In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, host Jeremy Rivera sits down with Scott Hendison, a veteran SEO professional and founder of Search Commander Inc., for an insightful conversation about the current state of SEO, technical challenges, and practical advice for website owners.
Key Takeaways
- Focus on making clients profitable, not just improving rankings
- Attribution tracking is the most neglected area in SEO
- WordPress specialization improves efficiency and results
- Real-world community involvement creates valuable link opportunities
- Inspect your own website regularly from a user’s perspective
- Entity linking may help websites avoid being negatively impacted by helpful content updates
Notable Quotes
“My job is not to just make you rank better, it’s to make sure you’re making money, to make you profitable.” – Scott Hendison
“Once you log in [to Webflow], it’s interesting, I understand how it’s built… and I think I don’t want any part of it.” – Scott Hendison
“You want good links, cure cancer. I’ll get you links from CNN and Fox News and everyone. Do something newsworthy.” – Scott Hendison
“Coming up with ideas is the best use of AI that I’ve found.” – Scott Hendison
“Anybody who tells you they’ve got it dialed in, I’m an expert, I know everything, they’re either lying or naive.” – Scott Hendison
Current Technical SEO Challenges
Jeremy kicks off the conversation by asking Scott what he’s currently working on. Scott explains he’s helping a contractors company track their leads better, dealing with a large entity called Service Titan that many contractors subscribe to. He describes the frustration of implementing basic features like forms that integrate with their ecosystem, noting they’ve been struggling with this implementation for three months.
Scott mentions that a Service Titan consultant ultimately told them the system simply isn’t ready for what they’re trying to do. He draws a parallel to the challenges with GA4 implementation and notes that his time is split between small local businesses and consulting for larger teams at agencies and end-user clients.
Finding Your SEO Specialization
When asked about his specialization, Scott describes himself as “a jack of all trades, master of none,” though he rarely handles paid advertising. He explains that when working with companies that have large teams, he’s learned to be respectful of their existing knowledge.
Scott highlights a challenge with clients implementing outdated SEO advice, mentioning a company that spent months implementing FAQ schema only to discover that Google was no longer supporting it as they had before. He discusses using tools like Screaming Frog, Semrush, and SE Ranking, plus more technical approaches like analyzing log files.
The Most Neglected Area of SEO
Jeremy asks Scott about neglected areas in SEO that can bring surprising value. Scott emphasizes that understanding traffic attribution is critically important:
“My job is not to just make you rank better, it’s to make sure you’re making money, to make you profitable. If I’m bringing you only one client a month, but they’re spending a million dollars, then that’s a winner.”
He explains that tracking where traffic comes from and what leads to conversions or phone calls is often neglected. Scott notes this was easier in Universal Analytics but setting it up properly in GA4 is something many site owners fail to do properly.
GA4 Implementation Challenges
Jeremy shares his own challenges with GA4 data and mentions his solution: “My solution has been to use a Google Data Studio, a Looker Studio that is called GA4 Classic, and it displays like 95% like GA3.”
Scott acknowledges he has the same bookmark for GA4 Classic Mode and questions why Google would rename something well-branded like Google Data Studio to “Looker,” which fewer people recognize.
Jeremy jokes that they should put “the person that did that and the person that created GA4 into a cage and have them fight.”
WordPress Specialization
Scott shares that he specializes in WordPress and refuses to work with sites built on other platforms: “If somebody has a site that’s not done in WordPress, we won’t touch it, we won’t log in. I don’t have the bandwidth to do something else.”
He explains this decision comes from efficiency: “I can do 10 things in WordPress in the time it takes to figure out one to do in something else.” Scott acknowledges he has one client using Webflow, but he wants no part in editing it, calling it a “fantastically expensive cumbersome system.”
Industry Experience and Learning Curves
When asked about difficult industries, Scott shares his journey from owning a computer store to getting his health insurance license. About ten years later, he took on a large health insurance provider in California as an SEO client.
“That was a real eye-opener for me,” Scott explains. “Even though I knew how things had evolved…I had no idea of the intensity of health insurance. That was when I realized that everything I knew was not even close to everything there was.”
Scott then reveals how he uses conference speaking opportunities to advance his own learning, pitching topics he wants to learn about: “I would pitch on things that I needed to learn and needed to understand and didn’t know.” He gives examples of pitching presentations on AMP and GA4 before they were widely understood.
