Hey, I’m JohnPaul Williams II, SEO specialist.
I got here the non-conventional route — but I worked my way through IT and marketing roles that gave me the confidence to build a process, and then go test it. What I do now is get local businesses found by the people already searching for them in their area. Here’s the whole story.
How a delivery driver ended up ranking accounting firms in San Francisco
In grade school I sold candy out of my backpack. In middle school it was high-end bags. By high school the product was me — I trained with the specific goal of turning my body into a scholarship, and it worked.
I didn’t have language for any of that at the time. Looking back the pattern is obvious: I’ve always been pulled toward building an offer that made sense for the people around me, then doing the work to actually deliver it. Watching families and businesses grow now, it makes sense this is where I landed.
My first job in this industry was driving deliveries for a cannabis shop. I moved from there into the IT manager role for the chain — five stores, somewhere between $15 and $20 million a year. IT was a one-person job. That person was me. Heavily regulated, audited constantly, no room to be sloppy about systems, access, or records. If you run an accounting practice, you already know what that kind of environment does to your standards.
Then I became their website manager, officially. That’s the part that redirected my life — because for the first time I was working next to professionals who did this for a living, and I could finally see the gap between what I’d taught myself and what the real thing looked like.
Ecommerce taught me the other half
After that I took a marketing coordinator role at an ecommerce company in Sonora. That job filled in everything the IT side hadn't. Domain infrastructure and integrations. Layout and page design. Copywriting. Email marketing. Paid ads. Graphic design. A stack of analytics platforms well past Google Analytics and Search Console.
It's also where I started running my own experiments and building my own theories about how the pieces of marketing actually relate to each other. Testing was the whole point - I could watch what was and wasn't working in link building, in Meta ads, and especially in SEO movement, and see it in the numbers instead of taking somebody's word for it.
Why I actually built J Williams Designs
I'll be upfront: I built this out of survival instinct. It evolved into something else - a tool for helping other people and serving the community around me - and that's the reason it's lasted.
And yes, I did want to start an agency. What I really wanted was agency. More of it than I'd had before.
I wanted to reach a health goal I'd been putting off for years, and I wanted to get there on my own two feet. I didn't entirely. I needed help from my community and from emergency services to get through parts of it, and it took me a while to be okay saying that out loud.
Recently I was granted state health insurance, which finally opened a lane to get a real diagnosis and move toward the procedure I've been working toward. I'm genuinely excited about it. I get to go fix some things I broke and neglected for too long.
What that stretch taught me is what I bring to client work now: the system is hard to navigate and it can be disheartening, but it isn't hopeless, and you have more agency in it than it feels like you do. You can build, fail, test, and try again - but plan it before you run it. You get one body and one reputation, so when you spend either, make it count. Get the equation and the vision lined up first, then move with confidence. That's true of a body and it's true of a business.
Plenty of things moved the needle. One could become a system.
I had to be careful juggling research and development while bootstrapping - but it taught me a lot. Ads move the needle right up until you stop paying. Networking moves it right up until you stop showing up. Neither one compounds, and neither one runs without me in the room.
So I went looking for the one thing I could turn into a repeatable process - something that kept working after I stopped touching it, and that doubled as proof of what I could actually do. That turned out to be long-form writing and video. A good article ranks, and it also shows someone exactly how I think about their problem before they've paid me a dollar. Same goes for the site it sits on: built to be read by Google and by the person actually searching in that neighborhood. I had to get good at both, and that took time.
My mom was the first real test of the theory. She ran a massage therapy practice. I rebuilt her website - and when she sold her client list in Modesto and moved the practice to San Francisco to start over, I got her ranking on page one in the new city. Different market, from scratch.
Then my first two SEO clients after her both landed on page one in the Bay Area, in their own cities. That's when I knew this was a real skill and not a fluke - and that the process I'd built was faster than, and every bit as powerful as, the traditional way of doing it.
Going back for my degree, and where it's all at today
I went back to school part time - one class a semester - and I hold down a part-time job to bootstrap the whole thing together, keeping this moving two or three days a week until I can do it full time. I'm at College of San Mateo now, working toward a transfer to a state or UC school here in the Bay Area to finish my BA in Business.
The certifications came the same way, over the past decade and mostly around the edges of other work: Google IT Professional. HubSpot. Google Ads. Pipedrive. Email marketing. A stack of others.
I'll be straight about what it costs - time, energy, and money I sometimes have to pull from somewhere else, and some weeks it's tiring. But I know exactly what I'm building toward: work that makes a thriving situation for myself, for families, and for my community, and the health and relationships I've been chasing this whole time. That's a trade I'll make every time.
The team
This is my small team - specialists I've worked with for years. Real relationships, real work shipped together. Not a marketplace, not offshore churn.
I lead it and I make the major calls. Every three months we agree on a roadmap together, then execute against it month to month. It runs on SOPs I've been refining for years, and every project lives in ClickUp so the work never sits in one person's head.
I'm organized. So are they. That's the reason your project doesn't stall when I'm in a meeting.
Where the process has landed
I’ve worked with businesses from Washington DC to the Bay Area and up and down the West Coast — most of it over Zoom.
#1 across their market in 136 days. They hired staff to keep up with the calls.
Off the map to the Top 3 of local results in 82 days.
First-page Google rankings in under four months.
How we work, and who we work with
JWD works with three kinds of clients. Take thirty seconds to find yourself here.
Accountants & bookkeepers
CPAs, tax preparers, bookkeeping practices. You're invisible for the searches your ideal clients use. Lead flow is inconsistent. You need predictable demand so the business can grow.
Lawyers & professional services
Attorneys, advisors, consultants. Referral-built and credibility-driven. You need a presence that signals authority before the first call.
Home-improvement contractors
Contractors, HVAC, plumbers, electricians, restoration. Your phone isn't ringing enough - and a competitor with worse service is getting calls you should be getting. We solve that.
The approach is always the same: keyword research that finds what your customers actually type, technical fixes to close any gaps, content that answers real questions, and a citations + link strategy that builds authority that lasts. Here’s the full process →
No churn. No off-shore handoffs. No mystery. You’ll always know what was done, why it was done, and what it produced.
90 days from now, your business could look different
The Hayward accountant didn’t plan to hire staff - they had to. The SF service business didn’t change their prices - they just became the one Google showed first. That was enough.