Owner & Lead SEO Strategist
20+ years of building, breaking, and rebuilding SEO campaigns for businesses across home services, legal, healthcare, e-commerce, and SaaS.
James Profits owns and runs strategy at Search Science. Across more than twenty years in the field, he has worked hands-on in local SEO, technical SEO, AI Search Optimization, and link building, and he still personally directs strategy on every engagement the agency takes. The results on the record include a 414% rise in phone calls for a law firm, 351% traffic growth for a multi-location franchise, and $263K in annual traffic value for an e-commerce client.
James Profits launched Search Science in 2004, fed up with watching small business owners get sold big promises and handed nothing but confusion. His fix was simple: build an agency where the person who pitches you is also the person who builds your strategy and answers for the results. Twenty years on, that is still how the agency runs.
Across those two decades, James has run or overseen campaigns in nearly every kind of business. The case study shelf covers local trades (HVAC, plumbing, locksmith, restoration), professional services (law firms, insurance, sports medicine, healthcare), franchise and multi-location operations, seven-figure e-commerce stores, and SaaS companies fighting for technical search terms. That range is the real edge: a play that lifts a multi-location law firm in one metro often carries straight over to a multi-location HVAC contractor in the Omaha area, and the other way around.
Inside local SEO, James is known for one thing in particular: rescuing Google Business Profiles that have quietly fallen out of the Map Pack. When a legitimate listing gets caught in Google's local filters, most agencies throw up their hands and blame Google. James has documented the exact remediation sequence: zip-code-based service area definition to eliminate overlap, schema-level entity building including EIN, founders, and C-level officers, location-page consolidation to fix doorway-page cannibalization, and tiered citation building to restore brand signal density. The approach has unfiltered listings for locksmith, law firm, insurance, and home services clients within 60-90 days.
Multi-location SEO plays by its own rules. The shortcuts that seem harmless on a single site, like spun city-template pages that just swap the town name, turn into doorway-page penalties once you scale them across dozens of locations. James has developed the regional hub architecture that Search Science uses for franchise clients: a central hub page that owns the high-volume terms, paired with deep location pages that earn rankings through unique local content rather than templated mass production. The approach has driven results including 1,800% increases in Map Pack visibility for sports medicine franchises and 2,000% map visibility increases for state-wide service area businesses.
James moved on AI Search Optimization early, right as Google AI Overviews replaced SGE in May 2024. While much of the industry still treated AI search as a novelty, Search Science was already shipping client work built for AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). The technical stack includes FAQPage schema deployment, DefinedTermSet schema for entity disambiguation, speakable schema for voice queries, passage-level content structure (40-55 word self-contained answers), Wikipedia sameAs references for branded entity recognition, and ongoing AI citation monitoring across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude.
On the technical side, James leans hard into something most shops ignore: cannibalization audits. When two pages on the same site chase the same query, neither one wins. The fix is not always a 301 redirect; sometimes it is keyword differentiation, sometimes consolidation, sometimes a noindex. Knowing which to apply requires reading actual Search Console query distribution per URL. James personally runs cannibalization audits on every new Search Science engagement.
Search Science has published case studies covering nine separate client engagements that James personally led or oversaw. Selected results:
414%
Increase in phone calls
Multi-location law firm
351%
Increase in phone calls
170+ location sports medicine franchise
$263K
Annual traffic value built
National e-commerce site
96%
Lower customer acquisition cost
SaaS local SEO tool
Additional case studies span insurance company organic SEO (300+ additional monthly phone calls), multi-location franchise Map Pack rankings (2,000% map visibility increase), GBP filter recovery (stuck listing unfiltered in 60 days), national e-commerce SEO ($263K annualized traffic value), 149% website traffic increase via DFY SEO campaign, and 63% organic traffic increase via tiered link building. See all Search Science case studies.
Almost every engagement opens with a strategy call with James himself. You will talk through your goals, where your SEO stands today, who you are up against, and what a realistic timeline looks like. No script, no upsell routine. If the fit is not there, he will tell you straight. Clients who proceed get monthly strategy access throughout the campaign, not just during onboarding.
For Omaha-area businesses considering SEO investment, the easiest first step is the free SEO audit James's team delivers in 3 business days. The audit is a real audit with actionable findings, not a sales pitch in disguise.
Schedule a strategy call to discuss your SEO goals. No script, no pressure. Honest answers about whether Search Science is the right fit.