Matthew Slaymaker on Ads, Creative Strategy & Honest Marketing

Matthew Slaymaker, Slaymaker Marketing  ·  Host: Jeremy Rivera  ·  Unscripted SEO Podcast

BEST QUOTES

"My hot take is you might not be ready for ads yet. If you're not getting an organic conversion rate of two to three percent already, your ads probably are never gonna work."

— Matthew Slaymaker

"Creative is 60, 70% of it on Meta — probably more like 70%. The better your creative is, the better Facebook can do of finding the right people."

— Matthew Slaymaker

"Every business that deserves to be in business is solving an actual problem. A lot of times with marketing, it's not about just saying 'buy this product' — it's about, here's this pain point, and here's how this solves for that."

— Matthew Slaymaker

Unscripted SEO Interview 

JEREMY RIVERA

Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted SEO Podcast host. I'm here with Matt Slaymaker, who's going to introduce himself to us and tell us why we should trust him as a voice in digital marketing.

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

What's up guys? My name is Matt Slaymaker. Like Jeremy mentioned, I'm in the digital marketing space. I'm a digital advertiser, been doing this for around 10 years. At Slaymaker Marketing, we do everything from Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Reddit, LinkedIn — every platform that could potentially be used to reach new customers, we use it. We work with a mix of B2B and e-commerce brands, some spending only like $100 a day, and we work with brands spending more than $30,000 a day on their ads. So a pretty ridiculous — fun — range of clients that we get to work with.

I've had the experience to touch on all these different areas, see what works, see what doesn't, see what makes a brand successful, see what makes a marketing campaign successful, and then — just as fun sometimes, not so much for the client, but from a learning perspective — see what doesn't work and what makes a brand not necessarily resonate with customers. Outside of digital advertising, I used to do SEO, used to do website design. I wasn't very good at it, wasn't very interested in it. So advertising was the area I decided to drill down into.

Website Readiness: Why Most Brands Aren't Ready for Ads

JEREMY RIVERA

I like to do this at the beginning, that way we don't have too much ground already covered — but what is your hottest take for small business owners, B2B, e-commerce that are running their ads? What do you want them to stop doing? What's the worst thing?

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

Honestly, this sounds crazy coming from an advertiser and an agency — where you often hear people say, yeah, flip on ads and all the customers will start rolling in. My hot take is probably: you might not be ready for ads yet. And really consider that. Take the time to think — will this actually help me or not?

I think a lot of times people think, if I can just turn on ads and start seeing some stuff come in, customers will start flowing in too. Oftentimes I find that the brands — small businesses and startups — who think, hey, maybe ads are doing something for me, you flip in there, they're spending ten thousand dollars and absolutely getting nothing out of it. So start from scratch in a sense, and I always tell people: start with the website, because that's where you're sending all the ads traffic. If you're not getting an organic conversion rate of two to three percent already — and it's more like 0.5% or 0.4% — then your ads probably are never gonna work.

Ads traffic will always convert 30, 40, 50% worse than organic traffic that comes through people who already know who you are, who are searching for you. So if you're not converting them efficiently, you're not going to convert ads traffic efficiently. Start there before you even turn the ads on, frankly. The advice might be: turn your ads off and evaluate — is this actually doing anything for you?

JEREMY RIVERA

That's interesting, because I was just talking with Greg Dineo — he's in the content marketing game — and we were talking about the challenge of the current AI conversion happening within SEO and that we have to be further out from the website in certain ways, but the website acts as the home base. I use the analogy of the kraken: you've got these tentacles that reach out and grab from different markets, reach out through different channels, but if your beak doesn't have the strength to crack open that mollusk — that tasty morsel from over there — you bring it in and you can't crack that nut. Your website needs optimization. It needs attention. There's conversion rate optimization that needs to be happening. There needs to be a review of your baseline marketing, your USP — your unique sales proposition. Do you know what it is? What's your positioning? Those are some fundamental things you gotta work through on your website before you bring more people in. If it ain't working for the small amount of people, more people might not be the answer.

