The Human Element in SEO for SMBS: A Unscripted Interview with Tianna Mamalick

Guest: Tianna Mamalick, SMB Marketing School

Episode Overview

Tianna Mamalick brings 12 years of SEO expertise focused exclusively on small businesses. In this conversation, she reveals why working with SMBs is more rewarding than enterprise clients, how to honestly manage expectations while delivering real results, and why she went back to human-written content after testing AI extensively. If you're a small business owner wondering what actually works in SEO right now, this episode cuts through the hype with practical, proven strategies.

Why This Episode Matters for Small Business Owners

Running a small business means every marketing dollar counts. Tianna specializes in helping businesses with limited budgets compete effectively by focusing on what drives actual revenue—not just traffic or rankings. She shares her formula for pairing SEO and paid ads that works specifically for service-based businesses, and explains why your service pages matter more than blog posts right now.

Key Discussion Points

The Small Business Advantage Unlike enterprise clients where a 20% conversion increase gets a polite "that's nice," small business owners email about life-changing results: hiring their first employee, taking their first vacation, or investing in business growth. For Tianna, this feedback makes the work meaningful.

Honest Expectations Setting

• Three-month minimum commitment required
• Clients must have budget they can afford to lose completely
• Not every market works the same (example: Pilates in Las Vegas vs. other cities)
• Regular check-ins at three months to evaluate if the strategy is working

The SEO + Ads Formula While ads don't directly boost SEO, they strategically help prime new pages through engagement. When expanding to multiple locations, running targeted ads on new service pages helps get Google Business Profiles moving faster and improves location-specific performance.

What's Actually Working in Content

• Service pages are the priority: Every service needs its own detailed page
• Blog posts are secondary: Focus on key blog content, not volume
• Collaboration posts: Feature complementary businesses (example: makeup company writing about top lotions that pair well with their products)
• Opinion-based content: Take hard stands on your values and approach

The AI Content Experiment Tianna's agency tested AI-generated content extensively—and none of those articles ranked well. They've gone 100% back to human-written content, using AI only for creating outlines based on top-ranking competitors. The reality: people want authentic mistakes and real human voice.

AI Search Reality Check Less than 10% of traffic comes from ChatGPT for most small businesses. While you should prepare by enriching About pages with certifications and expertise, this isn't the urgent crisis some marketers claim. Most people aren't using ChatGPT for business searches yet—we're still in early adoption.

Mining Your Best Content Stop using SEMrush as your starting point. Instead:

• Record sales calls and note what converts prospects
• Review customer support emails for common questions
• Ask front-line staff to keep notebooks of daily questions
• Use this real language in your content—it converts better than corporate marketing speak

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