From EMT Dreams to $99 SEO: The Early Days

I asked Blake what he was doing before Rickety Roo.

He was in-house at a marketing company that sold local SEO for like $99, $49 per month. He got the job because he could type fast. That's the only reason he got the job. He knew the Vice President of Sales and became a production manager within the first six months. Then he took over and ran their pay-per-click division for the remainder of his time there before he went out on his own.

Before that he was doing outside sales in the same industry as his father, used to be an EMT.

I asked what made him start Rickety Roo.

He initially really went freelance on his own because he wanted to focus on school. He was going to research as an EMT, he was going to move to Arizona, go straight to paramedic school and then go the paramedic firefighter route.

Then six months when he went out on his own (he started the agency February of 2009), something happened.

The Bike Accident That Changed Everything

October 5th, 2009, Blake was riding a fixed road bike with no helmet and ended up getting into an accident. He had a severe traumatic brain injury, had a fractured skull and a bleed in his brain. He was in a chemical induced coma, was in ICU for 3 days and critical care for three more, then discharged.

That automatically made him a liability. He would never be able to fulfill that career path that he was on.

"That's kind of how I started. It was initially a means to an end and then kind of slowly started growing it from there," Blake said.

I asked if he's okay now.

Yeah. He had some short memory issues for a bit, worked through all that stuff and gotten a lot of testing since because he's just very curious about neuroscience too. He's always learning, always trying new protocols and things. Cognitively he's good to go.

The First Few Years: Just Coasting

I asked what the first few years of Rickety Roo was like.

Honestly he was just kind of coasting. He really had no vision or dream of having the agency, let alone it being a remote agency and doing all these things. Initially it was just: well I'm able to pay my bills. He was in his early-ish to mid 20s then, it's like just kind of see what keeps going on.

He learned some lessons in business that no matter how good things are, things can change at the drop of a hat. Then when he met his now wife, he kind of realized it would be nice if he wasn't doing everything (doing all the work, all the admin, everything) and slowly started to kind of grow it from there.

The clients back then were still home service providers. His largest client was a garage door company. Then he took on this company that did animal trapping (they just started working together again after several years of not working with them, then the owner reached back out).

He worked briefly with an auto collision shop in Long Beach California, cosmetic dentistry, one of his favorites was a PI firm in Southern California (he believes they were located in Corona).

"I think within six months we got him ranking everywhere he wanted to rank for the keywords he wanted to rank for. He called me up and fired me. Said hey thank you very much and I don't need you anymore. I said wait wait hang on. That was it. Then like three or four months later he called me up and said hey what did you do to my SEO? I'm like I didn't do anything to your SEO, your competition is now outranking you. He's like well how much to get me back? I'm like I don't think I can work with you because I'm going to get you there and then you're just going to fire me again. So I stopped working with him," Blake explained.

He worked with an artificial turf company for a number of years too. It's been quite the spectrum. But the last several years they kind of niched down to get a little more focused.

Why Citations and NAP Consistency Are Dead

I asked Blake to give me a summary of what's been going on the past 18 years of local SEO, how it started, what was it like back then, and now what is it like now.

Back then if you built citations, you ranked in the map pack. It worked very very well. You had a list: okay here's my list of citation sources, build citations.

Since then, every time the local search ranking factor survey comes out, NAP consistency and citations keep getting lower and lower on the spectrum of what's important.

Even Darren Shaw said a couple years ago: citations are more table stakes now. Yeah sure, you want to take care of the major data aggregators and maybe the top 10, 20, maybe even 30 of citations that actually matter for that industry. But NAP consistency doesn't really matter anymore.

That used to be such a big thing: oh make sure your business name, your address, your phone number, the website and the category make sure that matches, hours of operation match across the entire local search ecosystem. Remember David Mihm had this whole chart that showed Acxiom, how it's related, these feed to this tier one and tier two, where you saw this whole ecosystem at play.

"That doesn't really matter anymore. The source of truth now is mainly that Google listing," Blake said.

What still worked back then that still works this day is having keywords in the business name. Surprise surprise, it's a really crappy ranking factor. The amount of spam that would get mitigated if they just lowered the weight of having keywords in the business name would be monumental. But here we are, it's 2025 and surprise: if you have keywords in your business name, your rankings magically just start showing up.

More user engagement signals, more personalization over the years has kind of come into play. When Google rolled out three main ranking components (relevance, distance, prominence), it's super hard to test this, but Blake kind of believes that distance as a ranking factor varies based on the primary category that's being used.

