The Portland SEO agency
built for performance.
Technical SEO, on-page, local search, digital PR link building, AEO, and revenue attribution — run by one team. Ad-Apt has been doing search work for Portland and Oregon brands since 2011, with referenceable results for LeadsRx, Boss PDX, Circle K, TastyTrade, and Teton Gravity Research. We solve for performance, not for monthly reporting theater.
Six pillars. One program.
Search work breaks when it is sold in slices. Technical without content stalls. Content without links plateaus. Links without local presence misses the buyer two miles away. We run the six pillars as one program because that is what moves the revenue line.
1. Technical SEO that doesn't just generate a PDF.
Most technical audits in Portland end as a 70-page PDF that nobody acts on. We do the audit, then we ship the fixes. Core Web Vitals tuning, indexability and crawl-budget cleanup, JavaScript-rendering audits, hreflang for multi-region brands, internal redirect chains, canonical correctness, sitemap and robots architecture, and schema deployment for Article, Product, FAQ, HowTo, LocalBusiness, BreadcrumbList, and Organization markup. For sites where the underlying CMS is the bottleneck, we migrate to an edge-native build on Cloudflare Workers with sub-50ms loads. Speed is a ranking signal and a conversion lever in the same motion.
2. On-page and content built around topical clusters.
Single-page optimization is a relic. We map topical authority by cluster — pillar page, supporting briefs, internal-link plan, and entity coverage — before a single sentence gets written. Briefs are informed by SERP intent analysis, real Search Console query data, and what AI Overviews are already citing. Content gets written for humans first and structured for LLMs second so the same asset earns both a blue-link click and a citation in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. Internal linking is treated as a system, not a checkbox: every new piece reinforces a parent cluster.
3. Local SEO that actually wins the pack.
For service businesses in the Portland metro, the local pack is the SERP. We optimize Google Business Profile end to end — primary and secondary categories, service-area definitions, product and service entries, photo cadence, Q&A seeding, and review-velocity systems — then we clean the citation graph across Apple Maps, Bing Places, Yelp, Yellow Pages, and the Oregon-specific directories that still feed local authority. We build neighborhood and service-area landing pages where they earn their own intent (Pearl District, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Lake Oswego, Vancouver WA) and we never spin up doorway pages. Boss PDX went from invisible to consistently ranking in the local three-pack for its core service terms inside seven months.
4. Digital PR is the differentiator.
This is the part most Portland SEO companies quietly skip or outsource to a content-mill broker. Real link building in 2026 means earning press — not bulk guest posts, not paid placements, not private blog networks. Ad-Apt runs digital PR campaigns: original data studies, expert commentary placement, journalist outreach for relevant local and trade outlets, and HARO-style reactive pitching. Every link is editorial, every link is on a site that publishes its own content, and every link is something Google would call earned if asked. We will turn down a campaign before we ship a tactic that puts a client's domain at risk.
5. AEO — visibility in AI answers.
In May 2026, a measurable share of high-intent commercial search no longer ends on a Google SERP. It ends in a ChatGPT response, a Perplexity answer card, a Claude citation, or a Google AI Overview block. AEO is how brands stay cite-worthy in those surfaces. We publish llms.txt manifests, harden FAQ and HowTo schema for extraction, restructure key pages into LLM-friendly question-then-answer blocks, monitor brand mention in the major LLMs, and pursue the third-party citations (Wikipedia adjacents, trade press, structured datasets) that LLMs actually pull from. Our free AEO audit tells you exactly which of your pages are getting cited and which are not. Read more on how SEO, AEO, and GEO actually relate.
6. Measurement: revenue, not rankings.
Rank tracking is a leading indicator at best. We instrument Search Console, GA4, and a BigQuery export pipeline so every organic session can be tied to the lead, opportunity, and closed revenue it produced. Multi-touch attribution is wired into the CRM where the client has one (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive); first-touch and assisted-conversion modeling is reported every month. The executive view is one number: organic-attributed pipeline against retainer cost. If we cannot show that ratio improving, the engagement is failing.
The case in five lines.
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01
SEO and engineering on one team.Our SEO leads sit next to the engineers who ship the fixes. No handing a JIRA ticket to a separate dev shop and waiting six weeks. Edge deploys go out the same day.
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02
15 years of search work.Founded in Portland in 2011, through three core Google algorithm eras, Panda to BERT to MUM to AI Overviews. We have seen what survives an update and what does not.
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03
Digital PR, not link mills.Earned editorial links from real publishers. We will not put a client's domain at risk to chase a metric. Most agencies in the Portland market quietly resell PBN inventory.
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04
AEO is core practice.We were instrumenting LLM citation tracking before most agencies had heard the acronym. AEO is shipped on every engagement, not sold as an upsell.
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05
BigQuery-grade reporting.Organic traffic to lead to pipeline to closed revenue, modeled monthly. We report on the number an operator runs the business on, not on a Semrush screenshot.
