Your audience is searching.

How do you distinguish between “buy-intent” and “informational intent” searches? Do you know which search terms your business ranks for in each category—and which ones you should rank for?

On an ongoing basis, I discover, vet, and capture search opportunities for your business, based on the search intent of real users. It’s all in my interpretation of the data.

If you’ve worked with SEO data, you know how difficult it is to figure out what really matters. Google will rank you for all kinds of random terms. How do you find the signal in the noise? And how do you group all these terms?

My eye is trained to distinguish groupings of search phrases that actually produce real leads (and customers) for your business. I only focus on what matters.

Who are your top competitors in real life? Believe it or not, they may not be your top SEO competitors. I’ll determine which websites you’re up against in Google Search. This analysis often leads to new search terms that you should be ranking for.

Unless you’re Tesla, you’re never going to rank for “performance electric vehicles.” But the search landscape is incredibly complex. In niche markets, we can often uncover huge opportunities that offer low competition from a search perspective. This means that even a lower-authority website can rank for your essential search terms, provided there aren’t a lot of great websites ranking already.

Granted, the mix of easy and difficult search terms looks different at every company. That said, this is an essential analysis to perform regularly. If you’re not doing it today, you could be missing out on great opportunities.

There is no SEO without content. More precisely, there is no SEO performance without phenomenal content. The web is exploding with options for your audience, and whether it’s written, video, or some other format, you need content to be found in search.

To be honest, I love creating content for SEO. I love analyzing the data, seeing the opportunity, and going after it with the best content on the topic that your audience has ever seen. Learn more here: Content Creation.

Of course, it’s not enough to create content. Once you start ranking, someone else will publish something fresher—or maybe something with a different perspective. Google wants to see recent content, and even your “evergreen” pieces need continuous monitoring and improvement to beat your competition in search.

Google doesn’t like slow websites—especially those that are slow on mobile. A few years ago, Google actually adopted this criterion as a major ranking factor. Today, if two websites are equally excellent in every other way, Google will prioritize the one that offers a fast, intuitive experience on mobile. If your site is old and slow, that’s bad news.

While I don’t have the technical skills to optimize site speed myself, I’ve managed optimization projects implemented by agencies. I know what to put in the brief, how to manage the project, and how to test results.

There’s no SEO success without data—but it’s not enough to generate a report. You have to understand what it means, and you have to pull the signal out of the noise. Only then can you see opportunities for improvement and prioritize them by the amount of bang they offer for your buck.

As an SEO professional, I engage in a regular monitoring cadence (usually biweekly, but I’ll adapt to the scenario). I use my own curated reports so I’m only looking at stuff that matters. With 8+ years’ experience, I can distinguish random data anomalies from real signals. And I know how to act on them—how to change the focus of a piece of content, freshen it with new research, or do whatever it takes to meet the shifting needs of users.