ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I'm Michael Rode. I build SEO Receipts.
Backend engineer in Wilmington, NC. Fifteen years in software, most of it on the server side. I write every guide on this site, and the SEO experience behind them comes from doing the work on my own products.
15 years
WORKING IN SOFTWARE
Mar 2026
LAUNCHED GAINFRAME ON THE APP STORE
Solo
One person writes and ships all of this.
Background
Engineer first, SEO second.
Michael Rode
FOUNDER & BUILDER · WILMINGTON, NC
I have spent about fifteen years writing software, mostly backend services and data plumbing. That is still my day job. Everything on this site gets built in the gaps around it, usually an hour in the morning before my daughter is awake.
In March 2026 I launched GainFrame, a progress photo app for the iPhone. It is a normal small product with a normal small marketing budget, which is how I ended up doing SEO at all. I ran paid ads for a while, watched the money leave, and started writing blog posts instead to see what would happen.
The blog was an afterthought. It turned into the channel that actually worked, and Search Console became the tool I opened every morning. Three months of that produced the report above: 2.71K clicks and 125K impressions for GainFrame.
HOW THESE GUIDES GET WRITTEN
The rules I hold myself to.
SEO writing is full of confident numbers nobody can check. These are the standards every post, academy entry, and comparison page on this site follows.
Every claim about Google behavior links to Google
Guides on this site cite Search Central documentation or the Search Console help pages. If a claim has no official source behind it, it gets labelled as my own practitioner opinion.
Numbers I cannot verify get hedged
I do not repeat third-party statistics from memory as fact. If a number comes from someone else's study, it reads as "studies generally report" instead of a hard figure.
Dated and corrected
Search Console changes. Posts carry a publish date, and anything fragile is marked as accurate at publication. When I get something wrong I edit the post rather than quietly deleting it.
My own traffic is public
SEO Receipts publishes my Search Console numbers on the same public leaderboard as everyone else's. You can check my claims about this site against the receipt.
What I am not
Worth saying out loud.
I have never run an agency and I have no enterprise SEO clients. My experience is one engineer growing organic search for products he owns, plus the Search Console API work that goes into this site. If you need someone who has managed a hundred-site migration, that is not me.
I also do not sell links, run a private blog network, or take payment to review anyone's tool. When a post mentions SEO Receipts, that is the one product I have a financial interest in, and I try to keep those mentions to the places they are genuinely relevant.
Read why I built SEO Receipts for the longer version of how the product started.
Find me
Questions and corrections are welcome.
If a guide here is wrong, tell me and I will fix the post. Email is slowest, X is fastest.
- X / TWITTER
- @mikerodebuilds
- michaelrode44 [at] gmail.com
- OTHER PRODUCT
- GainFrame
MY NUMBERS ARE ON THE BOARD TOO
Check my traffic claims against the receipt.