How a Seobility report led to ten years of working together

When Carl Keaton first called me about ten years ago, he knew me only through my website at the time. He had a Seobility report for ckvoicelessons.de and wanted to know which of its many recommendations would genuinely improve his existing WordPress and WooCommerce site. He had not even hired me yet, but we were already deep in a detailed consultation. Shortly afterwards, he sent me the report and immediately asked me to implement the points we had discussed.

What really mattered on the long to-do list

An on-page report can be very good at highlighting technical or content issues on a website. It knows nothing about the business behind it, though. It cannot decide which change should come first, how several problems are connected or whether a recommendation even makes sense for that particular website.

So I did not simply work through the list from top to bottom. We identified what was slowing the website down technically, where content and page structure were getting in each other’s way, and which changes actually mattered for visibility. By the end of this first optimization phase, Seobility rated the technical, content and structure categories A. The Google PageSpeed test used at the time also gave an A rating; important search terms ranked in the top 3 or top 5, depending on the keyword.

New questions kept coming after that. Some could be resolved with a targeted technical change; others required a content or business decision. Carl brought me in earlier and earlier—not just when something was broken, but when he wanted to know whether an idea made sense for his business at all. Individual optimization assignments gradually became a collaboration that is now a natural part of running his business.

Eventually, the website no longer fitted the business

Carl had built the first CK website himself, using a rather unwieldy theme and many plugins, each intended to handle a specific task. It had taken him a long way. Over the years, however, the Voice Academy continued to grow while the website became increasingly difficult to change.

So we rethought ckvoicelessons.de from the ground up. I developed the website concept with Carl, brought in one of my design partners for the visual design and implemented the complete technical system. We also added a separate server, configured to suit the installed application. I still look after both the website and server today.

WooCommerce has been a central part of the system since we started working together. Today, the website offers different lesson formats, trial offers and vouchers that customers can book or purchase; the Academy works both in person and online. Multilingual functionality, forms, content, booking journeys and connected marketing tools all need room to evolve without a change quietly breaking something elsewhere.

A later maintenance task showed how deep this work can go: the same background process was repeatedly being added to a WooCommerce queue. I traced the cause back to WooCommerce itself, reproduced the bug and reported it as a public WooCommerce issue . I also submitted a fix with a regression test. A WooCommerce maintainer confirmed the diagnosis; the bug was subsequently resolved through Pull Request #65450 in WooCommerce Core .

For CK Voice Lessons, this was not a new feature to admire on the website. It simply meant that the system was working properly in the background again. Tasks like these are part of maintaining a website that needs to do more than stay online: it needs to support a business reliably over many years.

The next challenge starts outside the WordPress admin area

The website, server, WooCommerce, multilingual functionality, advertising campaigns, search data and content are now closely connected. If we improve the destination of an ad, for example, a better-looking landing page is not enough. The page must match the ad, load quickly, support proper analysis and pass the inquiry on in a form Carl’s team can work with.

That is why we are currently looking at how to manage prospects and customers clearly and with due regard for privacy. Inquiries from the website forms and Perspective Funnels currently flow into Pipedrive; HubSpot is also connected. Carl has tried various solutions for this. The result is a chain of tools that each perform specific tasks but feel piecemeal as a whole.

A custom CRM that fits the actual workflow is therefore the next major project. Before we design an interface, we need to establish which data arrives where, what Carl’s team really needs day to day and which pieces of information reliably belong together. At the same time, we are improving his advertising campaigns and their destination pages, working on the click-through rate in Google Search and keeping an eye on visibility in AI-generated answers.

For Carl, the main value of this collaboration is that he does not have to untangle all these connections alone. I explain clearly what I think makes sense, what I would advise against and why. We make decisions with his business in mind; he does not then have to take on the technical implementation himself.

Carl puts it this way:

“I have worked with many service providers—including people with very specialized expertise in SEO and search engine advertising—but no one tells me as clearly as you do what is good and what is not, and above all, no one makes it so easy to understand why something is good or bad. You are always completely up to date, no matter when I have consulted you or on what subject. That is extremely rare, and I am very grateful that we met.”

Carl Keaton

There is now another Carl working on the project

Alongside Carl Keaton, the CK project now has an AI copywriter who is also called Carl. Day to day, this is less confusing than it first sounds: Carl Keaton runs the Voice Academy and is my client and sounding board. The second Carl works exclusively on content tasks within the project.

I built him as a project-specific AI agent following my Bianka pattern. He has a clear working brief, knows the approved project sources for CK Voice Lessons, and has his own memory and defined approval boundaries. Under my guidance, he takes up strategically relevant blog topics, researches them and prepares drafts. He is not allowed to publish anything.

Carl therefore has a clearly defined remit: editorial preparation. Topic selection, strategy, subject-matter review and publication remain with Carl Keaton and me. In other areas too, project-specific agents help me keep track of signals from advertising campaigns, Search Console, AI Visibility, technology and security. I explain the underlying idea in more detail in my Agents-Brain workshop series.

The tools have changed several times since our first phone call. Yet the collaboration still works on the same principle: Carl can come to me with a question he has not yet worked through, and I help him determine what decision it calls for. Sometimes that results in code, sometimes in a better campaign page, and sometimes in a deliberate decision not to add another tool.

On ckvoicelessons.de, visitors should mainly notice one thing: they can find lessons, coaches and a direct route to a trial lesson. The complexity behind it need not get in their way. Carl does not have to shoulder it alone either.

Sources

• CK Voice Lessons – the Voice Academy website and services
• Seobility project reports for ckvoicelessons.de from 2017 (internal project documentation)
• WooCommerce issue #63786: background process repeatedly queued
• WooCommerce Pull Request #65450: merged upstream fix
• Agents Brain: what remained of my AI team after changing tools