A little bit more about me...

In the summer of 2008, just before my final year of study at Lancaster University, I got in touch with what seemed like every marketing agency in the North of England asking for some work experience to assist me with my Marketing degree. Two of them got back to me. One had some work and invited me in for a coffee. That agency was Stickyeyes, who did something called “SEO”. I hurriedly looked up the definition of SEO, found myself completely confused but went along for the chat anyway.

Within a week I was sat in their office with a desk and computer, getting taught all about how to build links and how these links would help improve the search engine rankings of our clients, giving them more traffic. It was a world away from the more traditional marketing and advertising techniques that I’d been taught at university, but it was work experience and I was getting paid for it too! I couldn’t believe my luck. The summer came to an end and I went back to tell my tutors all about this interesting agency that I’d been working for, and lo and behold, none of them had even heard of SEO. I was left wondering what on earth I’d gotten myself in for!

Graduation soon approached and I found myself wholly unenthused by the traditional advertising agency graduate schemes that we were all being pushed towards. I’d had a taste of working for an upcoming digital marketing agency and wanted to explore it further. I got back in touch with Stickyeyes and luckily the team had expanded and they were still in recruitment mode, so I was back sat at that faithful old desk building links again. My full-time career in SEO had officially started. I spent three years at Stickyeyes, progressing to SEO Team Leader which involved me overseeing a small group of my fellow link builders and helping develop processes within the team, however after a while it was time to move on and expand my knowledge beyond the off-site element of SEO.

For the next two years I worked for a small digital design agency called Coolpink, which sadly doesn’t exist anymore. I worked under some great people at Coolpink and developed my knowledge into new areas of SEO, becoming an all-rounder and even having my first taste of client meetings and new business pitches. At this point I felt like I was really becoming a “proper” SEO able to competently put together strategies for clients which took into account core technical, content and link building components. I also started to learn about these deadly things called Panda and Penguin. Unbeknownst to me, some of the stuff I’d been taught up until this point was on the sketchier side of the fence when it comes to SEO (let’s say it was “grey hat”) and I subsequently had a bit of a job on my hands cleaning up various bits of over-optimisation and spammy link profiles when certain algorithm updates rolled round. Lesson learned!

The next move for me was a big one and to date has been the longest spell of my whole career. I moved to Search Laboratory as SEO Account Manager, keen to test myself in a bigger agency environment and on more varied and challenging clients. I spent seven years at Search Lab working in two SEO roles, the aforementioned Account Manager and then progressing into a team management role as Head of Technical SEO. This was new ground for me as it involved leading a team with more responsibility than I’d been used to, and brought with it new areas of development in my skillset, learning how to manage workloads of an entire team, develop new processes and ensure we stayed on the cutting-edge of SEO service for our clients. I also became involved in discussions around the agency structure, developing our toolset and running tests to prove or disprove SEO theory (one of which was published in Semrush and Moz).

The final part of my career to date involved me leaving Search Lab with a heavy heart and spending a short time as SEO Associate Director at Modo25, reuniting with some ex-colleagues and helping develop the SEO offering for the agency, before moving onto connective3 as Group Head of Organic Search. At connective3 I revamped our SEO service, aligning it with content strategy and digital PR to join the dots between the three disciplines and improving the service we offered our clients. Then in December 2023, more than fifteen years after that first batch of cold calls went out, I decided to leave full-time agency life and launch my own freelance SEO consultancy.

I’m excited by what this opportunity can bring for me, as I have developed a lot of skills throughout my career and now keen to help clients directly with their SEO growth plans. If you’ve been patient enough to read this partly self-indulgent biography then I think it’s only fair that I hear a bit more about you and what you’re looking for, so feel free to get in touch with me for a chat