I’ve been doing SEO for twenty years, I started on Twitter, and I still tweet. There was a moment I almost didn’t. Bluesky had opened, Mastodon was there, and John Henshaw from Raven Tools had abandoned the platform completely. The SEO community that was once foundational to Twitter was splintering into shrapnel. Talking with Bridget Willard on her Unscripted SEO episode reminded me why staying was the right call, and why the reason has more to do with trust than with any platform.
The platform owner isn’t losing sleep over you leaving
Bridget has marketed SaaS products on X and with blog posts for fifteen years. She watched maybe 20% of the developers, SaaS founders and WordPress people she works with leave. Her take on it was the most practical thing I’d heard on the subject.
I don’t really like any of the tech moguls, but that’s not gonna stop me from promoting myself or my clients. So I don’t think they lose sleep at night because we left them, so we might as well use it to our advantage. — Bridget Willard
Then she gave me the search argument. She sees a Twitter handle as a URL, and “SEO is words.” When she searched her own name and clicked Google’s News tab, her tweets were sitting there. If you’ve written off social as “not SEO,” that one search is worth running on yourself. Her post on why X is still relevant makes the rest of the case.
My wife already knew what most agencies don’t
My wife is a tattoo apprentice right now, and she’s getting a ton of bookings already. She uses social media the way she always has. She films herself getting ready, heading to the shop, setting up, doing the work. Some of the other artists at the shop don’t think they need to post every day. She can’t understand it. You did four tattoos today and you’re not going to post anything?
Bridget explained why my wife’s approach works better than I could.
The bigger the tattoo, the more hours you’re spending, the more days. — Bridget Willard
You’re trusting that person with your skin. Watch enough get-ready-with-me videos and you feel like you know her. Bridget’s line on it was simple: “because you’re recognizable and I’ve been following you, now I trust you.”
Compare that with what a lot of agencies sell as social media management: twenty scripted posts that go out at 8 a.m., noon and 6 p.m. for twelve weeks, with no replies to anybody. That’s a soapbox. What Bridget runs is a town square, and when I put it that way to her, she said “a hundred percent.”
Trust comes from vulnerability, even when the screen is in the way
Bridget doesn’t open with a pitch. She calls cold DMs “too much too soon” and keeps the conversation public until somebody asks for a meeting. Her description of what the screen does to us stuck with me.
It’s just me and 18 inches, you’re not really there. I’m just talking to the green light, you know. And we forget there’s another human over on that side of the screen. — Bridget Willard
Her answer is to be public about some part of your life that isn’t what you sell, whether that’s golf or homeschooling. “Small talk is the social glue,” she said, and it does the trust-building before you ever get on a call. She’s written about this in why small talk matters in business relationships.
I connected it to a conversation I had with my friend Michael McDougald about behavioral levers. Once you know that doing X leads to Y, there’s a pull to use it to manipulate people. The balance, to me, is that being more authentic and having more real conversations is itself what helps you sell. Corporate speak gets so rigid it loses its connection to humanity. Bridget’s reply was that the brand needs a human voice, and she’d spent the night before proving it, on Twitter until eleven for her client Rocket.net during a PHP vulnerability leak.
you can’t just post and ghost. — Bridget Willard
What should be impromptu is scripted
Bridget told me about a financial compliance client that scripts its conference panels. She’d never script a panel. The whole point is you bring yourself.
I laughed, because I’d just run an SEO panel with Patrick Stox, Ben Wills and Ben Senescu of OpenSEO with nothing written down. You’re all in SaaS, you’re all in SEO, I’ll ask questions, you ask each other questions, and we’ll see what happens. That’s how this whole show works.
But her explanation changed how I read it. Compliance people are used to submitting their answers before they’re approved to publish, so they keep doing it even outside the company.
They’re still gonna behave the same way regardless of the platform they’re on. — Bridget Willard
If you’ve ever wondered why one client’s team goes quiet online and another’s won’t stop talking, look at the industry before you look at the channel.
Direct traffic is a pile I can’t attribute
This is where we agreed hardest. Bridget thinks sales and marketing are siblings that companies force to compete for budget, and she called attribution “kind of a lie.” At best, it shows you the last thing that happened, not the years of trust before it.
I’d talked with Keith Perhac of SegMetrics the day before, and even he says to pick your poison between first touch and last touch. Then I gave Bridget my own mess of an example. Say I’m on my phone, running a remote-control session with Claude Code. It researches a tool and emails my client a suggestion. The client, on their desktop, copies and pastes the URL. Was that social, because of the surfaces it read? Mobile, because I was on my phone? Desktop? My analytics will call it direct traffic, and it isn’t. It’s a poorly bucketed pile of mishmash.
Bridget pointed to the Meta ad where a woman floats in a pool and tells her assistant to book lunch. How does that reservation show up in anybody’s report? Matt Brooks put the same shift to me a different way recently: you now have to optimize for the robot’s wallet, not only the human’s.
What you can still measure is how many people came, how many converted, how many bounced and what they were looking for. Fill in that piece of the puzzle, and stop prognosticating off poor sourcing.
Where I’d start
So here are the questions I’m asking about my own accounts, and you might ask about yours. When was the last time you replied to somebody instead of posting at them? Does a search for your name in the News tab show anything you wrote? What part of your life are you public about that isn’t what you sell? And if a customer couldn’t remember how they first heard about you, would your reports even notice?
For the full conversation, read the Unscripted SEO episode recap, watch it on YouTube or listen here. If you want the tactics in checklist form, SEO Arcade has Bridget’s off-page playbook for X. You can find Bridget at bridgetwillard.com, on X at @BridgetMWillard and on LinkedIn.