Jon Hunter is an experienced SEO professional with over 5 years working in the industry with many top brands and smaller local business. He has been a day to day practitioner of SEO as well as a manager in one of the countries largest search agencies being responsible for the redevelopment of their SEO product.

Here is where I tell my story …..

“You want to know my SEO credentials without this becoming an SEO bragfest really don’t you? Do I have the real world life experience to be have authority in what I say about SEO, and SEO consultancy? I will let you make your mind up but let you know where im coming from.

My relevant education was the Business and Computing diploma I did University at in the early did in the early 90’s, the internet did not get a mention back then (im not sure why because it was obvious it was about to become very important), but it laid the foundations of looking at using technology instead of  developing technology and also in looking at basic marketing and business methodologies and how they effect computing and technology does effect them.

My pre seo work experience comes from the worlds of programming and web development. First doing data conversion and processing work on large unix based systems, in both commercial and public sector fields. Then later moving into programming, analysis and management writing database driven websites using Cold Fusion as the prime programming language.

It was in 2004 that whilst working in house on a website I found myself with job finished and some time to kill, I had always wanted to get round to looking at search engines but deadlines had never allowed it and when its noit you own site, its gte the job done and look at the next site build coming your way.

This situation was very different. Success wasn’t about getting the project done on time, to budget and meeting specification, with the minimum of fuss and the maximum profit. Success here was ‘How many people are consuming our services online?’, when that was the question search engines became much more important. The next six months saw me being self taught and applying what I had learned to the projects I was working on , with no budget, little management support and quite a bit of success.

But boredom set in and an opportunity eventually knocked and I moved on to my first professional SEO position (and being general manager in a web design small agency) our customers were local business, who had on OK online presence and limited resources.  What we did have though was total control we built the websites, designing and programming  and we also did the all SEO and PPC. This control brought incredibly success for all the clients who would work with us, the most spectacular being  taking a local shop to be the out and out online market leader  in there field, and them staying there for 3 years, based on a few months work. They saw sales go up up to 500% and the actual cost of marketing drop by 80%.

Next stop big agency, I moved up to the biggest search agency in the North of England expecting to be able to learn more about SEO amongst the best professionals in the business, frankly I was disappointed I realised I was it. Their SEO product stank, the staff were untrained demotivated and going through the motions, and they didn’t know how to do SEO. They were a top notch Paid Search Company and still are.

Anyway re pretty much rebuilt it from the bottom up. Stopped haemorrhaging SEO customers, created new systems , recruited new staff, became results orientated and stopped the account managers and salesmen over promising to  our customers. By the time I left we had completely revamped the team, grown it from 4 to 14, were working in 3 pods, and had tripled our SEO customers as a business. I am not saying id it all on my own, there were 3 or 4 key people. Some still doing SEO very successfully at the same agency, others moved onto bigger and better things.

I moved for a complete change for 18 months and dropped out of SEO to work on other projects. I am now working clienstside on one or two sites, and starting to work on my own stuff”