Episode 101 - Amber Goetz

Erik Martinez:Welcome to this episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. Today we're diving into a topic that's getting more complex and honestly, more misunderstood by the week, Modern SEO. AI is changing how search works. User behavior is shifting, and a lot of advice out there hasn't kept up. I wanted to bring on someone who cuts through the noise. Amber Goetz has been deep in the data, watching what actually drives results and what needs to evolve as we head into 2026. Amber, welcome to the show.

Amber Goetz: Thank you. I'm excited to be on it.

Erik Martinez: I've been looking forward to this conversation [00:01:00] because SEO is near and dear to my heart, even though I am not the practitioner that you are. Before we start, can you tell us a little bit about your journey into SEO and what you're doing now?

Amber Goetz: The journey started long ago. It was probably 2012. I was a co-owner of a photography business and had also been doing web development and started to notice little things I was doing on the site was tremendously making leaps and bounds in search. And at that point I didn't know much about SEO. People weren't really talking about it yet as like a service. We had started this company in a new city and within six weeks we were just drowning everyone.

Amber Goetz: So then I'm going, what is this? And then I'm learning about SEO. Flash forward 13, almost 14 years later. None of those things work that worked in 2012. Those are gone. And here I am now. Like you just said, week by week there's something new and there's something to jump into. I'm just staying afloat. I'm just learning. I'm absorbing like anyone else in this space and just trying to share with my clients, what [00:02:00] is working and where they should keep focusing their energies and where not to.

Erik Martinez: I think that's great. I have performed some SEO tasks. I have purchased SEO services and it really is all over the map, depending on your philosophy and your background and whether you have a local business or a national business. There's all sorts of different, subtleties to each, e-commerce versus lead gen, all of those things are very different. The topic that I'm spending a lot more time on right now is AI. And every conference, webinar, blog post, podcast, everybody's talking about AIO GEO. And it seems finally we're starting to settle on this concept of GEO. How is AI from a practical day-to-day perspective, how is it changing SEO and what does that mean for businesses in 2026?

Amber Goetz: I think AI is not replacing SEO by any means. I think it's reshaping it though. I think [00:03:00] the way people are searching is changing very fast. We're seeing search engines and even the AI search results cater the results to what people are looking for, which I think is very cool. I think brands that are leaning on AI to help them be more efficient, not replace their strategy are the ones that are winning. I think we still need human minds in there, like really diving deep on who the customer persona is and using that, human knowledge compared with the spreadsheets and the data that AI can pull and collaborate for you to make you faster. That's my main takeaway with what's changing the most when it comes to humans versus AI.

Erik Martinez: Do you think that, this concept GEO or AIO, whatever you want to call it today, do you that is a magic trick behind it? I know there isn't, but what are the things that if you start doing, this will help.

Amber Goetz: The biggest thing that I see keep winning honestly, is really having a solid brand represented across the [00:04:00] board. I'm talking social media, your Google business profile, your FAQs. Keeping your brand so locked in that you have that same tone, everywhere. And I think brands that have always been really good at that are winning tremendously right now. Versus the brands who are like, I don't know, I paid some guy on Fiverr to do this and they're just running around. It's bring it all back together and have it be one strong voice. Those are the brands that I'm seeing doing super well. And we were talking about this, before we got started, YouTube and podcasting. GEO loves pulling data from those sources. So all of my clients who are like, oh man, I'm thinking of, pulling back on the podcast. I'm like don't do it. It's you talking, it's you building that brand. I am seeing the citations coming in from Spotify and Apple like wildfire.

Erik Martinez: Are there particular topics of conversation that seem to have more gravitas? Cause going back to the brand voice, which I've totally in agreement on I think today a brand identity. There's [00:05:00] organizations that have the marketing budgets to build that consistency. So how does a smaller brand, who doesn't necessarily have the big marketing department or the big marketing budgets compete in the SEO GEO space and build that consistency? What should they do first?