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

You'd be surprised how many brands I ask, 'Hey, what's your unique selling proposition? What makes you guys different?' And they're like, 'I don't know — we're a little bit better. Our quality is a little bit better.' If you can't answer that question, then how are customers gonna be able to tell the difference? It's hard out there, especially in the ads space. It's a battle for CPCs, and whoever wins the click — but then if you win the click and they get to your website, and none of those things are present, your conversion rate's gonna stink and you're gonna lose a lot of money.

One thing you also mentioned is that pivot of things moving to more of a zero-click world — not actually making it to the website — that we've seen with AI overviews and ChatGPT and people changing the way they do search. Organic click-through rates have really gone down over the last few years because people are getting their answer directly on the overview. Google Marketing Live was a couple of days ago, and some of the new features they added are the ability to check out directly from the ad, as opposed to ever making it to the website. Now YouTube ads — you can just check out directly on YouTube. It's kind of copying what TikTok Shop has already been doing, where people can just buy directly within the platform.

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

The storefront is kind of moving. It's not gonna be just on your website — that digital storefront is gonna be everywhere. It's gonna be on YouTube, on the Google Shopping page where people can directly buy right there without making it to your website. So how you present yourself at every stage — through your YouTube ads, through your channel, the messaging on your shopping ads — that might be the only chance you get to actually explain yourself and present yourself to a user.

Advertising on AI Platforms: ChatGPT, AppLovin & the Data Problem

JEREMY RIVERA

ChatGPT is in what — early beta? The rich people can advertise on ChatGPT. The peasants aren't allowed in yet.

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

Yes. I'm on the wait list. I haven't heard back yet.

I have heard that it's changed a bit. When they first rolled it out, they were charging advertisers on a CPM basis — like a $60 CPM, kind of high. Now they're starting to do it on a click-by-click basis. Once it is available to everyone, I think small, medium, and large businesses, it'll be a platform that everyone could potentially benefit from. But in terms of who can actually access it — yeah, they want a certain level of spend guarantees. They want you to come into ChatGPT and actually spend, not come in and spend a thousand dollars and be like, 'This doesn't work.' They want the data and they want to see if this is gonna work or not.

JEREMY RIVERA

Any hints or inside information on whether this is the key to Pandora's box — to finally give us some sort of metrics or visibility of how many users are seeing these branded queries from within the tool? Because quite frankly, from my understanding, we're quite blind. I know if you're on Bing Webmaster Tools, there are some small visibility signals through Copilot — though I don't know how accurate or useful those are. I've seen promises from Fabrice Chanel from the Bing side that Copilot will give some additional metrics. Any indicators that we're going to be getting Google Ads API–type volume information to quantify the spend on the ad side with these AI platforms?

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

On ChatGPT and LLMs — not yet. I'll have a better idea once I'm off that wait list and can see what it's like in there. I would be shocked if they don't give you advertising-level data of like what are the specific searches that triggered your ads to show — all that should be in there. A lot of these platforms, like Google Ads, tried to move away from giving you data for privacy reasons. When Performance Max first came out, everyone hated it because it didn't give you any data. You couldn't see what search terms led the ad to show — was it on display, YouTube, or search? Nobody knows. Over time, Google actually started rolling more and more reporting into it. Whether it's that they don't have the capability initially and then upon advertiser demand they start adding that in — I think that'll probably be the case with ChatGPT too.

Have you heard of AppLovin? Axon by AppLovin? It's ads that serve in mobile apps — a lot of times in games. There are certain games, like one I play with my wife called Stop — a word-guessing game — where you can unlock hints by watching an ad, or get an ad between levels. These are typically unskippable — like a 30-second video ad. Our clients are seeing really great performance out of it. At Slaymaker Marketing, a non-skippable ad format can be really helpful. You get people to watch more of your ad versus YouTube, for example, where after five seconds people are gonna hit that skip button.

