Who you would actually be hiring

The short version

I run an SEO practice from Collingwood, Ontario, under the name Georgian Bay SEO. Before that I ran a marketing company called More Customer Growth, doing SEO consulting and growth work for small businesses. I also build software: I am the founder of FixyFlow, a customer communication tool for one to five person service businesses.

That last part matters more than it sounds. Building a product for small service businesses means I spend my weeks looking at how their enquiries arrive, which calls get missed, and what happens between a Google search and a booked job. A lot of SEO advice falls apart at that seam. Traffic that does not become a phone call is a hobby.

Why independent

I have watched the agency model from close enough to know what it does well and where it leaks. It scales, which is real. But the incentive drifts: the work moves toward whatever reports nicely, the person who sold you the plan is rarely the one executing it, and by month six you are paying for activity rather than judgment.

Working alone removes that gap and adds a different constraint, which is capacity. I take a small number of clients because I do the work myself. When I am full, I say so, and I would rather tell you that than hire somebody junior to cover it and bill you the same.

How I work out what is true

Most of what circulates as SEO knowledge is repeated rather than measured. When I need to know something, I count it. In 2026 I counted every service business competing in local search in my own town, 348 of them holding 18,396 Google reviews across 22 categories, because I wanted a denominator before advising anybody on reviews. The median turned out to be 15, which is far lower than the number people assume, and that single fact changes what you should recommend to a business with eight.

I have done the same with AI answers, checking which businesses get named when you ask ChatGPT and Google's AI for a local recommendation across a set of towns and trades, and with my own sites, where I publish what worked and what did not. When I get something wrong I publish the correction on the same page rather than quietly editing the number, which has happened and will happen again.

What I believe about this work

• A ranking is not the goal. A booked job is the goal, and the two come apart more often than the industry admits.
• Most sites do not need more content. They need the content they have to be findable, correct and pointed at a decision.
• If a tactic would embarrass you when explained to a customer, it is not a tactic, it is a liability with a delay on it.
• The honest answer to "how long will this take" is a range with a reason attached, not a number that closes the sale.
• You should be able to fire me in thirty days. That is the only accountability in this industry that works.

Outside the work

I live on Georgian Bay, which is why a lot of the work that reaches me is trades and cottage-country operators, and why I know more than I expected to about septic systems and roof ice. I write at this site and publish research on the agency site. You can find me on LinkedIn and GitHub.

Where to look next

How the work runs and what it costs, what it has produced, and the things I have measured. If you would rather just talk, the contact page has a calendar link on it.

Contact

Email is [email protected], and the fastest route is to book fifteen minutes. Work is contracted and invoiced by Georgian Bay SEO, an operating name of 1000214050 Ontario Inc., at 48 Paterson St, Collingwood, ON L9Y 3N2.