The morning I recorded this episode, I had already spent thirty minutes on a call about precast concrete walls.
Not because I love concrete. Because we are building a page about how their walls protect against direct weapons and EMPs, and there was no version of that page I could write from a keyword tool.
So I did the thing I used to skip. I got the CEO, the CFO and the CMO on a call and asked them what they actually do here.
And the guy started listing things that were nowhere on their website. Fast. Built to spec. Adjustable in ways poured concrete can never be. That is the value proposition. That is what buyers ask for. It was not on a single page of the site.
That only comes out of a human conversation. There is no prompt for it.
I used to do it the other way and I got away with it
I want to be honest about this because I have been on the other side of it.
There was a stretch where my process was: open Ahrefs, open SEMrush, write the thing, done. Never talk to the client. I had success doing that. Search volume was high enough and the opportunities were sitting there loose enough that you could win without ever learning what the business actually sold.
I should never have worked that way. But you could get away with it.
You cannot get away with it now. In today’s economy, one must actually talk to your freaking client.
The middleman years
I have worked at half a dozen agencies of different sizes, and I kept falling into the same pit. The person managing the account did not know SEO.
I could explain something to them and they would nod along, and then it went through the gearbox and came out the other side as something else. It would have taken me five minutes to explain it to the client directly. That was not how the agency was set up. So you give up and hope they get it.
I brought this up with Stephanie Long on the show, mostly to see if it was just me.
It was not just me.
“I never talked to the clients. I just sent my report to the account executive, and that was that.”
She has been doing SEO for almost twenty years, she owns Mrs. SEO, and she is building Junction Jack, a vetted marketplace for hiring SEO help. She came up through agencies the same way I did.
And the client she had just picked up had lived the whole failure:
“He never talked to anyone but his account executive. So he didn’t understand anything, because the SEO person was never on the calls. And he didn’t understand the reports, and the account executive didn’t understand the reports.”
Nobody in that chain understood the reports. Somebody was still getting invoiced.
Why she thinks freelance is winning
Stephanie’s read on where the market is going is the cleanest version of this I have heard.
“I’m seeing more people want to come to individuals, because what I’ve been told, and I totally agree, is you talk to me. You don’t talk to the account executive.”
“I know people value so much talking to me as the owner. I hear it, I believe it, and I want to be able to speak to any concerns they have, versus somebody that doesn’t know.”
That is not a pitch for freelancing as a lifestyle. It is the observation that the translation layer is now the most expensive part of an engagement, and clients have started noticing.
She also told me something I did not expect, which is that clients are more interested in SEO than they have ever been. When she was the in-house solo SEO reporting to a CEO, nobody cared. They wanted open rates and likes. Now she gets on a marketing call with the PPC person and the email person, and her thirty minutes eats the hour.
“People are really, really interested, and I think that’s great. So people weren’t, and now they are.”
Her theory is that AI did that. People can finally see something happening, so they want to understand it.
The machines do not have a gut
I was riffing on Slack with Martin McGarry about the fact that LLMs do not have opinions. Humans are born with two things: b-holes and opinions. ChatGPT does not have either. It is built as the ultimate yes-man.
If you walk into one of those tools expecting truth, you are deceiving yourself.
And it got worse. There is now published work showing these systems have been caught choosing to lie, not hallucinating, lying, unless you run a second model whose whole job is to watch the first one. They invent, and they will not hold themselves to the original prompt.
Stephanie’s habit is the right one and it is not complicated.
“Like, I click through the links. I actually ask: give me the data behind this. I am very suspect of these tools, but I love them at the same time.”
She clicked every link on one query and every single one was broken. All of them. She wrote it up.
The version of this I keep repeating: check your 404s. Not because something on your site broke, but because ChatGPT imagineered a page you never had and started sending people there. It decided that resource should exist. Go build it and catch the traffic.
Human, human, human
Some SaaS company pulled the transcripts out of their support chat interface and looked at the most common opening word.
It was “human.” People typing human, human, human. Hitting zero. Trying to get to a person.
The amount of corporate resistance to shortening that loop is something I fight constantly and mostly lose. Margins get in the way, and a fully automated support desk is an enticing line item.
Stephanie’s answer when I brought it up was the same one, from the client side:
“That’s not the same value as talking to someone that can answer your question, because you have to get so specific, or they don’t understand, or they hang up on you.”
She was talking about SEO, not support tickets. It is the same complaint.
“You can have it, but it’s not going to be good.”
What I would actually do with this
Stephanie’s line is the one that stuck, and she wrote a whole post about it:
“SEO is like the batter to your AI. You have to have it together, or you’re going to fail.”
That is not a defense of old-school SEO out of nostalgia. It is a load-bearing claim. The tools amplify whatever base you give them. No base, nothing to amplify.
So here is my Monday version of all this.
Book thirty minutes with somebody at your client’s company who has never been on an SEO call. The CFO. The head of ops. The person who answers the phone. Ask them what they actually do here and what customers keep asking for.
Then go look at what is on the website.
The gap between those two things is your content plan, and I promise you no tool in your stack is going to hand it to you.
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Full episode with Stephanie Long is on Unscripted SEO. Find her at Junction Jack, Mrs. SEO, on LinkedIn and Instagram.
Related: Colby Wegter on why most freelancers fail at scaling · Gareth Hoyle on creatives who skip the business · Jon Henshaw on AI hype and Google’s sources of truth