What Is a Spirit-Filled Christian SEO Company, Anyway?
This post ranked number one and two in Google for spirit-filled Christian SEO company. That ranking is the reason a man in Houston picked up the phone, and that phone call is the reason my family lives in Texas today. Here is the whole story, because the keyword was never the point.
Originally published 2007. Rewritten and updated September 2026 — the story is unchanged; the page around it needed the work.
Why I Targeted That Keyword
I wrote the original version thinking, plainly, that I would target Christian business owners looking for a website or help with SEO. It worked faster than I expected — numbers one and two in Google in a short time.
But I chose it for a reason that had nothing to do with traffic. Growing up I always attended a Christian church, and I never felt comfortable just being myself there. I did not have the language for it then, but I am an empath, sensitive to people's energy. I would hear the grownups say one thing and feel a completely different vibe.
So when I built Deerstone, I started each day before work giving thanks to the Creator and meditating on gratitude. Gratitude is the fuel that supplies the faith to see the unseen, and seeing it has always pushed me to act when an opportunity shows up. Whether success becomes real is still my choice to make.
The Hack That Set Everything Up
I was good at building sites in HTML and Dreamweaver, and I could see how popular WordPress blogs were becoming, so I migrated my own site over and started writing.
What I did not know was how to properly secure a WordPress site. I got hacked. More than once.
That matters to the story, and it is also why WordPress security is something we handle for clients rather than leave to chance. I learned that lesson the expensive way, on my own business.
God Works in Mysterious Ways
I got a phone call from a custom software company called Espresso Moon LLC, in Houston, Texas, asking about SEO services. The owner, Doug Wheeler, found me because my site was ranked first and second for Christian SEO website design company.
The timing was almost absurd. I needed exactly what they had: Doug and the Espresso Moon team cleaned the malware off my WordPress site and got me back in business. Over the next five years our companies worked together on all kinds of projects, remotely, while I was still living in Santa Rosa, California.
Business was good. Life felt settled enough that I assumed nothing crazy would happen again — because God is in control and protects his children, right?
The Calm Before the Tubbs Firestorm
I will always remember my dad calling to ask me to pick up the last of my boxes from his house. Three days before everything in them would have been gone.
I did not want to make the drive. There was family drama and I was put off by the whole idea. But something in me said go, so I went, and I came back with my high school yearbook, a stack of irreplaceable photographs, childhood things, and all my military gear.
God is always speaking. Whether we respond is the part left to us.
My parents lived in separate homes a few miles apart, one off Riebli Road and one off Mark West. The Tubbs Fire took both of them in October 2017.
Our house survived. We had no power for seven days and I could not work, with four terrified children who were certain their things were about to burn like grandma and grandpa's had. We were a couple of miles north of Coffee Park. I watched the wealthiest parts of my hometown disappear overnight.
What the Fire Took After the Fire
I had saved money for a rainy day. It turned out to be a fire day.
I lost a lot of clients — not to competitors, but because their businesses or their homes no longer existed, or because they left the state entirely.
A few months later our landlords told us they were moving back into the house we had rented for five years. In a fair rental market that is an inconvenience. In Sonoma County after the fires, it was not. There was nothing affordable left.
A friend offered us a house in Louisiana, so we took the leap and moved everything we owned across the country. When we arrived we could not move in. The place had a massive flea infestation.
I found myself crying out to God for a miracle, asking him to find us a home.
Houston
We decided to go back to Houston. We knew the Espresso Moon team there, the housing was affordable, and it was big enough for a family of six.
We planted the company in Cypress, Texas, about thirty minutes north of downtown Houston. It is still where we work from, and it is why our Cypress and Houston and Houston clients get somebody local, and why our Sonoma County clients still get somebody who knows exactly what happened there.
It was the hardest move of my life: 2,100 miles with my wife, four kids and the cat in a minivan. Looking back, the obstacles were not obstacles. They were detours in the right direction.
So What Is a Spirit-Filled Christian SEO Company?
It is not a sales angle and it never was. It means the work is done a particular way: we tell you the truth about what your site needs even when the truth costs us the job, we do not buy links or make guarantees nobody can keep, and we do not take work we do not believe will help you.
It also means I believe a keyword ranking is never just a keyword ranking. Mine put a phone call in front of a man in Houston who ended up rescuing my business and, three years later, giving my family somewhere to land.
If you feel like the walls are closing in and there is nothing but darkness around you, do not give up. Amazing things are just around the corner. Trust and believe in who you are. God has always had my family's back, and he will have yours too.
One More Thing
If you run a business and want someone who will tell you the truth about what your site actually needs — including when the answer is cheaper than you expected — that is the whole offer.