Sonia Urquilla found SEO almost by accident — and turned it into a mission. On this episode of The Unscripted SEO Interview, the founder of SEO by Sonia joins Jeremy Rivera to explain why, in an AI-shaped search world, ranking a website is no longer enough. Her answer is a framework she calls “brand optimization”: getting found and mentioned everywhere your audience looks.
From her dad’s shuttered shop to SEO
Sonia’s why is personal. She watched her dad’s local shop lose its foot traffic and close — no Google Business Profile, no website, just a corner store that nobody could find online. He ended up taking a cleaning job at the airport. Years later, doing SEO for female coaches and consultants, it clicked: her dad never had a visibility problem he could see, but he had one all the same.
“You need to optimize your brand to be found, to be mentioned, because now we just don’t know where your audience is searching.” — Sonia Urquilla
“Brand optimization” — beyond the website
When Sonia started, SEO meant living inside a website chasing a few backlinks. Then it stopped working, and she had to get bigger than the page — social channels, Reddit, podcasts, blog collaborations, local citations, and the AI tools her clients now ask for recommendations. That’s brand optimization: showing up on every surface, not just ranking one.
It works even for a deliberately unglamorous niche. Jeremy raised the classic “boring industry” problem from his own world — he sells agricultural equipment and waste-oil heaters — where the pivot is the same: build the brand, show expertise, and turn your existing customers into a knowledge base.
AI leveled the field — so use it
Both agreed that fear-mongering keeps small businesses from the tools that would help them most. Sonia’s message to nervous clients: stop doom-scrolling the “AI is over” takes and just play with it. And when you do lean on AI for customer support, treat it like a new hire — as Matt Brooks of SEOteric puts it, you have to train your AI rep and fill in the blanks, because it’s lazy until you tell it exactly what’s going on.
The follow-up gap (and the “make a page” rule)
Jeremy pointed to Darren Shaw’s research that roughly 80% of local businesses never reply to a message, and fewer than 1% respond within an hour — then told the story of handing a ready-to-buy neighbor to a local contractor who took days to follow up. The lesson runs both ways: fix your follow-up systems, and turn repeat questions into content.
“If anybody asks a question more than once about your business, make a page.” — Jeremy Rivera
Interviews, Jeremy noted, are a goldmine for exactly that human-first content. He once interviewed both the CEO and the installer at a Florida precast concrete walls company — a single conversation that surfaced five or six articles and three real gaps in their content, including the question customers asked every time: can someone dig under the wall?
“Do you actually do your own SEO?”
Sonia is refreshingly direct about practicing what she preaches — her own Google Business Profile, her own backlinks, her own content tests. It raises a good question for anyone hiring help: how to tell whether an SEO actually does their own SEO, versus running a one-page site that never earns a lead organically.
The tool talk
Sonia is in research mode on her stack (eyeing SE Ranking, feeling the sting of $200/month tools she barely uses). Jeremy’s current pick is OpenSEO, the open-source SEO tool from Ben Senescu — GSC and backlink data with its own MCP, at roughly $10–20/month. He’s been wiring Google Search Console and Analytics into his Claude Code setup through it, chasing the perennial GSC frustration of “100 clicks but only 14 queries shown.”
Her playbook: 100 attendees to over 1,000
Ask Sonia for a tactic and she keeps returning to brand optimization — because it works. A career-coach client was drawing about a hundred people to each masterclass on ads and email alone. They wrapped the launch in a press release, social, email, and Reddit, and that December masterclass drew over a thousand attendees, with leads coming from places they’d never seen before.
The local goldmine
Sonia’s clients often insist local isn’t for them — they’re “online,” their clients could be anywhere. She disagrees: “so much gold in the local target community” goes unclaimed, and once you build citations and a real Google Business Profile, local calls start coming in. Jeremy’s favorite way to find those opportunities is Zip Local, which lists local charities and organizations looking for business sponsors — a couple hundred dollars for a link, visibility, and, with follow-up, real relationships and trust transfer. It’s the same thinking behind his community cleanup events: sponsoring real-world happenings as legitimate, trust-building link building.
Connect with Sonia
Find Sonia on her website seobysonia.com (she’ll send you a quick video website audit if you fill out the form), on LinkedIn, and on Instagram and TikTok as @seobysonia.
Listen to the full episode on Castos or watch on YouTube. For more conversations like this, explore the Unscripted SEO topical hubs, try the keyword-research tool at SEO Arcade, or see how Jeremy turns interviews into podcast-powered link building.
