Meet Michelle Bourbonniere, PhD

The Internet runs on words

You probably don’t give “Googling” much thought in your everyday life.

I didn’t either.

Back in 2013 I didn’t even know “SEO” was a thing.

Back then, freshly graduated from a PhD in History, I was mostly editing academic books and articles.

In 2017 I edited a website for the first time. And then something I didn’t expect happened.

Google noticed.

Literally the day after publishing the new website copy, my client’s site started ranking for things it never had before.

And—slowly but surely—those rankings went up and turned into traffic.

And that traffic turned into sales.

Cut to:

The Christmas vacation I spent curled up by the fireplace, devouring the 952-page classic The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization

The late nights I spent happily surfing through the reams of SEO data available for every site on the internet on Ahrefs, an SEO tool

2018—an intense year of testing, testing, testing—first on my own site and then on my clients’ websites (with their enthusiastic permission)

“On average, I get about 100 leads a month from Google. It’s been that way for years.

I start every morning by answering the emails I got overnight from prospective clients. They’re finding my site through Google.”

A decade ago, Google didn’t understand the words on webpages.

Now it does.

SEO, these days, is all in the words.

The way I do SEO involves absolutely nothing tricky, nothing shady.

(I’ve never paid for a link in my life, and you shouldn’t either.)

I’ll use words to improve your website, to make it more helpful to readers and more pleasing to Google.

Sounds good?

PhD in History from Stanford University (2013).
Copyediting Certificate from the University of California, Berkeley (2016).
I learned how to write persuasive web copy from Joanna Wiebe, the copywriter who invented the term “conversion copywriting.”