Green Vault Systems — what we found

I measured your search category, your site and your competitors. Most of what I found argues against hiring anyone, so I have put that part first.

Start here, because you can check it in thirty seconds

22 URLs on your domain still rank in Google and every one returns “not found”. They were the spare-parts listings on your old Shopify store — conveyor belts, motor drivers, thermocouples. Open any one of them and you will see it.

Now the part most people would leave out: it is worth about 61 visits a month. Not the 25,670 monthly searches those keywords carry — none of them ranks in the top ten, so almost nobody arrives. If someone quotes you that bigger number, they are selling you a project. It is half a day of work and it matters because broken doors are broken, not because it is large.

1Redirect each of the 22 dead URLs to the closest page that still exists. Your existing webmaster can do this in an afternoon in the WordPress admin. Do it whether or not we ever speak.

2Fix the /about/ page. It renders for a human and returns a server error to Google. That is a plugin or PHP fault sitting in your host’s error log right now, and it is an hour’s work for whoever maintains the site.

3Claim the 35 industry directory listings you are missing. You are on 6 of 41 I checked. It is free, it is tedious, and nobody should charge you much for it.

What I would not do, and what saying so costs me

I would not run Google Ads on your category. All 27 cannabis-equipment terms together are 3,790 searches a month at roughly $0.00 a click. A zero cost per click is not a bargain, it is a signal — either the intent is not commercial or the platform restricts the category. Ads management is billable work I am declining.

I would not rebuild the product catalogue. The product section is gone from your CMS entirely — your own sitemap index proves it. Restoring it is a rebuild wearing the costume of a fix. Redirect instead. A rebuild is the larger engagement.

I would not redesign the site first. I have already built you a redesign, and it is still not the first thing I would do. The dead URLs and the 3-of-40 answer-engine result are worth more than the design. I am arguing against my own shipped work.

And I would not buy links. Your backlink profile is smaller than Paxiom’s and cleaner than most — zero broken links, and you outrank two of the six competitors I measured. Paxiom’s lead is mostly its own sister companies linking to each other, which is not something anyone can sell you.

The diagnosis, in one paragraph

Your website is not the problem and neither is your SEO. You rank #2 for “cannabis packaging machines”, the exact phrase a buyer would type, and it is searched about 70 times a month. The ceiling is the category, not the execution: all 27 terms are 3,790 searches, while general packaging automation next door is 136,970 at $12–$91 a click — roughly 36 times the addressable demand for the same machine. And the companies holding page one in your own category are not Paxiom or ActionPac. They are customconesusa and amazon. The competitor set you think you have is not the competitor set you have.

What I would actually propose

Not a retainer with a list of deliverables. A sequence where each stage has to earn the next one, and where you can stop after any of them.

0You, free. The three fixes above. Nothing below is worth doing until they are done.

1Measure before optimising. GA4 and Search Console in your Google Cloud project, server-side tagging into your BigQuery, and a baseline of the zero-click surface. Nothing gets optimised until it is measured.

2Move into the adjacent category — the pages that do not exist yet, structured data, entity resolution. This is where the 36× lives.

3Answer engines, ongoing. You are named in 3 of 40 responses today. That number is the scoreboard, and it gets measured monthly, in public.

The clause that does the work: the warehouse, the pipelines and the dashboards get built in your cloud account, under your billing, and you keep all of it if we stop. An agency that can be fired without its client losing their data has to stay useful. I will put that in writing, because being willing to write it down is the whole signal.

One thing that is already yours for nothing: there are 1,024 licensed Washington producers and processors, 1,169 of them with an email address on file, in a public API the state runs itself. The open-data portal shows 365 of them. The file behind the regulator’s own map has the rest. I have named the endpoint in the report so you can pull it without me.

About the role you are advertising

I saw the Indeed posting — Marketing & Business Development Manager, Mukilteo, $65,000–$80,000. Two observations, neither of them a gotcha.

The twelve responsibilities listed are, in practice, three different jobs: a video producer, a demand-generation marketer and a data engineer. That budget buys one of those done well or three done badly. And the role is not on your own website — /careers/, /jobs/, /employment/ and /join-our-team/ all return 404, with no hiring language on the homepage. You are paying Indeed to advertise a job whose first duty is “manage the Green Vault website and SEO” while the About page returns a server error to Google.

I am not applying. What I do sits alongside a hire rather than instead of one: the measurement, data and search infrastructure built as a system, so that whoever you hire spends their time on the company instead of on the plumbing.

One thing I left out

Your site says 75 years of combined experience. Third-party profiles say 65. I could not resolve which is right, so it is not in the report — I am not putting a number in front of you that I cannot source. Worth fixing on your side, and I mention it because it is the same standard I applied to my own numbers: everything in the report either carries its receipt or is marked unmeasured.

The report is the diagnostic. It shows what I measured, how, and what I could not measure and why.