# Zach Pace

> Zach Pace is an SEO specialist in Greenville, SC. SEO Specialist II at Grand Canyon Education, former SEO Manager at Furman University, and founder of Ridgeline Digital Marketing.

I've been doing SEO since 2018. I've led content and SEO in-house at Charleston Southern and Furman, I'm an SEO Specialist at Grand Canyon Education, and I run Ridgeline Digital Marketing, helping service-based businesses get found in search and AI. This site is the record of all of it.

## Key numbers
- 8+ years doing SEO, since 2018
- +984% non-branded organic traffic at Furman in 2024
- 102% more organic search leads in year one at Furman
- +238% keywords ranked 1–3 at Furman in 2024
- 7.2x organic traffic value at Charleston Southern in under 8 months
- 3,836 keywords in the top 10 at Charleston Southern, up from 1,698
- +114% leads from search for Ridgeline client KFit Performance in 2026
- 5,787 college pages built on CollegeTrends.io
- 57K+ lines of code built with AI across 12 projects

## How I work
- Data over opinion: Every strategy is backed by data and experience, never assumptions. Where no data exists, I run the experiment myself.
- Outcomes over activity: I measure success by leads, revenue, and the health of the business, not by busyness or the volume of deliverables.
- AI-era innovation: I'm not sentimental about old tactics. I test AI tools, and build my own, so I know which ones are worth adopting.
- Long-term strategy: Search never stops changing, and SEO compounds. The biggest results come from a strategy you stick with.

## 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.

## Experience
- [SEO Specialist II, Grand Canyon Education, Inc.](https://www.zacharyapace.com/work/grand-canyon-education/) (In-house, Jun 2025 – Present): SEO for Grand Canyon University's website: page optimizations, new SEO pages, and career guides, plus ownership of the GCU blog and the team's AI automation work.
- [Founder + SEO Consultant, Ridgeline Digital Marketing](https://www.zacharyapace.com/work/ridgeline-digital-marketing/) (Founder, Mar 2025 – Present): An SEO and GEO agency that helps service-based businesses get found in search and grow to heights they never expected.
- [SEO Manager, Furman University](https://www.zacharyapace.com/work/furman-university/) (In-house, Dec 2022 – May 2025): Built Furman's content marketing strategy and blog from scratch, which contributed to organic search leads doubling in the first year.
- [Digital Marketing Associate, North Greenville University](https://www.zacharyapace.com/work/north-greenville-university/) (In-house, May 2022 – Dec 2022): General digital marketing role after moving back home to Greenville.
- [Web Content Strategist, Charleston Southern University](https://www.zacharyapace.com/work/charleston-southern-university/) (In-house, Aug 2021 – May 2022): First role out of college, at my alma mater. I moved the university toward SEO-driven program pages and a blog. Organic traffic value grew 7.2x and top-10 rankings more than doubled.
- [Marketing Intern, Fresh Water Systems](https://www.zacharyapace.com/work/fresh-water-systems/) (Internship, Aug 2018 – Apr 2019): Where it started. I went from picking orders in the warehouse to becoming the company's first in-house SEO, and built an expert-video content program.

