SEO & Organic Growth
SEO from someone who ships the fix, not a PDF
Most SEO recommendations die in an engineering backlog. I write the recommendation and then implement it the same week.
I take sites from zero organic traffic to sustainable search demand — not by chasing head terms I can't win, but by finding the queries a small site can actually own and building the technical foundation to hold them. I've done it repeatedly on my own properties — six live sites I built, launched, and grew myself.
The Difference
Why a developer doing SEO beats an agency doing SEO
Here's the loop that wastes most SEO budgets. The agency audits your site and produces a document. The document says your rendering strategy hides content from crawlers, your URL structure is flat, your internal links all use the same anchor text, and you need thirty new landing pages. All correct.
Then it goes to your engineering team, who are shipping features, and it sits in a backlog for two quarters. The agency keeps invoicing. Nothing ranks. Everyone concludes SEO doesn't work.
I close that loop. I find the problem and then fix it — in the templates, the routing, the rendering, the internal link graph, the schema. The diagnosis and the deploy are the same engagement, usually the same week.
Scope
What I actually do
Technical SEO
Rendering and indexability, crawl paths, site speed and Core Web Vitals, structured data, sitemaps, canonicals. The foundation that decides whether content has a chance at all.
Keyword architecture
Finding the queries a site your size can genuinely win, then mapping exactly one page to each. This is where most sites lose before they start.
Cannibalization diagnosis
When two of your pages compete for the same query, both lose. I find these in Search Console and fix them with targeting and anchor-text surgery.
Internal link engineering
Authority is a budget you spend across your own pages. Most sites spend it badly. Re-architecting this is one of the fastest wins available and costs nothing but thought.
Content structure & scaling
Templates and page types that let you publish the fiftieth page as easily as the first, because organic growth is a volume game played over quarters.
Authority building
Genuine editorial links, digital PR angles, and data-led pages that earn citations. No purchased links — that risk would sit on your domain permanently.
Proof
Six properties, built and grown from zero
I don't have anonymized client charts to show you. I have my own properties — named, live, and grown by me.
Two of those properties — GhostChat and Gmailytics — now carry genuine organic traffic and ranking keywords from content I wrote and structured. The travel properties, Hummus Trail and Abroad Bible, rank in the top ten for their core query cluster.
The same curve, three times
Across three of these properties I have full Search Console history from launch, and they trace the same shape: roughly six to ten weeks of almost nothing, then an inflection, then a sustained climb. One is five months into that curve and holds steady daily traffic. One is three months in with impressions rising and clicks beginning to follow. One inflected a few weeks ago.
That repeatability is the actual claim I'm making. Any single site growing could be luck or a lucky keyword; three following the same trajectory on the same method is a process. It's also why I won't promise you results in weeks — none of them moved meaningfully before the two-month mark, and I'd rather set that expectation now than manage a disappointment in month one.
A worked example: two of my own pages competing
Reviewing Search Console for one of the travel sites, I found a textbook cannibalization. The homepage was ranking around position 3 for a target query and earning zero clicks, because it embedded the same interactive map as the dedicated page built for that query — which sat down at position 7. Two of my pages were competing, and the weaker one was winning.
The fix was targeting and anchor-text surgery: rewrite the dedicated page's title, meta and H1 to lead with the exact phrase, then re-anchor every internal link pointing at it — navigation, footers, the homepage, even the machine-readable llms.txt — away from a generic "the route" to the descriptive phrase. Anchor text is how you tell Google which of your pages owns a query, and generic anchors throw that signal away.
I'm still inside the measurement window on that one. That's the normal rhythm of this work: diagnose, ship, wait for Google, verify. Anyone who tells you they know the outcome the day after deploying is guessing.
An honest note on where these sites are: the two SaaS properties have real organic traffic. The travel sites are climbing on impressions but rank at positions that don't convert to clicks yet — that's a content and relevance problem measured in quarters, and it's still in progress.
I keep the per-site numbers private because they're live commercial products, and I'd apply the same discretion to your data. What I won't do is show you a screenshot cropped at the good month.
Process
How an engagement runs
- Audit and baseline Crawl, Search Console analysis, competitor mapping, and a written record of exactly where you stand today. You can't prove growth without a starting line.
- Fix the foundation Indexability, speed, structure, schema, internal links. Nothing else pays off until this is right, and this is the part that usually can't be done without a developer.
- Map the winnable queries An explicit keyword-to-URL map covering what you'll target, what you'll deliberately ignore, and why.
- Build and publish Page templates plus the first wave of content, structured so you can keep publishing without me.
- Measure and iterate quarterly Watch what moves, kill what doesn't, and expand what does. Organic growth compounds — but only if someone keeps showing up.
Want to know what's actually winnable?
Send me your URL. I'll give you a straight read on what you could realistically rank for and what you should stop chasing — including if the honest answer is that SEO isn't your best channel.