A conversation with Shannon Lavenia on evolving SEO strategies, brand development, and leveraging AI for sustainable business growth

The landscape of digital marketing continues to evolve at a rapid pace, demanding new approaches to branding and SEO strategy. In my recent conversation with Jeremy Rivera on the Unscripted SEO podcast, we explored how local service businesses can leverage modern branding techniques and AI-powered tools to stand out in their markets.

During our discussion, I shared insights from our work at Brand Builder AI, particularly focusing on how businesses can create memorable brand identities that resonate with their target audiences. We examined the crucial role that customer feedback plays in brand development and why traditional SEO strategies need to evolve into more comprehensive, multi-channel marketing approaches.

One of the key themes we explored was the transformative impact of AI tools on content creation and optimization. As the digital landscape becomes increasingly competitive, businesses must adapt by embracing these technologies to maintain relevance and visibility. We discussed practical strategies for leveraging AI to streamline content production while maintaining brand authenticity and engagement.

The conversation culminated in actionable steps that website owners can implement immediately to enhance their digital presence and drive measurable results through reviews, engagement, and customer retention.

Killer Quotes from the Conversation

"Your brand is actually what you're uniquely known for. It's what are people saying about you and does it match up with what you want people to know you as?"

"Now, one article a month isn't even going to do it anymore. The speed of content is so intense right now that they're going to become unknown and obsolete in the conversation practically overnight if they're not pumping out massive amounts of content."

"You can take one article and create about 40 different pieces of content. Turn it into a blog post, a long story post on Facebook, a LinkedIn post, an Instagram post, a video, an email, a newsletter, a podcast... it's unbelievable."

"When we're working with a client, we're really looking at how do we get them ranked up, how do we help them convert those leads, and how do we give them very visual proof that they can't deny?"

"The way that you keep your clients is you become invaluable and you show them how what you're doing creates growth and increase and more beans for their business. Then they just never want to leave."

Wow. Sooooo Many Take Aways!

• Branding is essential for local service businesses.

• SEO has evolved to prioritize brand recognition.

• Customer feedback is crucial for brand development.

• A brand is what people say about you, not just your logo.

• Creating a unique brand positioning statement is key.

• SEO should focus on customer experience, not just traffic.

• Measuring success through reviews is vital for businesses.

• Content strategy should include retention and engagement.

• Holistic approaches to SEO yield better results.

• Building a brand takes time and consistent effort. Continuous SEO engagement is crucial for maintaining a competitive edge.

• AI tools can significantly enhance content creation and optimization processes.

• Businesses must adapt to the fast-paced content landscape to remain relevant.

• One piece of content can be repurposed into multiple formats for broader reach.

• Client retention is essential for long-term success in digital marketing.

• Effective keyword research is the foundation of successful SEO strategies.

• Utilizing AI can streamline tedious tasks like keyword analysis and competitor evaluation.

• Multi-channel marketing strategies are becoming increasingly important in SEO.

• Providing additional value, such as newsletters, can enhance client relationships.

• The future of SEO requires a comprehensive approach that integrates various marketing channels.

Here's the FULL Conversation:

Jeremy Rivera (00:01.152) Hello, I'm Jeremy, host of the Unscripted SEO podcast. I'm here with Shannon Lavinia. Why don't you give yourself a quick introduction and then we'll get going.

Shannon Lavenia (00:09.464) Awesome, I'd love to. And thanks for having me on here. I'm super excited for this interview. My name is Shanna LaVenia. I am the co-founder of Brand Builder AI, and we get leads and up-level people's brands for local service businesses. And super excited for this.

Jeremy Rivera (00:28.736) Okay, so you'd work with local service providers. So those are like plumbers, roofers, people who have like a storefront or more service area businesses or both.

Shannon Lavenia (00:42.394) So we work with both. We work with a lot of home service businesses and then also professional services. So accountants, coaches, consultants, people that provide service, B2C as well, or B2B.

Jeremy Rivera (00:56.788) Got it. So co-founder kind of covers a lot. Like what would you say is your aspect or background when it comes to marketing or SEO and what do you bring to your company and how does that interchange with what you do?

Shannon Lavenia (01:15.522) Awesome. Great question. So I've been an entrepreneur this year will be 23 years and started in direct to consumer sales back in 2002. So all that means is I sold somebody else's product direct to a consumer, but I did it independently. had our own business and we basically licensed the rights.

Um, in 2013, I launched my branding and marketing agency, and we focused on branding and website development. And, um, on top of that, I became a course creator. So I sold a number of courses for entrepreneurs on how to launch a business, how to scale a business, how to generate leads for their business and really focused on email marketing and list building. And, um, then in 2022.

