SEO
IS AN
ART
My philosophy of SEO is: there are creative solutions to business problems and their success can be proved with straightforward reporting. I've honed this philosophy over many years working with many different clients. On this page I'll explain some of my successes in SEO and how they worked.
2026: Growing from SEO into Answer Engine Optimization, Generative Engine Optimization, and Google A.I. Overview Optimization.
How to explain a 22 year career in Search Engine Optimization? I'll start with my most recent achievements, and go backward in time.
Scaling the Enterprise:
Vitamin & Health Supplements
The Challenge: Driving growth in the highly competitive YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) space requires extreme technical precision and E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).
The 2025 Result: +24.3% YoY Growth in Active Users.
By restructuring the site’s entity relationships and connecting specific health concerns to product clusters, I focused the site's organic search towards the customers that most wanted to buy our products. This double-digit growth in a saturated market proves that even established brands can find significant organic growth when search intent is properly mapped.
Our vitamin supplement site's monthly organic search performance as reported by Google Analytics went from a total of 406,244 active users in 2024 to 496,478 active users in 2025, a 22.21% increase!
2. The Conversion Specialist:
Career Training & Education
The Challenge: For education providers, traffic is a vanity metric if it doesn’t lead to enrollment. My goal here was to move the needle on high-intent actions.
The 2025 Result:
- Sessions: Grew from 276,318 to 305,010.
- Key Event Conversions: Improved from 4,371 to 25,740.
While active users grew steadily, the 476% increase in conversions is the headline. This was achieved by optimizing "Concept Clusters" surrounding career outcomes rather than just course titles. We guided new visitors toward the "Enroll" button through strategic internal linking and UX-focused technical SEO.
3. Strategic Pivoting:
High-Value Trucking Logistics
The Challenge: Total traffic volume isn’t always the best KPI for niche B2B services. My client was a Freight Brokerage for Truckers focused on providing the best agent service in the industry. In 2025, we saw a slight dip in total users, but thanks to my SEO artistry, the quality of those users reached an all-time high.
The 2025 Result:
- Engagement: Sessions increased despite fewer users, proving higher intent.
- Lead Gen: The /contact-us/ page saw a 5x increase in organic users (from 141 to 701).
- New Revenue Streams: The /join-our-agent-program page went from zero visibility to 311 high-intent organic users.
This case study highlights my ability to diagnose and treat traffic drops. When certain landing pages flagged in the second half of the year, I pivoted strategy to focus on bottom-of-funnel conversion pages. The result was a site that worked harder with more qualified visitors, and delivered more actual leads to the sales team.
4. Local Dominance: Men's Grooming & Haircut Services
The Challenge: Local SEO is a battle for the "Map Pack" and "Near Me" intent. Despite a cooling market trend as the economy shrank in 2025 and caused overall metrics to dip, we successfully defended and grew our most profitable local hubs.
The 2025 Result:
- Retention: Maintained a massive 79% Engagement Rate.
- Local Growth: Despite site-wide trends, individual store pages saw significant month-over-month growth.
My focus here was on maintaining site health and hyper-local relevance. By prioritizing the "Locations" and "Services" clusters, we ensured that the traffic we did keep was highly engaged and ready to book an appointment.
Learn how SEO helped a local men's haircut business to build foot traffic.
[COMING SOON: My SEO Career from 2010 - 2024]
I've had a long career in search, and I have many stories about how my SEO abilities helped clients grow their businesses. I will tell these stories on this page, and share my techniques for success, so be sure to check back in the coming days!
2010s: Addressing Duplicate Content and Other Technical Issues
I began work full-time as an SEO Strategist at Performics in Chicago in 2006. Modern e-commerce was being born and my agency delivered full-service digital marketing to a roster of famous clients.
The Product Issue: One client came to us because they were a firearms auction site. They were kind of like e-bay, but they primarily allowed auctions for guns. Google had very strict rules about what could be advertised, and firearms were not on the list. As a result, the client's only promotional option on the web was organic search, and they came to my team looking to build their organic traffic.
The Problem: Though the website had a large, dedicated user base and a brisk trade, they were getting out-ranked on key terms like "buy firearms", "auction rifles", and suchlike by other firearms websites. I ran a check on Google to see whether other sites were copying their content. What I found was that the website had made multiple copies of itself across at least fifty different domains. As a result, Google didn't know which domain was the "best" one, because there were fifty copies of each page in the site on different websites, and as a result all of the client's domains had lower ranks.
My Technical Solution: I explained to the client about duplicate content and how it negatively impacted visibility in organic search. We used a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect the duplicate domains to a single primary domain. This consolidated all of the client's link authority and, best of all, Google had only one place to look to find the best gun auction site on the internet. Twenty years later, the website is still going strong and is the leading authority for firearm auctions.
2003: Web 1.0 SEO & How I Got My Start
I got my start in search engine optimization as a web developer working for a traditional ad agency that produced radio and TV spots for its clients. I was in a new department where we helped develop clients' websites.
The "Brand Name" Problem: One day, a client, a well-known Air Travel company based in Atlanta, GA, came to us because they had a search problem, and they didn't know who else to talk to.
The problem was that when they searched for their brand name on Google, the #3 result was a third-party website about an air tragedy involving their company, where lives had been lost. The company was very concerned about this third party's prominent placement on Google on searches for their brand name, and how it might affect their potential customers.
What Caused the Problem: Research showed that Google ranked websites by their relationship to specific search queries. Strongly related pages got ranked higher, weakly related pages got ranked lower. Since the third party website used the company's name frequently, Google thought it was a "useful" result for search queries that included the company name.
My Artistic Solution: I explained to our client that they could add outbound links to their website that pointed to other websites with positive news stories and information about their company. From Google's perspective, these outbound links gave these positive pages the client's "Seal of Approval", and Google assigned them a stronger relationship to the company's brand name. After a few months, the positive news articles started appearing on the first page of results for searches with the company's brand name, and eventually the harmful website was pushed off of the first page of results.
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