Twenty years of SEO. One simple rule.

I sold my first client on SEO in 2006, back when ranking well mostly meant stuffing keywords into a page and hoping nobody at Google noticed. They noticed, eventually, and I’ve spent every year since relearning the job as the rules changed under my feet.

I founded SEObyNick in 2010, back when “content is king” was still a genuinely useful sentence and not yet a cliché printed on conference lanyards. That business grew into Keyword Rankers in 2021, right around when the industry started arguing over whether AI would replace SEO altogether. Spoiler: it didn’t. It just handed the people who actually understand search a much sharper set of tools, and left everyone else Googling how to write a prompt.

Two decades in this business teach you a few things the hard way. I’ve watched Panda, Penguin, and a dozen unnamed updates wipe out sites that were “doing everything right” by last month’s standards. I’ve seen agencies sell the same templated package to a bakery and a law firm and call it a strategy. And I’ve learned that the fundamentals, real authority, genuine relevance, a site that actually deserves to rank, never go out of style, even when the tools for building them do.

That’s the philosophy Keyword Rankers runs on: old-fashioned SEO judgment, the kind you only get from being wrong enough times to know better, paired with the AI tools that let us move faster than agencies still doing this the 2012 way. I’m not interested in chasing a trick that works until the next update breaks it. I’m interested in building something that still ranks in three years, not three weeks.

If you’re a small business tired of being handed a big agency’s leftover playbook, that’s who I built this for.

— Nick, Founder, Keyword Rankers