Jeremy Rivera (02:01.013) Yeah.

Shannon Lavenia (02:07.216) Um, no, 2021, we started to work a lot with local businesses and, um, really dug deep into like what their problems were, what their challenges were. And it was coming like right out of COVID where a lot of businesses really just crashed because, you know, they couldn't go into homes. They lost employees, like all of that. And we started to work with them on optimizing their Google business profile and.

Jeremy Rivera (02:12.128) Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Rivera (02:20.864) Yeah.

Sure.

Jeremy Rivera (02:34.272) Mm-hmm.

Shannon Lavenia (02:35.012) They're on the local pack and then also optimizing their email marketing on the backend. And now we're doing AI bots with that as well.

Jeremy Rivera (02:47.334) So there has been like a lot of changes in Google that tend to favor sites that are aiming to build a brand versus just doing big content plays. How has that evolved in terms of your recommended content strategy? What does it mean right now and Google and SEO to build a brand? Is it just buying billboards or what's your path to gaining visibility that you work with?

Shannon Lavenia (02:59.024) Mm-hmm.

Shannon Lavenia (03:16.976) So I love this because I have been a brand builder. The name of our agency is brand builder. You know, the first name of my agency was brand builder design. And we've always had this inherent focus on branding. And the very simplicity of it is if you have people that are walking around saying your company name, you know that you have basically own now you own some of your market share, right? People are communicating using your brand name.

And before there was a lot of focus on doing on page SEO and things like that to get found in the Google search. And there still is, right? That still is a very vital component to that. But now with social media, the more content that can be generated and the more that content can be focused around rec brand recognition, the more people are going to actually say your name and

The more people that type your name into Google, the more Google rewards you for that. So, and that's, that is like a missing component. Like you don't just want people to type in landscaper near me. You want people to type in like unwind landscaping and find that on Google. Cause now Google knows, okay, this is a brand that people like, people want, there's more people looking for this. So let's raise them up, you know, and give them more attention.

Jeremy Rivera (04:30.986) Hmm.

Jeremy Rivera (04:43.976) Yeah, I definitely agree with that. Like I can recall many conversations I had over my years of consulting over the last decade, 17 years of, hey, our brand, you know, like looking at in search console, you know, 50 % of this is branded search. We want to increase the number of unbranded searches that you're ranking for. Now I'm almost kind of jealous of those bigger sites that have a bigger distribution or a bigger part of

proportion of queries that are branded because it is a reflection of those secondary signals, the secondary access to that market. I like the way that you said it of converting that into a piece of the market that you own. And because, you know, it's very difficult if you always, you know, live and die by the sword of the algorithm, then it isn't, it isn't

Shannon Lavenia (05:29.646) Mm-hmm.

Shannon Lavenia (05:39.14) Yes.

Jeremy Rivera (05:43.228) always fully sustainable as a business model. can't anymore as an SEO say, just create content, just create links and you'll be rewarded because HCU, the helpful content update, know slew many people that technically by 2015 standards, that order, their content was an order of magnitude better, but there's people making plays and they're just not surviving. So, you know, I was talking with Morty Oberstein.

Shannon Lavenia (05:58.359) Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Rivera (06:10.528) a couple episodes ago about the evolution of brand. When it comes down to the ground level though for a small business, it isn't the same game as like managing comms on brand for Jaguar and realizing they're totally out of touch or even at Google being out of sync for what they're saying they're doing and what they're actually doing.

Shannon Lavenia (06:29.838) Right.

Shannon Lavenia (06:37.466) Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera (06:38.036) What does it mean to develop a brand when you are a small business?

Shannon Lavenia (06:44.248) So I think there's a, you know, for small businesses, one, there's a lot of confusion about what a brand actually is. I think when people are starting their business, they think it's a logo. you know, if I have a logo, then I have a brand. If I have a website, then I have a brand. And that is part of it. Like that's the visual aspect of it. And of course you want to have like visual recognition of what your brand is, but your brand is actually what you're unique uniquely known for.

Jeremy Rivera (06:55.168) You

Shannon Lavenia (07:13.388) So for example, you know, out here there's a roofing company that we work with and they're known for always getting the job done on time. And it's a big deal for people that are getting their roofs replaced because it's a hot mess when it's happening, right? Like you've got tons of stuff all over your yard. People are running around your house and everything. And if they say they're going to do it in a day or two days, then you want to know that it is going to be done in two days. And they become very well known.

for getting the job done in the time that they say it's going to be done. And when you look at their reviews, people communicate that. So, and that's really what a brand is. It's what are people saying about you and does it match up with what you want people to know you as? And the real indicator is when you look at the reviews and you look at the conversations that consumers are having online,

Jeremy Rivera (08:03.581) interesting.