Amber Goetz: You're saying like starting a podcast, starting a YouTube channel? Like how does someone small that does not have that time? I would say don't sleep on Google Business Profile. If you are a small business providing service to a local area, your Google business profile is so important, and they're changing it very quickly. I haven't seen it yet on my own personally, but I did read an article that they're gonna be rolling out, like AI automated phone calls to businesses on the Google profile, just to see response rate, the helpfulness. Like you don't have someone answering calls or being readily available for that. You gotta try to find a way to do it, because that goes outside of the SEO scope. That's just like hands in on the business to help you. But things like that, that are just popping up, they're taking away [00:06:00] FAQs or the ability to ask questions. That will be coming out from what I've read that will be coming out and that's been like a huge SEO component to like jam in as much content into those questions and answers as possible. And it's just okay, that's changing. So what's next? And now there's this AI calling thing where it seems like they're trying to pull in as much real brand persona as possible. If you've got someone that can answer the phone and answer those questions. That's far more powerful than, some guy on Fiverr, filling it, loading it up.

Erik Martinez: Oh, for sure. And yet it raises some real concerns, like in terms of who's answering that phone and are they trained up on what you do or is it just the, $15 an hour receptionist that you hired yesterday. Who gets that call?

Amber Goetz: Is the brand owner now tied to the phone? I've had that thought myself and I've been paying attention when calls just come in that say from Google. And this is my honest feedback, for most of the time, calls like that are spam [00:07:00] or it's a tire kicker. It's someone that's not really sure what they want. And now I'm like, I'm gonna answer them all because Google would be mad at me and stop showing my listing. So I would say pay attention to your Google Business profile as much as you can.

Erik Martinez: Does that also apply for businesses that don't have local? I work with a lot of businesses that are national but don't have retail or location. How do those guys compete with all of what's going on right now?

Amber Goetz: Citations. It's not fun, but getting your site listed in directories. You're saying like maybe someone runs an Etsy shop and they're trying to drive more business, finding directories on sites that have a great authority, so it's a larger site and they'll allow you to list your business or list your service. I think things like that would be helpful. That's a tough one though, without the ability to do any other SEO really make sure your content is rankable. That's gonna be tricky.

Erik Martinez: I totally agree with that.

Erik Martinez: You just said something that reminded me of something. So [00:08:00] way, way back when, I don't wanna even say how long, 'cause I don't want to date myself on the podcast. I was working with this firm who was helping us do SEO for a brand I was working for. And we were talking about canonicalization and I'm like we need to canonicalize these URLs. He's that was so like two years ago. And then you just brought up citations. I can tell you within the last few years I've had conversations with other SEO practitioners, no citations are dead. So what SEO advice are we listening to that we should absolutely not listen to?

Amber Goetz: Well first of all, they're wrong about citations. Okay. AI loves citations. LLMs love citations.

Erik Martinez: I'm with you by the way.

Amber Goetz: What I think is dead, SEO plugins that turn your content green or red or orange, if you've written it well enough. I think that is totally dead. You know what plugins I'm talking about? Have you used any of these, like Yost or Rank Math?

Erik Martinez: [00:09:00] I actually don't use any of them 'cause I don't like them.

Amber Goetz: Okay. Well, I mean, not too long ago, two years ago I feel like I could empower my clients to write better content. Write better copy that is rankable, no guarantees it's actually gonna rank, but I felt good at least telling them like I think you can do fine with the free version, but if you're liking the features that it's touting about you should give it a go because I think it's helpful for you. And I feel like those do not matter at all anymore. I don't think any of it matters. I don't think it's input matters and I think the main reason is, it's not judging the content based off of understanding the search intent. It is judging the content based off of, is it ticking the boxes of an H one and a meta description did they say the keyword five times? Like that is old. That's outdated stuff. Doesn't apply to your entire audience. 'Cause if you're not working on the content in your site, you're probably like, what is this lady talking about? But I have said it probably three times in the last week. Stop worrying about the score that plugin is giving you.

Erik Martinez: I think that's [00:10:00] right. It is really hard to come up with unique content if you're thinking about it in just those terms. If I'm just thinking about titles and meta descriptions, number of keywords and all those things, content's really hard to write that way. I've been experimenting, with using AI. What I'm finding is I can take this longer form content, I can go interview my clients, ask them a handful of questions about their brand. I've got about a 25 point questionnaire that I ask them. And then by working that brand voice conversation, marrying it up with what we're trying to do, we can actually generate pretty good content with AI. It's not perfect, I wouldn't say it's production ready content. But we can come up with good long form content, integrate some keywords that are relevant to the topic and get there. What do you think about that? Are you doing any of that kind of stuff or what's working for you?

