Who I am, in the shortest useful form
I am Bill Hartzer. I have practiced search engine optimization since 1996 and worked with domain names for exactly as long, having bought my first one that same year and sold it to a competitor two years later. I run Hartzer Consulting, which I founded in 2016, and DNAccess, which I founded in March 2023 to do domain name background checks and stolen domain name recovery. I am based in the Dallas–Fort Worth area of Texas.
Before consulting independently I held in-house and agency roles in sequence: an in-house search role at a North Dallas telecommunications software company in the early 2000s, then SEO manager at MarketNet, then several years at Vizion Interactive, then director of SEO at Standing Dog Interactive running a group of roughly twenty-five Dallas SEOs, then senior search strategist at Globe Runner, then senior vice president of agency services at Advice Interactive. Earlier than any of that I wrote IBM mainframe software manuals, which is a less glamorous origin than most people in this field claim and a more useful one than it sounds — technical writing is the habit of explaining a system to somebody who has to act on the explanation.
What this site is for
This is the professional record: the practice areas, the speaking history, the publications, and the sources behind each. It exists because a search for a person's name should return something that person is accountable for, with the evidence attached, rather than a scatter of third-party profiles of varying accuracy.
It follows one rule strictly. Every claim here traces to a source, and where the only source is me, it says so. You will find a start year rather than a round number of years of experience, because a start year stays true. You will find no named case, court, docket or testimony in the expert witness material, because expert engagements are routinely confidential and a biography that implies specific litigation without a citation is doing the thing it would criticise in an opposing expert. You will find no wall of mainstream press logos, because the verified press footprint is industry trade press and podcasts, and that is what is claimed.
It also does not sell anything. There are no rates here, no intake form and no promise of a response time. A biography that also converts is neither, and every claim on it acquires a motive the moment it does. Consulting and expert witness inquiries go to Hartzer Consulting; stolen domain recovery and domain background checks go to DNAccess; writing and commentary live at BillHartzer.com.
The work, in two halves
The consulting half is advisory and project work with businesses: technical SEO, website and domain migrations, search engine marketing, domain name strategy, domain name recovery, and online reputation management. The expert witness half is retained through counsel and produces written analysis and opinion: SEO, domain names, internet systems generally, social media, web analytics, and the investigative work that establishes who is behind a website.
They are less separate than they look. Both come down to establishing what is actually true about a technical system from records made at the time, and both are ruined by the same mistake — reaching a conclusion the underlying data cannot support. The difference is that in consulting a wrong conclusion costs a quarter of wasted work, and in litigation somebody is paid to find it.
Community and industry work
I co-founded the Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association in February 2004 with Jim Gilbert — sixteen invited local search professionals at a Hampton Inn on Stemmons Freeway — and built and ran its first website. I chaired the State of Search conference in 2020 and remain on its board. I spoke at BrightonSEO in September 2023 on advanced link profile analysis and sat on its link building panel, and I have spoken at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search and Search Engine Strategies conferences over the years. I have written for Search Engine Journal, Practical Ecommerce, CircleID and Vizion's blog, and I have been a brand ambassador for Majestic and OnCrawl.
How to use this site
If you are checking credentials before an introduction, the about, speaking and publications pages carry the record with its sources, including the places where sources disagree and which one I treat as authoritative. If you are trying to work out whether a particular problem is one I work on, the practice areas directory is the fastest route: twelve pages, each stating up front whether the work is advisory, a defined project, or testimony retained through counsel.
If you want to know how I think rather than what I have done, read the guides. They are the longest material here and the least promotional — a working method for a technical audit, an account of what link profile analysis is actually for, what a domain name background check examines, how a stolen domain name is recovered in practice, and what an expert witness in this field does and does not do.
And if you arrived looking for something to buy, the honest answer is that it is not here. That is not modesty or a funnel; it is the design of the site. Hartzer Consulting handles consulting and expert engagements, DNAccess handles stolen domain recovery and background checks, and both of them can have the conversation this page deliberately cannot.