Emory Rowland

Atlanta SEO Consultant, Emory RowlandI'm an Atlanta SEO consultant and founder of Leverable. Organic search has been a part of my life since the late 1990's when I built my first website and started analyzing the server logs. The search industry has grown and I have too. But, my mission to help brands thrive through SEO strategies I've learned remains stronger than ever. I'm all about "lift for the good guys."

I share my insights with followers at Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn.



Brands I've engaged with:

  • InterContinental Hotels Group
  • Extended Stay America
  • The Home Depot
  • A Small Orange
  • Rooms To Go
  • Chick-fil-A
  • GameStop
  • NCI

My Journey To SEO Consultant

I came of Internet age in the mid 1990’s when Yahoo was the top search engine and business.com was available for registration for $50. To get your content live you had to build the site in static HTML first before you worried about promoting it. I miss what the web was then, a frontier of discovery too young and innocent to be commercialized. And one where personal sites regularly appeared in search results. What few SEO consultants there were hung out in online forums and were too geeky for mainstream businesses.

I started noodling around with WordPress 1.0 and soon became enamored with blogging. One of my great loves has been expressing myself through writing. I wrote fiction, poetry, PC gaming reviews, political opinion and my Christian experience. I had fun just creating graphics and tools for visitors to my site to download for free. And all this was amplified by the great bullhorn of search engine optimization.

My interest in SEO began after poking around in server log files and observing the traffic that certain pages were receiving. These questions began to motivate my curiosity and continue to drive my exploration into SEO today:

  • Why did some of the pages receive more traffic from search engines than others?
  • How could I make the pages receive more traffic?
  • How might I monetize this traffic?

I learned that one of the early methods for SEO was to add meta tags to Web pages with the desired keywords and so, I wrote a meta tag maker software program called “Metty” to take care of this task. Of course, search engine optimization has evolved far past meta data and on page copy. The online version is still around and still has some uses today.

Whenever I designed websites, I learned to build in the underlying layer of SEO elements to make them perform in organic search. To my excitement, I discovered that sites I built could often compete with big brand names and even beat them for high volume search terms. I became fascinated with the ability of the little guy to make a big splash on the Internet. That fascination soon lead me to a professional career developing SEO strategies for some of those top brands and Atlanta search marketing agencies.

As SEO evolved through the years and became more mainstream, I learned to adapt my optimization strategies to include more technical SEO, content strategy, authority building and analytics. The foundation of my knowledge came from tweaking and experimenting done in my spare time, learning from friends and reading SEO forums and blogs. Those early SEO experiments served to ground me. The thought processes that came from them would prove valuable in helping clients achieve results throughout my journey to become a SEO consultant.

What Can I Do for You?

Get in touch with me at emory at leverable dot com

SEO Consultant, Emory Rowland displaying a real-life 301 redirect (road sign)

Posts by Emory Rowland:

Long-term SEO Benefits

Why SEO Must Be Long-Term

I LOVE SEO.

Let me put it another way: It’s my job to help your company love SEO as much as I do.

Companies that HATE SEO (and it’s okay if you’re one of them) usually just have a bad relationship with a certain search engine. And, like any relationship, a wise outside voice can help put things back on track.

And this is a relationship worth saving. Search has the power to connect your company with the people who need your product or service when they need it the most. SEO can position your site to show up at the various stages of the customer buying cycle and make your company grow.

All relationships have a give and take dynamic. The person in charge of your SEO is first a giver, not a taker. If you do it right, Google may reciprocate. Learn More »

Why No One Can Guarantee SEO Results

If you had a choice between SEO and guaranteed SEO, you’d always choose guaranteed, right? With any service, the guaranteed option is always better, right?

Not with SEO.

Before we plunge into what guarantees we should expect out of the SEO Industry, let’s look at ranking guarantees that are, and are not, provided for in SEO.

Have you ever seen a lifetime rankings guarantee?

A money back rankings guarantee?

Or how about a website replacement guarantee if penalized? Learn More »

Consultant David stands up to Goliath agency

SEO Consultant vs. Agency: Which Is Best?

One of the first digital problems to solve for your business is to figure out what type of SEO service delivers the best value. This will help set expectations before starting an engagement. And if things do take a wrong turn in your first attempt, you’ll have nailed down the requirements for your SEO team and can charge ahead.

Having worked inside both agency and consultancy worlds, I’ve been able to observe their strengths and weaknesses from the inside.

Let’s explore the differences in the two and which service might work best for you.

Consultant vs. agency business models will vary, but compare the risk they take to the risk you take when you sign on as a client. An agency or consultant stands to lose one client. You as the client, risk losing revenue and growth. And if you really get it wrong, you could lose things like your domain authority or reputation should your new SEO company tilt toward the black hat side. The risks are yours, so the responsibility is on you.

How do you assess whether you need an SEO consultant or agency? Learn More »