SEO SOP: Rewrite Your Marketing on the Customer’s Terms (Kill Ego Marketing)

A repeatable messaging audit for any business, distilled from Benjamin Behrooz of Branding Los Angeles on the Unscripted SEO podcast: rewrite your marketing on the customer’s terms so it actually converts.

Objective

Audit and rewrite your site and marketing so a stranger instantly sees their problem and how you solve it. Benjamin’s line: the biggest mistake is “building it for yourself and not your customer” — perception is the whole game.

Key Steps

1. Lead with their pain, not your feature list. Open every page with the worry the customer actually has — before a word about yourself.
2. Run an ego-marketing audit. Count “we/us/our” vs “you/your” on your homepage + service pages. If the page is about you, rewrite it around the customer’s problem.
3. Name the problem you solve in one sentence. “We help [customer] solve [problem] so they can [outcome].” Can’t fill it in? Fix positioning first.
4. Use the customer’s own words. Pull verbatim pain language from reviews, sales calls, and support tickets — it’s how they search and recognize themselves.
5. Sell the outcome, not the tech. “They don’t give a damn that you have AI — they want their calendar to work.” Translate every feature into a customer outcome.
6. Build the “front office of visibility.” A great back office (real work, good reviews) with no bullhorn is invisible — get on the channels your buyers actually use.
7. For local / blue-collar, layer IRL + geo touchpoints. Branded street team, print on the door, then geo-targeted digital follow-up.

Cautionary Notes

• Ego marketing is the default failure mode — if the page is about you, it won’t convert.
• Feature-first / AI-first copy repels buyers who only care about their outcome.
• A great back office with no front office = invisible; don’t skip visibility.
• Don’t invent customer language — use their real words or you’ll miss how they search.

Tips for Efficiency

• Mine reviews, sales calls, and support tickets for verbatim customer-pain language.
• Use the one-sentence test as a gate before any page ships.
• Global pass: swap “we/us” → “you/your” and re-read.
• Keep a feature→outcome translation table so no raw feature reaches a page.

Sources & Relevant Episodes

Benjamin Behrooz, Branding Los Angeles — on Unscripted SEO he argued you must “go into the market on your customers’ terms” and that the biggest mistake is building it for yourself, not the customer. Full episode: Benjamin Behrooz on Empathy, Blue-Collar Marketing & the AI Silver Lining.