20 Years of Making People Click.

A New Orleans area chiropractor tries to rebuild his practice after Hurricane Katrina, starting over in a city that is doing the same.

That same year, Will and Angie Scott launch Search Influence in a spare bedroom with a simple idea: help businesses succeed online through SEO.

The chiropractor becomes their first client. With nothing but a well-ranked website, his phone starts ringing. SEO takes him from in-home appointments to a booming clinic.

That result points to something that endures 20 years later: get the right people to find you, and the rest follows.

Everything else has changed. That hasn't.

Search Influence watches its clients' organic rankings slip as paid ads crowd in above them. So, the team learns to run those ads, and paid search becomes the next thing it offers clients.

When Facebook opens advertising to businesses, most agencies haven't touched it. But Search Influence digs in early. The Center for Restorative Breast Surgery is one of the first to benefit, and the fan base they build gives the Breast Center a foundation for reaching its audience for years to come.

The industry catches up eventually. It always does. But Search Influence's clients are already ahead. It's still how the team works: staying ahead so clients never have to worry about what's next.

When you can't connect your marketing to your revenue, every dollar spent is a guess. The Audubon Nature Institute stopped guessing in 2011, when Search Influence connected all four of its revenue-driving systems to Google Analytics. For the first time, it could trace each campaign to real results.

Word traveled. The National WWII Museum and New Orleans City Park came to Search Influence, drawn by what Audubon had found: a local partner who understood their business and could account for every marketing dollar spent.

Real dollar accountability became the Search Influence standard, and it has shaped every client engagement since.

When Google shifts toward understanding entities rather than matching keywords, most agencies keep doing what they know. Search Influence digs into schema markup instead.

While local SEO shops use review schema to chase star ratings in search results, Search Influence tests further: article schema, video schema, structured data that signals meaning across content types. The evidence comes back early and clearly: broader schema implementation moves client rankings.

The models powering AI-generated answers today run on the same logic: entities, structure, meaning. Search Influence has been working that way since 2012. Schema then. AI search now. Same instinct, different decade.

YouthForce NOLA prepares young New Orleans residents for careers in high-demand industries. Search Influence becomes one of its employer partners in 2015 and has hosted interns every year since.

Each intern spends time inside a working digital marketing agency, learning SEO, paid search, content strategy, and what professional work actually looks like. They leave with real experience and something worth putting on a resume. Search Influence gets to be part of what that looks like before a career fully takes shape.

A decade in, 26 interns have come through the program. The number keeps climbing, and so does the number of people who got their first real look at digital marketing here.

Search Influence turns 10, and that occasion calls for more than a party.

The team launches the "Make Your Dreams Come True" contest, setting aside $10,000 in digital marketing services for a local business or organization in New Orleans. The community votes. New Orleans Shotokan Academy wins, rising to the top through a public Facebook vote held over two weeks in January 2016. The academy receives the full $10,000 in services. SI also donates to two additional local organizations.

Ten years of business is worth celebrating. Search Influence ensures the community is part of it.

Search Influence goes fully remote overnight. The team hasn't gone back.

The transition works because the infrastructure is already in place. Morning huddles, department meetings, one-on-ones, and quarterly planning sessions stay intact. Documentation, training plans, and clear checklists, all built long before COVID-19 arrives, keep quality from slipping. KPIs covering time tracking, quality scores, utilization rates, and client retention mean the work runs the same way it always has, regardless of where the team sits.

The systems that hold the company together in 2020 are the same ones clients rely on today.

Search Influence pursues Women's Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) certification in 2022 after noticing that RFPs increasingly award points to certified women-owned businesses. Getting certified makes sense on paper. What it makes possible goes further than that.

Job applicants of all genders begin citing the women-owned, women-led designation as a reason they applied and want to work at the company. One new client comes through the door specifically because SI appears on the certified list — a client who would not have considered us otherwise.

Not just a line on an RFP. SI was always women-led. Certification helps the right clients notice. And the right candidates.