Amber Goetz: That's probably my favorite way to use AI. Is say here's my [00:11:00] piece of content, I'm trying to rank for X, this is the audience. I'll give as much context as I can if it's e-commerce, if it's not, and then I'll say, here is the competitor I want to outrank. I love having it give me this input and feedback because it is coming from that outside perspective. So it's doing different things for me. And even one layer further, if you're comfortable at all with code, having it evaluate schema data for both of those pages is like a whole other level. That's another thing that I'm seeing winning big time. It's no secret that LLMs love schema. But schema, almost like giving your schema its own tone of voice, like to match the brand. But I've been doing that. It used to be very straightforward, like service. This is the image featured very cut and dry, and I've been working in a little bit of actual personality into the information I give the schema and I swear it's working. I swear it's better.

Erik Martinez: You know what, I think it goes back to your brand voice comment earlier. You really have to have some consistency in the voice show up in all the [00:12:00] places. That's one of the things I'm really concerned about, from a business standpoint. I work with a lot of small, medium sized businesses and I think when you're in that small, medium sized business and you are in a segment of the market, let's say, luxury menswear. Are there a million companies in luxury menswear? No, but there's enough that a niche brand may have some challenges because clothing is probably one of the most described things on the internet.

Erik Martinez: I remember the days where I could bid. I did this experiment in the mid two thousands where I bid on dresses. I was working for a women's apparel company, niche brand, developed its own line of clothes. We bid on dresses and I saw everything else around it. Now you can't do that today, one, 'cause you can't afford to bid on dresses anymore. Everything else around it went up. All your SEO went up, all your other campaigns went up. The challenge for these really small brands is how niche is niche enough for them to get [00:13:00] relevant high quality traffic that helps 'em grow because they can't compete. Because Amazon and the marketplaces have now moved down out of those kind of key topic levels, and they're now a layer or two deeper than they were. And so it's getting really crowded and you're getting crowded out by the big companies. I think that's one of the challenges that mid-size businesses are struggling to solve in the world of search in general, but SEO specifically is like, where do I put my time and energy to get discovered in this realm?

Amber Goetz: I think you're totally right. And when you throw PPC into the mix. How do you compete with an Amazon retailer? How do you compete with that? You just can't.

Amber Goetz: This is why I don't like working on e-commerce, by the way.

Erik Martinez: I will say, e-commerce is tough. E-commerce is getting tougher and tougher every year. I do think AI can level that playing field. I think that there are still more niches. You know your point about brand personality is [00:14:00] going to force the mid-size players to build more of a audience approach to their marketing as opposed to worrying about all the technical things. So I do think there is a way out. I think the challenge is, how do you change the system that they're working in to start driving in that direction?

Erik Martinez: So I guess that's a decent pivot into this concept of SEO inside an organization. People think SEO is this one little thing. And you and I have already talked about links, we've talked about citations, we've talked about canonicalization. So we've talked a little bit of technical. We've talked a little bit of local. We've talked about a little bit of on page. And then we talked about brand, which is technically not an SEO only topic, but is highly relevant. How do you think SEO should change inside a marketing organization today to position themselves for the future and all these challenges?

Amber Goetz: This is my favorite topic in [00:15:00] regards to SEO. This is where I see so many wins coming. I think if teams were better empowered to just understand SEO better, they could almost eliminate the need for an external agency. If you think about a marketing team, almost always, there is a developer. There is someone who handles PR or the communication side of things. There's a content writer, a copywriter, there's someone doing a social, which is now a ranking factor for Google. And if those teams were more empowered and had a system in place where they just knew how to wrap the SEO fundamentals into their strategy when they're creating new content, when they're creating a campaign. I see this world where they can eliminate the SEO agencies that here's your bill, here's your analytics for the month. You're good. You know what I mean? I'm not saying there's not collaborative SEO agencies out there, but there's, plenty that don't share. They don't educate, they don't empower the people that are paying those monthly invoices. They're doing their job, delivering their analytics. And I'm not saying they're not doing the work, [00:16:00] they're just like just doing it and kind of keeping it to themselves.

