About
I started in code. I stayed for the search.
I am Michelle Carvo, an SEO and AI strategist. I came up through computer science (a B.S. in Computer Information Systems) and spent the next fourteen years figuring out why technically perfect sites still fail to get found. The answer, it turns out, is rarely the code. It is everything around it.
Most SEO people come from marketing. I came from the other door, the one with the terminal behind it.
That background shapes how I work. I do not hand over a PDF of recommendations and wish you luck. I get into the build: the schema, the templates, the redirect maps, the Core Web Vitals. And lately, the AI systems that do the heavy, repetitive parts so the human work can be the good parts.
Over the years I have worn most of the hats: project management, technical production, content, and analysis. The titles changed. The throughline did not: take something complicated, make it work, and explain it to a human in plain English.
Now my focus is the shift everyone feels but few have a plan for: search is moving into AI answers. I help local and regional businesses get cited by those engines, not just ranked beneath them, and I build the tooling that makes it repeatable.
How I work.
01
Diagnose at the source
I find the structural reason traffic is stuck, not the symptom. Usually it is duplication, crawl waste, or content nobody can quote.
02
Build the system
Then I build the tooling to fix it at scale: a Claude skill, a Make.com pipeline, an audit workflow. The work compounds instead of repeating.
03
Report like a human
Monthly, in plain English, with the jargon translated and the numbers that actually matter on top. You will know what changed and why.
The short version
Tools I live in
AhrefsSEMRushScreaming FrogSurfer SEOSearchAtlasSearch ConsoleGA4ClaudeChatGPTMake.comWordPressShopify
Camera, bass, vinyl, the garden, and a houseful of animals. More below →
Off the clock
A camera, a bass, and a houseful of animals.
Most of this happens alongside my husband. Our favorite version of a good time is being somewhere new with a camera, in a crowd waiting for a band to come on, or back home outnumbered by our own animals. The travel and the live music are non-negotiable. The pets came with the territory.
The same brain that likes untangling why a site will not rank likes a lot of fiddly, hands-on things. I shoot photos on an old Nikon, mostly outdoors and at shows. I play bass and a bit of guitar, badly and happily. I hunt for vinyl, catch live music when I can, and lose more weekend afternoons than I should to the garden, a sizable area with dozens of plants, a small greenhouse and an ongoing negotiation with the birds over the raspberries and blueberries.
At home I am outnumbered and outranked. One husky genuinely runs the place, backed by our cats, including the standout, Ginger, a rare female orange polydactyl with extra toes and zero humility about it. When I am not making something, I am usually gaming the classics (Halo, Mario, Goldeneye) or writing about all of it online, which doubles as practice, because the muscle that makes a good post is the same one that makes content people actually read.
None of it is unrelated to the day job. Gardening, debugging, and learning a bass line reward the same things: patience, and a willingness to try the boring fix first.
Want the long version over coffee?
I am always up for talking shop about search, AI, or a good optimization horror story.