn’t have as much access to first person expertise.”
The same logic applies to friction. If the buyer needs a PDF to hand to accounting, build the downloadable. If they need CFO sign-off or a county application, capture the email and go find out what their jurisdiction actually requires. That work gets much easier once you are embedded in the organization instead of sitting three layers of account manager away from it, which was Rivera’s other complaint: he has done SEO for companies he never once spoke to directly.
He offered himself as the evidence. He now knows considerably more than he ever expected to about actual precast concrete walls in Florida, purely because digging into a client’s world does that to you.
“But I think that’s good. I think it’s a stretch for our industry and a push for us professionals.”
Where to find Laura
“GPO dot com. Like I said, we specialize in big brands with lots of locations — but depending, we can make exceptions.”
She is on LinkedIn as Laura Hoot, and only recently by choice — she has spent most of her career deliberately keeping social separate from professional.
“So definitely connect with me on LinkedIn, and we can follow each other there and argue about stuff. If you want to.”
Listen to the full episode of The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast with Laura Hoot, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so the next one lands on its own.
