About Jeremy Rivera — 19-Year SEO Veteran

I got into SEO by accident — and I mean that more literally than most people do.

Early in my career I was a customer support rep at a web hosting company. Trying to make life easier for our customers, I built out a feature that let hosting clients do reciprocal link exchanges en masse. It seemed helpful at the time. What it actually did was contribute to the event that caused Google to penalize ALL reciprocal links across the board.

I watched Greg Boser come in and do the consulting work to get 20,000 websites released from being de-listed. Seeing the scale of the damage — and watching someone methodically undo it — was what made me want to do this work seriously. Not to exploit search engines, but to help people undo the kind of newbie mistakes I’d inadvertently helped create in the first place.

That origin shapes how I think about SEO. I’ve seen what happens when someone optimizes for a signal without understanding why it existed. I’ve seen what it takes to clean up the mess. And I’ve spent nineteen years since making sure the businesses I work with build on foundations that don’t require cleaning up.

What I Believe About SEO

Your website is the digital shadow of your real-world company. A bigger, more active real-world company casts a bigger, more credible shadow. SEO’s job is to accurately sketch that shadow — to make the online representation match and amplify what’s happening offline.

Most SEO tactics are attempts to manufacture the shadow without doing the real-world work that creates it. That’s why they have a shelf life. The work that compounds — editorial mentions, community involvement, genuine expertise, real conversations — is the same work that makes a business worth recommending in the first place.

In the AI search era this has become more true, not less. LLMs surface what third parties say about you, not what you say about yourself. The businesses that appear in AI-generated recommendations are the ones that have built an ecosystem of references — the ones that cast a real shadow.

The Unscripted Podcast Network

I host three shows under the Unscripted umbrella:

  • Unscripted SEO — weekly conversations with SEO practitioners, content marketers, and digital PR professionals about what’s actually working in search
  • Unscripted Small Business — marketing and growth conversations with small business owners and the consultants who serve them
  • Unscripted Home Improvement — business development conversations for contractors and tradespeople

The podcast isn’t just a content channel. It’s the methodology. Every guest interview is a knowledge-extraction session. The transcript becomes source material. The guest has a reason to share the episode — that’s a natural link and a mention. The conversation produces content no AI can replicate because it actually happened.

I built this model for myself first. Now I help other businesses run it through SEO Arcade.

SEO Arcade

SEO Arcade is the software and services platform I built on top of this methodology. It’s where the podcast production program lives — the done-for-you version of what I run on my own shows. Guest sourcing, production, content repurposing, link and mention tracking, internal linking strategy.

If you want to understand what I’ve built and why, the podcast is the best place to start. Nineteen years of how I see the industry, one conversation at a time. Listen to Unscripted SEO →

Background

  • 19 years of SEO consulting across enterprise, SaaS, e-commerce, and local service businesses
  • Host of Unscripted SEO, Unscripted Small Business, and Unscripted Home Improvement
  • Founder of SEO Arcade
  • Based in Cookeville, Tennessee
  • Published SEO author

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