My SEO & Digital Marketing Journey

Why I Love What I Do

What a journey it’s been! Curiosity led to self-taught skills that led to over 14 years of in-house, agency, freelance, and team leadership and everything in between.

• 1999 | Discovered the internet and started teaching myself HTML and CSS
• 2001 | Built my own site, hand-coded, no idea what I was doing
• 2005 | Started blogging
• 2008 | Built an online poker coach directory and learned WordPress and Joomla by breaking them repeatedly
• 2010 | Experimented with SEO tactics on a non-profit’s website and saw the results firsthand
• 2011 | Building sites for anyone who’d let me, learning the fundamentals on the side
• 2012 | Back into affiliate sites, then landed my first agency SEO job at Koozai
• 2013 | Joined an iGaming affiliate business as an in-house SEO — the start of nine years in the industry
• 2013–2016 | Went from “the SEO person” to building the SEO team from scratch
• 2016–2022 | Scaled into leadership — three teams, digital PR, global markets
• 2022 | Went freelance to get back to doing the work directly
• 2023 | Joined 10up (now Fueled), where I do SEO/GEO strategy, analytics and GTM implementation for major global brands and publishers

I’m a Digital Growth Strategist: SEO, analytics, GTM, audits. But getting here wasn’t originally a career plan. It was a slow, sometimes accidental obsession that took about a decade to notice itself.

It started in 1999. I was in my early twenties, and I’d just discovered the internet. All this information, on every subject imaginable, and the bit that I still find novel: anyone could publish something. You, me, some random person on GeoCities with a flashing “under construction” gif, anywhere in the world. (Actually I preferred Angelfire but hey).

I wanted to know how that worked, so I taught myself HTML, then CSS, then a bit of JavaScript, bolting them together into what was then called “dynamic HTML/DHTML” back then. There was also tons of learning about the ‘browser wars’, (document.all vs document.layers if you’re old enough to recall).

By 2001 I’d built my own personal site, hand-coded, with no real idea what I was doing but doing it anyway.

I made a ‘Beginner’s Guide To HTML’ site, which nearly resulted in the first and only Andy Killworth Youth Club (this is a legit email!):

Then… not much, for a while. I tinkered (I love that word). Nothing serious, and I was distracted by my then day-job of being a mortgage advisor.

2005 rolled around and I started blogging properly, on Blogger, about running, which is a nice bit of foreshadowing for a page you’ll find elsewhere on this site. Around 2008 I fell into online poker, and through that, into gambling affiliate sites. I built a poker coach directory, learned my way around Joomla and WordPress by breaking them repeatedly.

Then 2010 happened, and it’s the year I’d point to if you asked me when this actually started.

I was working at a non-profit in the local government industry. Part of the building our offices were in was meeting rooms, hired out to bring in income, except nobody was booking them. I’d just read The Art of SEO and was quietly obsessed with things that now feel laughably basic, like title tags and internal linking. I asked if I could try a few things on the website.

Nobody there knew what SEO was, including, honestly, me, not really. But I did it anyway, and the pages started ranking number one and two locally for the meeting room terms. Then the bookings started coming in.

That was it. That was the buzz. I still remember it – it felt like witchcraft.

After that I couldn’t leave it alone. I was working in admin for the local authority by 2011, but out of hours I was building sites for anyone who’d let me: a mate’s music site, a sports club, whatever I could get my hands on. By 2012 I was back into affiliate sites, writing content for the gambling industry, picking up a bit of side money from content and links. I was circling the industry without fully being in it.

And then, in the summer of 2012, somebody actually paid me to do it (whoop!). I got my first proper job as an SEO consultant at an agency called Koozai.

Getting Paid To Do the Thing: My First SEO Job

By mid-2012 I was desperately applying for anything in digital marketing. Two agencies gave me interviews. Koozai gave me the job. (In an odd bit of synchronicity, I met the husband of the person who interviewed me at the other agency on an 100 mile ultra marathon some years later).

The truth is, despite the affiliate tinkering and the meeting-room win, I was learning from scratch. Real, basic stuff: title tags, meta descriptions, the kind of things I’d throw around casually now but back then had to actually learn properly, in a room, with people watching.

I picked up a bit of PPC (which I sucked at, big time). I learned how to report to clients, how to work with teammates, how to be part of something rather than just poking at my own side projects in isolation.

