How I Work

Most "how we work" pages are marketing. Three steps with icons. Vague language about discovery and strategy and execution. A testimonial wedged between steps two and three. You read it and you know less than when you started.

I have been asked, by people who mean well, to make one of those pages. I am going to do something different instead. I am going to tell you what actually happens if you hire me, in enough detail that you can decide whether to bother reaching out. Including the parts that might make you decide not to.

The Audit

Every engagement starts with one, and I learned why the hard way. Early in my career I would take a client's word for what was wrong, build a strategy around their diagnosis, and then discover three months in that the actual problem was something nobody had mentioned because nobody knew it existed. A fintech company once told me they needed content strategy. What they actually needed was for someone to notice that their entire blog was being served through client-side JavaScript that Googlebot couldn't render. Their content strategy was fine. Their content was invisible. Three months of fees before anyone thought to look under the hood. I was the one who should have looked first.

So now I look first. Every time. The audit starts at $499 and takes five business days. I go through over a hundred technical checkpoints, pull apart the competitive landscape to see who is beating you and where the openings are, map out content opportunities that are actually realistic given your domain authority, and put together a short list of the five to ten things that will move the needle. Not a hundred pages of screenshots from automated tools. An actual analysis by someone who has been reading these signals for twenty years. You get the document and a thirty-minute call where I walk through what I found and answer questions. The full audit details are on a separate page if you want the granular breakdown.

There is no commitment beyond the audit. No automatic upsell, no "let me put together a proposal." Many clients take it and hand it to their internal team or their existing vendor, and that is a perfectly good outcome. I designed it to work on its own.

Why so cheap? I have thought about this more than is probably healthy. $499 is low enough to be trivial for a PE firm evaluating a portfolio company's digital presence. It is high enough that I do real work and you get something real back. Larger or more complex sites - enterprise-scale, multi-domain, multi-language - can run up to $999, and I will tell you which before you pay anything. I have seen the free audits. I have seen the $49 audits. They are lead-gen PDFs with your logo pasted in. This is not that. If you want to start here, get in touch.

What happens next depends on what the audit finds. Sometimes the answer is simple: your team takes the document and executes. If you already have an agency, the audit will show whether they have been doing good work or not. Sometimes they have, and the audit becomes a roadmap they can follow. Sometimes it becomes the evidence you need to have a harder conversation. Either way, you got what you paid for and we are done.

Sometimes the audit reveals one specific problem that is throttling everything. A JavaScript rendering issue making the site invisible to Google. A migration that broke hundreds of internal links. A site architecture problem burying the pages that should be ranking. I fixed Psik's rendering issue and they went from zero organic visibility to 400x growth. One technical problem, solved. Not every fix is that dramatic, but when the bottleneck is technical, removing it can feel like flipping a switch.

And sometimes the opportunity is large enough that it warrants ongoing work. This is the retainer - $2,499 a month - and this is where things get interesting.

What the Work Looks Like

I am going to describe a typical month in a way that is probably too detailed for some readers and not detailed enough for others, which means it is probably about right.

I crawl your site regularly. I am looking for things that break quietly - redirect chains that accumulate over time, pages that drop out of Google's index, speed regressions nobody noticed because nobody was watching, schema markup that was valid last month but is not anymore because a developer changed a template. These are the problems that erode organic performance so gradually that you don't notice until you have lost 30% of your traffic and can't figure out why. I find them before that happens. When I do, I either fix them myself or write a ticket for your dev team with enough technical detail that they can fix it without scheduling a meeting about it.

I do keyword and content research, but not the kind where you get a spreadsheet of search volumes and someone calls it strategy. I look at what your competitors rank for that you don't, what topics have realistic opportunity given your authority and content depth, and what the person typing that query actually wants to find. Then I write content briefs - target keyword, search intent, recommended structure, competing pages to study, internal linking targets. Your writers produce the content. I review it before it publishes. I am not a content mill and I don't pretend to be one, but I make sure what goes live has a reason to exist in Google's index.

I watch your competitors. What they are publishing, what backlinks they are acquiring, where their rankings are shifting. When a competitor makes a move that is going to affect your position, I would rather tell you about it before it shows up in your traffic numbers than after.

