Everything I’ve written, sorted by what it does for you.

Teardowns

A teardown is an audit nobody paid for. I pick a real business from publicly visible data — rankings, load times, site structure, response testing — take its marketing apart in public, and publish what I’d fix first. Names withheld, details altered, arithmetic intact. They exist for two reasons: because watching a diagnosis is the fastest way to learn to run one on yourself, and because every teardown doubles as proof that the problems I keep describing are sitting, right now, in ordinary businesses that think their marketing is fine. If you recognize your own website in one of these, that’s rather the point.

• $3,000 a month in ads, landing on a page that lost three buyers in fourPlumbing · the ads were fine; the page undid them.
• Ranked #1 for the term that matters. Nineteen hours to answer an inquiryLaw firm · the most expensive unattended inbox in the metro.
• Ranking for its own name, and nothing anybody searches forLandscaping · cross out the brand terms and one keyword survives.

Case Studies

Anonymized engagements with the numbers left in. Each one follows the same arc, because the work follows the same arc: a complaint that doesn’t match the reports, an audit that finds where the money is actually leaking, a fix that is almost always cheaper and more boring than anyone expected, and results measured in booked jobs and revenue — never in rankings for their own sake. The sectors rotate; the shape repeats. Read two of these and you’ll start predicting the third’s ending, which is exactly the instinct I’m trying to install.

• Google was crawling 340,000 URLs to find 11,000 productsEcommerce · eleven lines of robots.txt beat a year of content.
• They were optimizing for the 30% of conversions that didn’t matterHVAC · 90% of booked jobs were calls nobody measured.
• They ranked first and still couldn’t get anyone bookedHealthcare · a booking widget that was a blank white box for half of devices.

Thirty-Year Pieces

Most SEO writing is milk, not wine — it expires with the next algorithm update, which is why so much of it exists. This shelf is the opposite bet: pieces about the parts of search that were true thirty years ago in the Yellow Pages and will still be true in 2056, whatever the results page looks like by then. Being findable at the moment of need. Answering the question the customer is actually asking. Trust that compounds. Speed that closes. If a post here stops being true, I’ve failed at the category’s one rule — so it’s the shelf I write most carefully and least often. It’s also the one I’d hand a business owner who has been burned by an agency and now suspects the whole field is smoke: start here, where nothing depends on this year’s algorithm.

What I Won’t Sell You

An unusual shelf for a consultant’s website: the services I decline to offer, and the reasoning, in public. Bulk backlinks. Guaranteed rankings. Content by the pound. AI-generated location pages by the thousand. Some of these I won’t sell because they don’t work; some because they work briefly and then cost you more than they made; a few because they work fine and you simply don’t need me for them. Read this before any agency pitch and you’ll be the most annoying prospect on their call sheet — which is, of course, the point. An informed buyer is my best referral source — and the fastest way to prove I’m not selling snake oil is to publish, in writing, which bottles I refuse to stock.

Revenue Building

The tagline of this whole site is that rankings are vanity and revenue is sanity — this shelf is where the second half gets practical. Call tracking that ties a ranking to a booked job. Review rituals that compound. Pricing pages that close instead of hide. Intake speed, measurement stacks, the arithmetic of renting leads versus earning them. Very little of it is what people picture when they say “SEO,” and all of it decides whether SEO was worth buying. If you only have time for one shelf and you own the business rather than run its marketing, make it this one — most of the posts end with something you can hand to a tech, an office manager, or a web person on Monday morning and check by Friday.