It was early days for being an SEO consultant too, so a lot of what we did looks almost quaint now, like directories and social bookmarking sites for links.

What mattered was that I was being paid – actually paid! – to do the one thing I’d been quietly obsessed with for years. After a run of jobs that bored me senseless, that was the whole game changing.

A Journey Into iGaming

While I was at Koozai, I was still messing about on the side, selling content, active on a poker affiliate forum, running a couple of websites that weren’t making anyone rich, least of all me. That’s how a complete stranger ended up in my inbox one day, asking if I fancied full-time work instead of freelance.

I was sceptical. I couldn’t find anything about the guy online, and I already had a proper job. Junior, sure, but Koozai felt secure, and secure was still novel to me. We had a chat on Skype. He explained they ran a network of poker and casino affiliate sites, a small startup. Small enough that I still didn’t fully believe it until we met the CEO and COO in London, just before Christmas 2012.

I’d pictured a CEO and dressed for it – shirt, tie, the works. What turned up was a guy in his early twenties in a hoodie. I felt ridiculous. We talked anyway, about the freelance work I’d been doing, the gambling affiliate stuff I was getting genuinely into. A week later, he offered me the job. I started in early 2013.

There were about seven of us when I started. I was “the SEO person,” except the CEO knew SEO better than anyone I’d met. He’d built the entire business on his own knowledge of it. I came in doing link building and link removal, which at the time meant something specific and slightly grim: Google was mid-penalty-era, and the gambling industry runs on links the way most industries run on content. I learned paid link building with a real budget behind it, which was often boring and always useful. Somewhere across those years I manually assessed something like a hundred thousand sites for link quality.

The CEO hiring me (and taking a chance on me) was a key moment in my life and career and one I’ll always be grateful for.

Over the next two or three years the job changed shape. I started building a team. Recruiting, managing, actually learning what leadership meant rather than just being handed the title. I had real autonomy, real bonuses, and a niche that was as cutthroat as digital marketing gets.

That environment forced me to get properly good at competitor analysis: picking apart what rivals were doing, including the ones playing dirty, and working out what we could learn without doing it ourselves. I was doing all of this across regions too: US, UK, Canada, Germany, Australia, which meant learning how differently Google behaved depending on which version of it you were arguing with.

The CEO wanted to grow the company significantly, but the company was fully remote, and he wasn’t comfortable scaling that hard without more structure, specifically, without a London office. He didn’t quite trust anyone enough to build it for him, except his brother. So his brother set up a company that was, on paper, an agency providing services to the main company. In practice, it was the same work, the same people, the same everything, just a different name on the payslip.

And that’s where the next seven years happened.

Growing Into Leadership & Fast Scaling

That’s when things stopped being a small, scrappy operation and started being an actual company with actual ambitions. We opened an office in Camden, though plenty of us stayed remote, and the plan was to grow into the hundreds.

I still think the office had the best tea and snack selection I’ve seen. And yeah I used to nick quite a bit.

My role shifted with it. I went from doing SEO to building the people who did SEO: recruitment, talent acquisition, running interview after interview, then developing the team I’d hired across everything from on-page basics to proper technical SEO. Somewhere in there we made a deliberate move away from paid link building and into digital PR, which turned out to be brutally competitive in the best way.

There’s a specific thrill in watching your own team get bold: pitch something a bit mad, land it, and pull in a link from a national paper that no amount of paid link building could ever touch. That never got old.

And seeing your team grow and develop is an amazing feeling.

I was in the leadership group too, which meant working properly alongside Content, Design, and the rest, not just SEO shouting requests over a wall. Part of my job became pushing us into new regions as iGaming expanded — South America, Japan, wherever the market opened up next.

These were the years I actually grew up professionally, if I’m honest. Everything was moving fast: the company, the industry, SEO itself. And I was constantly trying to keep pace with all three at once, which sounds exhausting written down but at the time felt like momentum.

By the time I left, the company was somewhere around 300 to 350 people, and I was managing three SEO teams, which meant managing managers, not just individual contributors.

I was handling serious budgets too. Not just for links anymore, but for staff, for tooling, and for the digital PR agencies we tested and rotated through constantly, trying to find the right partners.

I learned more in this stretch than in any period before or since. Leadership, obviously, but also influence. How to get things done through people you don’t directly manage, how to hold a budget properly, how to recruit for a team you’re still figuring out yourself.

