Bill Hartzer

Bill Hartzer has spent three decades studying how the internet judges people, companies, and everyone in between.

He began his career as a technical writer before moving into search engine optimization, website development, and internet marketing at a time when most people were still asking what a website even was. Over the years he has worked inside international corporations, guided clients at top digital marketing agencies, and helped businesses of every size grow their visibility and credibility online. He launched and ran his own digital marketing agency, advised countless entrepreneurs, and built a personal brand that has been evolving since the early 2000s.

Today he is the founder of Hartzer Consulting and DNAccess, advising organizations that range from startups to Fortune 500 companies. His work spans the intersection of search engines, domain names, internet infrastructure, digital advertising, web analytics, and online reputation — a breadth that lets him identify issues that specialists working in one lane routinely miss.

Why he wrote this book

Much of Bill’s consulting work arrives after something has already gone wrong: a company whose name became a search term overnight, an executive whose old post resurfaced, a business that took a position without understanding how it would be read. The pattern across those engagements is consistent. The damage rarely comes from the position itself. It comes from taking it — or avoiding it — without having thought through how it would land.

The Unofficial Ballot is the framework he wishes those clients had run before the crisis, rather than after.

What he works on

• Technical SEO and enterprise search — crawl and indexation problems, website architecture, log file analysis, international search, and the technical audits behind large-scale visibility.
• Website and domain migrations — hundreds of them over more than twenty years, including recoveries for businesses whose migrations went badly.
• Domain names and domain security — portfolio management, acquisitions, registry locks, DNSSEC, and the recovery of stolen or hijacked domains.
• Internet investigations — historical website analysis, WHOIS and DNS history, website attribution, and forensic research using archived internet data.
• Expert witness work — retained in legal matters involving search marketing, online advertising, web analytics, domain ownership, and website traffic analysis.

In the industry

Bill has been part of the search marketing community since its earliest days. He was involved with DFWSEM in the early 2000s, when search marketing still felt like the Wild West, and has served on the board of the State of Search Conference. He speaks regularly at industry conferences and is widely cited in trade and mainstream coverage of search, domains, and online reputation.