I've spent 18 years in SEO, an industry that rewrites its own rules every six months and still expects you to have a five-year strategy. If you work in SEO, I already know your Monday mornings. I'm a Senior SEO Strategist and Director of SEO at Intrepid Digital. I build search programmes for businesses large enough that nobody agrees on who owns the robots.txt, but everyone has an opinion when it breaks.

My career has split fairly evenly between agency and in-house. On the agency side, I led SEO for brands including Autotrader, Avis, and Boscolo. I then moved in-house to run the SEO division of a specialist publishing group operating 22 websites and a video-sharing platform, the kind of role where you stop thinking about individual pages and start thinking about systems.

From there I joined Expedia, managing UK & Ireland search, then New Look, where I ran the full online marketing mix (SEO, paid, and affiliates) for one of the UK's largest fashion retailers. From there I moved to dnata Emirates Group, where I led organic search across six B2C travel brands, including Travel Republic, Travelbag, and Emirates Holidays, across more than 54 markets. Large-scale migrations, multi-market complexity, double-digit year-on-year growth in organic visibility. That's where "it depends" stopped being an acceptable answer. It's also where I learned to present organic results to a room full of VPs, right after the PPC team's presentation packed with every data point known to mankind. And I chose to stay in SEO anyway. No regrets. Mostly. Builds character.

At Intrepid Digital, I lead enterprise SEO engagements focused on AI-integrated search strategies, large-scale technical migrations, and connecting content operations to actual search performance, the kind of work where you are expected to have done the audit, written the brief, and explained it to a board who had questions about something completely different.

I also work with venture capital firms on SEO due diligence and pre-acquisition audits, helping investors understand whether the organic performance they're buying actually holds up or just looks good on a dashboard.