What happens when a data geek who couldn’t figure out Google Analytics finally gets a tool that speaks human.
I’ll be honest with you about where I started.
My SEO wasn’t terrible. My Fear Free Childbirth site had a domain authority of around 37. The Head Trash site was sitting around 25. For someone who wasn’t really doing anything she should have been doing – those numbers aren’t bad.
But “not bad considering” is not the same as good. And I knew the gap.
I knew about keywords. I thought about what people would search for. I was using Yoast on the free plan, writing meta descriptions, dropping in a focus keyword. That was roughly where it ended. I had a vague awareness that pillar posts and content hubs were a thing. I understood, in theory, that internal linking mattered. I’d even started doing some longer-form content towards the end of my Fear Free Childbirth work.
But understanding something in theory and actually managing it as a system are completely different things. The system requires time, consistency, someone tracking every URL, monitoring every signal, connecting the dots between what Google is telling you and what you should do next. In a corporate marketing team, that’s someone’s whole job. As a solo founder who also has to earn money, run client work, build platforms, write books, be a mother, and occasionally remember to eat – it just doesn’t happen.
So I was leaving enormous potential on the table. Worryingly. Every week.
The Google problem
Here’s a thing I will say plainly: Google Analytics is a nightmare.
I don’t know who they built it for, but it wasn’t for founders who are perfectly intelligent and data-literate but don’t have a computer science degree. The interface is counterintuitive. The metrics aren’t explained in plain English. Finding the specific thing you’re looking for requires knowing what it’s called before you know it exists.
I love data. I used to head up market data for a famous biscuit brand. I am genuinely a data geek – I built the entire Ladder of Growth model on a spreadsheet, I track client progress on consciousness scales, I have charts for everything. If anyone should be comfortable in an analytics platform, it’s me.
I wasn’t comfortable in Google Analytics. I used Improvely instead because it presented data in a way that actual humans could understand. Which worked fine for basic traffic data, but meant I was essentially ignoring Search Console entirely, which meant I was flying blind on the SEO signals that actually matter.
Building it properly from the start
When I rebuilt the Head Trash website, I made a decision: I was going to do this right from day one, not try to fix a legacy mess later.
I know what a legacy SEO mess looks like. My Fear Free Childbirth site – which has been running for over a decade, has over 1.8 million podcast downloads, significant domain authority, and has had people offer to buy it – is exactly that. Enormous potential, inconsistent foundations, years of content that hasn’t been strategically interlinked. That’s a big project I’ll get to. But it’s a much harder project than starting clean.
So with Head Trash, I started clean.
Before a single page was published, I mapped the content architecture. What are the main content pillars? What are the key posts within each pillar? How do they interlink? What CTAs belong to which content type? What should live on the website and what should live somewhere else – hence, eventually, the decision to start Substack for longer personal brand content rather than cluttering the site with it.
All of this lives in a site architecture document inside my Claude SEO project. It’s the North Star. Every piece of content I publish, every page I build, references it.
What 45 minutes a week actually looks like
Every week – sometimes more, depending on what’s happening – I sit down with my SEO project.
The project already has everything it needs as background context: the site architecture document, the build status tracker, a running log of all published content and their URLs. It knows the site. It knows the strategy. It knows what we’re trying to achieve.
What I bring each week is the fresh data.
I download the latest exports from Google Search Console – page queries, indexing status, any errors or warnings that have appeared. I download the relevant data from Google Analytics. I dump it all in.
Claude does the analysis. It tells me what’s working, what needs attention, what errors need fixing, what opportunities are emerging from the search query data. It gives me a prioritised action list.
I open RankMath SEO Pro – my SEO plugin – and work through the actions. Fix the indexing issues. Update the meta data where it needs updating. Address whatever Search Console has flagged.
If there’s new content to plan, we map it out – which pillar it belongs to, what it needs to link to and from, what the brief should be. If content has been published since the last session, I feed the live URLs back in so the project stays current.
Last week: forty-five minutes. No new content to publish. Just working through outstanding RankMath actions and reviewing the latest signals.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
What’s actually changed
The migration from clearyourheadtrash.com to head-trash.com is working. Google is picking up the signals. Traffic is moving in the right direction. The redirects are clean. The new site is being indexed properly.
I’m managing SEO at a level of sophistication I genuinely couldn’t have accessed before – not because I’ve suddenly become an SEO expert, but because I had enough foundational knowledge to direct the work, and AI has enough capability to do the analysis, the pattern recognition, and the prioritisation that would otherwise require either a specialist or many more hours than I have.
The knowledge was always there. What I didn’t have was the processing power to turn it into a weekly system.
Now I do. And it takes forty-five minutes.
The thing worth saying
I spent years knowing what I should be doing with SEO and not being able to do it. Not because I lacked the intelligence or the interest – I have both. But because proper SEO management is a systems job, and running a systems job solo, on top of everything else a founder has to do, is almost impossible.
AI didn’t teach me SEO. I already understood the principles. What it did was give me the capability to actually operate at the level I always knew was necessary – consistently, week after week, without needing to hire someone, without needing to spend days I don’t have on it.
There’s a version of this available to any founder who understands their own business well enough to brief it properly.
You don’t need to become an SEO expert. You need to understand what you’re trying to achieve, have the data available, and know enough to act on what comes back.
The forty-five minutes does the rest.
Alexia works with founders and organisations as a fractional AI systems builder. Work with Alexia
Head Trash helps founders and leaders clear the internal blocks that limit performance. Visit head-trash.com
