Hi, I'm Chay!
I'm an SEO consultant and digital marketer currently working at a digital agency, as well as helping out a few people on a freelance basis including Beyond Stitch, Bike Active and Bosmere Skip Hire. I also have a passion for photography which you can learn more about on my photography page.
Why I do SEO
Looking back at my younger years I can see where my interest in SEO came from. Getting hands-on with building my own PCs and servers and playing around with Raspberry Pis taught me problem-solving and finding creative solutions. Overclocking my CPUs taught me about making small changes and measuring the improvements. Collecting large amounts of data such as the ECU logs from my car to then sifting through the data to find something interesting and useful. Ever since doing geography as a subject at GCSE and A-Level, I've always enjoyed reading around subjects and then putting them into practice, which is something I get to do every day as an SEO.
All these small unrelated things have come together to make me realise that SEO is something that I would enjoy doing and so far it has been!
How I Started
My start in the world of marketing and SEO started at a local social media marketing/growth hacking startup. This was my first full-time role and I was in charge of running the Instagram/Twitter/LinkedIn automation for our own accounts as well as for our clients. This then quickly progressed into the more marketing side of things where I learnt how to plan a campaign, define target audiences, execute a strategy and then analyse the results to feedback into the next strategy.
Unfortunately, things didn't last and after a quiet period, I was made redundant so it was on to my second marketing role. In my new role, I learnt a lot more about marketing as a whole and started to learn some basic HTML, CSS and Javascript which then lead me into the world of SEO. I carried on learning, making improvements to client sites and reporting on their progress which made me confident in presenting reports and strategies to clients.
Since then I have been in other agency roles as a digital marketer where I've made SEO a focus of my role while continuing to develop my HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP skills to help reduce the need for development time when implementing technical SEO fixes. My useful code snippets page contains some of the more common ones I've used across sites.
How I Like To Work
Generally speaking, all of my SEO projects start with a chat with the client to see what they're looking to achieve, their budgets and timeframes. This gives both of us a chance to get to know each other and for me to learn your objectives.
If it's a good match then it's time to run a site audit to see how the site is currently performing. Once we know how it's currently performing, what you're wanting to achieve and your budgets, it's time for me to put together a strategy on how to achieve your goals from the website.
For some clients, this is enough as they're happy to implement this themselves. However, most of the time, once the strategy/plan has been created and agreed upon it's time to get to work on actioning the plan and improving the site. Along the way, there will be reporting on progress and the results.
We like to keep our plans as flexible as possible so that we're always able to adapt should things change such as a core update, seasonality and unexpected events that could impact your site or business.
Work With Me
If you're a small business or a personal brand looking for SEO support for your website then feel free to drop me a message on my contact form. We can set up a chat to see what you're looking to achieve and how I can help support that. This could be a one-off piece of work or an ongoing retainer to keep your site optimised and growing.
I'm also able to support local agencies who have one-off SEO requirements such as planning for a site migration, a site audit for a client or an SEO strategy that they can implement with their client. Just send me a message on my contact form and we can have a chat to see how I can help!
Obligatory Fun Facts
it seems almost impossible not to write an about page without having some fun facts so here are mine!
What do you do in your free time?
That all depends on the weather! Usually, in the summer it's all about getting out on the bike, doing some gardening, having friends over and BBQing. In the winter I usually end up tinkering with lots of little projects such as setting up pi-hole, playing around with new tools and getting in the kitchen and baking.