About the Author
From San Antonio's West Side to the executive seat — a career built on the discipline everyone underestimates.
The worst day became the first day
In 2012, Michael Ramirez was laid off from the Georgetown, Texas agency where he'd worked since college. Before he walked out of the building, he negotiated to take over the agency's remaining SEO contracts — and founded SearchRPM on the spot. The layoff that should have ended his career handed him his first book of business instead.
Trained where the demand was
Michael grew up on San Antonio's West Side and graduated from Lanier High School. After two years at UTSA he transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, was rejected from the McCombs School of Business, and landed in the Moody College of Communication — where the Interactive Advertising Program was quietly teaching what the business school wasn't: search, digital media, and the internet economy. He graduated in 2009, into the recession, with something almost none of his classmates had: a job in the fastest-growing corner of marketing.
Hundreds of businesses, from the owner's chair
Through SearchRPM and in-house roles, Michael has worked with hundreds of companies — roofers, lawyers, SaaS startups, e-commerce brands, enterprises — sitting beside the owners, learning where money is made and lost. That exposure is the core of his thesis: SEO is a business education disguised as a marketing channel, and the people who've had it make the best marketing executives.
The bootstrapped proof
In 2017, the frustrations of running an agency drove him to build Evisio.co — an SEO platform for non-marketing experts — with no software background and no outside funding. He calls it his personal MBA. Today Evisio is the preferred SEO software partner of Better Business Bureau organizations across Texas and California. In an industry the market famously doesn't trust, the BBB trusts Evisio with its members.
Today
Michael works as a fractional CMO for growing companies, running the nine-step playbook published in From SEO to CMO. He has been a mentor and speaker at SXSW and speaks regularly to business and marketing audiences.