SEO proof, not pitch decks.
Four engagements where organic actually did the work. References on request.
300% more demo requests from organic
Attribution-platform SaaS based in Portland. Topical-cluster rebuild around marketing-attribution intent, schema deployment, and a digital PR push tied to original benchmark data. Organic demo requests up 300% inside nine months.
Read case study →$0 to $1M with paid, SEO, and lifecycle
Portland-local service business taken from cold start to seven figures in revenue. Local pack ranked for core service terms in seven months. Built on GBP optimization, neighborhood landing pages, and earned local press.
Read case study →92% load-time cut, Core Web Vitals green
Mid-market site stuck on a heavy WordPress stack with seven performance plugins and still failing Core Web Vitals. Migrated to an edge-native build on Cloudflare Workers. Same content, 92% faster, hosting cost down, organic traffic recovered within two quarters.
Read case study →Multi-region car-wash launch
Enterprise car-wash brand launched across multiple US regions. Local SEO architecture for thousands of locations, edge-native site, schema deployment, and attribution wired to in-store revenue.
Read case study →Three phases. No theater.
Phase one — audit and plan (weeks 1-4). Full technical, on-page, off-page, and AEO audit. Search Console history pulled, GA4 cleaned, BigQuery export instrumented. Topical-cluster map drafted. Local presence audited. Output: a 90-day shippable roadmap with revenue projection bands.
Phase two — technical and content sprint (months 2-4). Critical technical fixes ship inside the first 30 days. Cluster content starts publishing weekly. Schema and AEO instrumentation deployed across the site. Local pack work begins on day one for local-intent businesses. First measurable ranking and AI-citation movement typically lands in this window.
Phase three — compound (month 5 onward). Digital PR campaigns run every quarter. Content cadence holds. Reporting consolidates around organic-attributed pipeline. By month nine, most engagements are paying for themselves several times over in tracked revenue.
Every engagement is scoped to the business and the SERP. Technical depth, content cadence, AEO, digital PR, and attribution sophistication all factor in. Talk to a strategist for a tailored proposal.
For a wider view of the audience-growth practice, see grow audience. For everything Ad-Apt does in Portland beyond search, the Portland marketing agency overview covers it.
What's included, every tier
- Technical SEOCore Web Vitals, indexability, schema, edge deployment when needed.
- On-page & contentTopical clusters, brief production, editorial publishing.
- Local SEOGBP, citations, neighborhood pages, review systems.
- Digital PREarned editorial link building, no PBNs, no link buying.
- AEOllms.txt, schema, LLM citation monitoring, AI Overviews tracking.
- MeasurementGSC + GA4 + BigQuery + CRM-tied revenue attribution.
- StrategyMonthly working session, quarterly executive review.
Questions Portland SEO buyers actually ask.
How is SEO pricing structured at Ad-Apt?+
Every engagement is scoped to the business and the SERP. Technical depth, content cadence, AEO, digital PR, and attribution sophistication all factor in. Talk to a strategist for a tailored proposal.
How long does SEO take to work?+
Technical fixes show up in Google Search Console within 2-6 weeks. Real organic traffic and revenue movement typically lands in 4-9 months depending on domain age, current authority, and how aggressive the content and link cadence is. AEO (AI search) citation can move faster, sometimes inside 30 days, because LLMs index differently than Google.
What makes Portland SEO different?+
Portland buyers search with strong local intent — "near me", neighborhood names, transit-line landmarks — and reward brands with real ties to Oregon. For service businesses the local pack matters more than the blue links. We treat GBP, citations, and locally relevant content as a first-class part of the program, not an afterthought.
Do you do AEO (AI search visibility)?+
Yes. AEO is run as one practice with SEO at Ad-Apt because the underlying surface area — structured content, schema, citations, authority — overlaps almost completely. We optimize for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews, publish llms.txt, and instrument structured data so the page survives LLM extraction. Start with the free AEO audit.
Do you do local SEO?+
Yes. Google Business Profile setup and optimization, citation cleanup across Yelp, Apple Maps and Bing Places, neighborhood landing pages, review-generation flow, and local-pack tracking. We have run local SEO for service businesses across Portland, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Lake Oswego, and Vancouver WA.
Can you fix our existing site or do we need a rebuild?+
We start by auditing what you have. About half the engagements we take on improve the existing CMS — usually WordPress or Webflow — with technical fixes, schema, and content. The other half migrate to an edge-native build on Cloudflare Workers when Core Web Vitals and hosting cost have become real blockers. We will tell you honestly which one applies before you sign anything.
Tell us which search
you need to win.
Ten-minute intro call. We will tell you honestly whether Ad-Apt is the right Portland SEO team for the job, what we would ship in the first 90 days, and what we would not bother with.
Talk to a strategist