SEO Without the Nonsense: What Actually Drives Organic Growth with Lara Schmoisman

Episode 225 – Coffee N°5 – SEO Without the Nonsense: What Actually Drives Organic Growth with Lara Schmoisman

SEO isn’t sorcery—it’s structure, clarity, and consistency. In this episode of Coffee Nº5, I break down the three pillars of SEO that every brand needs to get right: technical performance, backlinks that actually matter, and keywords rooted in what your audience is searching for—not what you think they care about. We get real about the difference between traffic and conversions, why your website is still the core of your brand, and how AI is changing the rules without eliminating the fundamentals. No hype. No shortcuts. Just the strategy you need to build organic momentum that lasts.

We’ll talk about:

  • Why your website—not social media—is still the core of your digital ecosystem.
  • The three parts of SEO: technical performance, backlinks, and keywords.
  • The truth about technical SEO: structure, performance, pages, and the tech stack that supports conversions.
  • Traffic vs. conversions: why most brands confuse them—and lose momentum.
  • How AI has changed backlink strategy.

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Lara Schmosiman (00:11)

Hi everyone, welcome back to coffee number five. And today I have another solo episode. I want to in this end of the year 2025, I want to address a lot of things that we talk over the podcast and we mentioned over and over again. And then when I’m having meetings with prospective clients or even clients, it’s something that comes up all the time. So I want to clarify a few things. Today we’re going to be talking about SEO. You know, I love SEO and I know how important this to drive organic.

 

traffic. I’ve seen so many brands wasting their budgets on media buy over and over again and they’re forgetting about organic. So let’s talk for a second about SEO. When we’re talking about the SEO, we want to divide it in three parts. The first part is what we call technical SEO. Technical SEO is how your website is functioning. It’s

 

Performing well or it’s not performing well if your website is not performing well remember your website is your core Everything that we learn comes from your website and all the information is where you control the narrative so It’s really important that you are performing well that your text stock is helping your website to perform well And then they’re gonna come the conversions

 

In this episode, by the way, we’re not gonna be talking about user experience or design or how we design a website for user experience. What we’re talking is about performance. We’re talking about how your website is

 

many pages you have in each page. How is the structure of this website? Is performing well? One more time, I want to…

 

This is about SEO, it’s not about AI what I’m talking about. Yes, your website needs to be structured for AI. You need to be structured for AI to find you, but it still has to be organic and your website needs to be structured correctly and functioning correctly. If your website is broken everywhere, no search engine or AI tool will help you.

 

And also let’s divide another thing. This is one thing is traffic. The other thing is conversions. So we need to make sure that your SEO is optimized to get your conversions. Then you can use as many AI tools that you want to drive conversions, meta, et cetera. But you want to have a core SEO that works for you. With that said, let’s move to the second part of SEO.

 

that is backlinks. Backlinks at some point were super popular and these really have changed because of AI. So right now what is important about backlinks? Backlinks is someone else’s website pointing to yours and that gives you authority. So we need to make sure that those qualities links are there and they’re helping you rank.

 

But one more time, and I know that this is a little confusing, AI is changing the game. So AI is not looking for as many backlinks that we wanted before. It’s looking more for quality links and more also on brand mentioning. So that’s really important. And the third part of keywords, of SEO, are keywords. Keywords, are different kind of keywords. One is short.

 

keywords like would be one word but they’re super competitive and then you have long tail keywords. Remember, what happens when you go to Google or you go to ChachiPD or Gemini, you ask a question looking for an answer. So that keywords need to be ⁓ the answer to people’s questions.

 

So this is not an easy task and that’s why we have a team that is very qualified and they take a lot of time a day doing research. We need to understand who is your target audience. When we understand who is your target audience, then we can go and find out what they’re searching for. And then we can be that answer creating SEO content. Don’t forget that I put this in social media last week that you can…

 

not stop blogging. You need to stop keep ChatGPT Super important. That is going to give you relevant keywords all the time. But you have to blog about the right keywords and have the right structure. When we talk about keywords, there are three kinds of keywords. The first keywords, I call it the DNA keywords, which are the ones who are your brand, your name of your product, or the name of your brand.

 

Then you have the second kind, which is competitors keywords. Every time your competitor is there, we need to make sure that you are showing up too. That’s what I help you for brand awareness. Remember, I actually, I read a study not that long ago that they used to be that people need to have 12 times to connect with their brand in order to make a decision to buy or not. Now it’s about

 

38 times so you need to be there when your competitor is you need to be there for brand awareness and The third one is the one that I call trending keywords that those change all the time So that’s why of course there are seasonal keywords like Christmas Christmas gifts and all those things But those are very generic So what we need to make sure is who is your target audience? What they’re looking for right about it on time and then grow with the trend

 

So I hope that this helped and that you understand a little more about SEO. And I will see you next week with Coffee Number Five

 

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