Amber Goetz: What if the team could work alongside them or don't need them at all? I've worked with plenty of marketing teams where I, try to teach. I'll say like, Hey, you know, you're writing a new piece of content, like, reach out to me first. Let's do a little bit of keyword research before we decide that heading. What the title of that it's gonna be like that. That's all it takes, is opening up that internal process a little. And I know that gets hard, especially with larger corporations. You've got all sorts of decision makers and legal counsel and all these other people and hoops to jump through. But I think in the end, enterprises would see massive changes just from their team's efforts alone.

Erik Martinez: You're almost describing like a little task force. Bring a little task force together, solve this one problem. When you're done, here's your next problem to solve. I think for me the biggest challenge I see with my clients, particularly on the e-commerce side, e-commerce companies are notoriously bad at generating content.

Amber Goetz: Yeah, because they're so busy keeping up with the [00:17:00] listings and the reviews. There's just so much going on.

Erik Martinez: Well, quite frankly, a mid-size retailer marketing team isn't big. It isn't deep. And so you may have an external agency, you may not. I still have clients who don't prioritize SEO. And they go to pay for it and we're like, guys, your paid ads will do better when we optimize our SEO. Your product listings will do better when we optimize your site for SEO.

Amber Goetz: The Google Merchant Center will do better if your site is optimized for SEO.

Erik Martinez: Absolutely. I think retailers struggle, like we already created copy for the product. I work with a lot of companies that are direct marketers and so they have a lot of product content that they've written. But writing it for a catalog and writing it for the web is not the same.

Amber Goetz: It's so true.

Erik Martinez: And honestly, how they write, they should be writing for humans, regardless. Back to our brand voice conversation, I think you're right, there probably needs to be a little bit of a task force even in those [00:18:00] smaller companies because it's multi-departmental. There's multiple people. I think the other thing that you've said earlier too, moving on to a different topic. We've got checklists for this and we've got a checklist for that. We got our Meta descriptions, our Meta titles and some of that is important. I still teach my clients. They're like, why do I need to write a meta description? Well, you don't need to, Google will pick one for you, but do you really want Google determining what you say about your brand? I know SEO agencies, we don't even pay attention to Meta descriptions. I hear it all the time, they don't matter. Well it's only a half a point on the score, but that may be the difference between getting an A and a B.

Amber Goetz: Absolutely. And what happens when your competitor does care?

Erik Martinez: I like to use sports analogies. You're in the fourth quarter of the game and you're tied, or you're one point away and you don't score, you don't kick the extra point 'cause you decided to go for two and you lose the game. Do those fundamental things. One of the things you've been talking about is this concept of fluff. [00:19:00] SEO fluff. In your mind, what is SEO fluff and how do you combat it?

Amber Goetz: I feel fluff when I say that is anytime the agency or SEO person you're working with is just giving you a bunch of technical jargon that you can't understand as a business owner who's focused on their business and why they do what they do. To me, that's SEO fluff. It's using a bunch of words, they go right over the head, they get overwhelmed, and then they're like, I don't know. This is why I pay other people. And then they give up, they give up the desire. I hear about it all the time, people get overwhelmed. They don't wanna look at the analytics, they don't wanna look at the reporting, 'cause they're just like, I don't understand. And they get backed into a corner and they give up on the idea. Anyone can do SEO. I dunno if they can do it well, but they can. If you learn how to do it, you can. And I try really hard to make sure that the words I'm using when I'm talking to any of my clients about why we're ranking, what's happening. I just had a call with a client on Friday who I've noticed some uptick in a specific search term. We are seeing [00:20:00] people search how to build a pool on a hillside. Is it possible to build a pool on hillside? There's a lot of questions coming around that, and him and I did this little jump on call and I showed him and he's like, I know why. It was such an awesome call because I really took him behind the curtain. We're in AH refs, I'm showing him what's happening with his keywords, and I need what's in his brain to help me make that content better and kick his competition's butt. Because I only know what I can know. I can only do the work I can see from the data. But when you work together with your client and you pull out their expertise, this is how you do good SEO. Really pulling out the real stuff, the value, the things that people want, and not just a bunch of nonsense and keywords that humans don't wanna read. So that's fluff. Like all of that to me is fluff when it's like we need to have, X, Y, and Z. And that's not really how it's working anymore. It's really a race and a game to provide better content than your competition is.