But the problem is AppLovin doesn't give you any data. Are our ads showing on good apps or bad apps? We have no idea. As an advertiser and as an agency, we're constantly demanding: when are we gonna get some of this data? Our clients don't feel comfortable advertising if we don't have this data. 'It's coming, eventually.' I think that's the case with a lot of these platforms. As they find the ability to report on it and as there's enough demand for that kind of reporting, they get their hand forced on it.

GBP Signal Boosting, Call Tracking & The SEO–Ads Synergy

JEREMY RIVERA

This is kind of a hybrid SEO slash advertising opportunity. Matt Brooks of SEOteric messaged me this morning about an interesting case where an ad company was using the click-to-call button from a GBP profile for a small business and running it in in-app games and other small ad placements to drive clicks — and those clicks were generating GBP clicks and traffic that were boosting these local service businesses' Google Local profiles. I was interested to see if you had, in your niche — whether you were working B2B on the local level or with some service businesses — whether you'd been able to measure or connect Google Search Console and Google My Business Profile performance when you activated ads, to see a correlative effect. I know very firmly that there's an extra 10% boost if you're ranked number one and advertising. And is there synergy between those two?

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

Definitely. When you allow call ads to show via Google Ads — if somebody clicks on a Google Maps ad, you've probably seen them before, where you search something locally and the first listing says 'Sponsored' or 'Ad' — that is a Google Ad being run. It used to be its own ad format; now it's often through Performance Max or a call extension. Those calls get recorded in the platform. You see who the phone number was, how long the call was, that kind of basic information.

But if you want something that's going to give you real data — like where did this phone call come from, was it Google organic search where they clicked the Google Business profile, was it Google Ads, and what did that actual call sound like, did it turn into business — my favorite tools for that are CallRail and What Converts. That one's a little bit cheaper sometimes, but they're both really good. Once you get to a certain size and you have enough phone calls that you need some degree of attribution to know where are these coming from and how should we invest in marketing to get more of them — that's where investing in a tool like that becomes more of a no-brainer.

If you're only getting one call a day, it probably doesn't make sense to pay for a tool like that just yet. But the cool thing about a lot of those tools is that you're paying per second or minute that is tracked. What are some other ways you've been able to track that better? Check out our results page to see how we've tracked and attributed calls for clients across different channels.

JEREMY RIVERA

Tracking's really interesting because in the SEO search world, we're seeing that Google has lied. Google said click behavior on the SERP is not used in rankings — but what they meant was it's not a ranking factor, it's used in ranking systems. The lawsuit came out and details showed that not only does the behavior of how people interact on the SERP function as a signal, but it's the C of the ABC: content, links, and how they interact with the SERP.

So if you can get more interaction with your Google Business Profile — not just reviews, but navigation signals — Joy Hawkins loaded, I think, ten or twenty phones into her car, drove to her client's location, and was able to measure a change in rankings afterwards because the signal proved that there were real people coming to this location. And in your Google Business Profile, there's a clickable click-to-call link — if you copy that link with the Google extension, it will track it as a call that occurred. So if you're serving mobile ads to people and they're clicking a link that triggers a call, it's attributed and can have positive lift to your profile.

I agree on CallRail — I've used it multiple times. Anytime where your lifeblood and conversions come from calls, you're an idiot if you're not tracking this stuff. There's a simple JavaScript swap out, but you do have to be careful where you use the numbers that go into the pool and whether or not you're purchasing them long-term. I had one case where a pool number fell out and calls were going to another business afterwards — that kind of contamination can happen with phone tracking numbers. It's not perfect, but it's probably a really good idea.

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

What we've learned from all of these platforms — Facebook, LinkedIn, Google — is that the platform rewards engagement, but it particularly rewards real engagement. Click-through rate is one signal. If people get your ads on Facebook and click, Facebook looks at that as 'people like this ad.' Same with likes, comments, shares. Facebook and LinkedIn look at all that stuff — 'this is a good quality ad that people like, and we're gonna keep serving it.' They throw the ads in there and Facebook decides which one gets more spend, usually based on the goals you've set — ROAS or whatever — but it picks up on conversion rate, click-through rate, all that stuff and throttles it.

