About

Growth marketers will promise you the world and make it seem like their “secret sauce” is exactly what you need. Don’t fall for it. Most of the time it’s rankings, traffic, and technical fixes sold as a mechanical problem: plug in the right tactics and the numbers move. Twenty years of doing this work has shown me that framing does more harm than good.

SEO is valuable. But the mechanics behind business growth have always been the same thing: value, trust, positioning, storytelling. Branding, in other words. I treat online visibility as a branding discipline with technical features, not a technical discipline that occasionally touches branding. Google itself grades pages on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, which is brand work with an acronym on it.

The Sou’wester Lodge, a vintage trailer resort, hired me to run their Google Ads. I looked at the campaigns and told them they were wasting the money. That’s not always the right call. Most of the time the fix really is in the ad account. But here, the site didn’t show anyone what it’s actually like to stay there. We paused the ads and redesigned the site instead. We haven’t turned the ads back on. Revenue is up 142% since the redesign.

Working with me can mean more digging than you were expecting, and more of the work landing back on you than you’d planned for. But it beats an agency that hands you rankings and traffic with nothing underneath them.

I spent over a decade growing a 26-person agency before going solo at the end of 2024. I launched Diviner to bring that same experience to businesses that don’t need a full in-house team. You work with me, Chris Bolton. If a project needs more hands, I bring in people chosen for that specific job, built around your goals, your voice, your audience.

Let’s talk about where you’re headed, and how to get you there faster, smarter, and with fewer wrong turns along the way.