My background, before EMGI

I studied Digital Technology and Solutions at BPP University in London and worked at EY in technology consulting at the same time. That period taught me how enterprise software is actually evaluated, how procurement cycles run, and how mid-market and enterprise buyers really think about vendor selection. None of that came from reading SEO blogs. It came from being inside the room.

A quick note on the name. My legal name is Matt Shirley but in the industry I go by Matt Emgi. That’s how I’m credited in podcasts, articles, quotes, LinkedIn, and conferences. It started as a brand shorthand and stuck.

How EMGI started

I started freelancing in SEO at the end of 2021, building my own affiliate site about SaaS and software. I took it from zero to 10K visitors a month by writing manually, publishing constantly, and learning how to earn editorial backlinks at the same time. That site is what taught me the actual mechanics. Not the theory.

The pivotal moment came in mid-2022. I wrote a guest post that got published on VentureBeat. The team at one of the SaaS companies covered in the article read it, liked how I wrote, and headhunted me to run their freelance content marketing. That client was ArticleForge, an AI writing tool out of the US. Over the next year I tripled the keywords they ranked for. More importantly, I learned that publishing strong content into a vacuum doesn’t work. Authority matters. Editorial mentions matter. The category context around your content matters. That experience is what shaped the EMGI thesis.

EMGI launched as a brand in early 2023. The work has been the same since: build off-page authority for SaaS brands across every surface buyers actually use to validate software. Not just Google. Reddit. AI Overviews. ChatGPT. Comparison sites. Industry publications. Newsletters. Communities. Editorial proof. That’s the “Search Everywhere” thesis, and it’s the thing that’s defined the agency since the rebrand.

Four years in numbers

What I was wrong about

I bought into the “Google says it, so it’s true” school for too long. I thought white-hat link building and SEO best practice was enough. It wasn’t. I wasn’t building the editorial authority signal that Google and the AI engines actually use to decide who to surface. Once I understood that, the whole approach changed.

The other thing I was wrong about: I used to think backlinks were the unit of work. Now I think visibility is. Backlinks are still a critical lever, but they’re one of six or seven surfaces buyers actually use to validate a SaaS company. Search Everywhere came out of that lesson.

What Search Everywhere actually means

The way SaaS buyers find and validate software has fractured. They Google, they ask ChatGPT, they scroll Reddit, they read AI Overviews, they check Clutch and G2 and Capterra, they look at LinkedIn for the founder’s posts, they listen to a podcast their peer mentioned. Trust forms across all of those, not just one. A SaaS brand that’s only visible on Google is invisible to a third of its buyers in 2026.

EMGI exists to build the off-page authority across that full surface. The work runs simultaneously across organic SEO, AI citation signals, Reddit, editorial publications, comparison + review platforms, brand mentions, and listicle outreach. Different surfaces compound on each other. A Reddit thread you show up in gets indexed by Google. An editorial backlink gets cited in an AI Overview. A G2 review surfaces in ChatGPT’s shortlist. None of these works in isolation. All of them work together.

The Search Everywhere funnel

How buyers actually validate SaaS in 2026. Three stages, three different trust environments, and where EMGI sits in each. This is the map I use with every new client.

How an EMGI engagement actually works

This is the 90-day sprint we run with every new client. Not because we expect clients to leave at day 90 (most stay two years or more), but because a sprint gives us a real goal and a real milestone. Big results in three months is the baseline. Anything less and the project drifts.

What makes EMGI different (the actual differentiators)

Who works on your account

Where our clients show up

Editorial placements EMGI has secured across SaaS, HR tech, fintech, dev tools, sales, and AI publications. We’ve placed clients in hundreds of domains over four years, and the brand-name press wins are the credibility surface AI search reads first.

What we do · What we don’t

Our original research

Three published research pieces so far. Each one is a category-defining study that signals authority to our clients and to the AI engines that read our work. Two of these are now widely cited by competitors who use the data in their own pitches, which is its own kind of validation.

Where EMGI is going

The three-year vision: be known as the category authority for SaaS Search Everywhere work. The practitioner-led research-driven boutique that mid-market and enterprise SaaS companies choose when they need real expertise, not commodity links. Service businesses, technology businesses, managed service providers — the brands building the next generation of B2B software.

What’s being built next: five or six new pieces of original research by end of 2026. Significant YouTube expansion. More SEO investment in our own site (the hardest thing to do as an SEO agency because the bar is so high, but we’re ready). Continued category-defining work on AI citation, Reddit citation, directory-based authority, and the visibility surfaces nobody else is mapping yet.

EMGI Group · United Kingdom · matt@emgigroup.com · LinkedIn · YouTube