About WhatIsSEO

Two decades in search, most of it running my own business, starting early enough that the job barely had a name and Google still rewarded things that would get a site removed today. I have watched every technique that ever worked stop working, which is the part nobody can shortcut and the part that decides what I recommend to you.

I started in television in London, working on search and digital for The Underwater Channel, a specialist TV channel run by the video platform Bablegum. This was the period when media companies were first working out that a website was not a brochure, and that a whole audience would arrive through search rather than the schedule. Doing it for a channel with a real broadcast audience is where I learned to work at scale and under scrutiny.

Then I stopped doing it for other people and did it for myself. From 2009 to 2014 I ran my own online retail businesses, building brands from nothing in webcams, LED lighting and electronic cigarettes. Every one of them was built on organic search. Those were not gentle categories either. Electronic cigarettes in particular were about as competitive as UK ecommerce got, with advertising restrictions that made paid acquisition largely unavailable, so organic was not a channel among several. It was the whole business.

That period taught me something a purely agency career would not have. I was selling on Amazon as well as on my own sites, and Amazon holds a certificate in my name for being a top seller over a Christmas trading period — the point in the year when getting it wrong is most expensive and there is no time to recover. Ranking on Amazon is a different algorithm from Google, with different signals and a much shorter route from position to revenue, and learning to do both is why I am comfortable saying I know what it takes rather than what the guides say.

That is the difference between me and a trainer who has only ever consulted. I have had my own money on the line, in markets where getting the SEO wrong meant no revenue that month rather than an awkward client call.

Along the way I have worked across trades, ecommerce, professional services and local operators. Some of that was under my own name, most of it as SEO-Professional.co.uk. The Google Business Profile carries 45 reviews at a 5.0 average, and they are public and not editable by me.

WhatIsSEO is that same business under a clearer name. Not a new agency with no history behind it, and not a rebrand hiding anything either. The domain and the branding changed because "what is SEO" is the question people actually type, and I would rather own the question than a job title.