Steve Wiideman is a multi-location and franchise SEO consultant and the co-founder and CEO of Wiideman Consulting Group. He has built his career around helping businesses grow through search engine optimization and digital marketing. His journey into technology began during his service as a U.S. Army infantryman from 1994 to 1997, when he taught fellow soldiers to use helmet-mounted cameras connected to computers in Bradley vehicles. After leaving the Army, he worked in IT at PacifiCare and IBM Global Services, where he helped a client move from printed, mailed reports to an online platform, saving the company nearly $1.3 million. This experience shaped his belief that the right technological solutions can deliver measurable business value.

His career later took him to Disney Parks and Resorts Online, where he managed SEO and paid search for Disneyland.com and AdventuresByDisney.com. The role deepened his focus on search marketing, a field he had been practicing since 1998. In 2005, Steve Wiideman began working with clients independently, including brands such as Skechers and RingCentral. In January 2015, he and Melissa Wiideman co-founded Wiideman Consulting Group, a multi-location and franchise SEO agency headquartered in La Mirada, California. That same year, the firm launched its free SEO Roadmap program to help businesses plan their search work in stages.

Business Fortune spoke exclusively with Steve Wiideman, Co-Founder and CEO of Wiideman Consulting Group, who shared how the company helps businesses navigate evolving SEO challenges, strengthen search visibility, and achieve sustainable digital growth.

Interview Highlights

Wiideman works with businesses ranging from small companies to major brands. How do you plan your SEO strategies to meet the different needs of local businesses, franchises, and enterprise clients?

The fundamentals don’t change much between a single-location shop and a brand like Applebee’s. You still need crawlable pages, accurate listings, helpful content, and genuine reviews. What changes is the scale and governance.

For a local business, we focus on its Google Business Profile, a handful of service pages, and the neighborhoods it actually serves. For a franchise system, the challenge is providing hundreds of franchisees with a consistent location page template and clean listing data while still allowing each location to feel local. We studied more than 300 multi-location brands to identify what top-ranking location pages have in common. That research, which won a Web Excellence Award, continues to shape our templates.

With enterprise brands like IHOP and Public Storage, success largely comes down to process: getting SEO into the development backlog, collaborating with brand and legal teams, and forecasting ROI so leadership can confidently fund the work.

Whether a client needs franchise SEO services, local SEO or enterprise SEO consulting, most engagements begin with a fixed-fee SEO Strategic Plan, so everyone agrees on priorities before any budget goes to execution.

Wiideman focuses on transparency and clear results. How do you help clients understand their SEO activities, track progress, and develop the skills to manage SEO efforts independently?

We’ve always believed that clients shouldn’t need us forever. That might sound like bad business, but it’s precisely why clients stay with us and refer us to others.

Every engagement includes a roadmap with clear phases, assigned owners, and due dates. We also provide the same templates, checklists, and tool recommendations we use ourselves.

For reporting, we bring together data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Semrush, and paid search campaigns so clients have a single source of truth. We focus on leads and revenue rather than vanity metrics like rankings alone.

Training is another key part of the process. Our favorite engagements end with an in-house team confidently running the playbook independently, with us serving as a sounding board when needed. This approach is a big part of why people call us the agency’s agency.

Search engines and digital marketing practices continue to evolve. What major challenges are businesses facing in SEO today, and how does your team help clients adapt to these changes?

The biggest shift is that a search doesn’t always end with a click anymore. Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini can answer questions directly on the screen, drawing information from sources they consider reliable and consistent. If a brand’s website is vague or its location data is inconsistent, a scraper site or third-party directory can end up becoming the source of truth for that brand.

For multi-location brands, this problem multiplies. One incorrect business hours field across a thousand restaurants can leave countless frustrated guests standing in front of locked doors.

That's why our answer engine optimization work starts with the fundamentals AI systems rely on: technical SEO, clean structured data, consistent business listings, location pages with real local content, and websites that answer customer questions better than anyone else.