Erik Martinez: What you're talking about is original [00:21:00] content. It's gotta be in your brand voice, whatever that brand voice is. Develop it. That's one of the things I'm trying to instill in my clients. Like you have a voice and if your sight, or your materials don't reflect that voice, nobody's gonna gravitate to it.

Amber Goetz: Well, if they don't trust it. You need to build that trust. This has been said a million times, they need to fall in love with the person behind the brand, not the brand. So that's where having conversations with my clients that have all the knowledge is so powerful because that is what's going to level up that piece of content and help make it that much better.

Erik Martinez: What do you recommend to your clients when you first engage with them? And let's just say they've been doing a little bit of the fundamental SEO. We're getting our stuff up, we're doing our title tags, we're doing our Meta description; we're doing all the 1 0 1 stuff. What do you do to help them level up? One, let's not do anything that doesn't mean anything. Let's not write any content that no one [00:22:00] cares about or feels will benefit them in any way. But what is it that you're doing in terms of here's the structure. Like we start with this and then we move on to this. I'm sure it's a little bit different for each client depending on where they are in their optimization curve. But I'm doing the one-on-ones things and we're not getting any traction. I have a client in mind that's going through this. What do you tell them to get ahead?

Amber Goetz: My assumption would be this has like maybe a beginner level, advanced skillset, so I don't wanna bury them with information that's gonna overwhelm 'em. I would advise having them review the competitor that's outranking them. Review their site, their content. Is the user experience better? How does it look on mobile? What kind of offers do the pages maybe have? I think more than ever, definitely since like 2023 with AI coming on scene, really good UX is winning because so many websites got generated. These rent to rank sites got generated. Just so much stuff that's not [00:23:00] real or interesting. I think we're going to see a big uptick in better designed sites. It's hard to get people even to go to a site anymore, especially with an AI overview. They're just like, I'm gonna read the overview and they move on. I think providing a really insane user experience, and I'm gonna use sunglasses, Pit Vipers. Have you seen their website?

Erik Martinez: No, but I'm gonna check it out after this.

Amber Goetz: You gotta, it's like very nineties on purpose. They're doing a funky user experience. You feel like you're on a dial up modem. I think that kind of thing we're gonna see coming back. I see little brands thinking outside the box. They're getting away from the basic website that we've looked at for the last 10 years. And I'm seeing a lot of bigger brands do that. So I don't know if they've got some knowledge on their teams that know we gotta go this direction. But I think just having a very unique user experience is really gonna help people. So coming back to when you look at your page that's about selling cleaning services versus your competitor's page, really look at it from that lens because there's so much [00:24:00] information and shiny objects thrown at us consistently. It's memorable, I'm gonna remember, that was a cool experience on that website. That's my guess.

Erik Martinez: So how would that Cause we've been having this conversation for the last six months on the podcast with various guests about the idea of agentic shopping. Not only are they, gonna be rolling out ads and we don't know how that's gonna manifest itself, but they're also starting to connect to people's shopping carts. We've been having this conversation that I see a day fairly soon, where you are gonna be talking to your agent on your device. Whether that device is a phone, a necklace, a pair of glasses, buried into your body. You're gonna be having these devices and you're gonna say, Hey, you know what? I need that snow shovel. So we were talking pre-show about my really long driveway and how I don't have a snowblower. And I'm hunting for a snowblower that will work on a gravel surface. I don't want it to be gas powered. I want it to be electric. [00:25:00] So there's all these things I need to know and then I can go, Hey, go find me five snowblowers that do this and show me what the possibilities are. I think what we're gonna see is those results get returned to us in whatever form we actually prefer to see it. It's either gonna come back as text because I like to read, or it's gonna come back as a video because I like video, or it's gonna come back as just a series of images. Whatever it is, it's going to come back in a form that's more consumable for me and the way I like to learn and consume information. But I'm never gonna visit the website. How do we prepare for that?

