Search, almost before
it was called SEO.

My background starts on the agency and brand side in Cape Town, South Africa. Broad, varied work across sectors almost before "SEO" was its own job title. Being a strong tourist destination meant I started with clients in the travel and tourism sector across South and Southern Africa: boutique hotels, shark cage diving, helicopter tours, and proper multi-week African safaris.

Three years in, I bought a one-way plane ticket to London and moved over.

Over the 19 years since (15 and counting in London) that turned into deep technical SEO work – crawlability, site architecture, programmatic content, the unglamorous fundamentals that actually move rankings – alongside strategy and programme leadership for regulated and high-growth clients. I've also spent enough time in digital PR to know what makes something genuinely newsworthy, and what only looks like it should be.

I started on GEO – optimising for how large language models read, cite, and recommend brands in AI-generated answers – early, before most of the industry had a name for it. That early start is the throughline of the work you'll find here: the same rigour and the same performance-orientated instincts, applied to a search landscape that's changing faster than most teams can track.

That early variety is still how I approach a brief. Search isn't a siloed tactic; it's downstream of architecture, content and product decisions made everywhere else in a business. The work is mostly stories about exactly that.

Today I work as an independent consultant through MARTEN.SOLUTIONS LTD, taking on retained advisory, fractional head-of-SEO, and project-based SEO and GEO work.

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