What made you want to do the work you do? Please share the full story.
I started as a web developer building sites for small businesses around Brisbane, and I kept running into the same problem. Clients would pay for a beautiful site, launch it, and then wait for customers who never showed up.
Nobody was searching for them because nobody could find them. One project stuck with me. A local hardware store owner spent thousands on a redesign, then called me three months later asking why foot traffic hadn’t moved at all.
I dug into his analytics and found the site had almost zero organic visibility, no schema, no local listings, nothing built for search. I rebuilt his SEO from scratch, and within four months his store started showing up for “hardware store near me” searches across his suburb. His foot traffic actually increased. That was the moment I realized development without search strategy is half a job. I moved into SEO full time after that and never looked back.
How is AI changing your business? What changes are you making to adapt?
AI Overviews have changed how people find answers, and a lot of our clients are seeing fewer clicks even when their rankings stay strong. Users get their answer straight from the search results page now, especially for simple questions like store hours or basic definitions.
So we’ve shifted our content strategy toward the follow-up questions AI doesn’t answer well, the ones that need local nuance or specific inventory details only a business would know. For our convenience store and gasoline clients, that means building content around fuel price comparisons by region, loyalty program specifics, and seasonal promotions AI can’t summarize accurately.
We’ve also started optimizing for citation frequency inside AI answers themselves, not just blue link rankings. It means restructuring how we write, leading with direct answers first, then supporting detail. Every onboarding call this year has included a client asking about zero-click searches, so we’ve built that concern directly into our proposals now.
If AI is impacting your business, please tell us 3 things you expect to change in the near future.
First, traditional keyword rankings will start mattering less than how often a business gets cited inside AI-generated answers. A page can rank tenth and still get quoted directly in an AI Overview if the content answers the question clearly enough.
Second, local service pages will need much stronger structured data, since AI models parse schema markup to pull accurate business details, and pages without it get skipped entirely in favor of competitors who have it.
Third, and this is the one I think gets underestimated, first-party review volume is becoming the new backlink. AI systems weigh recent, detailed reviews heavily when summarizing a business’s reputation, so a convenience store with 200 fresh reviews mentioning specific products will outperform one with better rankings but stale review activity. We’re already restructuring client strategies around these three shifts rather than waiting for them to fully arrive.
What are your greatest 3 skills and how have they helped you succeed?
My technical web development background is probably the biggest one, because it lets me diagnose indexing problems directly instead of guessing. When a gasoline retailer’s location pages stopped appearing in local search last year, I found a canonical tag error in the site’s code within an hour, something a purely marketing-focused SEO would have missed entirely.
Data analysis is my second strength, and it’s saved clients real money by catching ranking drops before they turn into revenue loss. I built a monitoring process that flagged a 15% traffic dip for one client within two days of it starting, instead of the usual month-long delay before anyone noticed.
Third is communication, plain and simple. Technical SEO work means nothing to a client if they can’t understand why it matters, so I’ve learned to translate schema markup and crawl budgets into terms that connect directly to their bottom line and their confidence in the strategy.
Tell us about a time you were dead wrong about something.
Early on I was convinced that more content always meant better rankings, so I pushed a client to publish four blog posts a week regardless of quality. Their traffic actually flatlined for two months straight.
I finally pulled the analytics apart and realized Google was indexing the pages but ranking almost none of them, because the content was thin and repetitive. I had mistaken volume for value, and it cost the client real time and budget chasing the wrong strategy.
We cut publishing down to one well-researched post a week instead, and rankings started moving within six weeks. That mistake taught me depth beats frequency every time, and I’ve never gone back to a quantity-first content plan since.
What is the biggest challenge you face each day and how do you handle it?
The biggest challenge is that search algorithms shift constantly, and a strategy that worked last quarter can quietly stop working without any warning. Google doesn’t send a memo when it changes how it weighs backlinks or local signals.
I handle it by checking ranking data every morning before anything else, looking for sudden drops or unusual pattern changes across client accounts. If something looks off, I dig into forums and algorithm trackers the same day rather than waiting for a monthly report to surface it.
That daily discipline has caught problems early more than once, including a manual penalty flag for one client that we resolved within 48 hours instead of losing weeks of visibility.
What do you value most and why?
I value honesty with clients above almost everything else in this work. SEO takes months to show results, and it would be easy to oversell quick wins just to keep a client happy in the short term.
Instead I tell clients exactly what to expect, including the timelines that feel too slow and the tactics that won’t work for their industry. One gasoline retailer wanted to target keywords with zero local search volume, and I told him directly it would waste his budget.
He appreciated the honesty and we redirected that spend into local schema work instead, which actually moved his rankings. That kind of straight talk builds trust that lasts far longer than a quick promise ever could.
What achievement are you the proudest of and why?
I’m proudest of turning around a convenience store chain client that was on the verge of dropping their entire digital budget because two years of previous agency work had produced almost no organic traffic. Their locations weren’t showing up for even basic searches like their own brand name plus city.
I rebuilt their entire local SEO foundation over four months, fixing duplicate location listings, adding proper schema to every store page, and cleaning up years of broken redirects from a site migration nobody had audited. Organic traffic to their location pages grew by over 200% within that period, and store locator searches specifically doubled.
What made it satisfying wasn’t just the numbers, it was proving that a client who’d nearly given up on SEO entirely could see it work when the fundamentals were actually done right.
What is your favorite movie and why?
My favorite movie is The Social Network. I’ve watched it more times than I can count, and it never gets old for me even though I know every scene.
What pulls me back in is how the film shows building something from nothing, the obsession, the mistakes, the relationships that get damaged along the way. It’s not really about coding or startups, it’s about ambition and what people are willing to sacrifice for an idea they believe in.
As someone who’s built strategies and campaigns from scratch for clients, I relate to that tension between moving fast and getting things right. The Aaron Sorkin dialogue also just hits differently every single time.
If you do charity or volunteer work, what is it and why do you do it?
I volunteer with a local literacy program in Brisbane that helps adults improve their reading and writing skills, usually people who missed that foundation earlier in life due to circumstances outside their control.
I got involved because a family member struggled with reading well into adulthood, and I saw firsthand how much that limited job opportunities and everyday confidence. It’s not something people talk about openly, so a lot of adults just quietly avoid situations where reading is required.
I spend a few hours most Saturdays helping tutor small groups, and watching someone read a full paragraph out loud for the first time without hesitation is something that sticks with me far longer than most work wins do.
Who has been your biggest mentor in life (personal or professional) and how have they helped you?
My biggest mentor has been my first boss at a small web development shop, a guy named Marcus who taught me that technical skill means nothing if you can’t explain it to a client in plain language.
When I started, I’d throw around terms like crawl budget and canonical tags in client meetings, and people’s eyes would glaze over immediately. Marcus pulled me aside after one meeting and told me if a client can’t understand what I’m fixing and why it matters to their business, I haven’t actually done my job yet.
That single piece of feedback changed how I communicate permanently, and it’s the same principle I lean on today when explaining AI Overviews or schema markup to clients who just want to know if their phone will start ringing more.
Just for fun, what is your favorite food?
My favorite food is a proper Vietnamese pho, the kind with the broth that’s been simmering for hours until it’s rich and complex rather than watery.
There’s a small place near my old office in Brisbane that makes one with beef brisket and tendon, and I used to grab it almost every Friday after a long week of client calls. Something about that first spoonful of broth just resets my brain after staring at ranking reports all day.
I’ve tried making it at home a few times, but it never comes close to that specific bowl, so I’ve mostly given up and just wait for Fridays.