Common SEO Mistakes
Jeremy asks about the biggest mistakes Scott has seen on client sites. Scott mentions sites blocked from indexing via robots.txt, but says the most common issue he currently sees is poor title tags: “The most common one I see right now…all the websites they build, the title tag is home, or the home page. Literally, I’m like, you guys have been working with this company for eight months and their title tag is home dash company.”
Another major mistake Scott identifies is “leaving things alone” when Google values updating content: “Change your title tag a little bit…Change a couple paragraphs. There are tools I’ve heard that help you right now. So you can drop in your paragraphs and you can use AI intelligently to freshen up those pages.”
Content Updates and Google Leaks
Jeremy shares that he’s been experimenting with updating old posts and republishing them with current dates. Scott confirms he’s heard of plugins that automatically change published dates and agrees that a newer published date can be valuable.
They discuss whether this approach might be considered “gray hat” SEO. Scott doesn’t think it’s “blackhat” but acknowledges it might be in a gray area.
The conversation shifts to the Google leak that occurred months prior. Scott believes it was genuinely from Google but contained outdated information: “I think it confirmed a lot of suppositions that I had made, that you had made. I didn’t see anything that was hugely groundbreaking.”
Link Building in Modern SEO
Jeremy asks about Scott’s approach to building authority and links given the changing platform landscape. Scott shares his “unpopular opinion”:
“My solution has been to literally not build links unless they have something link worthy to build links to. Links for the sake of links purposes, we stopped doing that in December of 2011, like about six months before Penguin.”
Instead, Scott recommends:
- Creating something truly newsworthy
- Supporting local infrastructure and community
- Sponsoring little league teams
- Joining the local chamber of commerce
“You want good links, cure cancer. I’ll get you links from CNN and Fox News and everyone. Do something newsworthy,” Scott emphasizes.
Digital PR and Community Involvement
Jeremy shares his own experience with community involvement: “I just did a park cleanup here in Sparta, Tennessee, in Cookeville, you know, for an asphalt client. And, you know, we got a few links from City Hall and Chamber of Commerce, and we also walked away with multiple bags of trash from that park, and that felt good.”
Scott agrees and references the concept of “Real Company Shit” (RCS) coined by SEO professionals, suggesting that doing real things that real companies do will get local attention.
They discuss the challenges of getting businesses to understand this approach to link building and the value of using ChatGPT for ideation: “Ask for ideas. You know, I’m a plumber in Nebraska in the winter. What can I do for my community that might generate… ask them a specific question like that and it will come back with ideas.”
AI Content and Helpful Content Update
The conversation turns to AI-generated content. Scott mentions he’s running an experiment with a local service website using “pure AI content” and notes it’s “doing okay” with increasing visibility as more pages get added.
Jeremy questions whether the helpful content update was Google’s anti-AI tool: “I view the helpful content as more a clap back against like just massive programmatic SEO.”
Scott notes this seems like a “recycled tactic” similar to how people used to create websites with “regurgitated garbage stuff” to earn AdSense revenue. He shares frustration with inconsistent Google search results, citing examples where results are inexplicably bad or unhelpful, while other searches deliver amazingly useful information.
Google Antitrust and Industry Future
Jeremy brings up Google’s antitrust lawsuit and monopolist practices. Scott expresses hope for a breakup, suggesting: “They could just move ads out…That would be a severe penalty…but it would really put up that wall of separation between the two.”
Scott references emails that came out during the case where “the president was actually suggesting maybe if we made the search results worse, they would search again and be more likely to click on an ad,” calling it a “smoking gun.”
They discuss how the average user often doesn’t realize how many results are actually ads, with Scott noting he has nothing against “a well-written ad that serves the purpose,” but Jeremy arguing that platforms shouldn’t prioritize ads that pretend to be organic results.
Entity SEO and Final Advice
As they wrap up, Scott mentions research by Bill Hartzer suggesting that sites hit by the helpful content update hadn’t implemented entity linking: “Sites that are using entity SEO had not been hit.”
For his final piece of advice, Scott encourages business owners to regularly examine their own websites: “Look at your website on your phone. Forget how it ranks, look at the experience that your users are getting when they’re on your site.”
He advises checking the site on both mobile and desktop to see what end users are experiencing: “It’s really rare that somebody will look at their own website and not have common sense criticisms about ways that things can be improved. And that’s what Google is supposedly looking for.”
Follow Scott Hendison at SearchCommander.com, on Twitter @shendison, and on LinkedIn.
Follow Jeremy Rivera at @jeremyriveraseo and visit UnscriptedSEO.com for more conversations like this.
