The history of SEO Doctor

Helping a business get found online is not something I learned in a weekend class or on YouTube. I have been doing this work since 2008, back in the early days of getting websites to show up on Google. My business partner and co-founder, David Solomon, has been at it since 1999, when he founded SouthSeas Marketing — a company he still owns and runs today. Between the two of us, that is more than 40 years of watching search change and learning to change with it.

Here is the story of how it all started, and why all that experience matters more than ever right now.

It all started in a sauna

Back in 2006 or 2007, I was sitting in the sauna at my local gym. I was having a problem with my computer and started talking about it with some of the other members. One guy asked me a few questions and said, "Try this." When I got home, I gave it a shot, and it worked. A few days later I saw him again, and we got to talking some more.

His name was David. He was a friendly, smart guy, and over the next few weeks we started playing racquetball together. Somehow our conversations kept turning to marketing and the internet.

Then one morning, very early, I heard a knock on my door. I opened it, and there was David. He said, "Meet me at Chick-fil-A in 20 minutes. I need to talk to you about something."

The adventure begins

It was 2008, and the recession was hitting hard. I had been out of work for a while. David had been running SouthSeas Marketing since 1999 and was deep into something called PPC — pay-per-click — using Google AdWords. We met up, and he explained how it all worked. Then he told me he had noticed I had skills I probably didn't even know I had.

That was the start of everything. For months, I learned how PPC worked and how to get good rankings. David noticed I had a hidden talent for writing great PPC ads. Soon after, he started designing and building websites too, and that opened a whole new world for me.

I had so many questions. What is WordPress? What is SEO? How does it work? I had to learn how Google viewed websites, how it decided which ones to rank, and how to do it right. So I jumped in headfirst.

A natural talent for SEO

For some reason, SEO just clicked for me. Content writing, headings, H1 tags, H2 tags, the whole structure of a website — all of it came to me like a duck takes to water.

David noticed his websites were ranking well on Google. And I don't just mean okay. I mean most of the time they landed on the very first page. In some cases, the same website showed up more than once on that page. I had a real feel for how the algorithm worked, and I studied it closely for years.

Then came YouTube

When YouTube started to take off, I studied that algorithm too. I watched my own videos climb to the top of YouTube's search results. Back then, before Google changed the way it showed videos, a good video could even land on the top pages of Google itself. I figured out how to do exactly that. I could put my videos on Page 1 of Google for just about any business.

Taking my skills into the field

A few years later, I went to work for one of the big national phone book companies as it tried to move into digital marketing. They needed people who understood this stuff, and I fit the bill.

My job was to go out into the community, meet local business owners, and help them get found on Google. Because I already understood PPC and websites so well, I was good at explaining how mobile marketing worked, along with everything else.

Outranking my own company

One day the company held a big meeting. Leadership announced that everyone would receive a URL so they could learn to build their own website and help sell products. During one of the training classes, they showed how to build a website's back end. For me, this was second nature. I already knew most of it.

Then the training video got to the part about where you put the SEO information. Nobody in the room had any idea what that was or how to do it. I almost fell out of my chair.

After the meeting, I drove the 100-plus miles back home, found my URL, and built my site. Out of more than 600 staff members and countless salespeople in the whole company, I was the only one who built one.

Here is the funny part. Soon after, my website started showing up several times on Page 1 of Google. It was ranking so well that I was outranking my own company.

That turned out to be a problem. A site built by one salesperson was pulling better rankings than the corporate site, and nobody upstairs quite knew what to do with that. We parted ways not long after.

I understood the decision, even if I thought the lesson got missed. Every bit of contact information on my site pointed straight to our own office — the rankings were going to the company either way. What stayed with me is what happened next: for the rest of that year, people in the office kept asking me to help them get their clients ranked.

The birth of SEO Doctor

Around that time, the phone book and newspaper business was falling apart across the country. I knew I had to make a move, and I knew what the move was: a firm that would tell a business owner what was actually wrong with their website, plainly, without selling them a monthly contract to fix it.

I took the idea to David. He built our first website, I optimized it, and in 2012 the two of us started SEO Doctor together as co-founders. That is still how we work: David builds, I optimize, and neither of us has to sell you anything you don't need.

Since then, David has built numerous websites and I have fully optimized each of them. For many years, we have stayed right on top of the latest technology, never falling behind in understanding how search really works.

The new era: AI visibility, GEO, AEO, and SEO

Today, things are changing again. With the rise of AI, there are new ways for customers to find your business across all the AI platforms. We call this AI Visibility, along with GEO, AEO, and SEO. This is the next level of being found online.

Here is the truth. If you do not have years of real SEO experience like David and I do, your business will get left behind. We have lived through every major change in how search works, from the early days of Google all the way to today's AI tools. That kind of experience cannot be faked, and it is exactly what you want in your corner.

That is where SEO Doctor comes in. David has been doing this since 1999 and I have been doing it since 2008 — more than 40 years between us, through every algorithm update, every shift in how people search, and now through the arrival of AI. We are ready to help you stay ahead in this new era.

— Steve Redhead, Co-Founder