If you're looking for pizza delivery near me or local coffee shop, sure that's going to be the number one ranking factor. But maybe in medical, legal, home services, he doesn't think it's as strongly weighted where relevance and prominence are a little bit higher up on the totem pole.

The 122% Conversion Rate Lift From Moving One Button

Blake and his team are rolling out something very soon (they're just coming up with prices around it): SXO, search experience optimization.

They have a case study on Microsoft Clarity's website showing a client they've been working with for a number of years. He ranks everywhere he wants to rank. They were kind of looking at: well what else should we do?

Celeste who runs that little division came up with: well what if we try to improve the conversion rate from organic traffic on pages?

Did one experiment. It wasn't anything dramatic, it was very very subtle. Mainly simply moving up a call to action a little bit. It resulted in a 122% improvement in conversion rate from traffic that was already going to that page.

"We just went: oh we have something here. Instead of looking at okay well we're ranking everywhere, what else can we do? It's like well what's the conversion rate? Same rules apply with paid search. If your baseline conversion rate let's say is 11%, well what can you do to get it up to 15 to 20?" Blake explained.

The Title Tag Spam Test That Still Works

I asked if there are any little tricks or tactics to improve conversion rate besides moving the button up the page.

First you have to establish a baseline set of data, then you see where people drop off, where people are disengaging.

Often times (especially with home service providers), getting collateral from clients like good quality imagery is difficult. When you're writing really good content, sometimes it can look like a giant wall of text. Creating simple separation is going to help improve conversion rates. Adding imagery always helps too, just making it easier to scan a page versus: oh this looks like something from a dictionary, I don't want to read this, and then they bounce.

Blake mentioned another test (which they don't really do a lot because it comes off really spammy but it works): keyword spamming the hell out of the title tag.

It looks atrocious. It looks kind of like meta keywords. But every freaking time they do it, it's always a decent net positive.

Your title tag, you've got what, 560 to 563 characters or whatever the length is (60 to 63 characters some change). You normally lead with your primary head term, a separator, and then brand name.

This test is where: you're taking a title tag and then sure you can make it start initially like a regular title tag (primary keyword, location, separator, call to action, another separator), and then you just start adding lots of other variations of the main head term, other locations, different combinations where it just looks bad.

Blake's talking like 250 to 300 characters bad.

"What you're relying on is truncation or Google just deferring to the H1 of that page, which usually will pick the H1. So you make sure the H1 sounds good, has the primary head term, maybe a call to action. Time and time again you always see a lift," Blake said.

Is it against Google's guidelines? You can make an argument it's not. Sure Google gives recommendations on title tag length, but they don't mention: we will penalize you if you do anything like this.

The Link Benchmark Tool They Built In-House

I asked Blake about link building: is there any space for building high DR links, or are you guys more focused on local or high DR, or is there a mix of both?

They built their own tool that they call their Link Bench (it's a link benchmark). What they do is export links from the client and from local competition, then upload it to the self-hosted system. It's a link classification system that has nothing to do with DR or domain authority.

It classifies links based on how they've manually tagged it: is it a citation? Is it a true local link? Is it a topic link? Or is it spam garbage? Or is it other?

They build a benchmark of the client against the competition they're trying to outrank. The benchmark really kind of shows the gaps.

Maybe the client is crushing it with citations and topical links but they have no local. Then their focus is going to be way more on local than it is going to be on the others. Vice versa, the benchmark really kind of highlights: okay here's where the client is lacking and we need to focus a little bit more on than the others.

Why Google Wants to Rank What's Popular Offline

Blake's opinion on local search hasn't changed over the years. His overarching belief system is that Google's trying to rank what's popular in the offline world in the online world.

So how do you do that? Do real world stuff. Sponsor little league teams and get involved in local community. If you're building up more of a local brand presence (as we've seen, if you haven't seen any of Glenn Allsopp's work from ViperChill, would highly recommend checking out because he does deep dives on massive corporations that just dominate SERPs), it's all outside of local but three to five conglomerates pretty much own like 80% of massive amounts of real estate on SERPs.

Home Depot doesn't sponsor all these little local things for just because they are trying to be good and community oriented. They're doing it because it's way more about brand presence and brand repetition.

The way Blake's team approaches it with clients: they have a link building questionnaire, they ask clients to fill out and they ask if they are actively or have past engaged with anything like that (if they have great, then they want to talk about it and see: is there an opportunity to revisit that or if they're interested).