Amber Goetz: We are gonna see less traffic, more and more to actual websites. However, the LLM is going to pull information from the site. And I think having great branding, great brand voice reviews, like staying on top of the reviews is important. 'Cause you know as a consumer, if you're going to go buy a blower, you're gonna spend a lot of money. So you're gonna wanna know that a handful of people have had a great experience with this blower. [00:26:00] I think having the content organized around the high level features. You answered the question, the product video that gives you like a highlight overview of why this is the best blower, the features of this blower versus the other one. Like it's gonna pull all that information from the site. So I think it's a matter of no more skimping. Fill out all the fields, get all of the metadata in, and if you've got a Shopify store, fill in all of that information because it is gonna like take away user experience and our site's so cool, go here and check it out. They're just gonna make their purchase right there in chat.

Erik Martinez: I think you're right.

Amber Goetz: I'm listening to you and I'm like if it shows 450 positive reviews, I know me, that's what I do. How many people? Okay, seems like overall everyone's very happy here. It's, kind of a no brainer.

Erik Martinez: Let's head into 2026 and beyond. If you had a founder or a CMO for an organization and you're advising them on the one thing that they should shift in their SEO strategy. What would it be in 2026 and why?

Amber Goetz: I think building [00:27:00] your authority in your niche, your industry. You need to make sure that you are allowed on all the channels. Saying those same talking points everywhere because it seems like, I feel like that's already winning. I went from I don't care about social media. But in the last few months, my tune has changed and I'm like, you know what you're saying here. What we're saying in this article, what you're telling me about building a pool on a hillside. Let's get it in a video, get it on your Instagram because it's working and I think it's gonna work more. And I think it's because to your point of people are gonna shop right in chat. I think if they're already on Instagram and they're already hearing about that thing they wanna spend money on, they're getting even that closer to going, I do wanna get a pool going in the spring. I remember hearing from this person, and I know when I asked chat GPT about building pool on a hillside. They did mention them in a list of vendors that live near me that I should try reaching out to. I think getting loud as you can and getting as clear and concise as you can on all the channels is going to be the winner of 2026.

Erik Martinez: I think that's good advice. I think the [00:28:00] biggest challenge for most of the teams or the people listening here is where the heck do I start? If you are in the e-commerce space as a portion of this audience is, I think the most overwhelming part is, I've got a thousand products, or I've got 3,000 products, or I've got 5,000 products. How do I tackle that particular issue? I know there's no easy answer to it. It goes back to the whole how do you eat an elephant concept.

Erik Martinez: You start cutting, start chewing. Before we head the close, is there any last piece of advice that you'd like to leave the audience with? I thought the last one was really good because I think it's right on point, but any other like key nugget, other than hire Amber to help you with your SEO?

Amber Goetz: I think the thing we started with is my most valuable input that I can see from an SEO perspective is to help improve your efficiency and not replace your strategy. As a business owner, you know what your key products and services are, you know what makes you [00:29:00] the most money, the ideal client happy. I think that's where strategy should start, defining those services that you wanna focus on. You talk about e-commerce and having a thousand digital products or a thousand products. Take a look at the products that are the most valuable to you and maybe start there. Don't try to rank for everything. Try to rank for the things you know that makes your company the best.

Erik Martinez: I think that's fantastic advice. Amber, thank you so much for coming on and sharing some of your insights. I think we had a fun conversation. I think SEO can get scary for people. Like, it's gonna be this technical conversation. We really talked about content and strategy and brand voice, and I think that's a really material important part of modern SEO today. If anyone wants to reach out to you, what's the best way to get ahold of you?

Amber Goetz: My website is theactivemedia.com. That's my brand website. I do have a free newsletter where I share SEO tips in very digestible ways. Just to help people understand it and feel less overwhelmed and you can find that [00:30:00] at goetzgo.com. So it's G-O-E-T-Z go.com. And again, that's free. I do one every week and I love to hear from people if they're like, Hey, I'm really stuck here. Like, ask me. 'cause it's like a video game for me. I really enjoy trying to figure this stuff out and help people.

Erik Martinez: Well, I really appreciate you coming on the show. I enjoyed our conversation and I think you offered some really practical advice for the listening audience. So everybody, thank you so much for listening to today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. We appreciate you joining us. Have a great day.

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