Michael Brown

Owns enterprise answer engine strategy across a four university system and corporate, directing an in house team and partnering with marketing, product, academic, compliance and executive stakeholders. Results go to the board and to a university president.

Three programs that did not exist before now run continuously. An AI visibility program instrumenting seven answer engines daily took the portfolio to the most cited domain in its category, roughly 5x the next source. A 30/60/90 experimentation model across five brands ended the internal argument about what organic was worth. A faculty content engine turned 48 subject matter experts into published authors at volume. Defensive work ran alongside all of it: platform migrations and a four catalog consolidation, with every link, redirect and ranking signal mapped before the switch.

Migration defense meant mapping 448,998 backlinks, 1,335,903 internal links and 20,344 redirects before anything moved. Rankings are easy to lose in a replatform and expensive to win back.

Owned organic strategy for a 32 partner university portfolio covering 97 partner and program combinations, and grew position one rankings 69% while keyword footprint grew 41%. Non brand organic returned $11.0M in paid equivalent value over five months.

Built the annual plan from the ground up: eleven initiatives, each with a written purpose, a lead target and declared dependencies across School, MarTech, Web, Brand and Analytics, with targets modeled from four years of per program baselines rather than handed down. Ran a 25 audit program that traced declining referral traffic to partner websites, a channel the company did not own, and said so plainly instead of absorbing the blame.

Ran flagship enterprise accounts at a global agency, one education client and two national telecom brands, and delivered $17.5M in organic value on the education account alone at a $44.73 average CPC. Promoted to SEO Director inside three years.

A full AMP experience overhaul, schema testing and FAQ schema scaled across every degree program lifted FAQ clicks 108% and People Also Ask presence 62%. On the telecom side, a change process for website updates stopped avoidable traffic loss before it reached production, and four internal tools were built rather than licensed, including a keyword discovery engine and a paid/organic query coupling dashboard. Mentored the US team and led global knowledge shares.

The commercial figures are attested in writing by the VPs who owned the P&L, not self reported. Client names and contracted values stay withheld under continuing confidentiality obligations, and can be discussed in general terms.

Ran organic and paid search across a freight carrier, its 80+ affiliated companies, and Kwikturn Media, the group's owned agency. One remit covering logistics, resorts, restaurants, retail centers and from scratch builds, plus an external ecommerce book tracking ~$4.5M in revenue across five accounts in nine months.

One of those from scratch builds became a business of its own. Identified the market opening for customs compliance inside the carrier's LTL shipper base and built the business model behind USA Customs Clearance, an adjacent revenue line rather than a marketing channel. It still trades at usacustomsclearance.com. The flagship freight property grew users 55% year over year. This is also where the QA and change management discipline started that carries through every role since: human review of every change before it reaches production. Rewrote a third party reservation system feeding the web platforms and cleared faceted search crawl budget waste on a 2,840 page property.

The cabinetry account is the cleanest result in the portfolio. Revenue nearly doubled on essentially flat traffic, and average order value actually fell 6%, so every dollar of the gain came from converting visitors who were already arriving.

Technical SEO and partnerships at a SaaS platform for small business, where the assignment was to stop selling one account at a time. Built two scalable channels instead: an association partnership model reaching trade association members in bulk, and an affiliate program with commission economics of its own.

Negotiated a national partnership with a sports governing body through four drafts to signature, securing an educational hub on their website, a recurring newsletter section, two magazine advertorials and convention seminar slots. Also authored a competitive platform assessment arguing for per entity page networks under central brand control, programmatic SEO, argued in 2014.

The startup leg of the record, and the reason commercial conversations, partnership terms and contract structure are familiar ground rather than a stretch at executive level.

A consulting practice running alongside every role since 2008, delivered direct and white label through agencies, with an 18 client book spanning global life sciences, property technology, online marketplaces, banking, industrial and trade associations.

It produced 15 documented processes, 8 reusable audit templates and 11 self built tools, each versioned and maintained. This is where the written technical audits live, with findings traced to root cause rather than listed as symptoms: redirect chains tracked to a builder's permalink change, a hidden module serving mixed content, sitemap misconfiguration, duplicate content at scale. Pre and post launch QA is contracted into the SOW, not offered as a favor. Search has been rebuilt several times since 2008, and each rebuild landed in six unrelated industries at once here rather than in a single employer's category.

Eighteen years of client work that never stopped, running through five employers and six industries. Client names withheld under signed confidentiality agreements.