Sara & Nik’s Podcast:
Rhea Drysdale

About this conversation

Today’s episode of Sara & Nik SEO Podcast features Rhea Drysdale, an SEO expert with over two decades of experience, who shares her thoughts on SEO, her legal battle against trademarking the term, and why AI may represent the future in the industry.

Her case rests on her own observations, after realizing how much her clients’ needs have changed, something which she clearly attributes to AI.

The 3-Year SEO Legal Fight

Rhea admits that her SEO journey was entirely unplanned and, for all intents and purposes, a mistake. After completing her marketing college, she applied for a graphic designer role, which quickly went sideways when the interviewer asked her bluntly “Do you know how a search crawler works?”

Since she did, she landed an SEO job right then and there.

From there to working in-house for a Fortune 1,000 company, where she managed dozens of brands and e-commerce entities, was only a step, which she gladly took. It didn’t take long for the corporate life to win her over and it took even less for her to specialize herself in reputation management. As she puts it: "I really like putting fires out."

This passion of hers is what recommended her as the perfect instrument in the legal battle that followed: someone had managed to secure the trademark for the term “SEO”. That would’ve been the 4th attempt, after 3 previously rejected submissions, which also had the person edit the Wikipedia page for “SEO”, where they would describe themselves as having coined the term.

At 24 years of age, Rhea didn’t think long before volunteering to oppose the registration because, in her own words:

“It's going to get registered if people don't oppose it. And we only have until this deadline to oppose it.”

What ensued was a 3-year battle that amounted to over $18,000, during which Rhea battled both the plaintiff and the people saying that her fight was pointless. She believed in the cause, though, because the person winning the registration case would set a legal precedent which could soon create a slippery slope.

Rhea isn’t against the idea of trademarking and industry standards, but she believes established industry organizations should be in charge of that, not individuals.

The Difficulties of SEO vs. Running an Agency

As an SEO expert, Rhea didn’t exactly have the qualifications necessary to run an agency. Yet, she found herself in the position of owning one, without realizing how difficult it would become. Suddenly, between handling office build-outs, workers’ compensation, payroll paper work, and security policies, she no longer had time to do SEO.

Her analogy was that of a baker who loved baking and opened a bakery, just to realize that running the bakery left him no time for actual baking.

The result was predictable: she wasn’t really good at it. As she explains:

“I do not think I was good at it for at least a decade, maybe more.”

The problem was that her focus was in the wrong place: on the people, instead of the systems that supported the team once some of the people left. But she persisted, learned how to construct healthy company values and learned the importance of boundaries.

This led to her ending relationships with clients once certain lines were crossed, which Nik agreed that this is a typical policy among agencies.

AI in Business Management in 2026: “This is a Car That Needs a Driver”

Rhea is blunt about it:

AI automation has become a problem in the corporate environment.

She explains how increasingly more clients ask her agency to automate processes, checklists, and guidelines and integrate them into AI workflows that the agency should then just monitor passively.

Her experience backs this up: one major e-commerce company rebuilding its entire content creation process after mass layoffs and numerous other small clients leaving her agency to run AI tools themselves. The results they’re getting are subpar compared to when humans led the operations, but the philosophy of “good enough” keeps the trend alive.

The problem with that, as Rhea herself noticed, is that “good enough” means something entirely different when applied to AI. In the context of AI, “good enough” means unverified and most likely factually incorrect.

AI output needs legal, factual, and even tone checking, which often takes more time than having humans handling the process bottoms-up. This led Rhea to the conclusion that “AI has not really saved time.”

While she admits that business development is still her weak point, Rhea says she keeps improving her skills and knowledge and that she’s shifted from reputation management to helping businesses increase their brand appeal. Among others, she’s now an elected library trustee working with a client on voter registration.

One of the problems she’s highlighting is that Google doesn’t display AI answers for election queries. This forces this type of content to match the early days of 2006, when you had to “have the exact match queries in every single unique page”.

More importantly, as Rhea sees it, it seems like Google doesn’t know how to fix the problem which, in her view, borders voter suppression. Which is why she’s planning to release an article soon to highlight the issue.