It's also based on how they score on wanting to sponsor local companies or local nonprofits.

"What we'll do is one of our deliverables is just the opportunities that we found that align with what they're looking to accomplish. We provide all that information: here's who the opportunity is, here's our notes on it, here's the potential costs, here's the potential impact. Then we give it to them and then it's up to them: okay do you want to move forward with any of these?" Blake said.

They create a fictitious person that works as an admin assistant for that home service provider. Then they'll do all the outreach for them as the admin assistant. When there's a need for a handoff, then they'll hand it off to the actual client to fulfill it.

The Client That Left Despite Great Results

I asked Blake what is one of the biggest lessons he's learned in the past few years.

The biggest lesson: there's many but the biggest one is no matter how buttoned up you think everything is, things can change just like that. He learned that lesson early on but continues to learn it.

That garage door repair company, they were like family to him. He went down and visited them every week to pick up a check. It was great. Then about a year in, he woke up to a text message saying that they were firing him and hiring this other guy who Blake had actually introduced them to because he was going to help out on some SEO stuff to save like $600 a month.

Blake was like: oh that hurt.

At the time they also represented like two-thirds of his income. He learned that lesson: never let a client represent anything more than like 15 to 20% of revenue for the entire agency. That's terrifying because things change.

No matter how good you think you have it with a particular client, sometimes they leave. A new person gets brought in. Or they get gobbled up by private equity. That's happened a lot in home services: they've had great clients they worked with, they get acquired, private equity comes in and they've got their own things, and you end up losing the client.

"We put in all that work and they get acquired and now we're out. But that's just business, don't take it personal," Blake said.

My Main Takeaway

The biggest lesson from talking to Blake is that local SEO has fundamentally changed over 18 years. What used to work (citations and NAP consistency) is now just table stakes. The source of truth is the Google listing itself, and keywords in the business name still works in 2025 despite being a crappy ranking factor.

Blake's journey from bike accident to agency owner proves that sometimes the worst moments create the best opportunities. October 5th, 2009, he was riding a fixed road bike with no helmet, ended up getting into an accident, had a severe traumatic brain injury, fractured skull and a bleed in his brain, was in a chemical induced coma, was in ICU for 3 days and critical care for three more. That automatically made him a liability for the paramedic firefighter career path. That's how he started, it was initially a means to an end and then slowly started growing it from there.

The 122% conversion rate lift from moving one button up proves SXO (search experience optimization) matters as much as SEO. Did one experiment, wasn't anything dramatic, very subtle, mainly simply moving up a call to action a little bit. Instead of looking at: we're ranking everywhere what else can we do, it's: what's the conversion rate? Same rules apply with paid search: if your baseline is 11%, what can you do to get it up to 15 to 20?

The title tag spam test that still works in 2025: take a title tag and start with regular format (primary keyword, location, separator, call to action, another separator), then just start adding lots of other variations of the main head term, other locations, different combinations. Blake's talking 250 to 300 characters. What you're relying on is truncation or Google deferring to the H1 of that page. Make sure the H1 sounds good, has the primary head term, maybe a call to action. Time and time again you always see a lift.

The link benchmark tool they built classifies links with nothing to do with DR or domain authority: is it a citation, true local link, topic link, spam garbage, or other? Build a benchmark of the client against the competition they're trying to outrank. The benchmark shows the gaps: maybe crushing it with citations and topical links but have no local, then focus is going to be way more on local.

The garage door company lesson teaches the hardest truth: no matter how buttoned up you think everything is, things can change just like that. That garage door company was like family to Blake, he went down and visited them every week to pick up a check, it was great. About a year in he woke up to a text message saying they were firing him and hiring this other guy to save $600 a month. At the time they represented two-thirds of his income. Never let a client represent anything more than 15 to 20% of revenue for the entire agency because things change, don't take it personal.

Want to learn more from Blake? Follow him on Twitter/X and LinkedIn @BlakeDenman, also on Blue Sky. Visit RicketyRoo.com and BlakeDenman.com. Blake emphasizes: testing is a lot of fun, test everything for yourself and see what works, ditch what doesn't, take what you want, leave the rest.

Listen to the full episode to hear more of Blake's insights on why NAP consistency is dead, the 250-character title tag spam that still works, the link benchmark tool they built in-house, and why Google wants to rank what's popular in the offline world.