Google does a lot of the same stuff. You're familiar with the metric called Quality Score, right?

JEREMY RIVERA

Of course. Yes.

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

Quality Score was made up of three components and was one of the biggest things back in the day that determined how much you actually pay in the auction — your bid times Quality Score. The three main components were: ad relevance (does the ad speak to the keyword you're bidding on?), landing page relevance (when you send people to the page, is it relevant to what they searched for?), and expected click-through rate (the more clicks you're getting, the lower in theory you'd be paying for CPCs). Now it's quite a bit more complicated. That tactic you explained — taking 40 phones to a store to see the impact — that is a black hat tactic I can get behind. I love the commitment of going out and buying 40 phones and seeing the impact.

But Google's algorithm is smart enough to know: if someone clicks on your website but then immediately hits back or immediately leaves, Google doesn't reward that click as much as someone who comes and spends 60 seconds or more. It's tracking session duration, engagement time. So there are companies out there who will promise you a bunch of bot clicks to your website for SEO value — and it really doesn't work because Google has caught on to that years ago. This is the exact same as with links, right? There are bot farms that spin up all these different websites — 'hey, I got you a thousand links from domain authority 1 out of a hundred websites' — none of that is gonna carry the weight of one link from a 50-out-of-100 domain authority website.

Creative Strategy: The New Primary Driver of Ad Performance

JEREMY RIVERA

I helped spin up AI Ads and Beyond, a podcast by Lisa Raisler, and she interviewed Russ Simmons. He said — tell me if you agree or disagree — creative is now the new primary driver of your success. The creative output, the ad collateral you're creating, has more impact now than ever. It used to be keyword selection, keyword ad group grouping — now it's what's the visuals, the video reel you're putting out. The quality of that is more impactful than ever.

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

Yeah. It depends on what platform you're talking about. For Meta, that's been the case probably for the last eight years and especially the last couple of years. Creative is 60, 70% of it — I'd say probably more like 70%. Most of the targeting options that worked best for pretty much every brand on Meta is broad targeting or Advantage Plus, where you basically just tell Meta, go find my customers. And it does a really good job of it — once it picks up on a few purchases, it's like 'that's the person, let's go find more people like that.' You really don't have to do a bunch of very specific targeting on Meta. If you try to do convoluted interest-based and look-alike audience layerings, you're gonna see worse performance than if you just did broad targeting. See how we approach social ads strategy at Slaymaker Marketing.

But that doesn't really work on the Google side yet. On YouTube, if you try that, it probably won't work as well as a more specific audience — a demographic-based, intent-based, or interest-based audience. Those still do way better. On the Facebook side, yes — creative is what allows Facebook to find the right people. The better your creative, the better your conversion rates, and the better Facebook can find the right people for each creative. And the more radically different angles you give it, the more it's gonna be able to serve that specific creative to the right person.

We have a client called Forkful — they sell meal kits. One of their top-performing ads is titled 'The #1 Gym Hack' with a picture of their meal kits. That ad serves to a very different audience than some of their other ads like 'If you're a busy mom, you need this' or 'If you're a working professional, you need this.' Giving that creative diversity across different audiences and angles is really how you find success on Meta — especially after the Andromeda updates, where Facebook doesn't reward you as much for making small tweaks. 'Hey, here's our top-performing ad — let's just change the color a little bit.' Facebook's like, 'No, that's not a different ad anymore. We need better diversity.'

On Google, especially with search ads, targeting is still king. If you're a dog food company and you target cat food keywords, it doesn't matter how good your ad copy is — you're not gonna sell product. And with Google broad match keywords and how much they're pushing AI Max and things like that, there is a lot of opportunity to show for the wrong stuff. I'd still say targeting is more like 50% of the game on Google Ads.

Marketing Boring Products & Finding the Pain-Point Angle

JEREMY RIVERA

Let's talk about boring. You're doing agricultural equipment, you're installing a concrete wall, you're doing behind-the-meter power generation for an AI company, or you're just doing oxygen and gas monitoring. How do you go about crafting creatives that catch when your product serves specialized industrial markets?

