You can't market yourself out of bad tech.

01 Diagnosis

The clicks that vanished without a ranking loss

At a national building-products brand, organic clicks were falling year over year while impressions held flat and average position improved. The "Great Decoupling" signature the industry was still learning to name. The playbook said "ranking problem." The evidence said AI Overviews were intercepting queries and answering them above the links.

I presented the diagnosis to leadership and rebuilt measurement around answer-engine visibility, standing up generative prompt groups tracking brand mentions, citations, and share of voice in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews across every product category, with pre-launch AI answer baselines logged to define displacement targets.

From rank tracking to answer-engine share of voice, measured against named incumbents.

02 The Build

A new enterprise site, with SEO in the room from day one

On a small core team, I led the SEO workstream for a ground-up replatform to Sitecore XM Cloud on a headless Next.js frontend. The governing framework was a 40+ page SEO strategy and technical requirements document I authored for the implementation agency: crawl budget, URL architecture, canonical logic, hreflang, and structured data standards.

I authored the content for the entire relaunched site: every core page, its metadata, and its UX copy, exceeding the MVP content target. I wrote the production robots.txt and deployed llms.txt for AI crawler guidance, and designed the structured data architecture, from NewsArticle schema for the press release archive to a Product schema pipeline specified from PIM data.

SEO built in from the ground up, not retrofitted after launch.

03 The Catch

QA the way a crawler reads it

As a technical SEO, I catch things most SEOs don't even understand. While others write and rewrite the copy on a page trying to change its rankings, I look under the hood to make sure Google would even bother rewarding it. Fundamentally incorrect code caps a page no matter how good the words are.

Running pre-launch UAT for the relaunch, that meant testing the site the way machines and assistive tech experience it: raw HTML against the rendered DOM, heading order, anchor text, contrast, and ARIA. Make sure what we designed is what crawlers and screen readers actually get.

One example: every product card linked with the same "View Details" label. Repeated generic anchors tell search engines nothing about the destination and force screen reader users to guess. The fix I delivered used the product name as the link with a stretched-link pattern covering the card, written as paste-ready code. Findings shipped as structured tickets framed as implementation requests, holding launch standards while keeping the agency partnership productive.

Equal parts technical and strategic means someone on the team reads the source.

04 The Boardroom

The voice of search engines at the decision table

I surface search insights into the decision conversations that matter. Brand teams get the SERPs worth targeting, intent matching, competitor analysis, and search volume research so the keywords we chase are maximum and intentful. Executive leadership, project managers, and stakeholders get plain explanations of how Google actually works and operates. In rooms where search has no other representative, I am the voice of the search engines.

In practice that has meant search-driven naming briefs with evidence-backed recommendations and live SERP exhibits, presented to brand management and legal across six product launches. It also means informing PR strategy: I founded a biweekly PR and SEO task force focused on E-E-A-T signals, backlink strategy, and thought leadership alignment.

Search intelligence shaping what products are called, how they launch, and what PR pursues.

05 The Operation

Owning the stack, not just using it

I evaluated the enterprise SEO platform market, authored the value proposition that moved the organization from Conductor to BrightEdge, and own the configuration end to end: keyword architecture in a four-layer tag system, competitor tracking, decannibalization via preferred-page assignments, and AI Catalyst prompt groups.

I also brought product copy production in-house from an external vendor. I built a governed AI content system in Jasper loaded with brand voice, SEO standards, and copy frameworks, then personally authored the full catalog: standardized product detail copy and web cards across 223 SKUs.

Tool strategy, procurement advocacy, and content operations, owned as one system.

06 Governance

Search discipline at regulated scale

Before that: SEO, quality, and accessibility governance across 80+ public-facing properties at CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield: Siteimprove administration, content audits that identified and resolved 2,400 issues while improving UX metrics by 32%, and accessibility and QA issues reduced by over 60%, all while holding WCAG 2.1 AA and Section 508 in a HIPAA-regulated environment.

Proof that search performance and compliance are allies, not trade-offs.