Headway

The Challenge

A Headway affiliated partner needed to grow organic visibility from a low baseline and make SEO work easier to repeat. The first research problem was unusual: "Headway" is also a common English word, so broad keyword research produced a large amount of demand unrelated to the broker.

I was brought in independently to build the research, diagnostic, and monitoring workflow. My scope covered SEO strategy, technical analysis, keyword operations, and AI workflow design. The affiliated partner retained final business and product decisions.

My Approach

I started with the quality of the data. Before using AI for recurring diagnostics, I needed a keyword foundation I could trust and a repeatable SEO context for the agent to work from.

• Build the foundation. I wrote 35 reusable SEO skill modules so research, technical diagnostics, and content planning could begin with the same domain context instead of a generic prompt each time.
• Clean and validate the demand. I combined Semrush research with AI-assisted classification to filter ambiguous "Headway" queries. I then checked relevance and intent manually, clustered the validated data in Semrush, and used it for keyword mapping and content strategy.
• Use AI to widen the audit. AI helped surface technical and entity-related hypotheses, including inconsistent company entity information that I cross-checked before remediation.
• Monitor continuously. I connected an SEO monitoring agent to first-party Google Search Console data through a custom MCP integration. It surfaces changes and hypotheses; I decide what matters, validate the finding, and prioritise remediation.

The Outcome

From 1 May to 26 July 2026, Google Search Console recorded 1.28K clicks and 41.9K impressions, with a 3.1% average CTR and 7.2 average position. The work also left the partner with a reusable workflow for research, validation, technical diagnostics, content strategy, and recurring monitoring.