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

Yeah, I have a client like that. The fun thing is pretty much every business that deserves to be in business and is successfully getting new customers is solving an actual problem in the world. There is a real reason that they exist. So a lot of times with marketing, it's not about just saying 'here's this product, buy this product' — it's about 'here's this pain point that you have, and here's how this solves for that. Here's this big life-changing impact that this is gonna have for you.'

For example, I used to work with a brand that sold a car sensor where if you plugged it in, it would tell you what your check engine light means. On the surface, that sounds kind of boring. But when you market it a certain way, it's 'Find out if your mechanic is ripping you off.' Hey, that's a much more fun angle — that's something that resonates with people. 'Find out if you're overpaying for your car repairs.' 'Save thousands of dollars.' There's an angle and a benefit that is going to resonate.

So with the agricultural products example — on the surface, yes, there are a lot of boring elements to that. But to the person who wants that product, there is something about it that is very exciting. That's where it all starts with marketing creative messaging: find out what your audience actually cares about. What do they prioritize? What is the pain point you're trying to solve for? Play around with it and see what's the best way to attack that angle.

One thing I love to do to come up with ideas: you'll run something on Facebook as an ad and get a bunch of comments through — some people trashing your product, 'This is way overpriced.' Some people being like, 'I love this because blank, blank, blank.' That's one of my favorite ways to come up with new ad concepts — identify what people don't like that you need to objection-bust, and then what are the things they love that give you new ideas you hadn't even really considered.

Authentic Brand Values: Can Marketing Ever Be Genuinely from the Heart?

JEREMY RIVERA

There's a push and pull of there being taglines and values that came up after my interview with the Permacast wall company. And I'll be asking the oxygen monitoring company I'm meeting with tomorrow: what are the values you want to bring to the market? And what do you think about this challenge — that inherently they can't actually hold that value if they're just telling people? Like there's a performative element. As a company, you just have to say that this is what you believe. If you don't say it, you miss the mark. But there's also this kind of make-believe world of marketing where you're saying what your company's values are — we're mission-oriented — which is good because you're communicating your value. Hopefully you're delivering that in the product you actually deliver, but there's also a cognitive dissonance: if you don't tap-dance to say you do that thing, you don't at all. You can't communicate that value. But you're also tap-dancing, which isn't genuine. Can you have genuine, from-the-heart marketing? That's kind of my question.

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

You can, absolutely — but you have to show it. You can't just say it. It's like when I went to college and learned about marketing, we had a class about sustainable marketing and Patagonia was the name everybody talked about. They were a great example of a brand that lived that value of sustainability — in terms of how much they donated, the materials they made their products with. That was a very real reason that people decided to buy from them.

Fast forward a couple of years, everybody's saying 'we're sustainable, we're made in USA, we're cruelty free' — all these things that everybody is saying. And so it doesn't really make you stand out anymore, especially if you're just saying it and not actually showing it.

One brand that did a good job of this: we worked with Yellow Leaf Hammocks. They were on Shark Tank about five years ago. They made their hammocks in Thailand — handwoven by villagers there — and their mission was to empower women in those communities to improve their lives through jobs. Some of the videos and collateral that worked really well for them was the business owner walking through the village and meeting the people and seeing the faces of the people who were actually weaving the hammocks. Every hammock that's woven has the name of the person who wove it written on it. That's the kind of stuff that actually brings your values to life. If you just say, 'We're charitable,' people don't really trust or believe you nowadays. But if you can actually show it and bring it to life for them, that's a very different thing.

SMBs & Social Media: Do You Have to Do the TikTok Dance?

JEREMY RIVERA

My wife works at a tattoo parlor, and she shared a TikTok with me — a small business owner who's like, 'Well, I guess I gotta put on a hat and song-and-dance to get on TikTok.' And the other tattoo artists she's apprenticing under are like, 'I just wanna do the stuff. Do I really have to be a social media creation expert now?' Her answer to them was yes. Is that your answer? Like, suck it up, Buttercup — this is the digital world we live in and if you wanna show proof of what you do, you gotta do it. But does that mean everybody's gotta do the silly TikTok dances, or is there another way?