## Projects
- [CollegeTrends.io](https://www.zacharyapace.com/projects/collegetrends/) (App, Personal, 2026, Live, built with AI): A free dashboard that lets prospective students, parents, and researchers compare every U.S. college on cost, earnings, debt, and outcomes, using the Department of Education's College Scorecard. (5,787 shareable school pages; 167 College Scorecard data fields; 14 ways to view the data)
- [3D site architecture map](https://www.zacharyapace.com/projects/gcu-site-architecture-map/) (Tool, In-house, 2026, Live, built with AI): An interactive 3D map of every page on gcu.edu. It shows a 1,700-page site's structure, sections, and internal-link weight at a glance. (1,700 pages mapped; 9 levels of crawl depth; 2,701 inlinks to the most-linked page)
- [TrailBlaze SEO Extension](https://www.zacharyapace.com/projects/trailblaze-seo-extension/) (Tool, Ridgeline, 2026, Live, built with AI): A free Chrome extension that audits any page, exports its content structure, and runs side-by-side competitor analysis in the browser. (5.0 rating on the Chrome Web Store; 11 audit and analysis features; $0 free, with no account or upsells)
- [BM Industrial Solutions](https://www.zacharyapace.com/projects/bm-industrial-solutions/) (Case study, Client, 2025, Live): A South Carolina industrial contractor went from 9 leads a quarter to 33 in one year, with calls from Google up eightfold and clicks from search nearly tripled. (9 → 33 leads per quarter, first quarter of the engagement vs the latest; 8x calls from BM's Google Business Profile, same two quarters; 2.9x clicks from Google search, same two quarters; 24 five-star Google reviews, double the count when the engagement began)
- [KFit Performance](https://www.zacharyapace.com/projects/kfit-performance/) (Case study, Client, 2025, Live): A Greenville personal training gym went from one in three website leads coming from search to nearly two in three, with leads from search up 114% in 2026. (+114% leads from organic search, Jan–Sep 2026 vs 2025; 64% of website leads now come from search (was 35%); 3x Google impressions in the first year; 38 → 71 mobile page speed score)
- [Furman University content program & blog](https://www.zacharyapace.com/projects/furman-content-program/) (Case study, In-house, 2024, Live): About 35 blog posts, built from scratch on a research-first SEO process. In 2024 they grew non-branded search traffic 984% and helped double organic visitors in the CRM. (+102% CRM users from organic search, 2024 vs. 2023; +984% non-branded organic traffic in 2024; 35 blog posts behind it all; 3x traffic value, about $100K/month by year end)
- [Bernco Solutions website](https://www.zacharyapace.com/projects/bernco-solutions-website/) (Website, Ridgeline, 2026, Concept, built with AI): A website concept for a family-owned HVAC contractor in Travelers Rest, SC, with a blueprint-inspired design.
- [BM Industrial Solutions website rebuild](https://www.zacharyapace.com/projects/bm-industrial-website/) (Website, Client, 2026, In progress, built with AI): A 22-page site for an industrial compressor and hydraulics contractor, built on a custom static-site generator with full local SEO structure. (22 pages; 11 service pages; 6 city pages)
- [Calliope's Treasures online store](https://www.zacharyapace.com/projects/calliopes-treasures/) (Website, Ridgeline, 2026, Concept, built with AI): An e-commerce concept for a family-owned Christian bookstore in Taylors, SC: 736 products, Etsy-style browsing, and product schema on every page. (736 product pages; 753 pages total)
- [FB Group Monitor](https://www.zacharyapace.com/projects/fb-group-monitor/) (Tool, Ridgeline, 2026, Shelved, built with AI): A Chrome extension that watches local Facebook groups for people asking for recommendations, a lead source for service businesses.
- [GCU blog program](https://www.zacharyapace.com/projects/gcu-blog-program/) (Case study, In-house, 2026, Live): SEO research for about 15 Grand Canyon University blog posts a month. 75 posts I researched went from not ranking to ranking, drawing about 15,700 estimated monthly visits. (75 posts I researched now ranking, up from zero in Aug 2025; 15.7K est. monthly organic visits to those posts; 87 of 93 ranking posts with their top keyword on page 1)
- [Greenville Community Resource Guide](https://www.zacharyapace.com/projects/greenville-community-resource-guide/) (Website, Personal, 2026, Live, built with AI): A free directory of food, housing, medical, mental health, and crisis resources in Greenville County, built so people, and AI answer engines, can find help fast. (145 pages generated from one spreadsheet; 63 local resources listed; 62 need-based landing pages)
- [HomeGym](https://www.zacharyapace.com/projects/homegym/) (App, Personal, 2026, In progress, built with AI): An iOS app that builds a 4-week training plan around the equipment you actually own, using Claude.
- [Hybrid site architecture](https://www.zacharyapace.com/projects/hybrid-site-architecture/) (Strategy, In-house, 2026, Proposed): A proposed URL structure for a university's degree programs: marketing hubs that rank for broad searches, and one catalog where every program lives exactly once.
- [JSB Grading website](https://www.zacharyapace.com/projects/jsb-grading-website/) (Website, Ridgeline, 2026, Concept, built with AI): A website concept for a land grading and clearing company serving Greenville County and the Upstate.
- [PayMyself](https://www.zacharyapace.com/projects/paymyself/) (App, Personal, 2026, Live, built with AI): How much of this month's LLC profit you can pay yourself after taxes, built for single-member LLC owners who often still have a W-2 job. Free to use with no account, with a QuickBooks Online dashboard. (51 state tax profiles (50 states + DC); 1-click QuickBooks Online connection)
- [Sauna House Greenville](https://www.zacharyapace.com/projects/sauna-house-greenville/) (Case study, Client, 2026, Live): A Greenville Nordic spa doubled visits from Google by people searching in Greenville in the first three months of local SEO work, with clicks from search up 55% and its average local map rank for spa searches moving from 15th to 7th. (+104% visits from Google by people searching in Greenville, June 2026 vs August; +55% clicks from Google search, June 2026 vs August; 15.3 → 7.1 average local map rank for spa searches, July 20 vs August; 425 → 483 Google reviews, with the 5.0 rating held)
- [This site](https://www.zacharyapace.com/projects/zach-pace-portfolio/) (Website, Personal, 2026, Live, built with AI): A portfolio that doubles as a machine-readable record of my work, with a Human/Agent view and an auto-generated llms.txt.
- [Ridgeline Digital Marketing website](https://www.zacharyapace.com/projects/ridgeline-website/) (Website, Ridgeline, 2025, Live): The agency's home base: services, case studies, and the TrailBlaze extension.
- [Charleston Southern content strategy](https://www.zacharyapace.com/projects/charleston-southern-content-strategy/) (Case study, In-house, 2021, Live): SEO-driven program pages, faculty buy-in, and a new blog on my alma mater's website. In under a year, organic traffic value grew 7.2x and top-10 rankings more than doubled. (7.2x organic traffic value, $18K → $131K/month; +126% keywords in the top 10; +114% organic traffic, low point to peak)

## Building with AI
57,248 lines of hand-written code across 12 projects in 8 languages, built with Claude Code (2026-04-29 to 2026-10-08); 11 GitHub repos, 147 commits. Details: https://www.zacharyapace.com/ai/

## Writing (by Zach)
- [How to Write Content That Ranks: My Outline Process](https://www.zacharyapace.com/writing/how-to-write-content-that-ranks/): The exact research-to-outline process I've used on hundreds of blog posts, with every Ahrefs step, a real example, and the prompt I use to turn the research into an outline.

## Press (coverage by others)
- [Meet Zach Pace of Ridgeline Digital Marketing](https://southcarolinavoyager.com/interview/meet-zach-pace-of-ridgeline-digital-marketing) (Voyage South Carolina, feature): A feature on getting into SEO at 18, running SEO in-house for universities, and why I started Ridgeline.

## Contact
- Email: zach@ridgelinedigitalmarketing.com
- linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zacharyapace/