Fourteen years in.
Still hands-on.

The operator's advantage

Most SEO consultants have only ever spent other people's money. Since 2018 I've been spending my own — running Cherished Emblems, a memorial and cremation jewelry brand where I'm the owner, the strategist, and the person at the laser engraver. Every ranking, every product page, and every abandoned cart comes out of my family's income. 19,000+ orders later, the playbook I sell is the one I live on.

Cherished Emblems started the way a lot of meaningful things do — with a loss. In 2018 our family lost a beloved pet, and in that grief we discovered memorial jewelry: something tangible to hold onto. Building a brand that helps people through their hardest days taught me more about search intent, trust, and content that genuinely serves people than any client project could. It has also become my laboratory — author pages, entity schema, review strategy, monthly AI visibility benchmarking — every technique I recommend runs there first, with my own revenue as the stakes. That foundation is how I ended up quoted in USA TODAY on pet loss and memorialization, cited as the brand's founder.

That changes how I consult. I don't recommend work because it fills a retainer; I recommend it because I'd do it on my own site. When I tell a garage door company which cities to build pages for, or an agency which fixes to ship first, it's the same judgment I use when my own revenue is on the line.

Why AEO became the specialty

I've done the full arc of technical SEO — migrations, indexation forensics, architecture rebuilds, schema at scale. Around the time AI assistants started answering questions instead of listing links, it became obvious that everything I'd learned about structure and entities was about to matter more, not less. Answer engines reward exactly the things technical SEOs have always cared about: clean architecture, unambiguous entity data, and content worth citing.

So I went deep. Today my practice centers on making businesses visible to AI — and measurably so, with fixed-query benchmarking that shows month over month whether ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews are naming you. The entity-building playbook I run for clients is the same one behind my own brands.

How I work

Directly. You talk to the person doing the work — every call, every email, every report. Transparently. Plain-English reporting, priorities ranked by impact, and honest "this isn't worth your money" calls when that's the truth. Deliberately small. I cap the roster so nothing ships at 80%.

Home is Corvallis, Oregon, and some of my favorite wins happen close to it — like helping CNC Woodcutters, a local family woodworking shop, get the online recognition their craft deserves. The other end of the range is multi-location retail programs and international expansion strategy for brands selling far beyond one zip code. Small shop or global catalog, the job is the same: be findable, be trusted, be the answer.