Once a month we get on a call for an hour. I don't read slides at you. We talk about what happened, what it means, and what we are doing next. And once a month I send a report. Not a fifty-page deck. Ranking changes on target keywords, traffic trends with context, technical issues found and resolved, what I did, what I am doing next. One page. Maybe two. Written in English, not in SEO jargon, so you can forward it to your board or your fund partner without having to translate it first.

You email me, I respond. Usually within a few hours, always within 24. There is no ticketing system. There is no project manager between us. There is no "your account representative will get back to you." It is me. Directly. This is the single biggest difference between working with an individual and working with an agency. It is also, I have found, the reason clients stay.

I should be clear about boundaries, because ambiguity creates scope creep and scope creep creates resentment. I don't write the content - I write the strategy and the briefs, your team produces the pages. I don't do design. I don't run paid campaigns. I don't guarantee rankings, and I will explain why in a moment. What I do well is fit into your existing team as the SEO specialist. I have worked alongside agencies, in-house marketing teams, solo founders doing everything themselves, and PE operating partners with six portfolio companies and no bandwidth for any of them. The pattern is always the same: I provide the strategy and the technical direction, your people provide the execution. It works best when it is a collaboration, not a handoff.

In terms of access, I need Google Search Console and Analytics. Server logs if you have them. I don't need admin passwords or CMS credentials unless we are doing specific technical work. And for the technically curious: I use Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, and the standard toolkit, but I also write custom scripts in Python and Go for things the off-the-shelf tools can't handle - log file analysis, large-scale competitive intelligence, automated monitoring. When I need a tool that doesn't exist, I build it. That is what happens when a coder does SEO for twenty years.

The Honest Parts

I will not promise you specific rankings by specific dates. I know this is what you want to hear, and I know my competitors will promise exactly that. They can afford to, because they know you won't remember in six months what was promised today, and if you do, they will blame an algorithm update. I would rather tell you the truth: Google changes its algorithm thousands of times a year, your competitors are not standing still, and the variables that affect organic search are numerous enough that certainty is a performance, not a position. I can show you what I have done for similar companies and tell you what the trajectory typically looks like, but I will not promise a number. Anyone who does is selling you confidence, not competence.

If you need revenue next quarter, buy ads. I am serious. Paid acquisition is instant. SEO is not. SEO is infrastructure that compounds over time and eventually produces returns that make paid look expensive, but that "eventually" is three to six months at minimum. If your board is expecting organic growth in 90 days, I will tell you that on the first call so neither of us wastes time.

What I will promise: an honest assessment of your situation, direct communication with no intermediary, senior-level work on every engagement - because I am the senior level, there is nobody junior doing the actual work while I sit in the meetings - and a willingness to tell you when something is not working, up to and including the possibility that you should stop paying me.

Every engagement is month-to-month. No long-term contracts. If it is not working, you leave. If it is working and you want to bring the capability in-house, I help you transition. I have done this multiple times and I prefer it to the alternative, which is keeping a client who feels trapped. OurCrowd was two years. LonesomeLabs was twelve months. Some clients do six months, see the trajectory change, and bring it in-house with confidence. The range is wide because the situations are different. If things are not working after three months, we have an honest conversation about why. Sometimes it is the strategy. Sometimes it is execution speed on the client side. Sometimes it is the market. We figure it out together, and if the answer is that I am not the right fit, I will say so.

Across a Portfolio

If you are a PE firm or a VC fund and you are reading this because someone told you to evaluate SEO across your portfolio companies, the model adjusts. Start with one company. Run the audit. If the work is good and the opportunity justifies expansion, we scale from there. Three or more audits drop to $399 each. Ongoing engagement for three or more companies drops to $1,999 per month per company. Ten or more, we talk.

The real advantage of using one person across a portfolio is not the volume discount. It is that what I learn from one company informs strategy for the others. Patterns across verticals. Competitive overlaps. Content approaches that can be adapted instead of reinvented from scratch each time. For fund partners who don't want to be in the operational details, I send a quarterly roll-up summarizing SEO health and progress across all companies in one document. Day to day I work directly with each portfolio company's marketing or product team. I sign NDAs. None of this is unusual.

Getting Started

If any of this sounds like what you need, get in touch or email me at amos@wskpf.com. Tell me what you are working on and I will tell you honestly whether I think I can help. I can usually start within a week.