Shannon Lavenia (08:12.4) Are they saying the same things about you that you want to be known for? And there's definitely ways to influence that. You can influence it with standard SEO methods like article writing, content writing and stuff and keep feeding that like we're the company that always gets done on time and include that in your messaging. You can include it in your emails. You can include it on your onsite brand.

But you really want to include that in the conversations that you're having with your customers as well, and keep putting it there in front of them so that they're basically communicating it back to the world. And that's really how you build that like brand notoriety.

Jeremy Rivera (08:45.44) Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Rivera (08:58.144) That's interesting, because then it makes, it converts what is seen sometimes as an insular activity of SEO. Like, hey, I launched a new site, can you go do the SEO this weekend? No, I cannot do the SEO, but it's also like, on the flip side of that, practitioners, and I'm.

Shannon Lavenia (09:09.677) Mm-hmm.

Shannon Lavenia (09:14.298) Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera (09:23.444) assuming that a lot of people listening to the unscripted SEO podcasts are SEOs, we need to stop being the navel gazers who are contemplating and interacting with software first and actually need to be, you know, I just talked with Keith Braze and we went over his people first framework and what he suggests is talking to, taking, doing three interviews with people that are actually buying your stuff.

Shannon Lavenia (09:29.006) Yeah.

Shannon Lavenia (09:36.26) Mm-hmm.

Shannon Lavenia (09:50.212) Yes.

Jeremy Rivera (09:50.616) and asking them like a series of specific questions about the value. What did they expect to get? Did that? What were they trying to solve? And how did they feel about how the outcome came out? And, you know, have them pitch you. How would you sell our service to to me? And then ask them again, how would you sell it to your grandma? And you kind of understand like

Shannon Lavenia (10:04.88) Mm-hmm.

Shannon Lavenia (10:15.393) Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera (10:19.092) like a universe of how people understand what it is that you do. And if that isn't aligned, then that's on you, not on them. So like SEO doesn't need to be as much about that cold process of, I've got a keyword research list. Which article am I going to write? Which has the highest volume? No, we need to take it back. We need to be talking to the salesperson and finding out, okay, when you lost that last deal, what was the friction point? Why did they drop out? And

Shannon Lavenia (10:27.608) Right.

Jeremy Rivera (10:48.484) well, they didn't know about this statistic. Well, that's a blog post we need so that you can reference and when that comes up, we solve and prevent that from happening. And that that ties into that voice of authority that you want for that brand to, you know, like how do you create or craft content that matches with your image and also helps your specific audience do what they need to to choose you.

Shannon Lavenia (10:58.82) Yeah.

Shannon Lavenia (11:05.892) Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera (11:17.896) and back and forth, right?

Shannon Lavenia (11:19.65) It's so that's you're so right on with that because it's, you know, you have the traditional methodology of SEO and there's a lot of advancements now with AI and it's always been very based on, on competing for keywords, right? Like competing for that search of what people are typing in. But when people type that in, like, what are they going to see? What's the next thing? And that's really where the brand positioning statement comes in. Like.

When people see your website, what do you want to be known for? You know, for example, and it's the same, like we work with roofers, they all do roofs. You know, there's not a to that. They all do roofs. like, what is the most important? Is it that, you know, you're going to put on a guaranteed leak-proof roof, right? Or are you going to be the on-time roof producer?

Jeremy Rivera (11:51.552) Hmm.

Jeremy Rivera (11:57.588) Yeah.

Right, right.

Shannon Lavenia (12:14.672) that gets a great product or are you going to be the friendly roof provider, right? Or like, what is it that's going to be you? And I remember when we were working with a landscape company out in Arizona, you know, it's the same thing. Like everyone does landscaping. It's like, basically they plant plants and they clean up yards, right? So there's not a lot of like different things. We know why we call them. But when we

Jeremy Rivera (12:33.568) Sure.

Shannon Lavenia (12:38.192) sat down and said, okay, so what is your brand positioning statement? And in the area they wanted to be number one for it's the average home value is a million dollars, right? So what do those people want? They want a yard they can enjoy, right? They want, so when we came up with their brand positioning statement, it was a soothing landscape you'll enjoy. And that really connected with their ideal customer.

Jeremy Rivera (12:47.68) Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Rivera (12:52.768) Mmm.

Jeremy Rivera (12:59.722) Hmm.

Shannon Lavenia (13:06.446) So while they're number one for landscaper near me, when people go to their website, it's like, we're gonna create a beautiful, soothing landscape you'll enjoy. And that's what people who own million dollar houses want. They already know they're gonna get, you know, great design and stuff like that. Like that's already inherent, but they also wanna know that it's gonna be something that's gonna add to their experience of life.

