This is a good place to stop focusing on the term Search Engine Optimization and to start talking about Internet Marketing. Search Engine Optimization is only one aspect of effectively selling your product or service on the Internet. Your success hinges on the cooperation of people from many disciplines. One of the primary reasons efforts to improve Internet sales fail is because of a lack of cooperation from management deciding what they want to tell the customer rather than concentrating on answering a customer's question or solving a customer's problem. And if you're lucky enough to have a potential customer visit your website, you have a few seconds to get his interest, or the customer clicks away.
While all pages are important, search engines place the most importance on the home page. The home page is valuable real estate. Every discipline in the company competes for this tiny space. It's even worse because most people will not scroll until they become interested. So you have the space above the fold (or what you can immediately see when you land on the page) to play with.
No matter how honed the consultant's people skills may be, there is a high probability that an honest Internet marketing consultant will get everybody upset. That's why success stories are few and far between.
Search has changed. A growing number of people now get their answer straight from an AI assistant or an AI overview at the top of the results, without ever clicking through to a website. That means it is no longer enough to rank on a page of blue links — you also have to become the source the AI trusts and quotes. I call this AI Optimization, or AIO, and it is part of the same job as SEO, not a separate gimmick to upsell you.
Here is where you have to be careful, because AI cuts both ways. The same technology that can help you can wreck your website in the wrong hands.
Use AI as a Tool, Not a Ghostwriter
I use AI every day — for research, for competitive analysis, for surfacing the questions your customers are actually asking, and for pressure-testing my own thinking. What I will not do is hand you whatever the machine spits out. AI confidently invents facts, it repeats itself, and left unsupervised it produces exactly the strained, generic, keyword-stuffed copy I warned you about earlier on this page. It just produces it faster.
- If your prospective provider is quietly pasting raw AI output onto your site, you will feel it the same way you feel any bad copy — that flat, hollow, uncomfortable read that sends visitors clicking away.
- Ask a simple question: does this person use AI to sharpen real human expertise, or to replace expertise they do not have? Those are very different providers, and only one of them protects your brand.
What Actually Earns AI Citations
The work that makes an AI model comfortable quoting you is the same work that has always separated good sites from bad ones: clear answers to the questions real people ask, genuine first-hand expertise, honest and well-organized content, and clean technical markup that tells machines exactly what your page is about. Do that well and you get found by people, by search engines, and by the AI tools sitting on top of them. Fake it, and every one of those three will eventually route around you.
Twenty-plus years of hands-on experience taught me the fundamentals. AI just gives me a faster way to apply them. It does not replace the judgment, and you should be wary of anyone who tells you it does.
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Does your SEO Company also represent your competitors? I will not accept SEO clients who compete with your business. Some web SEO Services boast that they're experts in a particular industry. If they do represent a competing business, it's a classic conflict of interest. Representing more than one competing SEO client also raises significant privacy issues. Get the agreement in writing.
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