I teach small business owners how get their website
on Google page 1 and in Ai Overviews by making SEO
(AEO, GEO) simple to understand and implement.
HELLO,
I'M YOUR NEW BIGGEST FAN
I’m Mel—
a former ad-girl
turned successful business owner
turned marketing educator.
I’ve come full circle.
For years, I’ve watched fellow small business owners struggle with the same problem: Marketing. Brilliant, talented people with so much to offer are burning themselves out trying to find clients and keep a full pipeline.They're exhausted from posting on Instagram all day, learning a new algorithm, second-guessing whether they should be on Facebook, TikTok, or the next new social platform.
That’s why I created MEL, MY SEO FRIEND. To give small business owners, creatives, and entrepreneurs the same freedom I've found: The freedom that comes when your marketing foundation is strong, sustainable, and built to last.
Let’s make your dream business a reality together!
Mel
Before Mel Zaelich taught SEO, she used these same strategies to grow her interior design business — earning national and local recognition and media features like these.
ABOUT MEL ZAELICH
Although Mel Zaelich may be a newer name in the SEO industry landscape, she is far from new to SEO.
After spending 20 years in advertising and marketing, Mel recognized early that search would become one of the most important growth channels for small businesses. So when she launched her own company, Happy Place Interiors in 2016, she invested in SEO immediately by hiring a local SEO consultant, optimizing her website, and letting SEO generate nearly 90% of her leads for ten straight years.
The strategy worked.
Her website has held Page 1 rankings for years, appears in AI Overviews, and is now surfacing inside ChatGPT’s search results, a milestone that many small business owners dream of.
But the more success Mel experienced, the more she noticed something: her peers, brilliant small business owners, were struggling. Not because they lacked talent, but because SEO felt complicated, technical, and out of reach.
Mel wanted to change that.
As she continued studying SEO under leaders like Neil Patel, Semrush, HubSpot, and Search Engine Journal, she stayed plugged into the newest evolutions of SEO, including AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization).
While developing a course to help small business owners simplify their marketing and get results like hers, she discovered a defining pattern: Every SEO task, old, new, technical, or simple, falls into one of three categories.
Your business must be:
Seen. Trusted. Relevant.
By defining outcomes and goals, rather than tasks, SEO becomes simplified, more strategic and much more doable for small business owners.
This simple, but industry-shifting system, became the foundation of her SEO STAR™ Framework, a modern reframing of SEO into three SEO Success Factors™ that translate the complexity of SEO into language anyone can understand and apply.
Today, Mel actively teaches small business owners how to apply SEO through this framework. Students are gaining visibility faster, understanding exactly why their rankings improve, and building stronger, more strategic websites that perform exceptionally well in the new world of AI-driven search.
In an era defined by AI Overviews and generative search, Mel is emerging as a fresh, needed thought leader that is bringing clarity, strategy, and a profoundly human approach to an industry ready for its next evolution.
WESBITE SEO + Branding:
Driving Awareness for Nonprofits
Mel Zaelich serves on the Board of Directors for Joy Collaborative, a Minneapolis/St. Paul nonprofit that creates amazing spaces for kids with life-limiting conditions.
Drawn to the mission right away, Mel stepped in as Marketing and Creative Design Lead and rebuilt the website from scratch. She partnered with Spacecrafting photography in Minneapolis, MN to capture the heart of the work, refined the messaging to be clear and compelling, and optimized the website for SEO so families, donors, and partners could find the organization online.
For nonprofits, visibility is everything.
A professional, search-optimized website is about building trust, attracting donors, and reaching the people who need your services most.
Since launching the new site in 2022, Joy Collaborative has grown rapidly. Melanie credits founder Mark Ostrom, the board, volunteers, and sponsors for the expansion, but knows that pairing strong branding with SEO made the organization easier to discover, easier to support, and impossible to ignore.
