I’ve been doing SEO for nearly 20 years. I’ve sat across from hundreds of small business owners and walked them through keyword strategies, link building, technical audits — the full playbook. And I’ll be honest: for most of that time, I thought marketing clarity was someone else’s department.
Then I had Bruce Ashford on the Unscripted SEO Podcast, and he said something that stopped me mid-conversation.
“Far too many businesses — the business or the product is the hero. If you want an effective marketing message, you need to write one in which the customer is the hero.”
Simple. Obvious in hindsight. And something I see violated on nearly every website I audit.
Your Website Is Probably About You. It Shouldn’t Be.
Bruce runs The Ashford Agency, a consulting firm that helps nonprofits and small businesses get two things right: their message and their structure. He’s a certified Storybrand coach, and the framework he uses is built on a narrative arc that’s 2,000 years old — hero, problem, guide, plan, stakes. {Want his perspective on our convo? Check out his article}
The guide is your business. Not the hero.
That distinction matters more than most people realize. When I do SEO work for clients through SEO Arcade, the most common problem I see isn’t a technical one — it’s that the page we’re trying to rank is organized around what the company wants to say, not what the customer needs to hear. You can optimize all the H-tags you want. If the message doesn’t land, the conversion doesn’t happen.
Bruce frames it this way: first impressions are visual, but commitments to buy are message-based. Google can get someone to your page. Your words have to do the rest.
The Three Levels of Every Customer Problem
One framework from the conversation that I’ve already started referencing with clients is Bruce’s three-level problem model.
Every customer problem exists on three levels simultaneously. There’s the external problem — the visible, surface-level issue. I need a battery. I need a wall system. I need SEO help. That’s the one most businesses address, and stop there.
Then there’s the internal problem — how the situation makes the customer feel. Frustrated. Embarrassed. Exhausted from dealing with it. Bruce’s point is that this is where the emotional resonance lives. You name that feeling in your copy, and suddenly you’re speaking a language the customer actually recognizes.
The third level is what he calls the justice problem: what every customer deserves. “Every car owner deserves a battery that lasts longer than a year and a half.” That framing turns a mundane product into a statement of values. It elevates the message without inflating the claims.
This is directly applicable to the kind of content work I document on jeremyriveraseo.com — the gap between content that ranks and content that converts is almost always at level two or three of this model. We write for crawlers at level one, and then wonder why the traffic doesn’t move the needle.
What Bruce Taught Me About AEO (That Surprised Me)
The conversation took a turn I wasn’t expecting when Bruce started talking about Artificial Engine Optimization — his term for making your business visible to ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, and Perplexity so those tools recommend you in their answers.
His three categories: make your site technically machine-readable (including natural-language FAQ sections), produce authoritative content, and build social proof through Google and LinkedIn reviews that specifically name your business and products.
None of that surprised me. What did surprise me was hearing it framed from a non-SEO perspective. Bruce doesn’t come from our world. He’s a messaging consultant who’s authored nine books and ghostwritten fifteen more. And he’s arrived at the same conclusion that the best link builders and SEOs I’ve interviewed on the Unscripted SEO Podcast have arrived at: trust signals that work for humans work for machines too.
I told Bruce about the community cleanup link building approach I’ve developed through SEO Arcade — sponsoring local cleanups, getting your name into event aggregators, city hall sites, neighborhood Facebook groups. His response was immediate: “It’s not manipulation to do that. You’re trying to let people see who you really are at heart.”
That’s the frame I’ve been looking for. What you do in the real world has to get penciled into the internet. AEO is just a new reason the same principle matters more than ever.
The Mission Statement Problem
The last thing that stuck with me was Bruce’s take on vision and mission statements. Most of them, he says, are D-minus. They’re tangled with jargon, designed by committee, and forgotten by the CEO before the ink is dry.
His prescription: 25 to 30 words, no jargon, must name what you’ll do, by when, and why — including some version of a justice statement. Something that says every customer deserves X.
I’ve been working with clients who are early in their content strategy, and I often push them to articulate what they actually stand for before we start building keyword architecture. Bruce’s framework gives me a cleaner way to have that conversation. A mission statement that passes his test is also a mission statement that becomes content, a headline, a social post, an About page that actually functions.