I run LocalLift. I'm someone who can't leave a broken thing alone — LocalLift was on version 4 before we had a single paying customer. This is the story of how it got here, and why $49.
I'm someone who can't leave a broken thing alone. If there's a problem, I'll solve it — and I'll keep improving on the solution long after most people would've called it done. LocalLift was on version 4 before we had a single paying customer.
Outside of work, I'm a mom to a couple little ones, wife to a rig welder, and part-time referee to a pack of dogs. In my spare time I cook, play trucks on the floor, and think about how to make LocalLift better for the people using it.
Honestly? By accident. I argued with a friend about whether I should go to school for digital media. She won the bet. A few weeks later I got my acceptance letter from SAIT, moved, and graduated with a 4.0. My first web dev boss told me to look up SEO. It took me a while to wrap my head around — and once I did, I couldn't stop.
I spent the next few years bouncing between roles until I landed with a mentor on the east coast of Canada who taught me what actually moves the needle. From there I consulted for enterprise SaaS companies with thousands of pages, and small operators like a magnetic jewelry maker in Arizona with a five-page site. Same fundamentals, wildly different budgets.
What I learned: there's an enormous amount of fluff in this industry, and most of it exists to make SEO sound harder than it is.
The enterprise work was interesting. It wasn't satisfying. The people I actually enjoyed helping were the ones doing hard, honest work who didn't have time to become marketing experts on top of running a business. That's where the real payoff was — not in impressing a boardroom, but in helping someone see their own listing climb.
Too much of the SEO industry profits from confusion. If business owners understood half the jargon they were paying for, they'd ask very different questions — and get very different answers.
Local SEO especially should be straightforward. The information is out there, but it's buried behind discovery calls, white papers, and a low-level fear that if you touch the wrong thing you'll break your online presence. Regular people running regular businesses need a regular solution.
I'd wanted to build something like LocalLift for years. The math never worked — the price had to stay attainable for trades owners taking what feels like a risk when they sign up, and I couldn't get there without cutting the parts that actually mattered.
AI changed the math. Not because AI is doing the thinking — I built the review process, I trained the team, and edge cases still come to me personally — but because it lets me deliver enterprise-grade output at a price a trades owner can say yes to without a boardroom meeting.
Translating. Most of my time in the big leagues was spent sitting between the client and the product, making sure the work being delivered actually matched what the client thought they were paying for. That's what LocalLift does at scale — it takes what a local SEO expert would tell you and hands it to you as a "do this, this month" instead of a 40-page audit.
Consistency beats intensity almost every time. Businesses don't fail at SEO because they never did it. They fail because they stopped after three months.
Because when the cost is small, it feels doable. Even if you have the budget for a full agency, you're signing up for weekly Zoom calls, quarterly PowerPoints, and months of onboarding before anything ships. Fifty bucks and a few hours a month should be enough to actually move your local rank. Not with bells and whistles. Just the work that matters, done consistently.
Small businesses deserve the same quality of marketing as enterprise companies — without enterprise budgets, enterprise contracts, or enterprise jargon. Local SEO shouldn't be a secret. And business owners should feel confident about the time they put into their online presence, not anxious about whether they're doing it wrong.
That's what LocalLift is built for.
From enterprise SaaS companies with thousand-page sites, to small local businesses — trades, retail, service — with five-page ones. Same fundamentals, wildly different budgets. Most of whom just wanted someone to translate.
"A unicorn of creative and practical skillsets with a fantastic track record of rapport and communication.
"Her ability to translate complex SEO data into actionable insights made her a trusted resource for clients and colleagues.
"I was struggling to get feedback from a particular contact who refused to respond to any of our messages. Josie took over client-facing communications and almost immediately she reversed the poor relationship.