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MBSearch
About

I started building websites in 2006. Twenty years on, this is where I write up what I have learned about search.

The short of it

SEO & AI Search Consultant

London, United Kingdom

Practising as MBSearch

Since late 2023 I have run two things side by side. SearchOps is a platform that tracks how businesses appear in local and AI search. I founded it and still run it. MBSearch is my independent consulting practice, with a small number of clients at a time. Each feeds the other. Consulting keeps the product honest about what businesses struggle with, and the product handles the parts of consulting that repeat.

Before that I worked agency-side at PACIFIC, in a UK team on Expedia Group’s transportation line of business, reporting into the client’s own Head of SEO. A change there shipped across thousands of pages, so it had to be right before it went out, and the hardest part was rarely technical. It was making the case to people who had every reason to be sceptical. Seeing how a large group governs search from the inside is much of what I bring to consulting now.

From 2014 to 2021 I worked freelance for small businesses: trades, restaurants, clinics, the kind of places where the marketing budget is whatever is left at the end of the month. When somebody is spending their own money, you learn quickly how to tell the difference between work that moves the business and work that fills a report.

Before that, from 2006, I built websites, and I came to SEO and marketing from development. That still shapes how I look at a site. Crawling, rendering, templates, and migrations are easier to reason about once you have built the thing being crawled, and it makes for a better conversation with the developers who have to ship the fix.

Across those years the work has covered SaaS, ecommerce, local lead generation, international sites and website migrations. I write it up here, in long guides on those subjects and shorter posts when something is worth explaining properly.

How I work

How I approach the work

Plain language, always

If a recommendation cannot be explained to the person who has to act on it, it is not finished. That goes for the guides here as much as for client work.

Fewer things, done properly

Most search problems come down to three or four issues that matter. Fixing those beats a hundred-item spreadsheet nobody opens twice.

Judgement over tooling

Tools are useful and I built one. The value is in knowing which numbers deserve your attention this quarter and which are noise.

Say what is uncertain

Nobody outside Google or the AI labs knows exactly how ranking works. Where I am describing a pattern from experience, I say so, and I do not publish ranking factor lists I cannot back up.

Experience

The route so far

Development first, then freelance SEO, then agency, then the platform and the practice side by side.

Founder & Managing Director

Dec 2023 to Present

SearchOps · Full-time · London, UK

SearchOps is a platform I built and run. It tracks how businesses appear across local search and, increasingly, across AI assistants.

  • Set the product direction and decide what the platform should and should not try to answer.
  • Work directly with the businesses using it, which keeps the roadmap tied to problems people actually have.
  • Turn the parts of consulting that repeat into something measurable and repeatable.

SEO & AI Search Consultant

Dec 2023 to Present

MBSearch · Self-employed · City of London, UK

Independent SEO consulting across SaaS, ecommerce, local lead generation, international sites and website migrations, plus newer work on how AI assistants decide what to cite.

  • Fractional Head of Search seats: owning the plan, the standards, and the reporting for groups too small to justify the full-time hire.
  • Audits and strategy across estates, from a handful of sites up to several hundred, plus the governance that keeps them consistent.
  • AI search visibility programmes: establishing a baseline, finding the sources answers are built from, and getting clients into them.

Search Engine Optimization Manager

Oct 2021 to Nov 2023

PACIFIC · Full-time · London Area, UK

Agency-side delivery on enterprise travel accounts, as part of a UK team working on the transportation line of business and reporting into the client’s own Head of SEO.

  • Search delivery across transportation, alongside the client’s in-house team and their content, paid, and development functions.
  • Worked at a scale where one change shipped across thousands of pages, so it had to be right before it went out.
  • Saw how search is actually governed inside a large group, including how a case gets made to stakeholders who were never going to be persuaded by a ranking chart.

Notable clients: Expedia Group, Vrbo, Skyscanner

Freelance SEO Consultant

2014 to 2021

Self-employed · Freelance · London Area, UK

Seven years working directly with small businesses. It is the grounding that shapes how I still work today.

  • Search work for independent businesses across trades, hospitality, retail, and professional services.
  • Learned the constraints that matter: no dedicated marketing person, no appetite for jargon, and every pound spent noticed.
  • Built the habit of explaining the reasoning, not just handing over the recommendation.

Website development, then SEO and marketing

2006 to 2014

Early career · Where it started

Started out building websites, then moved on to how sites get found and how they turn visitors into enquiries.

  • Built websites, which is where I learned templates, markup and how pages are served.
  • Moved into SEO and marketing, which the rest of this timeline grew out of.

Questions about any of this?

LinkedIn is the easiest place to reach me. Send a message or connect, and I will reply there.

Connect on LinkedIninfo@mbsearch.co
Consulting, and how it works