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

No, I don't think so at all. Two things: be real to who you are. Don't be someone that you're not because you feel like you should be. I feel like people see through that and it won't resonate if it's not what you're comfortable with. So start there. And then think about where do you actually need to be? You don't need to be on every platform. If TikTok is where your audience is, then yeah, fine — go there and try to find ways to bring your content to life in a way that's still true to you.

For me and my audience, it's primarily LinkedIn. And I'm comfortable in this format — a podcast, a conversation, speaking on stage. What I don't like is recording myself and talking to the camera. There's no feedback loop there — it feels completely unnatural. I still haven't posted a video on LinkedIn of me talking. I will, I need to do it, but for me what's more comfortable and what I've seen more success with is just sharing advice on LinkedIn, sharing an experience. It achieves the same goal: establishing yourself as an expert, establishing your credibility and authority, and expanding your reach.

On TikTok, it's obviously a video format and you have to hook their attention in those first couple of seconds or you're gonna lose them. But what I would encourage people to think about is the format and style and who you can potentially work with to make it feel more natural and comfortable. Maybe there's an employee or an intern who is more comfortable being in front of the camera. Maybe there's someone who can kind of interview you and tee you up with questions, then edit it so you're not talking directly to camera. Because a lot of times what throws people off is that feeling of 'I keep trying and I just can't get it right.' So reevaluate how you're tackling it and don't box yourself into this being your only possibility.

AI, Agents & Content Automation: What's Actually Working

JEREMY RIVERA

This question comes from my previous guest. What are you building on the agentic side? Not just the AI side — because we all can't help it, they keep baking AI into everything. But is there anything you've done unique with prompting, with skills, and then with that next fanciful layer of agentic? I'd interviewed the founder of GROAS, who claimed to have created a fully agentic ad platform that top-to-bottom handled all of the Google Ads experience agentically. Have you toyed around with such a tool? Have you built anything that's helped in your content creation, creative workflow, ad selection, keyword selection matrix on the LLM AI side, and anything that's slipped into or is on the agentic side of things?

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

Not that I've built, but I have played around with other people's tools. And I still have no idea where to start when it comes to building your own AI agent. But the ones that I've seen that are really cool can log into Google Ads, integrate with Claude, and build campaigns directly, build presentations directly. That's a big time suck for any agency working across several different clients. Most of our specialists work across about six to seven clients, and one of the biggest time sucks for them is preparing for client calls.

The main one I've been using — it's not an AI agent, it's just a workflow that has been really cool and productive for me — is integrating Claude with Slack and email and using it to identify who on the team is being extra proactive, and who could maybe step up a little bit. Because one thing that's very important for maintaining client relationships and giving confidence is to make sure clients are hearing from you on a daily basis — even if it's just internal team conversations, a new insight, a report. Claude goes through and basically scores the whole team: here's who's being super proactive, here's where we could be a little bit better. And it does the same thing with the change history in Google: these are the accounts that are getting a lot of love and attention, here's the ones that aren't.

From a management perspective, now that I'm not the one on a day-to-day pressing all the buttons in the account, it allows me to step back and see where are the opportunities to level up the team and see where we could grow more from a client management perspective — but also from our own level of proactivity and communication. Check out the Slaymaker Marketing services page to see how this operational discipline translates into client results.

Agency Growth: Referrals, Inbound Challenges & Honest Self-Promotion

JEREMY RIVERA

That kind of ties into a question I got from the Kalinka Group, where they wanted to ask about your business plan and what was the hardest part right now. As we're talking about the agency life and agency owner side of things, that sounds like a good solve — but what's a sticky widget? What's an area that isn't quite fixed, somewhere where you're looking to get some help or know you need to do some work?

