Andrew Mazzonna, SEO Director of VEA Technologies, joins E-Coffee with Experts to share how he got into SEO in a pretty unexpected way, discovering Black Hat World during a rough freshman year of college. What started with teaching himself WordPress and experimenting through trial and error eventually turned into a career spanning self-storage, e-commerce, and enterprise agency work.

In this episode, Andrew talks about how VEA Technologies is using AI to build a library of Claude skills for things like location page creation, sitemap monitoring, and content workflows. He also explains why self-storage is such a tough niche to stand out in organically, where proximity and reviews can matter more than keywords, and the difference between brand-level and facility-level visibility in AI search.

We also get into entity clarity, topical authority, structured data, and what makes content more likely to get cited by AI platforms. And while AI search is changing the game, Andrew explains why he still sees backlinks as table stakes for both traditional SEO and AI visibility.

To wrap things up, Andrew shares his take on learning SEO through trial and error, and one simple reminder: give yourself some grace.

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In this episode, we discuss:

00:00 - 01:11: Introduction

01:11 - 02:40: Andrew's Journey Into SEO and VR Technologies

02:40 - 04:34: Lessons From Hands-On Learning and Staying Close to Execution

04:34 - 05:39: Scaling SEO With Claude Skills

05:39 - 06:42: Why Self-Storage SEO Is So Competitive

06:42 - 07:52: Brand-Level vs Facility-Level AI Visibility

07:52 - 08:42: Finding the Right Questions Behind Search Intent

08:42 - 09:13: The Biggest Shift in SEO and AI

09:13 - 10:15: How AI Is Making Long-Tail Search More Accessible

10:15 - 10:45: Andrew's Favorite AI Platforms

10:45 - 11:37: Entity Clarity and Topical Authority for LLMs vs Google

11:37 - 12:24: Are Backlinks Still Dead? Andrew's Take

12:24 - 13:38: What AI Citation-Ready Content Actually Looks Like

13:38 - 14:41: Advice to His Younger Self

14:41 - 16:55: Closing Thoughts

 Connect with Andrew Mazzonna

 https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-mazzonna-58b60b83/

 veatechnologies.com

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