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A Bit About Me: My Journey Through the SEO Landscape to Leadership
Skip it if you like. But you should know who is telling you what to do, and why other experts trust them.
A short personal history: from traditional sales and marketing, to founding an “un-agency”, to leading enterprise campaigns at the largest independent search agency in Los Angeles, to running SEO for a marketplace with tens of millions of pages. The thread through all of it is explaining SEO to leaders who had exactly the challenges you have today.
Goals
- Show SEO principles applied in real companies, at real scale.
- Trace how SEO strategy has evolved, up to today’s AI search.
- Share what makes communication between SEO people and executives work.
You’ll walk away able to
- Appreciate the strategic value of search from a leadership seat.
- Recognise the challenges every executive hits with SEO.
- See how consistent messaging closes the gap between technical teams and the C-suite.
My SEO journey began unexpectedly. Armed with a background in sales and marketing, I saw digital as just another channel. The deeper I went, the clearer it became that search was not a tactic. It was a fundamental driver of growth and visibility.
At the agency I learned how little the channel was understood, by everyone from procurement to in-house marketers. There are metrics, and then there are metrics that matter. Listening to some agencies pontificate on their successes, you wouldn’t know the difference.
The journey, in six stops
Sales and marketing roots
Traditional marketing communications first. Search arrived as “another channel” and quickly became the main event.
The “un-agency”
Founded an agency built on user-first strategy across traditional and online channels. Early clients were won with clear metrics, elbow grease and a little British charm.
Corporate America, working with family
VP of Brand Communications: big ideas, change, and a website build. (Advice on working for family: don’t.)
The Search Agency, Los Angeles
Large-scale campaigns for national and multinational brands, starting with re-architecting a small-business directory and automating 250,000+ small-business sites. Built a consistent messaging framework so everyone from the C-suite to the front line understood what SEO was for.
Homes.com
VP of SEO and then performance marketing for a site with tens of millions of pages. The lesson: what holds enterprise SEO back is usually internal (silos, priorities, budgets), not the website.
Today: fractional leadership, GEO and MAPS
Advising agencies, start-ups and multinational brands on SEO, content and AI visibility, and writing the book you’re reading about.
The latest stretch of the journey is the one this site reflects: working as a fractional SEO and GEO lead, and building The MAPS Method, a framework for making a brand understood, trusted, found and usable by people and machines. The lesson from 25 years carried straight over. Leaders didn’t need more jargon when the acronym was SEO, and they don’t need more now that it’s GEO.
- Landing key clients with early SEO principles
- Tearing down a building while constructing a new one on the same plot: SEO at scale
- Why SEO loses the budget fight, and what changes when it owns one
- The messaging framework that worked at every level of management
- Lessons for today’s executives
In the book.
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