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

I'll start with what's worked really well for us, which is growth through referrals and partnerships. I'm part of several business community groups and a platform called Storetasker, where they send you leads and take 20% of whatever closes. Win for them, but win for me in the sense that I didn't have to do anything to get these leads. We've grown our agency like 200% over the last year just through keeping clients, upgrading clients, and growing through referrals and some of those free leads. For a full picture of what that growth looks like, check out our pricing page.

What's been the challenge is finding more inbound — getting people who've never heard of you before, who didn't get referred to you, to come through. It's the same things that our clients should pay us for, right? And to this point, historically it was like, we just don't have enough budget to throw at it from an ads perspective. Now we're to that point, so we started to reactivate some ads funnels and explore that a bit. But SEO — that's an area we just haven't invested nearly enough time and resources in, from link building and PR. I'm trying to be better about it with content on LinkedIn, going on podcasts, things like that for a little bit of PR and link building. But yeah, inbound marketing is the challenge for every agency owner.

Some people find a lot of success at events. For me, every time I go to an event, I get a bunch of business cards, make a bunch of connections, but it never turns into anything. So it's like, that wasn't worth the thousand dollars I paid to be there.

JEREMY RIVERA

Yeah. I've attended a number of different conferences wearing different hats — as an individual consultant, part of an SEO marketing team, running a booth for Raven SaaS tools. It's very easy to get distracted by the bright and shinies. The only times where real money changed hands was at the bar afterwards, in the hallway. The value wasn't in the presentation — it was chatting with somebody over the hot dogs or hors d'oeuvres afterwards. And it's mostly cross-pollination. If you go there hard-prospecting, people can smell it. You're much better aligned with 'hey, I've got something, you wanna reach the same folks — this is a good time to connect.' Read more about how podcast-based link building drives agency growth.

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

And the hard-prospecting people always cut off the conversation so abruptly because they're like, 'I have to talk to like 30 people while I'm here.' You'll be in a deep conversation with them and you can tell on their face they're eager to go talk to somebody else. That debate: which is more valuable for you — talking to thirty people for five minutes or talking to five people for thirty minutes and making an actual connection that you'll actually stay in touch with?

JEREMY RIVERA

Yeah. It's a challenging world.

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

What about you? What have you guys found to be what's working and what's the sticking point — this is something we wish could be better?

JEREMY RIVERA

I'm a big proponent of eating your own dog food. As a cobbler, I've been working very, very hard these past couple months to finally put some shoes on these poor orphan kids and actually do some SEO work. I have SEO Arcade, which is my SEO agency site. I've refocused the value proposition to basically two things: one is link building through podcasting for secondary clients, and the other is helping build white-label podcasts for brands and agencies using the huge amount of dialogue and value. This interview is 45 minutes — that's 4,000 to 4,500 words worth of content. And the sad thing is, most podcasts are going to be stuck in an MP3 file. But that transcript — I already turned my first interview today into three articles for my guest's site, a PDF ebook version, a slideshow version as a downloadable. It's been uploaded and published on three of my different sites: my personal SEO consultant site, the SEO Arcade site, and the Unscripted SEO Podcast site — all through Royal MCP connected to WordPress through Claude.

And with Blotato MCP connected to Claude, I've got three weeks' worth of posts, one day a week, two posts on eight different social media channels linking to the collateral I just made.

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

Dang. Then you're good, man. You don't need another podcast for the next few weeks. You're good.

JEREMY RIVERA

No, I need the podcast — the podcast is the engine because that's where the value add comes in. It's the information gain. LLMs don't have anecdotes. LLMs don't have personal experiences. They don't have conversations. And so whatever threat comes to the SEO world from agents, from AI, from LLM tools and whatever overviews — the people doing the valuable thing are doing this: you and me right now, talking about it. It's the best keyword research in the world. In fact, I haven't done keyword research that didn't start with a conversation in the past year. And I have a keyword research tool on SEO Arcade. I built it. But keyword clusters are better done after I have the conversation to find out what the seed keywords are for a particular niche topic. Conversations like this don't look at the most popular five keywords and talk about those things — it's what's your anecdote, what was your lived experience, what are you building, where did you lose, where did you fail? That's what I've been doing.