Jeremy Rivera (13:09.93) Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera (13:31.552) Mm-hmm.

Shannon Lavenia (13:31.6) and so while we're competing for those same keywords, what's most important to us is what's, what are they landing on? That's going to be the differentiator that's going to make the person say, this is it. Like I want to invest with you. and then what are those people going to say online? and their reviews are pretty unique because

If you go to, I mean, you can go to Unwind Landscapes in Phoenix when you look at the reviews, almost all of the reviewers have included pictures of their landscape. And it's because they have this inherent like pride of this like living space that they have outside now. So that's really how you like incorporate that brand with SEO.

Jeremy Rivera (14:18.56) So it's almost like, you know, expanding out of the 2010 mindset of my job as an SEO is to get the site ranking. instead it's a full, it's not even just, in 2020 I noticed there was a transition of thinking about, okay, now I got to pay attention to conversion, you know, and connect it to revenue. But really it's beyond the revenue point.

Shannon Lavenia (14:31.044) Mm-hmm.

Shannon Lavenia (14:41.668) Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Shannon Lavenia (14:47.77) Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Rivera (14:47.838) because that person, if they have a good experience, but you're not following up with them and prompting them, like with the follow-up email or with the right idea, then they're not going to give you that review. They're not going to give you that last feedback. They're not going to, they might, you know, and if you don't know that your service that your company's actually providing isn't matching up with the brand standard, then you're going to start develop.

Shannon Lavenia (14:58.416) Mm-hmm.

Shannon Lavenia (15:03.332) That's right.

Shannon Lavenia (15:15.748) Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Rivera (15:17.492) Dissonance between what you say on the website and what you actually do and that's going to lead to negative reviews so it's almost like SEO is starting to take more responsibility to try to Touch into the health of the business try to connect from from the first impression on social the second impression by email, you know via they sign up for something

Shannon Lavenia (15:24.163) Yeah.

Shannon Lavenia (15:32.73) Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Rivera (15:44.0) and they get an email and then they come to the site, they become a client, a client the first time. But that's not the end of the relationship or it shouldn't be because everybody should know that the hardest, the biggest cost is in, in new client acquisition. And it's way cheaper to maintain existing clients because they give you referrals. I even in my, it's silly because I know so many SEOs that get a lot of their SEO work from other SEOs.

Shannon Lavenia (15:59.226) Yes.

Shannon Lavenia (16:13.326) Yes.

Jeremy Rivera (16:13.418) versus trying to convince somebody new to trust them, it's so much easier to get that word of mouth. And that's true in so many other industries. like being, you know, thinking through, okay, well, what is the second, what's the return value that I can offer to my existing customers? You know, think about what is the content strategy for people who have already bought once, but I want them to buy again. I don't think that's a conversation that many SEOs have ever had.

Shannon Lavenia (16:21.712) for me.

Shannon Lavenia (16:33.476) Yeah.

Shannon Lavenia (16:39.706) Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera (16:43.168) It's always about that search volume which includes people who are the same customer again, but kind of focusing and segmenting a second batch of content or a piece of your content strategy that's retention or is servicing your existing client base. I know it's interesting to think of that in the local business space. I think some SaaS

Shannon Lavenia (16:51.812) Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Rivera (17:10.272) SEOs might have thought about that of, you I need a knowledge base. But so many SEOs don't even make their knowledge bases indexable. It's like, you know, my user, if they need a problem, they'll click here at the small link at the bottom that says support, and then they'll go to support to this sub domain, the sub domains linked to this sub domain, which has these threads that are not organized and not searchable. This is totally great. And it's going to make my users so happy.

Shannon Lavenia (17:20.334) Right.

Shannon Lavenia (17:35.268) Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera (17:39.498) that they're paying for my expensive software they can't figure out how to fix or use.

Shannon Lavenia (17:44.043) That's right. It's so true. I love what you're saying because in 2025, you really do have to think very holistically about how you're working with clients. And I think in 2010 and 2015, SEO, you know, I've been in business for a long time, right? I've been in business before Google like really took off.

Jeremy Rivera (17:54.4) Mm-hmm.

Shannon Lavenia (18:07.596) So I was around for the first evolution of Google AdWords and SEO was really like, we just grabbed on and said, okay, all we have to do is rank someone to the top and then they're going to get so much traffic. It's going to equal instant money for them. And it doesn't really work that way anymore. if, if a subscriber, you know, with, with inflation and everything else, business owners are a lot more attentive.

Jeremy Rivera (18:24.799) Right.

