Technical SEO
Indexability, redirects, canonicals, structured data, performance, accessibility, and the server behavior behind confusing crawl results.
Meet the Archmage
Ian Garcia-Theriault
Founder of Your SEO Wizard and a translator of opaque search problems into useful next steps.
Ian works across content strategy, technical SEO, local search, structured data, reporting, and lightweight web development. The common thread is clarity: people should be able to understand what their website is doing, why a recommendation matters, and what to do next.
Plain English before incantations
Storytelling Is Part of the Technical Work
Ian's route into SEO began with language. He studied English at the University of Maine at Farmington, with minors in Spanish and philosophy, and grew up moving between different places, cultures, and ways of communicating. That background made one lesson difficult to ignore: accuracy matters, but people only trust information they can understand.
That principle carries into his search work. A technically correct audit is not very useful when it leaves a business owner staring at a wall of warnings. A polished report is not clear if it never explains the evidence, the risk, or who should own the next step. Ian's work aims to connect those pieces without sanding away the important details.
Before founding Your SEO Wizard, his work included content, digital marketing, and video strategy for small and midsize organizations. He now leads SEO and digital strategy work at Local Image Co. while developing Your SEO Wizard's education library, services, and practical SEO tools.
Areas of practice
What Ian Works On
The work usually sits at an intersection rather than inside one tidy specialty.
Content and Local Search
Turning firsthand business knowledge into specific, useful pages that answer real customer questions and support realistic local opportunities.
Reporting and Tools
Building reports and software that show the evidence behind a finding, separate facts from inference, and make priorities easier to defend.
AI Search and GEO
Studying how answer systems find, interpret, cite, and compare sources without pretending that a new acronym replaces strong SEO fundamentals.
Selected work
Guides and Projects You Can Inspect
These pages show the mix of technical detail, plain-English explanation, and implementation context behind the work.
What Is SEO?
A practical introduction to how search engines understand pages and which foundations matter most for small businesses.
Beginner's Guide to Schema
A grounded explanation of JSON-LD, common schema types, validation, and the need to match visible page content.
Answer Readiness, GEO, and AI Search
A clear separation between content-quality heuristics, citations, rankings, and the fundamentals that support all three.
SEO Crystal Ball Case Study
A documented scan, source repair, routing diagnosis, deployment, and repeated verification workflow.
How to Read SEO Scan Fix Guides
A practical way to interpret warnings, choose the right level of technical detail, and avoid risky changes made without context.
How to Use SEO Graph Wizard
A guide to turning GA4 and Search Console data into clearer charts, exports, and reporting views.
Interview
How Local Expertise Becomes Trust
In the interview How This SEO Leader Turns Local Expertise Into Trust, Ian discusses plain-English reporting, the value hidden inside a business owner's own experience, realistic ways for local companies to compete, and how AI-assisted search is changing the research journey.
The central idea is simple: rankings can create an opportunity to be seen, but clear communication and credible evidence are what make a business worth choosing.
Profiles and background
Elsewhere on the Web
Outside the workbench, Ian reads and writes fiction, cooks, solves puzzles, plays word games, and follows research trails with suspicious enthusiasm. The “Archmage” title is mostly a joke. The pattern-spotting is not.
Bring the strange problem
Need a Clearer Read on Your Website?
Send the page, the goal, and the part that feels opaque. Ian will help identify the evidence and the smallest useful next step.