← All case files
Case file 01 · Platform

The SEO Console

Eleven applications, one login. The clerical half of SEO handled by software, so the judgement half gets a person's full attention.

Free audit
Latest round note

The free audit tool is live and running for anyone who wants one. Behind it, the shared spine — one sign-in, one billing account, one place your data lives — is being finished so the client dashboard can sit on top of it.

Next on the bench: the client-facing view, where you see your own current state and what changed, and can ask for work without writing an email.

Condition Audit live
Applications 11
Shared foundations 8
Client access In build
Presenting problem

An SEO agency is mostly admin wearing a strategy costume.

Pull the rankings. Re-run the audit. Check whether the fixes actually landed. Chase the citations. Rebuild the report. Send the update nobody reads. It is hours a week of collecting and reformatting things a machine should have collected and reformatted, and every one of those hours is an hour not spent on the part that needs a human — deciding what actually matters for your business this month. Agencies solve this by hiring juniors to do the admin. I solved it by writing the software, which is why you get me on the thinking rather than someone in their second week.

How it works

What the console actually holds.

Eleven applications sharing one set of foundations — a single sign-in, one billing account, one customer record. Add a tool and it inherits all of that on day one instead of becoming another island.

01

Audit

The public, free version is the one on this site. The same engine, unthrottled and scheduled, runs inside the paid product.

02

Local mapping

Where you actually rank across a physical area, drawn as a map rather than one national number that means nothing to a local business.

03

Lead finding

Finds and qualifies businesses against a brief, with a professional tier for heavier work.

04

Outreach & mail

Sequenced, deliverability-aware sending. Split into two services so a mail problem is never a campaign problem.

05

Client dashboard

Your current state, what moved, what it means, and a way to ask for work — without composing an email about it.

Under the hood

It can be operated by an assistant, not only by a person.

Three of the instruments are exposed as tools an AI assistant can drive directly. A request like “check this client's local visibility across the whole borough and tell me what changed since last month” can be answered by asking for it, rather than by opening four tools and joining the results by hand. It is the difference between owning software and being staffed by it.

What was actually hard

The problems that took the longest.

  • One customer, eleven apps Every application needs to know who you are, what you have paid for and what you are allowed to see — without eleven separate copies of that truth quietly disagreeing. Pulling sign-in and billing out into shared foundations was months of unglamorous work, and it is why a new tool now takes days rather than weeks.
  • Scheduled work that has to be right Jobs that run overnight against real client data have nobody watching when they go wrong. Getting the failure behaviour right — retry, report, never half-finish — mattered more than getting the happy path fast.
  • Deciding what a client should see The honest answer to “how are we doing” is a hundred numbers, and a hundred numbers is the same as no answer. The dashboard is still in build largely because deciding what to leave out is harder than displaying what is in.
Round notes

The last few weeks.

Build pipeline straightened so a documentation change stops triggering a full rebuild of the audit tool. Boring, and it was costing an hour a week.

Locked how a small-business site gets produced and tracked end to end, with a design review step made mandatory rather than optional.

Scheduled jobs moved onto a footing the hosting plan can actually sustain, instead of one that failed quietly at the edges.

Sign-in and billing extracted into shared foundations, so every app in the console reads from one account rather than its own.

Maintained from the working log. Updated when the build moves, not on a schedule. THE SEO CONSOLE · 01