Field notes
Notes from the work.
What we are seeing across owner-operated businesses and the vendors around them. SEO, AEO, audiences, intent data, and what actually turns inquiries into customers.
All posts
September 22, 2026
4 min read
AEO vs SEO: How to Make Them Work Together, Not Compete
AEO vs SEO gets treated like a changing of the guard, as if answer engines are replacing search engines and you have to pick a side. That framing is wrong, and building strategy around it costs you visibility in both places. Here is what each discipline actually does, where they overlap, and how to run them as one system instead of two competing budgets.
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September 22, 2026
3 min read
What Is a Custom Audience? Why Dynamic Beats a Purchased List
A custom audience and a purchased list get talked about like the same thing. They are not. One updates itself against live buying signals, the other is a snapshot that starts going stale the day you buy it. Here is why that difference decides whether your targeting works six months from now.
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September 22, 2026
4 min read
What Is Structured Data? Why Schema Markup Is Worth Getting Right
Structured data and schema markup get mentioned constantly and explained rarely. Here is what the terms actually mean, what they look like in real code, and why getting this right is what lets Google and AI answer engines understand your site instead of just crawling past it.
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September 21, 2026
5 min read
What Is an In-Market Audience, and Why You Should Build Your Own
Google and Meta call it in-market audience targeting: a modeled guess built from signals you never see, that disappears the moment you stop paying for placement. Here is the difference between renting an audience and owning one built from real buying intent.
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July 22, 2026
7 min read
The Dark Side of AI: When the Fun of Being Creative with Claude and Its Friends Creates Way More Work Than You Have Time To Do
AI was supposed to save me time. Instead I became my own worst scope creep. A confession from an agency owner who keeps building things nobody asked for, and the guardrails I'm adopting to stop doing free work disguised as fun.
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June 8, 2026
9 min read
How Not to Redesign Your Website
A redesign should carry your SEO equity forward, not torch it. We were brought in to recover a site that lost more than two-thirds of its organic traffic in a single migration: redirects that never fired, deleted content, and custom schema flattened to plugin defaults. Here is the anatomy of the damage, and the pre-launch checklist that prevents it.
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May 6, 2026
3 min read
The Importance of a Strong Content Strategy
Why a 2013 case for content strategy hits harder in 2026: more channels, AI search, broken paid playbooks, and what owner-operators should actually do about it.
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