SEO consulting from a practitioner, not an agency
SEO consulting for businesses that have tried the normal route
I started in SEO at the end of 1995. Before Google. Before the term had calcified into a job title, before anyone had built a conference around it or written a book about it or made a course you could sell. I learned the craft when it was still craft. That process has been running for thirty years.
What I have never done in thirty years is help a client, an employer, or my own business recover from a Google algorithm penalty. Not once. The Florida update in 2003 was the last time I adjusted my approach in response to a Google recommendation. Since then I have operated from a single principle: build for users, not for Google’s tolerance. That principle has held through every core algorithm change, every industry panic, every cycle of practitioners telling each other the rules had fundamentally changed. They had not.
If you are looking for SEO services from someone who has never been involved in the problem, that is what I bring.
The client history is range, not status
Mercedes-Benz, Barclays, Commerzbank, Booking.com, B&Q, TomTom, Native Instruments, the Theo Paphitis Retail Group, Game, Eaton Electric, and an advisory role with the UK Government. Each came with a different commercial context, a different technical infrastructure, a different set of internal political constraints, and a different definition of what success actually looked like once you got past the brief.
What that list represents is not brand association. It is thirty years of reading different business situations accurately and intervening at the right level. An automotive brand, a retail bank, a travel platform, a consumer electronics company, a home improvement chain, a navigation technology business, a music software company, a retail portfolio, and the public sector. No two of those required the same approach.
Alongside the client work I have six bootstrapped exits. Not funded, not diluted, not carried to a modest return by someone else’s capital. Bootstrapped. Exits are not common. Bootstrapped exits are rarer still. Six of them means I have built things people wanted to buy, more than once, across different market conditions and different stages of my own career. That is a commercial track record, not just a marketing one.
What separates this from conventional SEO services
I think in systems. Not as a posture or a brand claim. As a genuine description of how my mind works when I look at a business. When I walk into a commercial situation, my instinct is not to ask what is wrong with the SEO in isolation. It is to ask why the revenue is behaving this way, which channel is lying about its contribution, which metric is being optimised at the expense of a different metric nobody is watching, and what the whole picture looks like if you strip out the vanity reporting.
I can read a codebase
I can code. That changes the nature of the work in ways that practitioners at my level usually cannot offer. I can trace a technical SEO issue to its actual root rather than its surface symptom and sit with an engineering team and communicate in terms they take seriously rather than terms they politely tolerate. It materially shortens the distance between strategic recommendation and technical implementation.
I cannot be given a technical explanation that does not hold up
Over 2,500 websites built since 1995. When a developer or an agency tells me something cannot be done, or explains a limitation in terms designed to close the conversation, I know whether the explanation holds. That matters when the technical constraint is the thing standing between a recommendation and a result.
SEO sits inside a commercial system
Channels do not operate in isolation from each other. Teams do not operate in isolation from each other. The commercial system is always the right unit of analysis, and SEO only makes sense when you can see the system it sits inside. That is why I built letsrocc around the Chief Systems Operator concept rather than an SEO services model.
The penalty recovery question
I find the penalty recovery service category instructive. If you are selling recovery, you were involved in the problem. I have never been involved in the problem. The fundamentals have not changed once in thirty years. What has changed is the number of practitioners who build against Google's tolerance rather than user intent, and then sell recovery when the tolerance shifts.
What the SEO consulting work looks like in practice
The current engagement with Verisure illustrates the operating level. Before the first meeting with their digital leadership I had already processed Screaming Frog and SISTRIX data for both verisure.co.uk and verisure.fr. The finding that drove the engagement forward: France had 1,006 internal 4xx errors versus one for the UK. Zero AI Overview citations in France versus 67 for the UK. Visibility that peaked in 2021 and 2022 and had only partially recovered since.
That is a specific, evidenced, commercially serious problem. Verisure listed on Nasdaq Stockholm in 2025. Board-visible technical SEO issues on a listed company’s primary revenue-generating domains are not academic. I did not arrive with a slide deck and a generic framework. I arrived with a diagnosis rooted in the actual data for their actual sites.
That is the operating level. Data first. Evidence first. Commercial framing from the outset. Not a keyword research document. Not a content calendar. Not a monthly reporting cadence designed to justify a retainer. A precise read on what is happening in the site, why it is costing the business money, and what the sequence of fixes should be.
SEO in 2025 and beyond: structure, not tricks
Search is changing. Google is still dominant, but AI platforms now cite web content directly. If your content is not structured for extraction, you become invisible to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and the next wave of AI search.
Semrush studied 300,000 URLs cited by AI platforms. The pattern is clear: content with strong section structure is 22.91% more likely to be cited. Content with clear summaries is 32.83% more likely. Content with stronger E-E-A-T signals shows 30.64% correlation with AI citations.
This is not a new game. It is the same game. Build content that is genuinely useful, structure it so that both humans and machines can extract value from it, and back it with real expertise rather than manufactured authority signals. The businesses that have been doing this well for the last decade are the ones that AI platforms are citing now. The ones that were gaming keyword density and link networks are not.
The principle I have followed since 2003 holds: build for users, not for tolerance. That principle now applies to a broader set of platforms than Google alone.
SEO consulting and website audits
SEO consulting work frequently begins with a technical audit. We provide website audit services across eight dimensions: technical, SEO, performance, conversion, ecommerce, accessibility, security, and content. Each audit is practitioner-led, not AI-generated.
But the audit is one layer. The commercial examination that sits around it is what makes the difference. An SEO audit will tell you that your crawl budget is being wasted on faceted navigation. It will not tell you that the reason nobody fixed it is because the development team reports to a CTO who does not consider SEO a priority, and the marketing team that cares about it has no authority to get engineering time.
The Marketing MRI is the engagement that examines both the technical surface and the organisational system underneath it. SEO is one domain within that examination. The result is a diagnosis you can actually act on.
Who this SEO consulting is for
Ecommerce businesses spending meaningful money on SEO and not getting the commercial return. You have an agency. They send reports. Traffic moves. Revenue does not follow in the way it should.
SaaS businesses where organic is supposed to be a primary acquisition channel and the numbers are not supporting the thesis. The content programme is running. The rankings are not compounding.
PE portfolio companies where the marketing function needs to demonstrate commercial contribution before a transaction. The SEO estate is an asset. It needs to be valued and optimised as one.
Businesses that have changed SEO agencies more than once in three years and the performance curve looks the same. The problem is not the agency. It is the system the agency sits inside.
Businesses where the CTO and CMO disagree about the importance of technical SEO and someone needs to bridge that gap with evidence both sides will accept.
Thirty years of practice. No penalty recoveries.
If your SEO investment is generating activity but not generating commercial confidence, the issue is probably not tactical. Start with an examination of the system. If the problem turns out to be purely technical, a specialist will cost less and we will tell you so.