Are you struggling to make your small business stand out in the endless seas of digital marketing? Imagine a dedicated crew, each member chosen for the specific skills they bring to help your business navigate those waters.
I’m Dane Gustafson, and this is the vision behind Viking Search Marketing.
As captain of this crew, I bring 14 years of SEO experience to helping businesses improve their visibility in online searches. Along the way, I’ve built relationships with talented professionals whose expertise complements my own.
For each project, I assemble a small crew of vetted specialists chosen for the work at hand. Together, we provide support across digital marketing, including user experience, paid search, analytics, graphic design, and copywriting.
The “Viking” part of the name is a nod to my Scandinavian heritage, but it also reflects how I work. I put together the right people for each voyage: a crew, not a department, hand-picked for your business. We’ll work with you and for you, providing experienced, personal marketing support without the overhead or bureaucracy of a big agency. You won’t have to pay for services that your specific site doesn’t need.
How I Became an SEO Expert
For my whole life, I’ve loved puzzles. I’ve always liked figuring out how things fit together. Not in a vague, resume-bullet “I’m a problem solver” way. In a genuine, slightly obsessive way. Give me a system with a lot of moving parts and a result that’s supposed to happen, and I want to know why it isn’t happening yet.
That puzzle-solving instinct runs throughout my career, even though the path itself wasn’t a straight line.
In college, I pursued all things visual. I’ve always appreciated visual aesthetics, so I studied graphic design and web design formally, while teaching myself about the art of photography and starting a small photography business.
After this, a job in manufacturing taught me to look beyond the finished product and examine the process behind it, looking for ways to take something from “good enough” to “the best it can be.” Manufacturing, you ask? Yes, for reasons that made sense in my twenties, like getting married and needing to pay rent, I spent a few years doing quality assurance at an FDA-regulated facility. I found that this satisfied the “puzzling itch” in a way I hadn’t anticipated.
At its heart, quality assurance work is process optimization work: writing SOPs (standard operating procedures), finding where a process breaks down, and tightening it until it runs the way it’s supposed to. And I loved that part more than I expected to. My time in quality assurance taught me more about how to think in systems, to spot the inefficiency hiding in a process everyone assumed was fine, and to be a little stubborn about optimizing something even when “good enough” would have been fine to most.
My next career move, working in-house at a large, family-owned company, taught me something even more important about digital marketing and solving puzzles. During this time, I essentially became the entire in-house marketing department for two different businesses within the company. And I do mean the entire marketing department: product photography, graphic design, brochures, blog articles, website management, whatever needed doing that week.
Frankly, it was a lot, but it taught me something plainly which I bring to my current role as an SEO expert: great products and good creative work only go so far if nobody can find the business online.
Your website can look amazing, but if no one can see it, that beautiful site isn’t helping your business.
I found this is especially true in e-commerce, both B2B and B2C. For this reason, SEO kept gaining more of my attention until it was obviously the thing I should be doing full time.
The next career move let me focus on SEO full time at a very large organization with a lot of websites to manage. It brought my creative and analytical instincts together: seeing how individual pieces fit into a much bigger system, testing a change, and watching what happens across a data set large enough to reveal patterns I couldn’t see before.
Over the past 14 years, I’ve studied SEO, put it into practice, and taught others how it can help their websites reach more people. It’s become the ultimate puzzle for me, drawing on the skills I’ve developed at every stage of that winding path. Watching organic traffic grow, and knowing that growth means a business reaching more of the people who need it, is still one of the most satisfying parts of this work.
What Working at Scale Actually Taught Me
Working with so many websites gave me the chance to see patterns I might have missed working on just one. I could make a similar change across dozens of sites, watch what happened, and get a clearer picture of what consistently helped businesses in a particular industry.
That experience shapes the work I do with small businesses today. Many of the same SEO fundamentals apply whether you’re managing dozens of websites or helping one local business get found. Seeing those principles at work again and again taught me where to focus, what to question, and which changes were worth the effort.
Every business still has its own puzzles to solve. But the years of testing and learning give me a stronger starting point for yours. I bring that experience to figuring out what your website needs, so we can spend less time guessing and more time on the work most likely to make a difference.
Why I Started Viking Search Marketing
Here’s what I want small business owners to know: you don’t always need an elaborate SEO campaign to start seeing results. A complete Google Business Profile and a useful website can do more than you might expect, because people often search online before deciding whom to call.
Plenty of genuinely good businesses are still nearly invisible online. Not because they’re doing anything wrong. Just because nobody’s had the time to make sure people can find them.
I understand why. Running a business already takes everything you’ve got. Learning an entirely new discipline on top of that isn’t realistic for most owners, and it shouldn’t have to be. That’s the gap Viking Search Marketing exists to close: helping small businesses use the time and resources they already have wisely, so they show up for the people already searching for what they offer.
I’d Rather Bring in an Expert Than Wing It
Here’s something I genuinely enjoy about running Viking Search Marketing this way: I’m the SEO expert. That part’s on me, and I own it. But SEO isn’t the only piece of getting a business found and chosen online, and I don’t pretend it is. When a project needs something outside that lane, I don’t guess and I don’t fake it. I bring in people I already know and trust, people I’ve actually worked with on past projects and jobs, not names pulled off a list.
Every project gets whoever it actually needs: no more, no less. A paid search and paid ads person for a project that needs paid media. A UI/UX person when the real problem turns out to be usability, not SEO. An analytics expert when GA4 needs to be set up the right way, not just installed. Someone who knows cybersecurity, inside and out, when that’s the gap. That’s the bench: people I trust because I’ve already watched them do good work, not people I’m hoping will work out or do a job that is simply “good enough.”
That’s the real difference between a crew and a department. A department is whoever’s already there. A crew is whoever’s truly needed, hand-picked for the adventure ahead.
Find the piece that’s missing, bring in the person who has it, put it back together. That’s the puzzle that Viking Search Marketing will solve again and again.
-Dane
Got a puzzle of your own? If your business is hard to find online, I’d love to hear about it.