Matt Edens
Most people who end up in search marketing came up through marketing. I didn't.
Forge Growth is my practice: one expert who owns a company's entire search presence, organic, paid, local, and AI, and answers for the result. When you work with Forge Growth, you work with me.
Matt Edens
Founder, Forge Growth · Boise, ID
Built under pressure, not in a classroom
Before marketing, I spent my career in environments where the cost of a bad call was measured in lives, not click-through rates. Nine years as a Marine Aircraft Rescue and Firefighter. Two deployments to Iraq. Three summers on wildland fire crews. Roughly four years as an emergency paramedic.
Complex systems, incomplete information, high cost of failure.
Pressure reveals everything. Systems survive it.
Search as an environment, not a channel
Most people treat search as a channel, a box to check next to email and social. I treat it as an environment with its own physics: how buyers move, how engines read, how intent forms and resolves. I've done every job in this field myself: specialist, manager, director, executive, across web development, SEO, and paid media. I know how the pieces affect each other because I've owned each one.
You can't build a systems model of something you've only seen from one angle.
Why Forge Growth exists
I founded Forge Growth in late 2025, at an inflection point: AI-generated answers are displacing ranked results, and agentic systems are beginning to search and decide on buyers' behalf. The ground is moving.
The businesses that come out ahead won't be the ones who optimized hardest for 2019.
Belief, then consequence
Marketing should produce revenue, not reports
If it doesn't move revenue, it doesn't survive. Reports are evidence, not the product.
Growth is a system, not disconnected tactics
Tactics in isolation plateau. Systems compound, each layer reinforcing the next over quarters, not weeks.
Judgment beats tools
Clear thinking and accountability keep performance stable when conditions change. Tools are leverage, not strategy.
Performance, accountability, and integrity matter. The rest is noise.
Why one owner
The businesses I work with are multi-market or multi-service, and they expose the truth quickly. Revenue shows up or it doesn't. Most of them have had four vendors each owning a piece of search while nobody owned the outcome. I take the whole thing, and the accountability that comes with it.
Either the work produces revenue, or it doesn't.
Forge Growth isn't built for volume, hype, or shortcuts.
It's built for owners who want clarity, accountability, and systems they can rely on under pressure.
That's the work I do.