Michael Konves
Konves Digital Founder, Author, and SEO Consultant
SEO Background
I architect SEO projects that produce real results. As the founder of Konves Digital and author of Search Principles, I provide high-level SEO strategy, technical consulting, and hands-on training for businesses looking to grow their revenue through organic search.
I’ve been at this for a while. In late 2008, I moved from a role as a copy editor and co-founded an SEO department with two of my-coworkers. We learned along the way and successfully ranked websites while navigating the industry-shifting Panda and Penguin updates. Since then, I’ve worked on everything from single-page sites to enterprise platforms with over a million indexable pages.
A Teacher’s Approach to Growth
Before my career in marketing, I was a teacher. This background is why my passion for growing businesses is second only to my passion for teaching and learning.
- Empowerment over Dependency: I truly enjoy those lightbulb moments when someone you’re teaching “gets it”. For me, this is just as fulfilling as getting my hands dirty on a site and producing growth directly.
- Cost-Effective Solutions: Sometimes, hiring an SEO agency isn’t a good business decision. If you’re just starting out, it might be a better bet to learn the basics and save money by doing the actual work yourself.
Enterprise SEO Results
My experience includes producing real revenue growth via organic search from multi-year campaigns:
Highspeedinternet.com
- Organic Traffic Growth: Achieved a 948% increase in organic traffic in 2017.
- Revenue Scaling: Directly contributed to growing revenue from $300k in 2016 to $30 million in 2020.
- Technical Health: Reduced crawl errors on the site to just 4 total in 2018. (This is not a typo. I was obsessed with this for a while, and we had a really good engineering team. Good times).
Architecture and Migrations
I have architected and overseen massive sitewide migrations and redirects for enterprise brands:
- Broadbandexpert.com to highspeedinternet.com: Managed a redirect map of 40,000 pages.
- CMS Migrations: Led the transition of highspeedinternet.com, cabletv.com, and broadbandnow.com from custom CMS platforms to WordPress.
Deep Technical Problem Solving
Here are a few examples of technical issues I’ve solved:
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Manual Penalty Recovery: I diagnosed and wrote reconsideration requests for eight sites facing manual penalties.
- Link Penalties: Managed a two-month recovery process involving repeated disavows until the penalty was lifted.
- Doorway Pages: My reconsideration request persuaded Google to lift penalties for seven sites in just four days.
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Crawl Optimization: At whistleout.com, I diagnosed a crawl trap involving parameterized pages that were slowing down Googlebot.
- By updating the robots.txt with specific disallows, I reduced crawl time from about 12 days to about three 3 hours.
- Templatized schema markup: On highspeedinternet.com, I architected a templatized schema solution that automatically applied product markup to ~30,000 city pages
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Site architecture: On satelliteinternet.com I adjusted URL folder structure and internal linking to strategically move a target brand “down” a level
- This prioritized both the existing brand and a new brand.
- Successfully maintained traffic on the deprioritized brand, and unlocked rankings and traffic to the new brand.
Custom Tool and Software Development
I believe that when existing tools aren’t adequate, you build your own. I leverage Excel, Python, SQL, Node.js, and AI agents to create proprietary solutions that accelerate SEO results, help measure SEO performance more accurately, and reduce inefficiencies on SEO and copy teams.
Here are some examples of tools I’ve created:
| Tool Name | Core Technology | Function and Impact |
| Geo Rank Tracker (GRT) | Python, SQL, Redshift, Airflow | Tracks keywords in thousands of zip codes to provide accurate, city-specific rankings data. It protects $50M in revenue by providing increased granularity in testing. Replaces less accurate 3rd-party tool costing $60k/year for less than $10k. |
| WordPress Copy Manager | Python (.exe / .app) | Features a GUI for non-technical users. This reduces a 2-week copy update process to a few hours. |
| Bulk Uploaders | Node.js | Ingests CSV or JSON list of up to 100 pages, converts JSON to HTML, and publishes content on individual pages. Includes safeguards to prevent server overload. Includes toggle between test and production environments. |
| HTML Scraper | Python | Ingests list of URLs, scrapes HTML, generates a single file with all HTML. |
| Schema Generator | Python | Finds on-page tables in HTML file (from HTML Scraper), generates product schema files for individual pages. |
| Schema Uploader | Python | Ingests product schema files (from Schema Generator), connects to WordPress, uploads and publishes schema to the corresponding pages. |
| Page Evaluator and SEO Brief Generator | Google Gemini | Ingests SEO factors to compare pages and provide accelerated optimization suggestions. |
Technical Tool Experience
Here are a few examples of tools I use:
- Diagnostic Tools: Google Search Console, GA4, Semrush, Ahrefs, MajesticSEO.
- Collaboration: Trello, Jira, Airtable.
- Creative and Development: Excel (Advanced), Sheets, Gemini, Claude, SQL, Python, Node.js.
Let’s Grow Your Business
Whether you want me to optimize your site or teach you the skills to do it yourself, I’d love to help you scale.
- Read more about SEO consulting I offer
- Explore SEO training
- Contact me directly
Testimonials
Byron Hardie
Chief Digital Officer: Indianapolis Business Journal
“Michael provides amazing technical depth and challenges everyone to broaden the scope of what is possible in digital marketing…”
Noga Katz
VP of Marketing: Kontalt.io
“Michael is a dedicated professional. He’s extremely skilled and his creative thinking allows him to find solutions to difficult problems. He’s knowledge is extensive and he always gets the job done. He’s a delight to work with, and is an asset to any team.”
Vanessa Stuivenvolt Allen
Director of Content Strategy: Resolute Digital
“…what a massive impact he made on the sites he worked on and the people he worked with.
Michael is not only a brilliant SEO expert who tackles complex challenges with passion but also takes the time to teach others on his team. I learned most of what I know about SEO from Michael, and I have to thank him for taking me (and others) under his wing when I was just starting my career.”