Shannon Lavenia (18:37.038) to their beans, their beans out and their beans in. And if they don't see directly that what you're doing converts to beans in, they're very willing to just walk away because they won't understand that once they stop the activity, it's gonna have a negative effect. When we're working with a client, we're really looking at how do we get them ranked up?

How do we help them convert those leads on the other side of it? And how do we give them very visual proof that they can't deny, right? So they can't deny more reviews coming in. So when we give them report at the end of the month and we're like, hey, look at these 21 new five-star reviews you got, to them, that's beans, right? Like that is gonna equate to money because now they're getting more calls. We track the calls they're getting.

Jeremy Rivera (19:12.862) Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera (19:16.383) Right.

Shannon Lavenia (19:33.048) So we're able to give them like valuable proof. And when we're signing a client, sometimes they'll ask the question that we all get, which is how many months do I have to do this for? Like we are not the lowest price provider. So when we give them, know, when we tell them how much our service is, they're like, Whoa, how many months do we have to do this for? And I'm like, there's never, my response to them is there's never going to be a day where you're going to want to leave. And, and they're like,

Jeremy Rivera (19:42.816) Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Rivera (19:46.698) Sure.

Jeremy Rivera (20:00.832) I like that.

Shannon Lavenia (20:02.414) And they're, you know, and they laugh about it. And I'm like, look, I said, here's what it's like. Let's say I go to your house. I knock on the door, you open the door and I hand you a bag of money. And you go to close the door and I hand you another bag of money and you go to close the door and I hand you another bag of money. Are you ever going to close the door? And and, they're like, no. And I said, that's what we're doing for you. Like the ROI is so significant. Like you're never going to want to shut the door on that. But when you stop these activities, like.

Like we get you to number one, if you're not continuing, if we're not continuing with the process, somebody else is going to pick that up and go knock on somebody else's door. Right. And now they're going to be number one and you're going to lose that spot. And that's just the reality of it. And it makes sense to them that way. Right. Because it's not SEO, as you know, and I know is not a one and done service. It.

Jeremy Rivera (20:52.989) Right.

Jeremy Rivera (20:59.968) friends.

Shannon Lavenia (21:00.63) very competitive, you're on the field, you're in the game, right? It's like, yeah, yeah, I mean, that's just what it is. But it's also the most fruitful, the most fruitful and reliable producer of consistent income over time. It's way more than Facebook ads or Google ads or anything else. It is definitely a

Jeremy Rivera (21:04.478) You're in the race. If you stop running in the race, then other people get ahead.

Shannon Lavenia (21:29.594) baseline of reliable, consistent income that's going to come in from calls of people seeing you, number one.

Jeremy Rivera (21:39.36) It's definitely an area it's optimized. So I'm curious, you said that...

you're utilizing AI. Let's dig into that. Like how is that changing your business model of what you provide? What is the value add that you're trying to position with that? What are you bringing to the market on using those tools? Cause there's kind of two edges to that sort. And we can talk about both. One is the application and utilization of by search tools.

Shannon Lavenia (21:46.703) Mm-hmm.

Shannon Lavenia (22:04.58) Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera (22:10.972) in the creation of new search markets, know, perplexity and chat GPT, Microsoft Copilot, all based off of Bing's index are now growing.

Shannon Lavenia (22:13.829) Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Rivera (22:25.972) you know, type of ecosystem that has a type of search function. AI Overviews has replaced just featured snippets at the top of SERPs as a potential result. You may get both. You may get one or the other.

Shannon Lavenia (22:36.868) I know, it's wild.

Jeremy Rivera (22:45.6) So there's the AI as it's being utilized to change the nature of search itself. But then there's also on our side, I mean, I've been using AI powered tools since 2015 myself. I use the early version of Jarvis, which became Jasper, but I'm only seeing in the past, you know, two to three years where the big explosion of awareness around GPT, have I seen, you know, the adoption of .ai domain names or, you know, entire

Shannon Lavenia (22:58.608) Mm-hmm.

Yeah, me too.

Shannon Lavenia (23:14.031) Thank you.

Jeremy Rivera (23:15.526) business models that are trying to integrate these different capabilities and facets. So where do you land on that? What are you trying to do with AI? And then we'll circle back to how you're understanding the change in the search market with AI powered search tools.

Shannon Lavenia (23:33.474) So one, I'm completely fascinated by AI. And I have been, I also was an early adopter of Jasper and Jarvis and thought it was just the most fascinating thing. We definitely rely very heavily now on AI for our copywriting and copywriting for articles, copywriting for emails and

We've developed our own custom GPTs that model like what we want to do and it's very human like writing, very personable writing. And I think for a lot of people that are getting into AI, one of the things they don't understand is AI is just like anything else. Like you have to give it really good instruction, really good direction, or it's going to come out robot like, right? It's going to have all the

you know, unlock your next, you know, whatever, or, you know, uses all these hypes. It's not going to match your brand.

