Hi, I'm Zach.
I went from the warehouse floor to "our SEO guy" in 2018 and never looked back.
I started in the warehouse at Fresh Water Systems in Mauldin, SC, picking and packing orders for their water filtration store. When the new marketing director launched a sitewide product photo shoot, he asked me to be the point of contact because I knew the warehouse. That turned into an internship offer.
On day one of the internship in 2018, the marketing director told me, "I want you to be our SEO guy." Nobody in-house did SEO, so I taught myself, starting with Moz's guides and YouTube. Before long I was running keyword research, filming interviews with the company's certified water expert, and turning them into videos and blog posts that captured search demand. I kept building that skill all through college.
After graduating from Charleston Southern University with a communications degree, I went to work on its website as Web Content Strategist. My content strategy there grew organic traffic value 7.2x and more than doubled its top-10 rankings in under a year.
Then I moved home to Greenville, first as a Digital Marketing Associate at North Greenville University, then as SEO Manager at Furman University. At Furman I built the content marketing strategy and blog from scratch, which contributed to organic search leads doubling in the first year.
Today I'm an SEO Specialist II at Grand Canyon Education, and I run Ridgeline Digital Marketing, which I started in March 2025. Ridgeline helps service-based businesses get found in search and AI, and ties every decision to leads and revenue instead of vanity metrics.
I also build tools. TrailBlaze started as the Chrome extension I wanted for my own audits, and now anyone can use it for free.
When I'm not deep in SEO, you'll find me with my family, vibecoding, camping, reading, or getting a workout in.
What I believe about SEO
Growth over everything
The point of SEO is to grow the business: a predictable, compounding engine of leads, calls, bookings, and closed deals.
Traffic for traffic’s sake is meaningless
Rankings and traffic only matter when qualified visitors land on the site and turn into new business.
Good SEO is good GEO
Search engines and LLMs work differently, but what it takes to rank in one is essentially what it takes to be mentioned by the other. Google's John Mueller made the same case in a December 2025 talk.
Look at what already ranks
The best way to know what will rank in Google is to study what ranks there now. You'll never have all the information, but good data beats assumptions and opinions.
If no one can find you, you don't exist
As the SEO joke goes, the best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google. Being invisible in search and AI answers is costing you business.
Hope is not a strategy
In Sharran Srivatsaa’s words, “When you don’t have a strategy, everything looks like an opportunity.” The job is to pick the few levers that return the most for the effort.
No two businesses are the same
If the goal of marketing is to stand out, a cookie-cutter strategy is the worst thing you can do. Study the competition, find the edge, and retire tactics that stop working.
University SEO
- 102%more organic search leads in year one at Furman
- +984%non-branded organic traffic at Furman in 2024
- 7.2xorganic traffic value at Charleston Southern in under 8 months
On the road
BrightonSEO San Diego, November 2024.
