About Michel Fortin
Michel Fortin is a leading authority on visibility marketing and a seasoned marketing advisor with over 30 years of experience. He specializes in diagnosing visibility gaps and addressing strategic opportunities that drive awareness, traffic, and demand.
Michel provides business owners and marketing leaders with strategic guidance on how to increase exposure and revenue. He uses a multipronged approach that combines modern SEO with positioning, branding, communications, and digital PR.
Since 1992, Michel has been instrumental in generating over a billion dollars for his clients. His pioneering work and insights are behind numerous game-changing digital marketing strategies and record-breaking success stories, such as the first-ever campaign to generate over $1 million online in under 24 hours.
Michel is the author of Power Positioning, The Death of The Salesletter, and User-First SEO. He is also a prolific speaker and the VP of Digital Marketing at Musora Media, the company behind Drumeo, which is an online education platform for musicians.
Perhaps you’re an expert in your field or an established business with a well-known brand and a solid value proposition. But even if the stars are aligned, you’re still having a tough time driving more business because lesser competitors are more visible than you are.
The problem is, it’s only getting tougher.
For one, the digital landscape has changed dramatically in the last few years, even in the last few months. Searching online and buying behaviours have shifted while a crowded marketspace has grown more competitive and noisy by the second.
As a result, online platforms and search engines like Google are more sophisticated than ever, evolving at an accelerated pace. But most SEO and marketing practices, however, remain outdated, offering only band-aid solutions that fail to address fundamental issues, let alone provide a clear strategy for growth.
For example, chasing higher rankings is misleading. Without a clear strategy, they’re only vanity metrics that often fail to create traction. And the results they produce, if any, are fleeting at best.
There’s a better way.
A more effective, long-term approach is to achieve greater visibility — and to do it in a productive, scalable, and sustainable way. It comes down to presence, prominence, and performance. In other words, it starts with showcasing your value, aligning it with your audience, and optimizing it for their specific journey.
Combining user-first SEO with positioning, content, and digital PR will drive more traffic naturally. Moreover, it will also help you:
- Expand your brand awareness;
- Gain and maintain a competitive edge;
- Crush even your toughest competitors;
- Become an in-demand authority;
- Dominate and expand your market;
- Stand out without risk to your reputation;
- Drive more qualified traffic and leads;
- Improve your audience engagement;
- Attract more ideal clients to your firm;
- Easily convert more prospective clients;
- Grow and scale your business; and,
- Quickly adapt to unforeseen changes.
Visibility Booster™ starts with a comprehensive 360° deep-dive into your current marketing visibility, your online presence, and your audience. It identifies important issues to address and uncovers any gaps worth pursuing. I then create a strategic, long-term roadmap to guide you or your team on what to do to improve it.
It’s not an SEO audit, or a cheap, quick-fix solution using outdated, snake-oil tactics that promise overnight rankings. It’s a holistic marketing approach aiming to drive your business’s visible growth through a combination of marketing channels and strategies. For some, it may take a few weeks. For others, it may take a few months or more depending on many factors, such as:
- The number of issues to address,
- The complexity of the project,
- And the resources available.
Once I know your challenges and your goals, and if we’re a good fit, I can provide you with the next steps. But if you only want a high-level analysis, with a list of recommendations and issues to address, I also offer a light version called the Visibility Detox.™ I also offer private 1:1 virtual coaching meetings you can record.
Latest Articles
Improve Semantic SEO With These 10 Disambiguation Tips
Keywords are less effective than topics (or entities, in the world of semantic search), as keywords are ambiguous and can mean different things. Improving the clarity of your content will help search engines understand how relevant it is in relation to a user’s query. Here are 10 tips to help you improve that clarity.
Semantic SEO: How to Drive More Meaningful Traffic
Semantic search has been around for a decade but the concept is still fairly unknown, much less SEO around it. Semantic SEO boils down to improving what your content is about and how it’s aligned with your audience’s search intent.
User-First SEO: Grow Your Visibility Using This Modern Approach
Keyword-first SEO tries to appeal to both searchers and search engines, but it results in compromises. However, a user-first SEO approach naturally appeals to both because search engines have evolved to meet the same objective you have: help the user.
Grow Your Visibility By Focusing Less on Google’s Algorithms
Traditional SEO focuses on optimizing for the search engine, but it ends up hurting both your rankings and your users. Adopt a user-first SEO approach and focus on your user’s pain points instead, and you’ll satisfy both naturally and more effectively.
SEO May Get You Rankings, But SXO Will Get You Results
With the help of machine learning, today’s SEO is more about optimizing for the search experience by offering great content and a great user experience (UX). It’s to appeal to the user and their search intent, and to help them along their journey.
Semantic SEO: Why Rankings Are Terrible Metrics
Search engines used to be about matching queries. Now, they’re about answering questions (i.e., responding to a query’s intent rather than its content). Semantic SEO looks at the meaning of keywords, which is why keyword rankings alone are insufficient.
How Negative Reviews Affect Your Reputation and Your SEO
Negative reviews affect your reputation and your business. Ignoring them or attacking them can also hurt your SEO. Here’s how to manage, improve, and get more positive online reviews.
Headless SEO: What it is and What it Means to Your Business
Along with and likely due to the rise of apps, the headless CMS is becoming a popular design option for many websites. It’s faster and more flexible. But applying SEO can be a bit tricky.
The Death of Keywords and The Rise of Topic Clusters in SEO
Keyword-driven SEO is outdated and ineffective. Modern SEO pays less attention to the words you include in your content for the search engines and more to the topics of interest to the user.
How to (Finally) Break Free From The Burden of Begging For Backlinks
One of the most common tactics in the world of SEO, and it’s something that a lot of SEO experts still swear by, is building backlinks. But building SEO backlinks don’t have to be painful.
