I did not build My Site Buddy because I wanted to go sell software.
I built it for myself. For our own agency. Internal use. I wanted to get more work done without turning every day into a game of jumping from one tool to another, then another, then another.
I have been doing SEO and online marketing for a long time. More than 20 years. Long enough to remember when having a good tool was a real edge. Rand and SEOmoz, which became Moz. SEMrush. Ahrefs. Screaming Frog. Conductor. HARO. Then Search Console, Google Ads, Analytics, Bing, Microsoft Ads. Every one of them gave you something useful. That was the deal.
Then we got more tools. And more tools. And then AI tools piled on top of the SEO tools.
The monthly cost is one thing. You can look at twelve or fifteen subscriptions and do the math. The bigger problem is what all of that software does to your brain. Rankings here. Links there. Outreach somewhere else. Somebody says one issue is urgent, somebody else says it is not even a problem. After a while you are not really doing the work. You are managing the tools that are supposed to help you do the work.
“Every new tool was supposed to make the work easier. Instead, it gave me another place to look.”
That is where My Site Buddy started. I wanted the tools I already trusted to work with me in one place. Not as another dashboard. I have enough dashboards. I wanted to be able to have one real conversation about a client and bring the useful information into that conversation.
When the information sits together, you start seeing things you do not see when you look at each tool by itself. You can compare the recommendation from one platform against the recommendation from another. You can see the average. The outlier. The thing that is probably noise. The thing that needs a human being who understands the client to make a call.
That is not magic. It is just better than trying to keep fifteen tabs open and pretending you are not going to miss something.
I am still the conductor
It does not matter if you are a one-person agency or an agency with fifty people. You are constantly the conductor. The people around you are part of the orchestra. The tools are part of the orchestra. The client is sitting in the audience, waiting to hear whether it sounds right.
You have to give instruction. You have to change direction. You have to decide what is worth doing and what is not. That part does not go away because AI showed up.
My Site Buddy gives me more speed when I am conducting. It keeps the score organized. It lets the work move without making me the bottleneck for every little thing.
“You are always the conductor. My Site Buddy gives you more orchestra without losing the score.”
That is the whole thing, really. Chat holds the request, the decisions, and the live coordination. The client workspace holds the code, the tools, the data, and the rules. People can work on different parts at the same time. Then Git and a senior approval turn the loose conversation into an actual release.
That last part matters. Fast is good. Fast and unaccountable is not good. I have been around too long to pretend otherwise.
Why I built it
Stripped down, this is what I was trying to fix:
- I was tired of being the switchboard. The tools were useful. The constant movement between them was not.
- I wanted better answers, not more reports. If five sources are looking at the same business, I want to know where they agree, where they disagree, and what I should actually do next.
- I wanted an idea to become work while it was still fresh. Read a good article, see a competitor doing something smart, have an idea in the car—fine. Bring it into the client conversation and do something with it.
- I wanted the person with the experience to stay in charge. My Site Buddy can move a lot of work. It should not pretend to own the client decision.
- I wanted the work to have a trail. Development preview. Revisions. Git. Senior approval. A release you can look back at. That is how client work should move.
A good idea should not have to die in a saved tab
This is where the old way of working got ridiculous.
You read a good blog post about SEO, paid search, reputation management, content, whatever. There are a lot of smart people writing useful things. You see an idea that could help a client. Then comes the jungle gym:
- Save the article.
- Remember why it mattered.
- Write a brief.
- Find the person who can do it.
- Explain the client context again.
- Wait for a draft.
- Send revisions through another tool.
- Hope it looks right when it finally reaches the live site.
Sometimes that is the right process. Big work needs real thought. But a lot of useful work gets stuck in that machine for no good reason.
With My Site Buddy, I can bring in the idea, ask for two or three versions, push it into a development environment, look at it, change it, and get it ready for Git. A form. A call to action. Navigation. A new page. A color change. A content update. A bigger rebuild if that is what the business needs.
The point is not that every change should go live automatically. The point is that it can go from a good thought to something real today. Not three weeks from now after six people have translated it six different ways.
What it means for different people
For a larger agency
- Keep each client’s work, tools, code, and rules in its own workspace.
- Let the SEO person, writer, designer, developer, and QA person take their pieces at the same time.
- Give the senior people a clear place to review the work instead of asking them to reconstruct the whole story from chat threads and tabs.
- Move faster without making the agency’s name the thing that takes the risk.
For a smaller agency or solo operator
- Get more of the reach that normally belongs to a larger specialist team.
- Use the sources you connect to a client workspace without having to visit every platform one by one.
- Go from an idea to a preview and a reviewed release in the same day when the work is ready for it.
- Keep the client relationship personal and senior-led, even when your ability to execute starts getting much bigger.
For a small business owner
- Make a useful website change without starting with a developer, an Upwork job, or a long email chain.
- Ask for an adjustment to a form, a page, a call to action, a navigation menu, or the look of the site in plain language.
- Look at the development version before you approve it. Keep changing it if you need to.
- Take something you learned from an article or from watching a competitor and put it into practice while you still remember why it mattered.
It was not supposed to be something I sold
For about six months, it was mostly my thing. Our thing. I was building it because it made sense for the way we worked.
Then I shared it with a few people I know in the industry. I watched three or four different people interact with it. Their reaction made me stop and think. A couple of friends looked at me and basically said, “I could sell the shit out of this.”
And I understood what they meant.
The advantage is not subtle once you start using it. It gives a good operator more reach, more visibility, and a shorter line between a decision and the work. I would not love being the agency or business competing against somebody who is using it well. That may sound like a big statement. I think it is an honest one.
So I talked with Bob, Gareth, Ben, and other people whose opinion I trust. We decided it was worth building into something other agencies and businesses could use.
That changed the responsibility. An internal tool is one thing. A system other people trust with their client work is another thing entirely. Bob and I have spent a lot of time on security, access, and making the release side as tight as we can make it. We will keep doing that. You do not get to call something a serious client-work system if security is a slide at the end of the deck.
I am not an expert in everything
I have said this to clients for years: I am not an expert in anything. I am just really good at reverse engineering what is working online.
Look at the best businesses in a vertical. Look at the top three or five search results. Look at the paid ads. Look at the AI answers. What are they doing better? What are they explaining? What do their pages look like? How do they make it easy for a customer to understand, trust, call, buy, or fill out a form?
You do not have to be a rocket scientist to start asking those questions. The hard part is collecting the evidence, separating the good ideas from the bad ones, and actually getting the useful part onto your own site.
That used to be a three- or four-year curve in a lot of cases. Now it can be three or four months. Maybe in a couple of years it will be three or four weeks. I do not know. But I know the curve is moving.
My Site Buddy does not make somebody an SEO expert, a marketing expert, a design expert, or a developer overnight. It is not a substitute for knowing your business. It is an amplifier for what you already know, what you have read, and what you can figure out when the information is actually in front of you.
“After more than 20 years in this business, it feels like I have more reach than one person should reasonably have. Honestly, it feels like I have 250 years of experience sitting next to me.”
That is a crazy thing to say. But that is what it feels like when the work does not get stuck between the idea and the execution.
For an agency owner, a marketer, or a business owner who has been trying to improve a web presence for years, that is the value. You still have to think. You still have to decide. You still have to own the result. You just do not have to spend all day conducting fifteen different pieces of software before the work can begin.