Laura Hoot: SEO Isn't Dying, It's Hitting Another Boom

Everyone on LinkedIn says SEO is dead. Laura Hoot has been doing it for close to twenty years and sees the exact opposite happening: hiring, not mass firings. She joins Jeremy Rivera to argue that the SEO expert just became the Claude expert, the ChatGPT expert and the Gemini expert without needing a new degree, because the foundation transferred intact.

Laura runs SEO for big national multi-location brands at GPO, where the team calls the work "discoverability" - a word she argues was always the accurate one. She started in 2007 writing keyword-dense copy in college, took an SEO-slash-customer-support job at Vrbo when HomeAway was the flagship, and has since worked H-E-B, vet clinics and national retail. Half her career was spent running paid search and organic at the same time, which is why she is blunt about the cost of the silo between them: the algorithms differ, but the intent and the volume data are identical. Jeremy ties it straight back to Lisa Raehsler's episode on Google's AI Max, which now scans a site for its own landing pages instead of requiring purpose-built ones - which is exactly the argument for getting PPC and SEO budget approved in the same meeting.

Her strongest claim is that keyword research matters more now, not less. The historical question data sitting in Search Console, Semrush and Ahrefs is the closest available proxy for how people actually prompt an LLM, and she treats it as the predecessor signal rather than a legacy report. She also flags JavaScript as a re-emerging blocker, since AI crawlers are far less patient with heavy front-ends than Googlebot learned to be, and notes that AI-assisted traffic is still a very small share of GA4 across every client she works on - for now.

Jeremy pushes on the local-versus-national divide, which Laura calls the single biggest strategic differentiator in her career, and tells the story of a counseling client whose article went three to four times up in organic traffic while the client was simultaneously reporting lost rankings - and none of it converted, because a liver-detox page had started surfacing for cod liver oil and colon cleanses. They get into why WordPress tags poisoned a genuinely good idea, why the four-blog-posts-and-four-links-for-5k agency model is gone and never should have existed, and the "it's goog enough" problem AJ Kohn named years ago about trusting third-party search volume.

Laura's advice for the moment: stop optimizing for the surface and start asking where your audience already is. Read the full recap and transcript, and find more interviews at The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast.