# John Vantine > Director, SEO @ GoodRx Location: Santa Cruz, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/johnvantine I'm a strategic SEO leader with 20 years of experience driving meaningful growth for enterprise brands. I specialize in scaling organic traffic, revenue and generative search visibility, most recently taking GoodRx from 4MM to 12MM organic monthly sessions. I build high-performing teams, build product roadmaps and help brands appear wherever users are searching. People often ask how I ended up in SEO: I've been building on the web since I was in the 8th grade. In 1998, I ran a small personal website (hosted on AOL!) that I updated by hand, with daily updates from my personal life and links to weird news stories to make my friends laugh ("blogging" wasn't a thing yet). The world wide web didn’t feel so massive back then. If you were a teenager in the 90s, you probably remember sites like mine. Some time passed, the site got bigger, and got mentioned on the radio -- suddenly I was getting tens of thousands of visitors a day, ultimately crashing the server (no longer AOL at this point) that hosted my site. This scenario would occur several more times down the line. Out of necessity, I learned about web analytics and log files, so that I could determine where my visitors were coming from, where in the world they were located, and which query they used to find my site (keyword data was still provided back then). I loved going through this data, searching for those same queries myself, and seeing how my site ranked relative to others. I quickly made a connection: I got a lot of traffic for queries related to topics that I wrote about often, like the band "System of a Down", which I was obsessed with at the time. At the same time, small business owners would reach out offering me cash (or free products) in exchange for a link from my site to theirs. I noticed that they were very specific about the anchor text that I’d use to link to them. This was when I started to put the basic pieces of SEO together. My (mis)adventures as a webmaster of a popular website continued for about a decade, and I learned many lessons along the way. I received a bachelors in fine arts and entered the workforce as a web designer. Through an interesting chain of events I found myself immersed in the SEO industry. I have a strong background in graphic design, and find myself leaning on those skills often, but my true skills and passion are in the search realm. ## Work Experience ### Director, SEO @ GoodRx Jan 2021 – Present | Oakland, California, United States - Led generative search strategy through a rapidly-evolving SERP landscape, implementing new strategies to maximize visibility within various generative search engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AIOs), integrating new AI tools to bolster SEO and content processes, and reporting on LLM visibility/citations. As a result, GoodRx was the #23 most-cited domain on the web within Google's AI Overviews, per a May '25 ahrefs report. - Hired and grew team of 4 full-time SEOs. - Played a key role in transforming a small Wordpress blog into an industry-competitive media operation (GoodRx Health) which grew upper funnel organic traffic +250% over 2 years. - Owned strategic roadmap for organic growth, while leading SEO team as they execute projects spanning across content and numerous products to help teams reach distinct traffic goals. - Built a moat around 1000s of conversion pages, securing and maintaining top rank for ultra-competitive drug pricing queries ### Product Lead, Growth @ GoodRx Jan 2018 – Jan 2021 | Santa Monica, California, United States Working cross-functionally across product, engineering, editorial, UX and data to spread the gospel of SEO, ensuring that all GoodRx properties are accessible to users and search engines alike. Building experiences and creating content that address the latest and most challenging consumer health problems. ### Director of Product, SEO @ TrueCar, Inc. Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area • Led company-wide SEO strategy with a focus on internal linking and crawl optimization for 100K+ page site. • Successfully led a complex site migration to a new tech stack while maintaining traffic, performance and crawl parity. • Built and maintained a robust SEO knowledge base used by engineers, PMs, designers, and marketing team. • Defined, monitored, and reported KPIs to VPs, C-Levels and other stakeholders in a variety of recurring functions. • Collaborated with engineers on a performance initiative to improve site speed, moving hundreds of conversion pages onto the first page of the SERPs for competitive vehicle terms. ### Senior SEO Manager @ Edmunds Jan 2012 – Jan 2016 | Santa Monica, CA • Grew organic search traffic 12% YoY (2014-15) beyond forecasted growth by optimizing for crawl efficiency and significantly reducing site footprint. • Secured and maintained top rank for thousands of ultra-competitive head terms by collaborating with editorial team to create and optimize best-in-class vehicle review content. • Managed relationships with vendors to create and socialize technical site audits, which I broke down into eng tasks for multiple product teams. • Lead the development and implementation of an SEO-friendly inventory product which is now the default used car shopping experience on the site. • Lead daily SEO scrum to coordinate team efforts and oversee progress made on all SEO-related issues • Acted as resident SEO champion, keeping stakeholders informed on the latest developments in the SEO landscape. Created quarterly presentations to demonstrate SEO impact and socialize best practices ### Senior SEO Manager @ Wpromote Jan 2009 – Jan 2012 | El Segundo, CA • Built and executed custom SEO campaigns for 10+ large clients including Suzuki, Body Glove, and Bayer. • Consulted with client-side leadership teams to secure buy-in for the engineering resources necessary to implement technical optimizations. • Managed the development, launch and maintenance of Wpromote's web-based SEO Audit Tool, which earned hundreds of high-authority external backlinks for the website. • Led SEO strategy and content marketing for Wpromote. • Attended search conferences and industry events, representing Wpromote and gathering the latest trends and strategies to present internally and share with clients. • Trained and mentored new SEO hires. ### SEO Manager @ Turn 5, Inc Jan 2008 – Jan 2009 | Malvern, PA Employed a variety of "white hat" SEO practices for a number of large ecommerce sites under the "Turn 5" brand, categories included aftermarket mustang parts, computers, women's fashion/hair care, billiards, and pet supplies. I became a "jack of all trades", taking on a variety of tasks within the orbit of SEO: • Maintained several large ecommerce sites via Yahoo! Stores • Created and tracked goals/conversions in Google Analytics • Ran A/B testing to improve conversion metrics (CRO) • Led email marketing for several stores, including headline/template A/B testing and optimization • Led outreach program to acquire inbound links, which included ongoing client (webmaster/blog) relationships • Wordpress design/implementation (ported blogs from Drupal to Wordpress) ### Webmaster/Founder @ John's Crawlspace (A small, independent web venture) Jan 1998 – Jan 2008 | Philadelphia, PA • Managed high-volume website: built and scaled personal web property to support (at peak) 10,000+ daily unique visitors, owning server configuration (moving from free to enterprise-level paid hosting), bandwidth constraints (I found out what "unmetered" really means), and frequent host migrations after viral traffic spikes (e.g., "the Fark effect") took down servers. • Pioneered early data-driven content strategy: developed my SEO strategy via server log file analysis, identifying user trends and high-interest search queries to inform a content roadmap that led to consistent traffic growth and audience engagement, effectively "reverse-engineering" the rank algorithms of early search engines, all prior to the existence of modern analytics platforms. • Monetization & partnerships: Monetized content via nascent ad networks (AdSense) and navigated the emerging "link economy", negotiating strategic link placements to influence search rank position and traffic, all before off-site SEO best practices were established. • Community engagement: launched a forum with hundreds of active daily users, driving engagement through daily (scheduled) threads, polls, "new music friday" roundups, etc. Recruited a distributed team of volunteer moderators to maintain engagement and enforce community standards. ### Graphic Design Lead @ US Auto Parts Jan 2007 – Jan 2008 | Trenton, NJ Led design for several large automotive ecommerce sites. Created layouts and logos, styled existing sites with CSS, worked with photographers to prepare new product photos for various ecommerce sites, and tackled any other design-related tasks that came up along the way. ### Volunteer Teacher, Ve Deme Orphanage @ Dream Africa Volunteer Service Jan 2007 – Jan 2007 | Ve Deme, Volta, Ghana I spent some time in late 2007 volunteering at The Volta Home in Ve Deme, Ghana. My time was spent working with children in the orphanage, both in and outside of the classroom. While there, I: • Wrote lesson plans and taught multiple subjects to a variety of age groups • Helped Ghanaian teachers to create and prepare exams for their classes • Assisted orphanage leaders with educational and multi-cultural skills • Organized and led multiple trips (and various other extracurricular activities) with the children at the orphanage ### SEO Specialist @ WebpageFX Jan 2006 – Jan 2007 | Carlisle, PA My first time getting paid to do SEO! I owned onsite SEO strategy and implementation (via hand-coded HTML) for a variety of local clients. SEO was much simpler back then... A little keyword research here, some metadata optimizations there, and a few backlinks made a world of difference. This job kick-started my career in digital marketing... and it was fully remote, too! Prior to WebPageFX, SEO was just a hobby. ## Education ### Bachelor of Arts in Art & Design Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania ### Art Delaware County Community College ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/johnvantine - Website: https://j0hn.com/ - Website: https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnvantine/ --- Source: https://flows.cv/johnvantine JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/johnvantine/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-05