About Dan Shaffer

Dan Shaffer started at WebFX in April 2013 as an internet marketing intern, the summer before he finished his Business Information Systems degree at Messiah University. The company was still called WebpageFX then, and it had no in-house marketing team. When Dan came on full time as a web marketer, his job was the start of one. Most of his early weeks went to writing for the company blog and making content that could earn traffic and links. He had started a personal blog in college to practice writing, and his early bylines included a guest post for Muck Rack on how to evaluate bloggers. He later wrote up what the team learned from a run of infographics that pulled in nearly a million page views and got picked up by Mashable, Forbes, and HuffPost. The lesson he took from it still shapes how he works: ship, measure, improve, repeat.

Over the next decade, he moved from marketing specialist to analyst, then assistant team coach, team lead, and, in 2022, Director of Marketing Operations. That role put attribution at the center of his work. When WebFX surveyed more than 500 business leaders about their marketing plans, Dan’s reaction to their ROI numbers was a question: "Is the data they are using for ROI tracking accurate?" He has argued that real ROI tracking has to follow the whole customer journey, not whatever a single tool reports. He still does this work, connecting SEO.com and WebFX lead data to show where customers actually started. Across those years, the marketing Dan ran brought thousands of clients to WebFX, and he has audited tens of thousands of websites for SEO.

Dan took over SEO.com as Director in 2024 and was promoted to Sr. Director in January 2026. He leads the SEO.com and OmniSEO teams. At SEO.com, he sets SEO strategy and runs content operations. At OmniSEO, WebFX’s AI search visibility platform, he leads marketing, sales, and product management.

In August 2026, Business Intelligence Group named OmniSEO a Technology Market Master in the SEO, GEO & Content Discovery category of its Sales and Marketing Excellence Awards (the Sammys). Dan was quoted in the announcement, describing OmniSEO as "a clear map of your AI visibility landscape" for the businesses it serves. In a 2025 WebFX video on data and technology, he was just as direct about measurement: "You honestly would have a difficult time being competitive without data." Every year, he speaks to classes and student clubs at Messiah University, Shippensburg University, and Penn State about marketing, SEO, answer engine optimization, and using AI at work.

His writing on SEO.com focuses on how AI is changing the way people find and judge businesses. In "The Cold Hard Truth About the New Marketing Funnel," he argues that AI didn’t fit into the old funnel. It "collapsed the top stages into a single event." He calls the AI that now sits between a brand and its buyers the AI mediation layer. His answer is to grow what he calls AI Surface Area: all the public content about a brand, from reviews and video to blogs and social posts, that AI tools draw on when they describe it. He has also written about tracking brand mentions across AI engines and contributed to SEO.com’s expert roundup on how control over AI Overviews could affect businesses.

His advice to students who want to break into marketing: it has never been easier to get started, so just try it. The more you try, the more you learn. He takes a longer view of SEO strategy. When an algorithm update or an AI shift hits, many SEOs chase quick wins to recover. Dan argues that a three-, five-, and ten-year outlook is what sets a business apart over time.

Outside work, Dan is happiest outdoors, usually fishing, and spends as much time as he can with his wife and three kids.