My name is Will and I’ve been in digital marketing since 2011. In 2023 I left agency life and opened Forkball, a one-person consultancy specializing in the disciplines in which I always did my best and most enjoyable work: technical SEO, content strategy, and analytics. I pride myself on fully personalized, bespoke solutions: no cookie-cutter templates, no reports built on screenshots or raw tool exports, no cheap bullet points, no cut-and-paste ChatGPT output. Everything I do celebrates the union of art and science where digital marketing lives: hard quantitative data, reconciled with the intuitive understanding of search behavior that I have honed over decades, and translated into the language of your goals.
Have a look around! If you think Forkball might be a good fit as a partner in one of these areas for your company, nonprofit, or personal website, drop me a line and we’ll talk. I’d love to help you grow your audience, and am confident that I can.
Under the hood of your website are a thousand little moving parts. You already know how to arrange and manage them to keep the site running. What you might not know is that almost every one of them also holds some influence over the way a search engine perceives the site.
How fast do your pages load? How usable is your site on mobile devices? Are you keeping the right pages out of the index, and are you going about the exclusion in the right way? Are there any hitches in your redirects, or your internal links? Are there unresolved issues with your domain that you inherited when you bought it? Google is smart enough today to bring all these matters under consideration when they evaluate you as a search destination, and they do.
To maximize the size of your organic search audience, and to make sure that your other SEO efforts count for as much as they can, all the critical technical SEO factors — the above, and many more — should be examined and polished to the brightest possible shine. I’ll help you.
“Content” has become an omnipresent word in our daily lives, and one that often feels a little oppressive. Even people who don’t work on websites for a living have to reckon with the way the word has begun to flatten the universe of human creativity, representing this collective delusion that research articles, blog posts, interviews, selfies, songs, recipes, movie trailers, and Twitch streams are somehow all the same thing. And those of us who do work on websites for a living have to deal with the concept of content in a whole other way: as the name of the central production chore that will keep the site fresh and interesting to users, whether they’re the people who already visit it, or the ones who may yet discover it via search or social. “Content” to us is “that thing we have to keep making,” and the only times when we’re grateful for the multitude of meanings the word now has is when we realize there’s a kind of content we haven’t tried yet.
But if it feels like a chore, chances are your approach is the problem. With the right orientation, making content for the web is a pleasure, because you’re writing about the things that inspire and motivate you. You just have to trust that there are people out there who share your interests, or work in your field, and would love to read what you wrote, whether it’s to help them solve a problem, learn something new, or find a community of like-minded people. And you need someone who can translate your passion into a language that matches the search queries they’re typing in when they go looking for that kind of thing. That’s where I come in.
Forget AI. Just Be You.
“Why should I write my own site content when I can just prompt ChatGPT to write it?” Because ChatGPT, and other LLMs, are nothing more than sentence-guessing machines trained to emulate existing texts, most of which came from elsewhere on the web. Their general way of working, in layman’s terms, is to take the input prompt and output a synthesis of all the relevant texts they’ve been fed on that subject — the average of them all. In other words, they are designed to sound like everything that’s already been written, which is why they have an uncanny voice that sounds like everybody and nobody.
You learned as a child what you end up with when you mix all your watercolors together: gray. Do you want the voice of your unique brand to sound like the average of all your competitors’ voices? Do you want it to sound gray?
You’re here because you care about your brand. You know it brings unique value to the field, something new and special that your competitors can’t offer. It deserves a voice that has a unique value of its own: yours. There is no substitute for your enthusiasm, your understanding, your informed perspective. So let’s work together to write and edit your site content the right way, enjoying the fact that we are humans with points of view, and trusting that the fellow humans who read it will feel the difference.
You created your website for a reason. It’s there to serve some purpose. But how good a job is it doing? What about it is working and what about it is not? If something about it seems to be working, how sure are you that it couldn’t be working even better? Are there changes you ought to be making? If so, where, and how?
The only way to begin answering these questions is to track and quantify engagement with your site in all its aspects, so that you can create a record of what users are doing on there, what they could be doing, but aren’t, and what they might like to be doing, if only the site gave them the power. Let’s set up custom analytics tracking so we can measure all the measurable things, monitor the site’s performance over time, and figure out how we can make it into the best version of itself.
Oh, and has Google Analytics 4 been driving you crazy? Have the new cookie consent requirements made your head spin? I can help with that too. Let’s chat.