Lisa Corwood, founder of Fuelled Agency, joins Jeremy to discuss how she transformed creative marketing experiments at a UK car dealership into a full-service agency philosophy. From the viral "Where's Wally" campaign that sparked it all to navigating Search Everywhere Optimization in 2026, this conversation covers authentic community engagement, why no industry is truly "boring," and the looming question of AI-generated content quality.

Lisa Corwood
Founder, Fuelled Agency

• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• YouTube

• (00:01) Introduction and Lisa's background
• (00:18) The origin story: From UK car dealership to agency
• (02:15) Creative community engagement vs. traditional advertising
• (04:13) Facebook Groups and providing genuine value
• (06:01) The "spray and pray" problem on Reddit and social platforms
• (07:05) Ad blindness and brand values alignment
• (08:51) Building content ecosystems that connect
• (10:59) Why "boring" industries have the most passionate audiences
• (13:14) Showing your team and humanizing your brand
• (15:06) The "20 leads" question: Testing your funnel
• (16:54) Co-marketing with complementary businesses
• (18:44) Search Everywhere Optimization: The multi-platform customer journey
• (21:20) The accelerating pace of change in digital marketing
• (23:24) AI content, "slop," and the trust problem
• (25:22) Gen Alpha's skepticism toward AI-generated content
• (27:57) What's next for Fuelled Agency in 2026

"If you're going to go in there, don't just walk in a room and shout what you're saying and go out. Treat it as if it's a group of people—not a place to just spray and pray."

"No matter what business it is—if it's selling a product, if it's shiny, if it's Lamborghinis or diamond rings—behind all of that is a team that makes that happen. Tell everybody about it!"

"If you got 20 leads right now into your business, where would they go and what would happen with them? If you don't have an answer to that, there's something you need to look at."

"Customers will hop from one platform to the other to get what they are looking for. They won't just take a five-star review as gospel."

"I'm not against AI—but use it in collaboration, in conjunction. You can't solely rely on it."

Lisa's Agency & Socials

• Fuelled Agency
• Fuelled Agency Services
• Creators Club
• Lisa on LinkedIn
• Lisa on Instagram
• Lisa on YouTube

Industry Resources

• Search Everywhere Optimization Guide – Single Grain
• Search Everywhere Optimization – Backli...

Guest: Tianna Mamalick, SMB Marketing School

Tianna Mamalick shares her 12-year journey in SEO and why she's passionate about working with small businesses. With honest insights on managing client expectations, pairing SEO with paid ads, and the current state of AI-generated content, this conversation reveals what's actually working for service-based businesses right now.

Why Small Businesses? For small businesses, a 10K monthly revenue increase is life-changing. Tianna shares how clients email her about hiring their first employee or taking their first vacation—results that go far beyond vanity metrics.

Managing Expectations Brutally honest approach: clients sign for three months minimum, must have budget they can afford to lose, and receive realistic assessments of whether their business model fits the proven formula.

SEO + Ads Strategy When done strategically, pairing ads with SEO helps prime new location pages and service pages through engagement, even though ads don't directly impact SEO rankings.

The AI Content Reality After extensive testing: AI-generated content isn't ranking. Tianna's agency went 100% back to human-written content, using AI only for outlines based on top-ranking articles.

Content Strategy Shifts

• Focus on service pages over blog posts
• Every service needs its own detailed page
• Mine customer support logs and sales calls for real language
• Create collaboration posts featuring complementary businesses

AI Search Adoption Despite the hype, less than 10% of traffic comes from ChatGPT for most small businesses. Prepare by enriching About pages and author bios, but don't panic about immediate massive shifts.

• Andy Crestodina & Content Chemistry
• SEOteric - Matt Brooks
• Get Me Links - Alejandro Marinas
• Gus Pelogia interview on SEO's universal superpower
• Michael McDougald, Right Thing Agency
• Precast Walls - service business example

"People want to work with people they like, know and trust. It's not just about the backlink. We're really looking at conversions—how can we get SEO to convert for you?" — Tianna Mamalick

• Website: smbmarketingschool.com
• Instagram: @smbmarketingschool
• Funnel Summit - January 28th

✓ Service pages first: Make product and service pages comprehensive before worrying about blog content

✓ Human content wins: AI-generated articles aren't ranking—use AI for outlines, humans for writing

✓ Record everything: Mine sales calls, customer support logs, and front-line staff conversations for gold

✓ Every service gets a page: Stop using men...

In this episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast by Be Sharp Digital Marketing, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Matt Bailey, a digital marketing veteran with nearly 30 years of experience spanning from the pre-Google AltaVista era to today's AI-driven landscape. Matt shares his journey from building real estate websites with journalism principles in 1995 to founding SiteLogic and helping shape the SEO industry through his work with the OMCP (Online Marketing Certified Professional Organization).

This conversation explores the evergreen principles that have survived every "SEO is dead" cycle, the critical gaps in SEO education, and why AI is both a productivity tool and a source of strategic confusion for businesses. Matt and Jeremy discuss the importance of conversion optimization, the holistic webmaster approach that got lost in the 2010-2020 era of easy Google traffic, and why understanding content, context, and community remains fundamental to digital marketing success.

Key Topics Covered:

• Why newspaper layout principles from 1995 still drive SEO success today
• The 18-24 month shelf life of SEO educational content
• Enterprise red tape horror stories (drug tests for editing 10 pages!)
• Why LLMs are "like pre-Google search" and the shiny object syndrome around AI
• The seven strategic questions every business needs to answer before tactics
• How to remove friction down the funnel and leverage your website correctly
• Why social traffic behavior differs dramatically from search and blog referrals

Matt Bailey

• Founder & CEO, SiteLogic Marketing
• 30+ years in digital marketing (since 1995)
• OMCP contributor and instructional design expert
• Former Microsoft Worldwide Education consultant
• Website: sitelogic.com
• Learning Platform: learn.sitelogic.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mattbaileysitelogic

Matt Bailey's journey into digital marketing began in an unexpected place—journalism school. While he quickly realized journalism wasn't his calling, the education gave him something invaluable: an understanding of how to lay out content for quick consumption. Headlines, subheadings, bullet points—these newspaper design principles became the foundation of his website development approach in 1995-96.

Working in real estate at the time, Matt started building websites as electronic versions of printed pages. What he didn't realize initially was that the markup he was using for visual layout was exactly what early search engines needed. This was the AltaVista era, where SEOs would spend entire nights resubmitting pages to chase rankings.

When Google arrived, Matt's content-first approach paid immediate dividends. Pages structured with clear hierarchy and reader-focused design performed well naturally. This early lesson—that optimizing for visitors and optimizing for search engines aren't separate goals—would become a through-line in his entire career.

A pivotal moment came when Matt was working on real estate websites and asked himself: "What can I do on the website that will have the biggest impact?" He didn't have an answer. That question forced h...