Somehow, I Ended Up in Marketing.

SEO wasn’t the plan.

I was doing a bit of everything in marketing. Then one day I started working on SEO. On page optimization. Keyword research. Trying to understand how search worked.

One thing led to another. Technical SEO, backlinks, outreach, content, digital PR. Eventually I was working across strategy, analytics, and accounts, connecting pieces I’d first learned separately.

I didn’t have a master plan. I just kept getting curious.

Traffic stopped being the whole point.

For a while, SEO and organic were treated like their own little world. Rankings went up. Traffic went up. Great. But what did that actually mean for the business?

Connecting the work to leads, pipeline, revenue, and business objectives made more sense to me. It also made the questions more interesting.

Okay, they clicked. Now why would they give a shit?

Who are these people? What do they need? What makes them choose us? Where does the journey break? Search was one part of a much bigger picture.

Then AI changed how I worked.

I started learning about AI and automation because I wanted to make the work easier. There was too much repetitive stuff between having a question and getting somewhere useful.

Why am I doing this manually again?

That turned into workflows, agents, internal tools, and experiments. Sometimes the answer was a better process. Sometimes it was building the thing I wished already existed.

That’s how the Topical Authority Mapper started. I got tired of stitching together tools to understand content gaps, ICP pain points, internal linking, and cannibalization. So I built something to connect the dots.

I’d rather understand it first.

Before jumping into channels or tactics, I want to listen. What does the business do? Who is it for? What do those people care about? What needs to happen for the business to move forward?

Then I want something we can test. A hypothesis, some evidence, a small experiment. Enough to learn whether we’re onto something or just attached to a nice idea.

Before we do more stuff, what are we actually trying to solve?

Still following the questions.

SEO is a big part of how I got here. These days, my curiosity reaches further into growth, positioning, product marketing, and how all of it connects to business outcomes.

I’m especially interested in what happens inside early stage startups, where the questions are open and there’s room to figure things out. Founders and small marketing teams building something people might actually care about.

This site is where I share what I’m thinking, testing, and building. Some of it works. Some of it teaches me what to try next.

I don’t need a neat label. I want more interesting problems.