The person behind your marketing actually does the marketing.
Birchwood Digital is a small Buffalo studio built on one observation: most small businesses get lost inside big agencies. We stay small on purpose, tell you the truth about your budget, and build our own tools.
Michael Villari
Michael runs every Birchwood engagement himself, from the first keyword map to the monthly report. He started ranking websites in 2017, took an agency site to #1 in Buffalo on a deliberately terrible domain name to prove exact-match domains are a myth, and has since put dental practices, contractors, an architecture firm in New Delhi, and a crypto platform on page one.
Along the way he started writing software: first tools to run Birchwood faster, then full native apps. Today the agency runs on lead-scanning, SEO-research, social-planning, and bookkeeping software he built, which is why client hubs and automations here are custom code rather than rented templates.
When you call, you talk to him. When something needs fixing, he is the one who fixes it.
Michael is there for your toughest jobs. The keywords he is proudest of were the hard ones: page one for “bitcoin”, a term with more than seven million searches a month; most of the top finance and loan keywords in the United States as Assisting Regional Manager for the US market at Financer.com; #1 for “Best Musician of 2019” for every month of that year; and #3 for “best musician” itself, against the entire internet. Bring him the campaign nobody could crack. That is the part of the job he likes most.
Marketing should pay for itself. Everything else follows.
The 5x rule
Every client should get at least five times what they pay us back in revenue. If a plan cannot clearly get there, we say so before you spend, even if that means a smaller engagement or none at all.
No lock-in, ever
Month to month. We earn next month with what happened this month. A contract that makes leaving harder than staying is a confession that the work will not speak for itself.
Radical transparency
Budgets discussed openly. Rankings, ad spend, and leads visible in your own dashboard. Plain-English reporting with every number traced to its source. No black boxes, no “proprietary systems.”
Buy the boring, build the edge
We rent proven tools for commodity work and spend our build hours where they matter: your website, your keyword strategy, your conversion tracking, and the hub that holds it together.
Finished things, not pitches
Our outreach offers a demo site, an audit, or a working tool, never a sales deck. The first call is a working session about your business, not an ambush.
Focus beats size
A tailored campaign for your exact market beats a big-agency template every time. A short client list is the feature, not the limitation.
Fifteen apps, designed and shipped in-house.
Native iOS and macOS software, privacy-first and local-first, built with the same discipline we bring to client work. Each card says what the app does and what it proves about how we work for you.
Apps we ship
HomeBrain
Your whole household, cataloged and protected. On-device VIN and plate scanning, automatic recall checks, a Face ID document vault, and a one-tap insurance snapshot.
Where Did I Park?
One tap when you park, zero panic when you return. Landmark photos, sign-scanning meter timers, and walk-back directions. No account, no server, no tracking.
Vantage
A local-first cockpit for your life’s data: fast capture, durable personal telemetry, and analysis where every insight traces back to the entries behind it.
Memento
Turns three-hour videos into briefs with a TL;DR, action items, and quotes, every line linked to its timestamp. Ask the video questions and pin the answers.
Political Watch
A live dashboard for Congress, the courts, and the executive branch, with an analyst that writes a plain-English briefing every session. Nothing stored.
Stackbook
Every website, API, and service a project depends on, in one glanceable reference. Tribal knowledge written down, with secrets deliberately left out.
Tools that run Birchwood
Pipeline
Scans the web for businesses with outdated websites, qualifies them, and drafts outreach for human review. Every email that goes out is one a person approved.
Poach
Competitive SEO research: backlink profiles, rankings, and traffic estimates for any domain, cached and compared over time at per-report cost instead of a $249-a-month seat.
Postline
A social media planner with per-platform previews, a drag-to-reschedule calendar, and a production board that shows which posts still need artwork.
Harbormaster
Every project drawn as a ship in a night harbor, straight from git: what is committed, what is drifting, what has gone quiet. Click a ship for its dossier.
Birchwood Ledger
Runs the tax side of the business: what to set aside from each payment, what is due next, who owes what, and what to type into the return in April.
Side projects, because craft
Perch
A tiny aviary that lives on your Dock. Twelve bird species by day, owls by night, each one animated, none of them repeating. Entirely local.
Quiet Feed
A browser extension that removes the Facebook home feed and replaces it with a quote. Groups, messages, and marketplace keep working.
Ask Clawd
A desktop AI companion that sits on top of your windows. Click it to chat, pick your model, and keep your API key in the system keychain, never in the app.
Dark Clawd
A pixel-art desktop companion and launcher. Each part of the sprite opens a different tool, and dragging never fights the click targets.
Want a one-pager? The first six link to a PDF. Want one of your own? See the app portfolio or tell us the idea, and we will give you an honest read on scope, cost, and whether it should be an app at all.
Building, measuring, and telling the truth about both.
Ranking since
Nine years of white-hat SEO, Google Ads, and websites that convert. The Bitcoin and New Delhi results came from doing the fundamentals well, not from tricks.
Number, not a menu
One price sized to your budget with tool costs included. No line items, no setup surprises, no hourly billing. It grows only when results have earned it.
Custom code
Websites are hand-coded. The client hub is ours. Automations are written, not dragged from a template library. Your data walks out with you any day.
We use our own systems
Birchwood runs on the same kind of hub, automations, and tracking we install for you. They work because we depend on them.
Want to work with people who treat your budget like their own?
A free, honest assessment of where your marketing stands and what we would do differently. If we are not the right fit, we will say so and point you somewhere better.
No contracts. Month to month. One point of contact.