Jeremy Rivera (24:34.528) It's not going to match your brand. It's just going to be like, it's, it's, I mean, I mean, we say it AI, but a lot of it is just LLMs language learning models. They just predict the sentence pattern and come up with the most likely thing, but that's not always the best, like just cause it came up with that sentence at first. That doesn't mean that it's on brand. It doesn't mean that it's use that useful. It just mean that it came up with that based off of the prompts.

Shannon Lavenia (24:43.972) Yeah.

Shannon Lavenia (24:56.73) Right.

Jeremy Rivera (25:01.64) So just cause it came up with it doesn't always mean it's the right way to phrase that. Like having a section at the bottom that's always says in conclusion or like, you know, introducing at the top conclusion at the bottom. Okay. You made that off. You just like copied and pasted from GPT. Like, so what are the extra steps internally that you're doing to, I'll call it craft prompt, you know, prompt craft something that's more useful or finding patterns to, to

Shannon Lavenia (25:11.024) That's right.

Yeah.

Shannon Lavenia (25:25.604) Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera (25:32.756) make your creation process more effective.

Shannon Lavenia (25:37.008) So we, in our GPTs where we're instructing how to write, like we just handle things like that. Like don't put in conclusion at the end of a paragraph. And we always instructed to talk like we're having a conversation in the writing. And then before it's posted or anything, we have a human overview it and edit it too. So, but it's.

You know, we used to have a full-time copywriter and we no longer do because it's just very easy to use the copy that's coming out of the chat GBT or actually the one we prefer the most is Claude for copywriting. just produces great copy. For SEO, I think the tools have really evolved. Even SEMrush, it has like really been pushing hard to integrate

a lot of AI modules. We use a tool called Search Atlas that I really like. It's been very effective on local search results. So I think we're going to see more and more tools that are integrating the AI and are able to do a lot of the things that used to be very tedious, like keyword analysis or evaluating competitors, looking at competitor keywords.

and optimizing websites for it. You know, now you can plug in a website to chat to BT and say, you know, please review this entire website and give me an analysis of the SEO and it'll like literally go through and give you a whole program of like what you need to fix. So it's, it's pretty cool what we're able to do now where before, you know, if we were taking on a client, we would have to do like a one week analysis and say, you know, give us a week and then we're going to give you our

you know, program of how we're going to do this. And it's so different now. You know, when SEO was first the thing, was like, it was very tedious.

Jeremy Rivera (27:42.652) Yeah, and if we're honest, there was a lot of shortcuts of using offshored third party writers from the Philippines or from Colombia to try to cut down on those content creation costs and try to scale up. So now we kind of have a bit of that. But it sounds like the change is, you know, there's a bigger expectation. Like you're not going to be able to come to

Shannon Lavenia (27:50.575) yeah.

Shannon Lavenia (27:59.44) and then.

Jeremy Rivera (28:10.88) come to a client and say, we're publishing one article a month for you for our SEO campaign.

Shannon Lavenia (28:16.142) Now, one article a month isn't even going to do it anymore. I mean, the speed of content now is so insane. And even when I'm talking to business owners and they're a little AI adverse, I'm like, I'm like you, you aren't, they, don't have a choice. because the speed of content is so intense right now that they're going to become, you know, unknown and obsolete in the conversation.

Jeremy Rivera (28:28.074) Yeah.

Shannon Lavenia (28:43.792) practically overnight if they're not pumping out massive amounts of content. And that's what, you know, email, video, you know, people are adverse to video and like, you don't even have to make your own videos anymore. Like you can use HeyGen, you can use, you know, InVideo, can use Veed. I mean, there's so many tools, just start creating videos because you have to get that content out there. And now Google's giving preferential space on the page to YouTube. So,

You know, if you're not on YouTube, it's like you're missing out on a whole chunk of that first page result that you could be, you know, getting a result for.

Jeremy Rivera (29:23.828) Got it. So what's your thoughts on like, you know, we used to have like detailed content marketing strategies and say, Hey, you're accessing all of this upper funnel. Let's answer these really basic questions and we'll get rewarded with search traffic. now AI overviews, you know, you pop that question into GPT and it's there's a lot of that upper funnel piece that's being eaten up, but

Shannon Lavenia (29:51.045) Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Rivera (29:52.032) So how do you see the shift in strategy, like as far as what you produce and what you expect from it and how you stage that conversation to the client of like, we're doing this to make the upper funnel to put our branded picture out there. So we show up in those AI snippets or the, you know, the AI tools. What's your

Shannon Lavenia (30:15.898) Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Rivera (30:19.122) approach to the changing upper funnel piece of content.

