The Growth Hub Podcast

A handful of genuinely useful data points surface (disavow tool being deprecated, calculators as an underused SEO asset, AI for keyword clustering) but the majority of the episode is filled with hedged non-answers ('it depends'), common SEO wisdom ('write for humans, not Google'), and conversational padding that any intermediate marketer would already know.

“Google has actually announced that they're in the process of taking away the disavowing tool”

“calculators are probably the most undervalued asset when it comes into an SEO strategy”

The guest posting take ('I think it's dead. I think it's a trash strategy') is mildly contrarian and the calculator-as-lead-funnel angle has some freshness, but the overwhelming bulk of the episode recycles standard SEO maxims that saturate every SEO blog and LinkedIn carousel.

“I think it's dead. I think it's a trash strategy”

“calculators are probably the most undervalued asset when it comes into an SEO strategy”

Steven Schneider is a genuine practitioner who built and exited a 40-blog portfolio at $100k+/month using pure SEO - real operator credentials. However, he now runs a small SEO agency and the conversation rarely surfaces the depth of hard-won operational knowledge that credential implies; he stays at the advisory level throughout.

“we had 40 in our portfolio. We scaled that to well over $100,000 a month in revenue. And we did all that with no backlinks”

“I've teamed up with a couple of great entrepreneurs to offer our own strategies that we've used for almost a decade to grow our own businesses, but now we implement them for clients”

A few concrete reference points appear (40 blogs, $100k/month revenue, brand briefs of 5 - 10 pages, DR 0 vs DR 50, word-count ranges, tool names like Ahrefs and lovable.dev) but the episode lacks any named client case studies, specific keyword data, traffic figures, or before-and-after results that would make the advice actionable and verifiable.

“we had 40 in our portfolio. We scaled that to well over $100,000 a month in revenue”

“each of our clients at Trio SEO gets a custom brand brief that's anywhere from 5 to 10 plus pages”

The host shows genuine curiosity and fires a few decent follow-ups (pushing on why SEO writing tools are 'dangerous', inviting the guest to challenge a hypothesis on long-tail keywords), but concedes and agrees too readily, lets several vague answers pass unchallenged, and spends considerable time framing questions with his own anecdotes rather than extracting depth from the guest.

“Okay, I love myself a follow up question there. Why would you say they're dangerous?”

“do challenge me on this”