A dentist, a roofer, and a law firm all need search visibility — but what works for one can be a waste of time for the others. The keywords, the trust signals, the buyer’s journey, and the competition are all different. I build search strategy around how your specific industry actually earns customers, not a generic checklist.
Most SEO advice is written for everyone, which means it’s precisely right for no one. The reality is that a high-ticket, slow-decision business like a law firm needs deep trust and authority content, while a same-day service like emergency plumbing lives or dies on the local map pack and reviews. An e-commerce store cares about product and category structure; a clinic cares about reputation and YMYL credibility. Point the same playbook at all of them and you over-invest in the wrong things.
After fourteen years working across these fields through Salterra, I know where the leverage tends to sit in each one — which queries actually convert, which trust signals matter to that buyer, and where the competition is soft. That context is the difference between SEO that produces customers and SEO that just produces a report.
Local service businesses — trades, home services, restaurants — live and die in the map pack. The decision is fast and the search is “near me,” so the work is your Google Business Profile, reviews, and being the closest credible option. Authority content matters far less than showing up on the map with five stars and a phone number. For these, local SEO basically is the strategy.
High-trust professionals — law firms, medical and dental practices, financial services — sell slow, high-stakes decisions. Google treats these as “your money or your life” topics and holds them to a higher credibility bar, so the work is real expertise content, author and entity signals, reviews, and the trust markers that make someone comfortable handing you a serious problem. Thin content gets you nowhere here.
E-commerce competes on structure and scale: category and product architecture, internal linking, faceted navigation done without creating crawl traps, and product structured data so listings show rich results. The battle is won across hundreds or thousands of pages, not one.
SaaS and software sell to a researching buyer, so the leverage is in bottom-funnel and comparison content — the “best tool for X,” “alternative to Y,” and integration queries that capture people close to a decision. Ranking for the broad term matters less than owning the searches that convert.
Most businesses are a blend, but knowing which shape yours is closest to tells you where to spend first — and that’s most of the value of treating SEO by industry instead of by checklist.
Each guide breaks down what actually moves the needle for that industry — the queries that convert, the trust signals that matter, and the realistic path to ranking.
Whether you want a second opinion, a full audit, or hands-on work, it starts the same way: understanding how your industry’s customers actually search and decide. From there I build a plan that prioritizes the moves with real leverage for your field — and skips the busywork that looks productive but doesn’t convert in your market.
Request a consultation →Tell me your industry and your market. I’ll tell you where the real opportunity is for a business like yours — and the moves worth making first.