The title says twenty, but the exact count says seventeen. Graphemics has been around since 2009, so in 2026 it’s 17 years, and I prefer date math over a round number. What follows is the real journey—what I learned at each stage—and one uncomfortable data point at the end I wasn’t planning to include.
2009: I start at an online travel agency, in Portuguese
My first job in digital marketing wasn’t in Spanish. I joined BestDay Travel as a Portuguese Web Content Coordinator. I wrote and edited copy for Brazilian travelers who wanted to visit the Mexican Caribbean.
That start shaped me for good: you don’t translate a text—you rewrite it for the reader. And content without search behind it is just decoration. That same year Graphemics was born, in parallel, with my first local clients.
2009 to 2016: seven years inside a large company
I moved through roles as SEO analyst, SEO coordinator, and SEO assistant manager, owning the SEO strategy for México, Brasil, Argentina, Colombia, Chile y
Uruguay. Six countries, six ways to search for the same hotel.
Two lessons I still use:
- The same intent is worded differently in every country. What in Mexico is “hotel todo incluido” gets searched differently and in a different order in Brazil. Copying a strategy from one country to another costs months.
- Measure before you opine. In a company with a real budget, nobody buys “I think it works.” You learn fast to bring the numbers.
2016 and 2017: Brazil again, from the other side
I led digital marketing at QuestionPro as country manager for
Brazil. It was my first time selling software instead of travel, and it taught me to treat positioning as a full funnel, not a keyword list.
2017 to 2020: testing with my own businesses
Advising others is easy until it’s your own money. I launched two businesses to
test at home:
- Cyclope Drones, aerial photography and inspection with drones in
Cancún and Playa del Carmen. - Cancún MakeUp and Hair, makeup and hair for weddings,
which I ran from 2017 to 2020.
In both, clients came through organic search, without paying for ads.
It was the proof I needed: I’ve lived what I recommend with my own money.
The clients who taught me more than any course
Long-run cases matter more than the flashy ones, and these are the ones I can
share:
- A wedding photography company in the Riviera Maya: a client
since 2009 and still active. Seventeen years with the same person is the best
review possible. - America Car Rental: more than ten years of Google Ads, with campaigns
for 19 cities and around 200 campaigns, each destination with its own localization. - Cancún Cosmetic Dentistry: more than eight years building the brand
on YouTube. - GMB Broker: a six-year relationship, including pulling them out of a
hack with their site and Meta and Google accounts compromised.
The common thread is staying power. A client who stays ten years doesn’t stay
for a pretty report—they stay because the work shows up in sales.
What changed in seventeen years
The tools changed: from directories and forums to YouTube, and from there to
AI-shaped results. The weight of Google’s map in local searches shifted, and today it
decides many visits before anyone opens a website.
What hasn’t changed: people want a precise answer, and the page that delivers it first and best wins. Every time someone promised me a shortcut,
underneath it was just a new version of the same idea, poorly explained.
What I’d tell my 2009 self
First, stop chasing the latest tactic. Almost everything that felt urgent
in 2009 is a footnote now, and what has always worked is boring: understand what
people are searching for, write the best answer, and let time do its work.
Second, document more. Many of the decisions over these years worked out by
intuition and never got written down, which forces you to relearn the same thing each
time. This series of articles, with numbers and dates, is partly how I’m fixing it.
Third, choose clients well. Good work comes from a relationship where the
client shares real numbers and accepts that results take time. With someone asking
for miracles in a month, burnout shows up before any ranking.
Why Cancún
It’s an odd market, which makes it interesting: international tourism in several
languages, real estate for foreign buyers, healthcare for traveling patients, and
local businesses that depend on being found on the map. If you can rank here, you
learn to speak to different audiences from a single city—and that mix has taught me
the most.
The uncomfortable data point: our own site
I checked Search Console for graphemics.net before publishing this. In the last
180 days (through October 4, 2026), searches that combine “SEO” and
“Cancún” gave us 15 variants, 2.273 impressions, and zero clicks.
The breakdown:
- “seo cancun”: 572 impressions, average position 13,6.
- “seo en cancun”: 467 impressions, average position 22,2.
- “agencia seo cancun”: 387 impressions, average position 40,6.
An SEO agency whose own site doesn’t show on page one for
“agencia SEO Cancún.” It hurts to write that. But it’s the classic cobbler’s
shoes: time goes into client sites and our own gets pushed back. We’re fixing
it with a page built for that query, and we’ll share the before-and-after numbers.
What I’m taking away, in four lines
- The client’s language matters more than the tool.
- Results are measured in years, not weeks.
- If you haven’t tested it in your own business, don’t recommend it.
- A client who stays is the one result you can’t dress up.
If it’s your call who runs your marketing
Ask for cases with dates, not logos. Ask how long each client has been with them and what
happened when something went wrong. And be wary of anyone who guarantees the top spot
on a fixed timeline.
If you have a business in Cancún or in the Riviera Maya and want a candid read on
what’s happening with your visibility, write to us. We’ll tell you what
we see, with data from your own site, no strings attached.
Dates and cases from the author’s track record. Search figures from Google Search
Console for graphemics.net, period from April 7 to October 4, 2026; updated daily.
Versión en español: Veinte años haciendo marketing en Cancún
