SEO: 11 proof points
Rows on the facts page whose own text or source section carries "SEO". The product name links the page with the full text. All skills.
| Role | Product | Situation | Task | Action | Result | Year | Skills |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing Director, EuroDNS | EuroDNS EuroDNS, an ICANN-accredited international domain registrar specialising in unusual domain extensions. Customers included MailChimp, Lotus F1 and Time Warner. | Four years of decline when Tom joined: traffic dropping, online sales down, a legacy website, and SEO damage left by a previous agency's black-hat work. | Turn it around. | Restructured the marketing department (four direct reports), implemented KPIs and rebooted every marketing channel including the website, in under 8 months. Remediated the black-hat SEO damage. Analysed user flow and redesigned the website and ecommerce funnels. Collected customer feedback and repositioned the product. Launched over 500 new domain extensions, repositioning dry domains with Creative Commons photography of the world. First provider to offer a free SSL certificate with every domain. | Decline reversed. Organic traffic doubled in 12 months. Bounce rate halved, from about 60% to about 30%. | Feb 2013 - Nov 2014 | turnaround, growth, conversion, SEO, funnels, KPIs, launch, marketing, ecommerce, domains, team leadership, international |
| Head of New Media, Host Europe Group | New Media New Media department: all online touchpoints, ecommerce, digital campaigns, email marketing and SaaS dashboards across all brands | Promoted from web designer to management team to take ownership of the end-to-end online presence across multiple brands. | Create the department from scratch and run every online channel across every brand: ecommerce portals, SEO, branding, UX, email marketing, blog, development, copy, creative and reporting. | Built a team of five to six. Established KPIs and web metrics to steer the business. Prioritised the development roadmap and briefed the development teams. Introduced self-service support and pioneered site-building tools. Optimised the support centre. Built the affiliate marketing, content marketing and online ads programmes. Scaled SEO to #1 for "domain names", "web hosting" and "dedicated servers". | 123-reg became the first company to register 1 million .uk domains. Sat on the Senior Management Team and the on-call duty rota, still in his 20s. | Jan 2006 - Jun 2008 | turnaround, SEO, funnels, KPIs, roadmap, 0 to 1, brand, marketing, SaaS, startup, ecommerce, domains, web hosting, team leadership, stakeholders |
| Independent Consultant | independent consultant Remote product and strategy consulting | Moved to Denmark after meeting a Dane on a ski slope; needed to finance the move and Danish studies (Prøve i Dansk 3) and wanted into the Danish startup scene. Former employers Host Europe (UK) and EuroDNS (LUX) needed product and strategy work; Everplaces (DK) was a local startup client. | Deliver product and strategy work remotely from Copenhagen while building a life in a new country. | Briefed senior management, product managers, designers and marketeers. Pitched products; produced user stories, specifications, storyboards and wireframes. Wireframed order funnels to improve conversion. Created the strategy to refactor the legacy control panel serving 3M domains. Wrote content and did SEO, including interviews with MailChimp, Creative Commons, the EFF, Rand Fishkin and Michael Palin. Remotely managed teams in the UK, Luxembourg and Romania. | Spotted Raspberry Pi before launch, got in touch and turned it into a sponsorship deal. The EuroDNS engagement turned into the Marketing Director role. | Sep 2010 - Apr 2013 | pharma, growth, conversion, SEO, funnels, launch, marketing, startup, domains, web hosting, team leadership, remote, international, stakeholders, partnerships |
| Co-founder, TextualHealing.com | TextualHealing.com TextualHealing.com, mobile barcode tickets and coupons via MMS | Fresh out of university as the dot.com bubble popped and there were no jobs. The idea was good; the founders were far too early and lacked experience. | Launch a multi-sided marketplace for mobile tickets. | Wanted perfect and kept polishing instead of shipping. No go-to-market plan and no viable first iteration. | Never launched. Years later a CEO's motto, "launch crap, but launch", completed the lesson: ship in small viable increments to capture value and learn early, but never ship junk; to learn fast, run a test. | 2002 - 2004 | pharma, growth, SEO, launch, marketing, web hosting, remote, international, partnerships |
| Head of Marketing, Opbeat | Opbeat meetup video engine Opbeat developer community channel | The audience was developers, who are allergic to advertising. Brand-building and acquisition with no budget for ads that would not have worked anyway. | Reach developers where they already were, and have them bring the audience. | Advertised for a video marketing intern to travel the world attending developer meetups, unpaid but all expenses covered. Filmed and live-streamed the meetups on the company blog; speakers promoted the stream to their own developer audiences. No direct advertising in the video; the audience captured with retargeting ads, organic traffic and backlinks. | Grassroots meetup presence and a content engine that fed the trebling of traffic and sign-ups. Scrappy, high-leverage. | Nov 2014 - Apr 2016 | growth, conversion, SEO, KPIs, launch, 0 to 1, brand, marketing, SaaS, startup, developer tools, team leadership, international, budget |
