About the Company

HigherVisibility is a full-service digital marketing agency co-founded by Adam Heitzman in 2009. That longevity matters — in an industry where hundreds of agencies seem to appear overnight, HigherVisibility has been building its reputation and client base for nearly two decades. While the agency covers paid search, web design and development, paid social, and conversion rate optimisation, its core identity and the reason most clients originally come through the door is SEO.

The client base is deliberately broad. Rather than niching down into a single vertical, HigherVisibility has accumulated deep experience across several: multi-unit and franchise businesses (served at both the national corporate level and down to individual franchisee locations), home services, financial services, automotive, e-commerce, and law. The franchise vertical is a particular strength — Adam and his business partner came from a financial services background and have built significant expertise in helping franchise brands grow both their national presence and their local footprint.

The Challenge

HigherVisibility's primary call to action is straightforward: get a proposal. That is what most visitors to the site are ultimately asked to do. But not every visitor is ready for that conversation. Some are researching. Some are curious. Some want to understand where they stand before they commit to talking to a sales team.

Adam needed a way to serve those visitors — to give them something of immediate value that kept them engaged with HigherVisibility without pushing them prematurely into a proposal request. The answer was a website SEO audit tool that prospects could use on their own terms, at their own pace, without having to speak to anyone first.

How They Use SEOptimer

HigherVisibility has been using SEOptimer for three to four years, and their implementation goes deeper than most. Rather than using the off-the-shelf white-label tool, they have integrated SEOptimer's API into their own infrastructure — giving them full control over the layout, the branding, and the output, all hosted on their own URL.

The tool sits on the HigherVisibility website as a supplementary conversion path, running alongside blog posts and content pages. A visitor reading about SEO can, at any point, enter their URL and receive an immediate, detailed audit of their own site. The report is branded as HigherVisibility's own, the design matches their visual identity, and the prospect can download it and act on it immediately — without any friction.

What happens next is where the lead generation value kicks in. When someone fills out the audit form, they have not asked for a proposal — but they have signalled clear intent. They are interested in SEO. They have a website. They want to understand how it is performing. HigherVisibility uses that signal to follow up with a targeted, relevant outreach.

"They come, they read information, they put in their URL and immediately get the results. We then use that as a tool to reach out and say, hey — you filled this out, you didn't necessarily ask for a proposal. Would you like us to put one together, or can we hop on a call to discuss further?"

The Numbers

HigherVisibility generates around 15 of these audits per month through the embedded tool. Adam is candid that this number has softened somewhat from where it was two years ago — a shift he attributes partly to changes in how Google surfaces content and partly to the fact that the current version of the tool does not yet include the GEO and AI search checks that are increasingly relevant to prospects. That addition is on the roadmap.

What makes those 15 leads significant is their quality. These are not cold contacts — they are people who visited the site, engaged with the content, actively entered their own URL, and wanted to know where they stood. They are marketing qualified leads in the truest sense: self-identified, already curious, and primed for a follow-up conversation.

The API Advantage

The decision to integrate via API rather than use the standard white-label tool gives HigherVisibility something most SEOptimer customers do not have: complete control over how the tool looks, behaves, and fits within their broader marketing infrastructure. The output matches their branding precisely. The experience feels native to the HigherVisibility website. There is no visible seam between their own content and the audit functionality.

"It gave us the flexibility to build it how we wanted to. To use the elements we wanted to use."

For an agency of HigherVisibility's size and experience, that level of customisation is not a luxury — it is a requirement. Their website is a core part of their business development operation, and every tool embedded within it needs to meet their standards. SEOptimer's API made that possible.

Adam's view on AI is reassuring for anyone who has been worrying about the future of SEO. The LLMs — ChatGPT, Gemini, and the rest — use search as their grounding mechanism. When they need current information to answer a question, they perform searches, and to be included in those searches, you need to rank. The fundamentals have not changed.

"The most important piece is that all of these LLMs use search as a way of grounding. Because they are performing that search and using search engine data as their grounding information, SEO is as important today as it has ever been. You have to rank well to be in that consideration phase."

He frames it with a clarity that cuts through a lot of the noise in the current conversation:

"The first step of that — 80% of AI SEO — is good SEO. There's 20% that are still new items and new things. But you have to do the table stakes and the good stuff first to give yourself a good opportunity to perform well in AI."

Why SEOptimer

Adam's recommendation to other agencies is simple: whether they go down the API route or simply use the white-label tool out of the box, the underlying value proposition is the same — give potential customers a way to understand their own website, and use that signal to start a more informed, more relevant sales conversation.

"I would urge any agency to consider using something like this. It's helpful to provide your potential customer with this information, and it's a great way to gather that initial feedback and use it as a warm lead generation tool."