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.