Nine years is a long time in any industry, let alone one that moves as fast as this one, and by the end I was ready for something different. More hands-on, more mine. I left in August 2022 to go freelance, wanting to get back to doing the work directly rather than only running the people who did it.

And the parent company? That was acquired in 2026 for $1 billion. SEO isn’t dead!

Freelance – Eek

I left excited about going freelance. I figured I had the skills, I just needed to point them at different clients instead of one company. Turns out that finding the work is its own skill, completely separate from doing the work, and it’s not one I actually had.

Constantly pitching, constantly selling yourself, applying for gigs that may or may not go anywhere. I was worse at that than I expected to be, and it knocked my confidence a bit.

That said, I did get work. A lot of it through Upwork, which threw me into a proper variety of situations. Different CMSs, different technical setups, industries I’d never touched after a decade of gambling and iGaming. I also picked up one ongoing client who I still work with now, in the also competitive finance affiliate space.

Looking back, that variety was genuinely valuable. Coming out of one industry for the first time in ten years and seeing how differently other industries approached the same problems taught me things that my time in iGaming never could have.

But by December 2022, two things were true at once: I wasn’t getting enough consistent work (not great as a Dad of three!), and I was missing being part of a team more than I expected to. Freelancing is a lot of isolation, and I hadn’t really planned for that part. So I applied for a permanent role at an agency called 10up.

10up (and Now Fueled): Getting Properly Humbled

I joined 10up in February 2023, and a couple of years in, the company merged with Fueled. So technically I work for Fueled now, though nothing about my day-to-day actually changed. Same team, same work, just a different name at the bottom of the email.

I went in thinking I knew SEO like a real epxert. Ten years in one industry will do that to you. Agency life took that confidence and quietly dismantled it. Suddenly I wasn’t dealing with one company’s tech stack, one industry’s quirks, one region’s version of Google. I was dealing with all of them, all at once, and a lot of it I simply hadn’t seen before.

Google Tag Manager was the big one. I hadn’t properly worked with it before, and I found it genuinely difficult at first, in a way that a decade of gambling SEO hadn’t really prepared me for. Getting comfortable with it took real effort, and it’s now one of the parts of the job I enjoy most.

Since then I’ve worked across a proper spread of sites. B2B, publishers, tiny sites, huge ones, startups, SaaS. Different tech stacks entirely: WordPress, Vercel, single-page applications, whatever the client’s using. I’ve built up serious depth in GA4 and custom tracking through GTM, and I’ve had to get properly fluent in consent management too, platforms like Usercentrics and OneTrust. Migrations, audits, the lot.

What’s actually changed, though, is less about the tools and more about how I think. Somewhere in the last couple of years I stopped thinking of myself as “an SEO” and started thinking of myself as something more holistic: a digital growth strategist. When I look at a site now, SEO is one lens, not the only one. I’m thinking about conversion rate, about UX, about whether the thing actually works for the human using it, not just whether it ranks.

That shift is the whole reason this page isn’t just called “My SEO Journey” anymore.

What’s Next: SEO, GEO, and AI

Right now feels like one of the genuinely pivotal moments in this industry (even more so than ones like Penguin or Panda). We’re no longer just optimising for people and search engines.

I’ve thrown myself into understanding it properly. I want to know how different LLMs actually work, not just what the buzzwords mean. I use AI tools myself, to sharpen my own processes and get more value out of the work I do for clients, which means I’m learning this stuff from both sides at once: as someone using the tools, and as someone optimising for the systems behind them.

What I think I bring that’s slightly different is the combination: real, deep experience in how SEO actually works, underneath the hood, married to a genuine fascination with this new AI layer sitting on top of it. GEO, AI SEO, whatever the industry settles on calling it eventually, isn’t a replacement for the fundamentals. It’s an additional layer, and you need the fundamentals to make sense of it.

If you’d told 1999-me, teaching himself HTML to figure out how any of this worked, that twenty-five years later he’d still be doing exactly that, just with a very different internet to figure out, I’d have believed him instantly. That’s the throughline, really. The tools change. The fascination hasn’t. I don’t see how anyone can get bored with SEO or digital marketing!

I don’t think AI replaces what I do. I think it amplifies it, if you know how to use it properly. Finding out exactly how is the most interesting problem I’ve worked on in years.