Below is our interview with Steve Wiideman. Steve Wiideman is a multi-location and franchise SEO consultant, founder of Wiideman Consulting Group, and co-author of SEO: Search Strategy for the AI Era (Stukent, May 2026) with Professor Scott Cowley. He also teaches AI-Driven SEO and Digital Marketing at UC San Diego and Strategic Search Engine Marketing at Cal State Fullerton.
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to your company?
A: Wiideman Consulting Group is a digital marketing consultancy specializing in SEO for franchise and multi-location brands.
We help companies figure out how to be discovered when someone is looking for what they offer, whether that’s through Google, Maps, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, social search, or whatever comes next.
Our work typically starts with research and audits, followed by a prioritized roadmap that brings together technical SEO, content, location data, reputation, digital PR, and now Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO. For larger brands, that often means figuring out how to execute a good search strategy across hundreds or even thousands of locations without creating chaos for the internal marketing team.
I’ve personally been doing SEO since the late 1990s, and our consultancy has intentionally stayed relatively lean. We’d rather be the strategic team helping clients make smarter decisions than become a giant agency selling a hundred different services.
Q: What makes you the best choice? How are you unique?
A: I probably wouldn’t tell someone we’re the best choice until I understand what they’re trying to accomplish. There are some terrific SEO firms out there, and different businesses need different things.
Where we’re unusual is our specialization.
We spent years looking at which types of clients we could create the most value for, and multi-location and franchise brands kept rising to the top. Their challenges are incredibly specific: hundreds of Google Business Profiles, thousands of location pages, inconsistent business data, franchisee participation, reputation issues, local content at scale, and now trying to figure out how all of that information gets interpreted by AI platforms.
That’s the playground we’ve chosen.
We’re also fairly obsessed with testing. SEO isn’t a checklist anymore, if it ever really was. We test, measure, learn, occasionally discover that one of our brilliant ideas wasn’t so brilliant, and adjust.
The other difference is that we try to tie SEO recommendations back to actual business outcomes. Rankings are nice. Revenue, reservations, calls, catering orders, appointments, and customers walking through the door are considerably nicer.
Years ago, one of our clients generated roughly $1.25 million in additional revenue while we were charging only $2,500 per month. That was one of those moments where you realize you may need to rethink your business model.
Q: Any highlights about your latest announcement?
A: One of the developments I’m most excited about is our expansion from traditional SEO into a much broader search strategy that includes AEO and AI discovery.
Search behavior is becoming conversational. Someone who used to type “Mexican restaurant near me” might now ask an AI assistant, “Find me a highly rated sit-down Mexican restaurant nearby with dim lighting and margarita specials.”
That difference sounds subtle, but it completely changes what brands need to communicate online.
For multi-location companies, we’re now researching the prompts customers might use, studying which sources AI platforms cite, identifying gaps in the evidence those systems rely on, and helping brands structure their websites, location data, reviews, content, and external mentions accordingly.
I also co-authored the textbook SEO: Search Strategy for the AI Era with Professor Scott Cowley, which was published by Stukent in May 2026. Teaching this material while simultaneously applying it with enterprise brands has been especially rewarding because the classroom and the consulting work constantly challenge each other.
The industry is moving quickly, so nobody gets to declare victory and stop learning.
Q: What can we expect from you in the next 6 months? What are your plans?
A: A lot of experimentation.
We’re building out a more formal framework for what we call modern search visibility, where SEO, local search, AEO, social discovery, reputation, citations, and AI visibility all live under one strategy instead of being treated as separate marketing channels.
We’re also investing heavily in systems that help multi-location brands manage this work at scale.
Historically, an SEO team might track several hundred keywords. Now we may also need to understand thousands of conversational prompts across hundreds or thousands of locations, along with which sources ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google, Reddit, YouTube, and other platforms are using to form recommendations.
Humans shouldn’t be manually staring at giant spreadsheets trying to solve that problem.
So we’re experimenting with AI-connected research, reporting, auditing, and workflow tools that can surface the important questions: Where are we losing visibility? Why? What changed? Which locations have problems? What should the team work on next?
I’m particularly interested in where search goes once AI assistants stop merely recommending businesses and begin acting on our behalf by making reservations, placing orders, scheduling appointments, or completing transactions.
That’s when “SEO” becomes much bigger than optimizing webpages.
Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?
A: Probably how much of what we learn gets shared.
I’ve always believed that helping people before selling to them is a much better business strategy than chasing people around the Internet asking for a meeting.
We teach. We publish research. We share frameworks. I teach at UC San Diego and Cal State Fullerton. Our team creates guides and training material, and quite a bit of what we know is available publicly even if someone never becomes a client.
That philosophy goes back to the early days of the company. When I first went out on my own after leaving Disney, I wasn’t a trained salesperson. I learned pretty quickly that I was much better at helping someone solve a problem than trying to “close” them.
Funny enough, helping people usually did the selling for me.
That still influences how we run the company today.