Wiideman’s services include SEO consulting, audits, training, and procurement support. How does combining these services help businesses and agencies improve their digital marketing capabilities and achieve better results?

Each of our services strengthens the others. An audit identifies what's not working, consulting turns those findings into an actionable plan, and training gives the team what it needs to implement it. Procurement support helps brands avoid spending money on the wrong agency or tools. We also provide SEO expert witness services in legal cases where search marketing work is in dispute.

Many brands come to Wiideman after a disappointing agency experience. We help them develop requests for proposals (RFPs), define evaluation criteria, assess proposals, and select a technology stack that fits their needs. As a Semrush Enterprise channel partner, we also have in-depth knowledge of the platforms we recommend.

Agencies work with us from the opposite direction. They bring us in for senior-level strategy, troubleshooting, or training when they secure a major franchise account. This allows the agency to retain its client while delivering better results.

Wiideman also invests in training and knowledge sharing to support the wider marketing community. What steps are you taking to promote ethical SEO practices, improve industry standards, and help businesses make informed marketing decisions?

Teaching is the part of my job I’d do for free, and for years, I did. I ran one of the largest SEO Meetup groups in our area, led free workshops, spoke at events like DigiMarCon, LeadsCon and the Local Search Summit, and volunteered as an agency trainer to push for more transparency in our industry.

Today, I teach AI-Driven SEO and Digital Marketing Strategies at UC San Diego Extended Studies and Strategic Search Engine Marketing at Cal State Fullerton. Scott Cowley, Ph.D., and I co-authored SEO: Strategy & Skills for Stukent, a textbook used in more than 45 colleges and universities. In 2026, we released SEO: Search Strategy for the AI Era. When students learn ethical SEO in the classroom, shortcuts lose their appeal.

My advice to any business owner is simple: if someone guarantees rankings, walk away. My goal is always to provide value through practical resources, including templates, tool recommendations, and case studies, so people can make informed decisions on their own.

As Wiideman Consulting Group continues to grow, what are your key priorities for 2027 and beyond, and how do you plan to expand your impact on the digital marketing industry?

For 2027, our first priority is AI search visibility for multi-location brands. Every brand we speak with wants to know how it appears in AI-generated answers and what it can do to improve its visibility. Our next priority is agentic commerce readiness, ensuring that when AI assistants begin booking and placing orders on behalf of customers, our clients' locations are the ones they choose. We also want to continue expanding our educational initiatives, from training for in-house teams and agencies to our Stukent courseware and university classes.

We’ll continue to grow the way we always have: by hiring great people. There’s always someone smarter than you out there. Don’t be threatened by them; hire them. That philosophy has taken us from a two-person practice to a team supporting brands with thousands of locations.

Under the Leadership of Steve Wiideman

Steve Wiideman is a multi-location and franchise SEO consultant. He is the co-founder and CEO of Wiideman Consulting Group, based in La Mirada, California. He served in the U.S. Army infantry from 1994 to 1997, earning the Army Achievement Medal. He later earned a B.S. in E-Business Management from Westwood College of Technology.

At Disney Parks and Resorts Online, Wiideman managed SEO and paid search for Disneyland.com and AdventuresByDisney.com. He has been practicing SEO since 1998, and his firm has worked with clients including Applebee’s, IHOP, Outback Steakhouse, Public Storage, Skechers, and Meineke Car Care Centers.

Wiideman co-authored two Stukent textbooks with Scott Cowley, Ph.D.: SEO: Strategy & Skills (2021) and SEO: Search Strategy for the AI Era (2026). He also teaches at UC San Diego Extended Studies and California State University, Fullerton. He has written for Search Engine Journal, BrightLocal and the Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, and was named Industry MVP at Conductor's 2018 Searchie Awards.

“Rankings are nice. What I care about is whether our clients made smarter decisions and grew because of the work.”