About Growth Forensics:
Who We Are & Why This Practice Exists
Angel Diaz
Growth Forensics' founder
Who we are
Hi, I'm Angel, Growth Forensics' Founder
I spent years working inside one of the most competitive organic growth environments in the world. At Canva, organic was not a side channel but a primary growth engine serving hundreds of millions of users across dozens of markets.
What that experience produced was a specific understanding: organic growth does not fail because teams lack effort or intelligence. It fails because no one is looking at the whole system at once. Every practitioner, every agency, every consultant, every in-house lead, is optimising a component. No one is diagnosing the engine.
When I started working with founders and growth leads outside of Canva, I kept encountering the same situation: real investment, real effort, results that did not match. And when I looked carefully at why, the answer was almost never what it looked like from the outside. The visible problem was almost never the structural cause.
That gap, between what looks like the problem and what actually is the problem, is what Growth Forensics exists to close. I built the diagnostic methodology to make that investigation systematic rather than intuitive, and to produce findings that are grounded in evidence rather than experience alone.
Organic Growth Diagnostics is the name I gave to that discipline. It is the methodology that makes the structural diagnosis rigorous rather than intuitive. Growth Forensics is the practice built around it. The practice does four things: it diagnoses organic growth engines to find the structural constraint, builds engines from the correct foundations for companies investing in organic for the first time, fixes the constraints identified in a diagnosis, and leads the organic growth function as a fractional practice where internal capacity does not yet exist.
This practice exists because organic growth fails in a predictable sequence
Most companies investing in organic are not failing because they lack content, links, or effort. They are failing because no one has told them which part of the organic growth engine is broken — and why fixing the wrong part first makes everything else less effective.
Our 10 layer framework
Not sure if this is what your company needs?
Don’t hesitate to reach out. We will discover if an organic growth diagnostic engagement is what your company needs at this stage.
The observation that made this practice necessary
Organic search was changing. Not slowly — structurally. The rules that had reliably produced rankings and traffic for a decade were producing less pipeline per session than they used to, and the gap between effort invested and revenue generated was widening in ways that the standard SEO toolkit had no framework to explain.
Angel Diaz had spent more than a decade inside that toolkit. Five years as SEO lead at Canva — one of the most visited websites in the world — and years before that helping startups and established companies build organic programmes from scratch. He had seen what good looked like at serious scale. He had also seen, at the same time, something he could not reconcile with conventional SEO thinking.
“Companies with technically excellent SEO were still not generating organic pipeline. The content was good. The links were real. The rankings existed. And yet the commercial outcomes were absent. I kept asking why, and the standard answers kept being wrong.”
An organic growth practice. Not an SEO agency
The distinction matters and it is not semantic.
Growth Forensics is not structured like an agency. An SEO agency sells ongoing delivery: content, links, technical optimisation, against a monthly retainer.
Its commercial model depends on continued execution. The incentive is to keep the work running, not to diagnose why the work is not producing the outcomes you hired it to produce.Growth Forensics starts with a structural diagnosis.
The diagnosis identifies the binding constraint and produces the correct intervention sequence. What follows depends on what the engine requires: building the infrastructure where it is missing, fixing the specific constraints the diagnosis identifies, or leading the organic growth function on a fractional basis where senior capacity does not exist internally.
In every case, the starting point is an honest structural assessment, not an activity plan.
The Core Principle
The dossier produced by a Growth Forensics diagnostic is a complete and standalone document. A competent internal team or a well-briefed specialist agency can execute the intervention sequence from it without any further involvement from this practice. We tell you that upfront because it is true, and because an organic growth practice that withholds information to create dependency is not an organic growth practice, it is a retainer with extra steps.
The practice also differs from strategy consulting in one important way: the recommendations are grounded in signal-level evidence collected during the engagement, not in frameworks applied from outside. Every finding in the dossier is traceable to a specific signal. Every recommendation is connected to a specific structural gap. There is no generic best practice in the output — only what is true about your engine, and what fixing it requires.
A complete structural assessment of your organic growth engine
The Growth Forensics diagnostic methodology assesses the organic growth engine across ten components. Each component has a defined set of signals — 10 to 16 per component, 122 in total — that are assessed individually, aggregated into a component-level state (Healthy, Fragile, Blocking, or Missing), and then interpreted in the context of the full engine.
The ten components are:
01 Narrative & Positioning — Is your market position encoded consistently across every organic surface?
02 Accessibility — Can search engines reliably find, crawl, and index your content?
03 Category Presence — Do you exist in the results buyers use before they know which vendors to evaluate?
04 Demand Match — Is the traffic your engine attracts composed of buyers, or of an audience that will not convert?
05 Authority Flow — Is the authority your domain has earned flowing toward the pages that need to rank?
06 Conversion Architecture — When the right buyers arrive, does the page experience convert them?
07 Trust — What does a buyer find when they search your name to validate their initial impression?
08 AI Visibility — Does your company appear when buyers use AI assistants to research the category?
09 Operating System — Does your team have the skills, systems, and prioritisation to run and improve the engine over time?
10 Expansion — Is the engine architecturally ready to extend into new geographies or audience segments?
What the dossier contains
The output of the diagnostic is a dossier — a document that covers every component in full. For each component: what was assessed and why, what the signals show, what the finding is, and what the recommendation is. Each signal assessment is supported by evidence — data exports, screenshots, annotated crawl data, and where data does not yet exist, explicit instructions for what needs to be produced and by whom.
The dossier also contains an intervention sequence — the order in which constraints should be addressed to produce compounding results rather than parallel activity with no structural logic. Addressing a Conversion Architecture problem before a Category Presence problem is addressed produces marginal results. The intervention sequence prevents that. It is one of the most practically useful things in the document.
What changes after the diagnostic
The leadership team has a precise answer to the question they have almost certainly been asking: why is organic not producing more pipeline?
Not a hypothesis, not a best guess informed by industry benchmarks, but a signal-level answer with the constraint named, the evidence for it documented, and the sequence for addressing it defined. The agency or internal team has a brief that is more specific than anything they have been given before. Not ‘produce more content’ or ‘improve the technical SEO’, but a component-level prioritisation that tells them exactly which part of the engine needs attention first, what signals need to move, and what good looks like when they do.
From the diagnostic, there are four possible paths forward. The team self-executes the intervention sequence using the dossier as the brief. Growth Forensics leads the Engine Build where the infrastructure identified as missing needs to be constructed from scratch. Growth Forensics leads the Organic Growth Fix where specific structural constraints need specialist resolution.
Or Growth Forensics acts as fractional organic growth lead, providing ongoing strategic direction, execution oversight, and leadership of the function until the team can own it independently.All four paths start from the same place: a structural diagnosis that tells the team exactly what the engine requires, in what order, and why.