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

Love it, man. I need to get on it. We're doing a lot of that stuff in the sense that I have Claude analyzing call recordings — I have it integrated with Fireflies call recording software and it reads the transcripts and comes up with content. But I need to get a true MCP to do what you're doing where it just auto-pushes out to all these places. That's the manual work I'm still doing that I need to stop so I can have an hour back in my day every day — to go to the gym or enjoy some sunshine.

JEREMY RIVERA

Well, it came out of my wife saying, 'You're looking at your phone too much.' I was like, 'Why am I looking at my phone so much?' I was walking away from the laptop and grabbing Claude and trying to post to all these social channels. I'm like, 'You've had Buffer for twenty years and you can't find a solution to post to your socials? You're not a digital marketer — come on, step up.' But happy to talk with anybody who wants to hire my professional SEO consulting services — check out SEO Arcade — to get this content podcast system cracking and working. A little bit of self-promotion — I usually don't indulge in that, but it's too perfect.

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

That was a good moment for it. Yeah, man. Awesome.

Closing: Unanswered Question & Where to Find Matt

JEREMY RIVERA

To wrap things up — what's a question that you had in your mind that you would have liked to have been asked before you came on the show?

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

That's an interesting one. Honestly, I thought you asked really good questions. The main things that come to mind are: what does it take to be successful with advertising? And like we talked about earlier, I think it all starts with the website and where you're gonna send people. You touched on creative being such a huge part of it — and it is — and then targeting. Those are your main three levers that you're pulling at any given time. So no, man, I think you did a great job. I don't think I'd add any questions to the list.

JEREMY RIVERA

Fantastic. I love it. Well, shoutout — tell us what is your preferred social medium. If people have questions, they want to follow up, give you some of that inbound you're looking for — where should they reach out to you?

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

Not TikTok dances yet. I'll work on them — once I get the moonwalk down, I'll post something on TikTok. But no, I'm on LinkedIn: Matt Slaymaker. I'm the one with the black shirt and the microphone. Slaymaker Marketing is also on LinkedIn. Go to SlaymakerMarketing.com — we have one free audit left that we do for any brand. So if you're already spending on advertising and you want someone to take a look and see where it could be more efficient, we'll tell you if it's working and if it's not. There's really not a good reason not to do it because it's free — it's normally $500 and we have one left. If you want it, go to the website and claim it — it's the big button at the top. Those are the two main places you'll find me: LinkedIn or the website.

JEREMY RIVERA

Well, thanks so much for stopping by.

MATTHEW SLAYMAKER

Thanks for having me on.

Key Takeaways

→  Before turning on paid ads, audit your website's organic conversion rate first. If organic traffic isn't converting at 2–3%, ad traffic — which always converts 30–50% worse — won't save you. Start with your USP, your positioning, and your site's CRO before spending a dollar on ads.

→  The digital storefront is no longer just your website. With Google's direct checkout from ads and TikTok Shop–style buying within platforms, how you present yourself at every touchpoint — your YouTube ad, your Shopping ad copy — may be your only shot at explaining your value to a customer.

→  On Meta, creative is roughly 70% of success. Broad targeting or Advantage Plus works better than narrowly layered audiences — let the algorithm find your customers, and give it radically different angles and creatives to work with. On Google Ads, targeting still accounts for about 50% of the game.

→  Finding the pain-point angle transforms boring products. A car diagnostic sensor becomes 'find out if your mechanic is ripping you off.' Read your ad comments — the objections and the love both give you your next creative brief.

→  Authentic brand values must be shown, not just stated. Brands like Patagonia and Yellow Leaf Hammocks built real equity by demonstrating their values through evidence — factory floor visits, named artisans — not by claiming them in a tagline.

→  AI is most valuable when applied to real leverage points: Matt's Claude–Slack integration scores team proactivity and account activity, helping him manage a growing agency without touching every account daily. Jeremy's MCP–WordPress–Blotato pipeline turns one podcast interview into weeks of content across eight social channels — making the podcast the engine, not just the product.