About · since 1996
I’ve been doing this
since 1996.
Thirty years in search. Three clients at a time. One person doing the thinking.
I find where your money is leaking, then I stop the leak. Sometimes that’s technical — Google quietly gave up on half your site eight months ago and nobody noticed. Sometimes it’s structural, like fourteen towns sharing one paragraph in a footer. Often it’s neither: a form nobody can finish on a phone, an offer that takes three sentences to explain, or the fact that most of your leads arrive by phone and nobody has ever counted them.
1996
first site ranked · AltaVista days
30 yrs
of watching the rulebook change
3
clients at a time
1
person who reads your report and does the work
The story
Search used to be a meta tag.
I started in search when search was AltaVista and Lycos, and you ranked a page by stuffing keywords into a meta tag. It worked, it was stupid, and everybody knew it was stupid. Then Google arrived and made all of it worthless overnight.
That’s happened to me maybe twenty times since. Panda. Penguin. Hummingbird. Mobile-first. The helpful content update. Core updates nobody bothered naming. And now answer engines that resolve the question without ever sending you a click.
I’ve spent thirty years watching this industry throw out its own rulebook and write a new one. That’s the qualification. Not a certificate — a very long memory.
1996
AltaVista and Lycos
Keywords in a meta tag. It worked, and everybody knew it was stupid.
1998
Links became the vote. Everything before it was worthless overnight.
2011
Panda
Thin content stopped paying. Content farms went quiet.
2012
Penguin
Bought links became a liability instead of an asset.
2013
Hummingbird
Queries became questions. Pages had to answer them.
2018
Mobile-first
The phone became the site. Desktop stopped being the reference.
2022
Helpful content
Content written for the ranking, not the reader, sank.
Now
Answer engines
The question gets resolved without a click. The recommendation is the ranking.
Every one of these made somebody’s playbook worthless. Scroll →
The model
Why I work alone.
I’ve worked at agencies. Most of them are client acquisition machines with a delivery department bolted on. The senior person sells the work and a junior does it, and the client never finds out.
That model isn’t evil, it’s just what happens when you need to scale a business built on people. I decided not to build that business.
So I take three clients. You talk to me. The thinking is mine, the strategy never gets handed down, and when something goes wrong there’s nobody for me to blame.
What I believe
Four things, after thirty years.
01
Rankings are vanity. Revenue is sanity.
A #1 position that doesn’t convert is an expensive trophy. I’ll tell you when I’ve won you one that isn’t worth anything.
02
Diagnosis before prescription.
Selling SEO work before looking at a site is malpractice everywhere else and standard practice here.
03
Most of it doesn’t matter.
Half of what agencies bill for is theatre. Thirty years is mostly a very long list of things I’ve learned to skip.
04
Say the uncomfortable thing.
If your problem is your offer and not your traffic, that’s what the audit will say — even though it costs me the retainer.
Where the thirty years went
1996 – 2018
Agencies
Fourteen of them, on both sides of the sale. Where I learned what gets billed and what gets done.
2018 – 2023
Chrysler dealer network
SEO Manager for the dealer network. Hundreds of local sites, one set of rules, remote from Kansas City.
2022 – 2024
ACE Handyman Services
SEO Manager. Home services at franchise scale — the map pack, the phones, the service pages.
2024 –
The SEO Savant
Three clients at a time. Every price on the page. No discovery call.
Outside the work
Southern Arizona.
A long memory, a full house.
I live in Southern Arizona with my wife and children. I’ve worked from a lot of places and for a lot of agencies, and I’ve seen most of what this industry does to the people paying for it.
What I bring to the table is a love for helping people and a delight in getting good things done — which is a strange thing to put on an SEO website, and true anyway.
Put thirty years to work on your site.
It starts with the Revenue Audit. Two weeks, $3,500, yours to keep whatever you decide next.