Shannon Lavenia (30:23.384) So I used to, and I assume you mean like traffic coming in, correct? Okay.

Jeremy Rivera (30:30.322) Yeah, you know, like, because I view content creation as kind of upper or upper funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel at the bottom. Like you're comparing yourself to, you know, other different competitors, giving your hard pitches in the middle. You're, you know, doing different ways of solving the problem with your solution. And upper funnel is what is a vacuum cleaner?

Shannon Lavenia (30:35.929) or funnel, yeah.

Shannon Lavenia (30:54.672) Yeah, exactly. Okay. So I think nowadays it's so much easier to optimize that upper funnel, to get the content created and to really get a massive amount of content around around a topic. I mean, back in 2002, like making a video and posting it was like an insane amount of effort to do that. I mean, it's just like now it's just so different.

Jeremy Rivera (31:18.526) Yeah, I was.

Shannon Lavenia (31:23.952) So everything that we advise starts with the keyword research. So just going back to the fundamentals of SEO, you find your keywords that you want to be known for, you write the article, and then you take that article and you convert it into as many pieces of content as you possibly can. So one article, if we think about this, like you can create about 40 different pieces of content. You can take one article.

So you turn it into a blog post, then you can turn it into a long story post on Facebook. You can turn it into a LinkedIn post. You can turn it into an Instagram post. Then you can take that and you can put it into one of these AIs and you can make video with it for every other one of the channels. You can make it into an email. You can make it into a newsletter. You can make it into a podcast. You know, it's like, you can take that one piece of content and you can literally generate just...

all of these different types of content. can take, turn it into one long form YouTube video. Then you can take that long form YouTube video. You can make about 15 different shorts out of it. You know, it's like, it's unbelievable. And all of that, all of that can be done in less than an hour, you know, and all of that can literally be done for like $50 hiring somebody off of Fiverr.

who will you say, here's my article, make all of these things and they'll make it and package it up and send it over to you. And now you have all of this content for that keyword that you can push out onto every engine, every channel.

Jeremy Rivera (32:51.732) Yeah, different channels.

I know this is going to be like kind of esoteric as a reference, but have you ever read Kurt Vonnegut?

Shannon Lavenia (33:05.921) I possibly, I read a lot of books. What's the title?

Jeremy Rivera (33:10.302) So it's like Cat's Cradle. Okay, so Slaughterhouse Five is another one of his books. There was this...

Shannon Lavenia (33:14.78) yes, yes, yes. Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera (33:21.76) He contacts these multi-dimensional beings and they see humans as like their entire lifetime So when they're talking to them, they see them as a baby as a as a grown man and as an old man all at the same time and when you are talking about that single the piece of content I was thinking about the description of like looking on the face forward They see a creature with all of these arms and we look at content from hey, it's just an article But if we turn it to the side like they're all of these different

Shannon Lavenia (33:49.604) Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Rivera (33:51.724) ways to take that same concept, slice it off and reuse it. I think Ross Huygens often says, create content once and redistribute it forever.

Shannon Lavenia (34:04.494) Yeah. And I think that's really the future of SEOers if they embrace it. And I know there's always been this divide between SMMA and SEO, like social media managers. And so that was like one animal. And then there was like SEOers and that was another animal. And then there was email marketing and that was like another animal. And there's been like this divide of agencies that really wanted to niche down on service.

Jeremy Rivera (34:34.463) Yeah.

Shannon Lavenia (34:34.776) And I think if the way that we're going in the future is like, we have to be all encompassing and really niche down based on industry and provide a comprehensive solution. And it doesn't require the same level of effort and work that it used to. It's actually very linear now, you know, to take that one article and to produce all that different content, because you don't have to hire

Jeremy Rivera (34:58.292) Yeah.

Shannon Lavenia (35:04.58) You know, I was, we were amazing people with what they could do with, with Heygen. And they were like, I had no idea that I could take a script, you know, create an avatar and the avatar will literally run through this whole script. And all the script is, like, you take your article and you put it in a chat, you between you say, Hey, make a script out of this. It makes a script. You plug it into Heygen, Heygen makes the video and now you've got a video for YouTube.

And you'd have to like really look very hard to not tell that that's a that's not a real person. It's crazy.

Jeremy Rivera (35:42.298) yeah, I was playing around last year with taking mid journey images and then, using DID, and then animating them and having them read the script. But it's like an elf, you know, reading your article. so, so that's definitely new. I think it's interesting. It's, it's a, a challenge. And I thought about this the other day of, know, we treat, you know,

Shannon Lavenia (35:57.006) Yeah, it's wild, right? I love that.

