Phil Belleville

Phil Belleville is the founder of AI Search Engine Optimization and of Omaha SEO, and has worked in search engine optimization since 1995. He leads every engagement at this agency personally, from the first strategy call to the monthly report.

Experience since 1995

Phil started doing search engine optimization in 1995, before Google existed, and has done it continuously for thirty-one years. He founded Omaha SEO in Omaha, Nebraska, the same year. That agency is a Google Partner and holds an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau, and it still operates today with local service businesses as its core clients.

Over three decades the work has changed several times: from directory submissions and meta keywords, through the link-building era, through the mobile and local eras, and now into search that happens inside AI assistants. The constant has been the same: understand what a searcher actually wants, build the page that answers it best, and make sure the search system can verify that the business behind the page is real.

What I work on now

Most of my time now goes to AI search: getting businesses ranked in Google and cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews at the same time. In practice that means answer engine optimization for the questions customers ask, generative engine optimization for the citations AI engines choose, and local AI SEO for service businesses whose customers are in a specific market.

I also work on the entity side of search: making sure a business is described consistently everywhere a machine might read about it, so that Google’s Knowledge Graph and the AI engines that draw on it know who the business is, what it does and where it operates.

How I do the work

I built an AI-assisted SEO system on Anthropic’s Claude with more than forty specialized skills, each one encoding a specific piece of the work: keyword mapping, competitor profiling, page building, schema, internal linking, audits, reporting. The system does the heavy lifting on research and drafting. I make the decisions, check the evidence and own the result. It lets a small agency do the depth of work that used to require a large team, without the drift in quality that comes from handing pieces of a client’s site to whoever is available.

Results I can point to

I sold a website I built that held more than nine hundred top Google rankings, for a six-figure price. The agency websites I run rank at the top of their own city markets for the searches an agency needs to win, which is the test I would apply to anyone selling this work: does their own site do what they say they can do for yours?

What I believe about search

Search engines and AI assistants are trying to do the same job: find the most trustworthy answer to a real question and put it in front of the person asking. Every durable ranking I have earned in thirty-one years came from serving that job rather than fighting it. Every ranking I have watched disappear, my own included, came from a shortcut that served the search engine instead of the searcher: pages for cities where nobody worked, content produced faster than it could be made true, links bought by the hundred.

The AI era has made this stricter, not looser. An AI assistant that recommends a business puts its own credibility on the line, so it favours businesses it can verify from several independent sources and pages that state facts plainly enough to quote. That is good news for real businesses and bad news for everyone else, and it is the assumption behind every plan I write.

How I work with clients

I start every engagement with research into what actually ranks and gets cited for the searches a client wants, and I show that research before I recommend anything. Plans are written in plain English with the pages, the changes and the order of work named. Reports say what was done, what moved and what comes next, in a form an owner can read in ten minutes. I do not hand clients off to an account manager, and I do not promise positions by a date, because nobody who is honest can.

What the first month looks like

The first month is research and foundation. I map the searches worth winning to the pages that should own them, profile what currently ranks and gets cited for each one, and fix the things that stop a site from being trusted at all: the facts about the business, the structured data that describes it, the pages that should not exist, and the links that should. Only then does content work begin, because content built on a site that search systems do not trust is wasted. By the end of the month you have a written map of the site as it should be and the first pages built to it.

Other things I run

I created WordPress Dynamics, an education brand that teaches local service business owners how to make their WordPress websites rank and convert. I also publish videos on AI search for business owners and practitioners, and I write the guides and tool reviews on this site’s blog, where every post carries my name.

Where to find me

Contact

Email hello@aisearchengineoptimization.com or book a free AI SEO strategy call. I answer every message myself within one business day.