Hi. I'm Richard.

Meet Your SEO Expert

My first experience with SEO and performance marketing began in 2006 while I was researching ways to market my photography (which I am still actively involved with) after completing grad school. As my obsession with search grew I convinced the ad agency I was working for at the time — as a copywriter — to start optimizing their website for organic search. No one there had heard of SEO at the time so the discussion was eye-opening and a bit controversial but we pushed forward with it.

Two years later, after countless hours of testing on my own website, I got an SEO job at The Search Agency (since acquired by Forward PMX / Assembly Global). While there I worked on a number of clients in real estate, apartment rentals, flower delivery, cruises and insurance. That was an incredible learning experience to work on such a variety of sites and alongside talented colleagues such as Brandon Schakola (eBay, Overstock/Bed Bath & Beyond), Grant Simmons (Homes.com), Mark Fillmore (Tinuiti) and Holly Miller Anderson (Under Armour).

After three years at TSA, I moved onto RAPP Worldwide (NYSE: OMC) to lead SEO strategy for the L.A. and New York offices. We worked with clients including Toyota, Schwab, Nescafé, Mattel, Disney and Novartis. I worked with a talented team of developers and data strategists, and built sites for our clients. One highlight was researching gamification for a kids' website we were rebuilding, so I had to play kids' games while at work. I especially owe a lot to my boss at RAPP, Ross Jenkins. Ross is an analytics and data science guru who taught me so much about analytics and measurement.

Feeling the itch to relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area, I took a job at Backroads. Backroads is the #1 active travel company in the industry and I spent 7 years there full-time as a marketing manager, initially managing SEO, paid search and direct marketing. Eventually I was promoted and was leading all of the digital marketing channels by the time I left. I absolutely loved working there. I truly believe that Tom Hale is the best founder and president. The company culture he has built there since 1979 is unlike any other place I have ever worked.

I left my full-time role right as COVID was starting, and worked for Backroads part-time through the pandemic while being a stay-at-home dad for my newborn daughter and then 4-year-old son at the time, as daycare was shut down. I helped complete their site rebuild from a legacy Ruby on Rails site to a headless Drupal platform. I also consulted with several other clients (adventure travel, luxury travel, cooking classes and real estate investing) during this time doing SEO site audits and managing PPC accounts.

Most recently, I spent three years at Auction Technology Group (LSE: ATG) as Director of Performance Marketing where we owned eight marketplace sites including Proxibid, LiveAuctioneers, The-Saleroom, Bidspotter and EstateSales.net. There, I led a team of SEO, SEM and paid social specialists. Much of my focus was on technical SEO and managing efficient ROAS campaigns for our auctioneer clients.

Why the SEO Consultant.Ai?

The world is changing at a more rapid pace than ever before. AI is everywhere across most facets of our society today. Digital marketing in particular is experiencing these often-daily changes — AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT and Perplexity rewriting how people search. The pace is real. Even this site has evolved with it: the original template was AI-generated by GoDaddy from my prompts, then I rebuilt it on WordPress, and now you're reading the current version — hand-built from scratch by me and Claude Code.

I chose this brand name because not only do I enjoy the creativity and productivity that LLMs such as ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity have afforded us, but the name symbolizes my desire to always stay on top of things and maintain a cutting-edge approach to SEO and marketing in general. Many people are skeptical or trying to bury their heads in the sand. I wouldn't recommend it. While you might not like this current age of AGI expansion, ignoring it won't do you any good — you run the risk of getting left behind. Or, if you really hate AI that much, just hire me and let me run performance marketing for you instead.

The original P.S. on this section said the brand "would eventually make for a cool SaaS platform." That's no longer hypothetical — I've shipped three free tools for AI Search optimization, including QueryDrift. More on the way.

Follow me on LinkedIn, or get in touch.