About Christopher Abraham

I'm an independent SEO consultant in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, DC. I've called the DC area home since college, and I take clients across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.

What I'm working on now

• Testing how AI assistants describe businesses and people, and fixing what they get wrong.
• Finding content that JavaScript frameworks hide from crawlers, on React, Next.js, Alpine.js, and headless builds.
• Making SEO changes through pull requests on GitHub, alongside the developers who own the code.
• Reading repositories with AI coding assistants to plan migrations before anything breaks.
• Writing structured data that ties organizations, locations, and people together as entities.

The short version

How I got here

My first online home was a text-based conferencing system, and I've kept an account on The WELL, one of the oldest online communities, for decades. That's where my email address comes from. I built my first websites in 1994, hand-coding HTML for anyone who asked, and started optimizing them for search engines in 1998. I've worked with open-source content management systems since 1999: Movable Type, Plone, Drupal, WordPress, and plenty of platforms that no longer exist.

Before the agencies, I started as the image center administrator at PNI, Picture Network International, part of SRA in Arlington, then became an associate at Rheingold Associates, the virtual community consultancy of Howard Rheingold, a Linux system administrator at Caucus Systems running professional online events, and a builder of websites for clients that included the Treasury Department.

In the agency years I was the technology strategist at New Media Strategies, one of the first firms to treat a brand's online reputation as something to manage, and then a senior account supervisor on the interactive team at Edelman's public affairs practice in Washington. In 2006 I developed long-tail blogger outreach: rather than pitching a handful of famous bloggers, my team researched and pitched thousands of niche writers who actually cared about a client's subject, treating it as earned media, closer to public relations than to paid social. I co-founded Abraham Harrison, a digital marketing firm that ran search, content, and outreach programs from Washington, Portland, and Berlin. It ran as a fully virtual company before that was normal: two founders and fourteen contractors across the United States, Europe, India, and Africa, spread over ten time zones. Google liked the setup enough to publish a case study about the firm, quoting me as president and COO. Later I was team lead for special projects at Reputation.com, working with high-profile individuals on search results that mattered to them.

A word about New Media Strategies, because it shaped everything after. I was employee number 13 there, from 2002 to 2006, in an open-plan former newsroom in a Rosslyn tower, back when word-of-mouth marketing meant joining online communities and becoming a real, contributing member of them for months before a client's name ever came up. The firm grew past 120 people and trained every new hire, me included, as if it were a discretion bootcamp. In 2002 I helped develop the practice that became online reputation management, which I've done in one form or another ever since. I've written the whole story up, tongue firmly in cheek, as "I was a teenage Russian troll." I was neither a teenager nor Russian. And yes, working under a nom de guerre is an old habit.

I'm proud to work alongside two firms: as a digital strategist with Meritus Media, a digital PR and marketing agency, where search, Google Business Profile, and reputation work sit beside the PR, and as a business partner at Stainless Communications, a senior-led brand, PR, web, and growth firm.

My independent practice runs mostly through Upwork and centers on the technical end of search: why a page isn't indexed, why a template hides content from the crawler, why a migration lost traffic, and how a business shows up when someone asks an AI assistant about it.

What I'm known for

• Forensics. I like the cases nobody else could explain. The answer is usually a mechanism: a script that never runs for Googlebot, a canonical pointing at the wrong page, a redirect chain that drops equity at every hop.
• Working inside messy, inherited sites. Twenty-year-old WordPress installs, half-finished migrations, themes three developers have patched. I'm comfortable there.
• Translating between marketers and engineers. I write tickets developers trust and summaries executives read.
• Using AI with judgment. I use AI tools for metadata drafts, topic gap analysis, FAQ coverage, and repository analysis. Every output gets checked by a human who knows what good looks like.

Teaching and speaking

I've been a guest lecturer at Georgetown University's School of Continuing Studies on organic search engine optimization, online reputation management, and influencer marketing. I taught blogging courses, SEO included, at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, lectured on blogging and viral strategy for Columbia University's executive public affairs program, and spoke on a South by Southwest panel. Forbes once listed me among its top 50 social media power influencers.

Outside work

I studied literature, French, and German, I captained my high school speech and debate team, and I write every day. That background shows in the work: findings argued like a brief, with the strongest evidence first and nothing claimed that the data won't support. I'm a longtime member of Renaissance Weekend, have rowed out of the Potomac Boat Club, and spent years volunteering as a sous chef at Miriam's Kitchen in Washington.

Published as Chris Abraham

Most people know me as Chris, and nearly two decades of my bylines carry that name. Christopher Abraham and Chris Abraham are the same person:

• LinkedIn, with my full work history.
• My Biznology column, a weekly marketing and search column for years.
• The Huffington Post, where I wrote as a contributor.
• Muck Rack, which collects my articles across publications.
• Earlier columns for Advertising Age's DigitalNext, Socialmedia.biz, and Marketing Conversation.

There's more to the story than search: Honolulu, crew, Freemasonry, hyperfiction, Renaissance Weekend, and a Reddit community of slow joggers. It's all off the clock.

Check my work

• My Upwork profile, with job history and client feedback.
• My LinkedIn profile.
• Case studies, written up with the evidence and anonymized.
• Guides that show how I think about indexing, audits, schema, and AI search.

Updated October 6, 2026