About Bill Hartzer, Search Marketing Consultant

Where the work started

I have worked in search since 1996. That start was not as a consultant. It was in-house, as the search marketing person and webmaster at an international telecommunications software company, responsible for sites published in several languages for several markets. From the first week the job was never only about what a search engine wanted. It was about what the release schedule allowed, what the content management system would let anyone change, which department owned the translation, and who had to agree before a URL could be renamed.

That turned out to be the most useful thing I learned, and it is why I write specifications rather than opinions. A recommendation that cannot survive contact with a development queue is not a recommendation. It is a wish. I have consulted since — a different seat, the same constraint: somebody else owns the code, the calendar and the budget.

Almost nothing about the technical web of 1996 survives into now. The structure of the problem does. Something has to find your pages, understand them, and decide they are the best answer available. Nearly every failure I get called about is a failure at one of those three points, wearing a costume borrowed from another one.

What I do, and where the line falls

The work sorts into a small number of things. Organic search, which is mostly technical diagnosis, information architecture and the editorial judgment attached to both. Site migrations, where the sequence matters more than the cleverness. Link profile and penalty diagnosis, where the first job is establishing whether there is a manual action at all, because the remedies are unrelated. Paid search, where the account structure and the conversion data are usually the problem rather than the bidding. And strategy, which is mostly deciding what not to do — the part that saves the most money and gets sold the least.

Across all of it, one line stays fixed. I diagnose, specify, prioritize and verify. Your developers, your agency or your content people implement. That is the correct arrangement rather than a limitation: the changes that move organic search live in templates, server configuration, redirect rules and build pipelines, all governed by your release process, your testing and your ability to roll back. The corollary is worth stating before anyone inquires — if nobody can build anything, an advisory engagement produces accurate documents and no change in the numbers.

One person, and what that changes

I am independent. There is no team, no account manager, no junior doing the work under a senior's name on the proposal. Whoever you speak to on the first call is the person who runs the crawl, writes the specifications, sits with the release and writes the report.

The limits are less often admitted, so here they are. Capacity is finite, and when I cannot do something in the window you need, the useful answer is to say so rather than to accept the work and staff it thinly. I cannot run a content production program; that needs writers and editors, and it is a different business. I cannot execute daily across a large portfolio of advertising accounts. And there is no bench to hand you to if the fit is wrong, which is why the fit gets tested in the first conversation rather than in month three.

In exchange, the reasoning is always available: there is nobody between you and the person who formed the judgment, so any recommendation can be interrogated down to the evidence underneath it.

What I do not claim

No outcome is guaranteed here, in any phrasing. Nobody controls a ranking system they do not operate, and Google's own guidance for hiring a search provider says plainly that no one can guarantee a first position.

There are no client logos here, no testimonials, and no case studies with percentages in them. A percentage without a baseline, a date range and a stated method is decoration; if a number cannot be checked, it is not evidence.

There are no badges whose issuer I would not name, and no claim of a special relationship with any search engine, because there is no such thing to have. What replaces all of it is specificity — documented thresholds, mechanisms traceable to primary sources, and a willingness to tell you that the work you asked for is not the work you need. That last one is the only credential in this field that is difficult to fake.

The litigation and domain name work

Alongside consulting, I work as an expert witness in search-related litigation, and on domain name matters. Both have their own subjects and their own places, and this is not the site for either — but they belong in any account of how the consulting work is done, because they shape it.

Writing for a record where every sentence may be cross-examined changes how you write everywhere else. Sources get cited rather than paraphrased from memory. Dates get recorded at the time instead of reconstructed later. Anything resting on inference is labeled as inference, and anything another person could not reproduce does not go in at all. That habit is expensive to acquire and free to carry, and it is why a finding in an audit names the affected URLs, the evidence and the test rather than simply asserting a conclusion.