About Josh Blackburn

Josh Blackburn is an SEO lead with over a decade in search who builds AI tools for SEO, AEO, and GEO. He has been building and ranking websites since 2012, leads local SEO at MeanPug Digital, and has built and sold two sites of his own.

How I got here

I started building websites in 2012, mostly fitness affiliate sites, and learned SEO the hard way: by ranking them, losing rankings, and fixing what broke. One of them, AthleticMuscle.net, drew 1.04 million organic visits in my last ten months of owning it. I sold it in 2019 for six figures. A hunting site, Tactical Huntr, sold in 2020.

In 2020 I took SEO full-time. Since then I've worked on a legal marketing team, at an iGaming media company, and at a software company, and I now lead local SEO at MeanPug Digital.

What I work on

• Local SEO: Google Business Profile, citations, reviews, and multi-location strategy for law firms and home service businesses
• Technical SEO and site migrations
• AI search visibility, also called AEO and GEO: how ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini mention and cite brands
• Schema markup
• Link building and content strategy
• SEO automation and team leadership

Why I build tools

Most of what I build starts the same way: a repetitive SEO job I got tired of doing by hand. So I turn it into a tool, a script, or a workflow, and then give away what's useful.

What I've built

• AI Visibility Tracker: Checks whether ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini name a brand, cite its site, or leave it out.
• Schema Markup Generator: A free JSON-LD generator for 23 schema types, with graph mode and links to the Schema.org Validator and Google's Rich Results Test.
• Internal Linking Tool: Finds the exact sentences on your site that should link to your important pages, ranked with your Search Console and backlink data. Runs in your browser, no signup.
• Internal SEO tooling: WordPress plugins that edit titles and H1s in bulk and update internal links and redirects across a site, an AI content pipeline, and an automated backlink outreach workflow.

Where I've worked

1. MeanPug Digital2026 to present
   SEO Lead

   Leads local SEO for the agency's law firm clients, sets team KPIs, and builds the systems and training the team runs on.

2. iLawyerMarketing2024 to 2026
   Senior SEO Strategist

   Local SEO for national and regional firms across 10+ locations. Grew one client's share of voice in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to 27% or more.

3. Link Whisper2022 to 2024
   Growth Marketer

   Doubled revenue and new customer sign-ups and grew non-branded organic traffic 335%.

4. Better Collective (VegasInsider.com)2021 to 2022
   SEO Performance Manager, then Director of SEO and Content

   Led a team of 13 in iGaming SEO, took a flagship revenue page worth $5M+ a year to the #1 ranking, and guided a CMS migration from 900K+ URLs to 25K while preserving search equity.

5. 1Point21 Interactive2020 to 2021
   SEO Associate

   Managed local SEO for 18 law firms and ranked #1 for "Orange County Personal Injury Lawyer."

6. Affiliate websites2012 to 2020
   Founder

   AthleticMuscle.net and Tactical Huntr, both built, ranked, and sold.

Connect with me

LinkedInXGitHubEmail