Jeremy Rivera (36:10.88) we say the word social media, there's still a website, know, so like, and they have their own individual, yeah, they have their own search engine involved in it. So like, I think it's kind of an excuse, you know, of like, like, I don't want to do that too. But I think, I think you're with some of these tools and capabilities kind of expanding.

Shannon Lavenia (36:13.612) Mm-hmm. It's search engine. Every social platform. Yeah.

Shannon Lavenia (36:25.071) Yeah.

Jeremy Rivera (36:36.244) what we can do and getting them done faster. I think it would help more SEOs to try to see if they can embrace multi-channel and think about, you know, like that conversion of the form on your site to sign up for the email. That ultimately, is like, if you have created a functional newsletter and follow-up, then that's actually potentially more volume.

Jeremy Rivera (37:04.404) than just raw organic search to certain articles. Like the number of people that are going to hard convert, you know, that are looking for that product that day that are going to do it is less than 1%. But if you have a softer piece and you don't have to rely on, is there somebody else at the company that can make a newsletter? Like if you know those fundamentals too and can like help facilitate that process.

Jeremy Rivera (37:31.072) treat it as part of your workflow, treat it part of your, you know, that's your conversion process too. Because if you can take credit as the SEO for conversions out of the newsletter too, then that takes a bit of the pressure off of, well, how many articles are ranking in what position and sending how much organic traffic? Because then you can also say, hey, we've, you know, this channel, this channel, and this channel. Because like relying on a single channel,

Shannon Lavenia (37:46.009) Yes.

Jeremy Rivera (38:00.858) single channel even, know, SEO reliably or can be a reliable. There are aspects of it that do grow over time, but putting it in isolation is the worst way to optimize it.

Shannon Lavenia (38:14.326) Mm-hmm. It really is. And it's just easy now. Like when we write articles, we take those articles instantaneously and we put them into a newsletter and we create social media posts and we get those scheduled. And the social media posts link back to the articles on the site. So it's just, you know, it's a very comprehensive, like holistic approach.

And it's, and then it doesn't say to the business owner too, like, Hey, you need to have somebody writing these emails. Like we're just sending you the articles. and you know, they really appreciate that because they, never want to leave. Like the, name of the game in, in any business that we're doing, whether it's SEO or social media management or full service agency or whatever is client retention, right? You want to keep your clients.

And the way that you keep your clients is you become invaluable and you show them how what you're doing creates growth and increase and more beans for their business. Then they, just never want to leave, right? You're not, you're not another line item. in most cases you're something that's given them so much relief. They never even think about you. Right. So most of our customers just don't even ever think about us and

Shannon Lavenia (39:32.94) We call them, we give them their monthly report. We're like, hey, these are how many reviews you got. This is how much traffic you're getting. This is how many people click the emails. This is how many sales that we attribute to what we're doing. And they're just excited about it.

Jeremy Rivera (39:48.67) So wrapping up as a final note, like what's the most actionable thing that somebody listening to this that has control of a website, what should they immediately go to after they've listened to this?

Shannon Lavenia (40:03.12) I think the number one thing you could do is really look at like what additional value you can provide based on what you're doing. And the most, I would say the easiest thing to probably add in is that email component where you can take the articles and you can integrate them into a newsletter. You can also put them into social media posts that.

is an extra value. doesn't take a lot of time. It doesn't take a lot of effort. It's extremely easy to outsource and it provides all this additional value. You can increase your prices based on it and your company owner is going to see more than just an article a week. They're going to see all of this content being pushed out that makes their brand better known.

Shannon Lavenia (40:58.288) and gets their content more in front of people, has their actual customer base reading their content, not just because it's being searched, right? So you're multipurposing that. And I think it makes you a lot more valuable in the end. And it will also boost your results.

Jeremy Rivera (41:17.866) That makes a lot of sense. Where can people find you? Where are you active on socials yourself? Give your site again and any tools or widgets people can sign up for.

Shannon Lavenia (41:31.374) Yeah, so you can find me at brandbuilderai.com. . And I'm mostly on Facebook. So you can find me there. under Shannon Tice. And I don't really have any tools to sell you other than our agency. We do have a full service CRM and all of that. But...

You know that one of the tools I recommended was Search Atlas. I definitely love that. It's a newer SEO tool that's come out that is really slick. Yeah, so I think that's probably it.

Jeremy Rivera (42:10.752) Thank you so much for your time Shannon.

Shannon Lavenia (42:13.998) Yes, it's been great. Thanks for including me.