Michael Cottam

Michael Cottam is an independent technical SEO and GEO (generative engine optimization) consultant based in Bend, Oregon, working solo rather than as a multi-person agency. Clients are located worldwide, spanning most European and southeast Asian countries, Australia, New Zealand, and less common markets such as Dubai, Peru, Trinidad, Iceland, and the Galapagos Islands. The client base ranges from small, family-owned businesses to internationally recognized brands, across industries including e-commerce, B2B, legal, finance, medical, travel, healthcare, real estate, auto, food and beverage, and news, among others, with 17+ years of experience and over 1500 clients cited. Services center on technical SEO: on-page tuning, site audits, page load time optimization, crawlability and indexation review, schema implementation, and site architecture and migration consulting. Additional offerings include Google penalty recovery, backlink reviews, email deliverability work, GEO/AEO mentoring, group training, and hourly consulting rather than retainer-based contracts, with billing tracked by the minute. The stated approach emphasizes content that Google's systems judge more valuable than competitors' content, alongside attention to schema, rendering, user experience factors such as Core Web Vitals and click behavior, and backlinks viewed both for ranking signal and for contextual relevance. A set of free Chrome extensions and technical resources (covering meta data extraction, backlink statistics, Core Web Vitals, and related on-page tools) is also made available through the site.