SEO typically means waiting months for results while watching your marketing budget disappear. Most businesses expect to wait six months or more before seeing any meaningful return on their investment. Michael Hodgdon has spent 27 years refining his approach to cut the timeline down to under three months, and his method is transforming how companies think about search engine optimization. His method doesn’t follow the usual chronological SEO playbook. Most agencies plan out campaigns months in advance, working through a checklist of optimizations regardless of what’s actually moving the needle. His team takes a different approach entirely.
Focusing on Quick SEO Wins First
“The model is based on an in-depth audit at the beginning of the process and then identifying the things that can be done fastest to produce the quickest results without regard to doing SEO chronologically,” Hodgdon explains. Rather than starting with technical fixes or content strategies, his team looks for pages that are already close to ranking on page one.
These transactional keywords often need just a small push to break through. Once they identify these opportunities, they optimize those pages first and support those efforts. “We work on the core fundamentals, focusing on the areas that provide the quickest wins,” he says. The strategy gets updated monthly instead of following a rigid long-term plan. “We set the strategy at the beginning of the month, and at the end of the month we’re re-strategizing based on all the changes we made,” he notes. This flexibility lets them capitalize on new opportunities as search rankings shift.
Building SEO Success with Team Effort
Each client gets assigned a senior SEO specialist who handles communication and strategy coordination. But the actual work involves multiple team members with different expertise areas. “We assign a senior SEO specialist who runs point, but we have a very experienced team and we can delegate among team members,” Hodgdon says. The implementation happens gradually throughout the month. “With SEO, sometimes it’s not good to do too many changes all at one time because if you get a certain result, you don’t always know exactly what drove that result,” he explains. After making changes to pages, they use Google Search Console to request re-indexing and wait a few days to see the impact.
Showing SEO Impact with Client Results
Hodgdon’s average time to get clients to page one is 2.8 months. “That’s compared to an industry average of six months or more,” he points out. This performance shows up in their client retention rate of 98 percent, which happens because the work pays for itself through additional sales. A recent case with Wham Bam Handyman shows what these improvements look in practice. When they started working together, the company had seven indexed pages in Google. “Within three months, we had 174 pages,” he reports. Their backlinks went from zero to 48, organic traffic jumped 120 percent, and new users increased 184 percent. The business results were even more impressive. Their call conversion rate jumped from under 30 percent to over 50 percent. “Their average hourly rate went from $90.16 to $122.44 within three months,” Hodgdon says. Their average job value grew from $168 to $681, and by month three, “their ROI from SEO was $14,000.”
He started in SEO back in 1996, when there wasn’t even a Google yet. “It evolved from being a wild west show to being a very structured, methodical process,” he reflects. Back then, you could rank in AOL or Yahoo using almost any tactic. Now it requires much more methodical, data-based approaches. But the field keeps evolving rapidly. “In the last year and a half, it’s become a whole new frontier—now we’re doing large language model placement with ChatGPT and Perplexity,” Hodgdon explains. His team has been incorporating AI into their SEO programs, and while the returns aren’t as robust as traditional Google rankings yet, they’re seeing results. One client got four leads from AI sources in a single week, compared to the six or seven daily leads they typically get from Google. The combination of proven fundamentals with new technology keeps his approach ahead of the curve while delivering consistent returns for clients who need results sooner rather than later.
Connect with Michael Hodgdon on LinkedIn to explore faster, ROI-driven SEO strategies.
