The long way into search.

I got into SEO by accident — fixing broken product pages at a job that had nothing to do with marketing, because nobody else would. Turned out I liked the puzzle: crawlers, intent, the gap between what a page says and what it actually communicates.

For a while I did this inside agencies, optimizing for retainers instead of results. I burned out chasing quick wins for clients who didn’t want the truth — that most of what moves rankings is slow, unglamorous work nobody wants to bill for.

So I stepped back, rebuilt from nothing, and started over on different terms.

Fewer clients. More honesty. Work I could actually stand behind instead of work that just kept a dashboard green for another quarter. That’s the practice I run now.

Today I split my time between hands-on consulting, writing about what I’m actually seeing in search, and training in-house teams to think for themselves instead of waiting on an agency retainer to tell them what’s wrong.