Ernesto Ortiz: Algorithm Updates Only Hurt the Incomplete

Ernesto Ortiz came to SEO from an engineering background and did not trust what he read, so he bought domains and ran single-variable tests until he had a short list of things that actually moved the needle. Five years later he runs Structural SEO on month-to-month contracts for e-commerce clients in Australia, the US and the UK — every client can walk at any time, which is exactly the point. You can find the agency at structuralseo.com.

His framing of algorithm updates is the sharpest thing in this episode. Updates are not punishments; they are the dials being re-weighted. “When you get affected by those in a negative way, it’s because you’re incomplete. You optimized for the set of factors that were currently tuned up.” Build a complete signal picture and an update has nothing to catch — you go up, or nothing happens. We wrote the long version of this conversation up as Algorithm Updates Only Hurt the Incomplete.

Then he takes the traffic conversation apart. Every publisher panic chart, he argues, is a business-model problem wearing an SEO costume. “Are you actually losing sales or are you just losing traffic? What’s happening to revenue per session?” If you sell something, people still have to come and buy it, and it is irrelevant whether they read your article or the AI answered them first. That idea is the spine of Traffic Is a Proxy: Measure SEO by Revenue Instead.

The reporting section is the part agency owners should steal. Ernesto reports revenue, but he also reports the pure SEO metric he can actually defend: non-brand traffic to category and product pages. “Non-brand traffic on pages that matter, not non-brand traffic on blog pages about who knows what.” Blog posts exist so the collection pages rank; their traffic is instrumental, never the goal. He pairs it against branded traffic to separate his work from the rest of the marketing team’s. More practitioner plays like this live in the SEO Tactic Library, and more technical conversations in our technical SEO practitioner guide.

Also in this episode

• B2B is D2C ten years ago. He sold operable walls — $2,000 acoustic partitions — through a real e-commerce checkout while every competitor ran a contact form. Bring D2C clarity to B2B and you stand out immediately.
• Google only acts at scale. From a two-hour conversation with Pedro Diaz, formerly of Google’s search quality team: “They only look into things that have a scale that makes it worth doing.” That is why Lorem Ipsum pages still rank and why the casino SERPs look the way they do.
• The PBN-mention tactic that gets you into ChatGPT. A hundred listicles saying you are the best works in under a week, costs almost nothing, and leaves a massive footprint. His filter: “Would you bet the future of your business on this tactic?” Most legitimate businesses say no.
• Where LLMs actually help. He uses them to find gaps and missing coverage, never for expertise or direction.
• The easiest pitfall to avoid. LinkedIn posts selling AI systems from people who learned the word “SEO” two months ago. “Don’t get overwhelmed by that nonsense.”

Jeremy also went on Ernesto’s show — that conversation is on his YouTube channel. For more interviews with people who actually do the work, browse The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast or the digital marketing and paid search guide.

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