| Marketing Director, EuroDNS | EuroDNS SEO remediation EuroDNS organic search | A previous agency had used black-hat SEO. The damage was part of why traffic had fallen for four years. | Repair the search footprint and get organic growth back. | Implemented remediation for the black-hat SEO damage, analysed user flow and redesigned the website and ecommerce funnels on the back of it. | Organic traffic doubled in 12 months. Bounce rate halved, from about 60% to about 30%. | Feb 2013 - Nov 2014 | turnaround, growth, conversion, SEO, funnels, KPIs, marketing, ecommerce, domains |
| Marketing Director, EuroDNS | EuroDNS domain extensions EuroDNS domain product range | A registrar whose edge was unusual domain extensions, selling them to a customer base that had been shrinking. Hundreds of new extensions were arriving in the market. | Reposition the product and give customers a reason to buy from EuroDNS rather than the giants. | Collected customer feedback and repositioned the product. Launched over 500 new domain extensions: where most registrars showed extensions as word art, EuroDNS showed .aq with a picture of icebergs, Creative Commons photography with the author credited, so a string of characters became a place. Rebooted the newsletter and built content marketing around it, including interviews with Rand Fishkin and the EFF. First provider to offer a free SSL certificate with every domain. | Part of the turnaround that reversed four years of decline in traffic and online sales. | Feb 2013 - Nov 2014 | turnaround, growth, conversion, SEO, launch, marketing, ecommerce, domains, team leadership, remote, international |
| Independent Consultant | Raspberry Pi partnership A partnership with Raspberry Pi | Consulting for Host Europe around 2011, Tom found out about Raspberry Pi before it launched, before anyone had heard of it. | Turn a hunch about an unknown project into something for the client. | Reached out to the creators directly and offered them a server for their downloads. Shaped that into a sponsorship deal for Host Europe. | Host Europe became a sponsor of Raspberry Pi before it launched. | 2010 - 2013 | pharma, growth, SEO, launch, marketing, web hosting, remote, international, partnerships |
| Sales Executive, Host Europe Group | sales competition First job, answering phones in web hosting sales | Graduated into the dot.com bust with no jobs. Got a foot in the door answering phones at a web hosting company: not his passion, but the way in. | Be good at it while finding the way to the web team. | Learnt to listen to customers by answering the telephone. Won the annual sales competition. Spent evenings and weekends on the alternative website (row 31). | Won the competition. Nobody expected it, so the prize changed from a Psion organiser to a record player, still in use. The alternative website got him into the web team the following year. | Mar 2003 - Feb 2004 | turnaround, SEO, funnels, 0 to 1, brand, marketing, SaaS, startup, ecommerce, domains, web hosting, team leadership, stakeholders |
| Head of New Media, Host Europe Group | 123-reg 123-reg.co.uk, the group's domain brand | Running all online channels for a group whose biggest brand was a domain registrar in a market with several larger rivals. | Keep the registrar growing while the group went through acquisitions and a rename. | Owned ecommerce and every online channel for the brand: the domain search and order process rebuilt earlier, #1 organic rankings for "domain names" and "web hosting", the affiliate programme, online ads and early content marketing through the blog, and the KPIs and web metrics to steer it all. | 123-reg became the first company to register 1 million .uk domains, on a platform doing 2M+ unique monthly visits. | Jan 2006 - Jun 2008 | turnaround, SEO, funnels, KPIs, 0 to 1, brand, marketing, SaaS, startup, ecommerce, domains, web hosting, team leadership, stakeholders |
| Group Design Manager, Host Europe Group | group design Design across the group's brands after the Pipex acquisitions | Via acquisitions the company became part of Pipex, the UK's fourth largest broadband provider: multiple brands, multiple offices, each with its own design. | Manage the web design output for the whole group and keep the ecommerce funnels improving while the brands were being stitched together. | Coordinated a team of designers and developers across multiple offices. Created the project and campaign briefs. Led ecommerce across the brands and kept optimising the order process. Laid the SEO groundwork that the New Media department later took to #1 for the core terms. | Design and ecommerce run as one function across the brands. The platform reached 2M+ unique monthly visits in this period. Promoted to Head of New Media in January 2006 to build the department around it. | Aug 2005 - Jan 2006 | turnaround, SEO, funnels, 0 to 1, brand, marketing, SaaS, startup, ecommerce, domains, web hosting, team leadership, stakeholders |