Welcome Tom Light, our fab new Head of SEO

I've been working agency side for over 12 years now, most of that time spent at a previous agency where I started with the SMB team, helping to grow some of the smaller businesses. I worked my way up to the enterprise team, eventually leading some of the biggest global campaigns, running my own pod, and helping to secure new business wins.

Over the years at my previous agency, the team grew from 6 to 22 people. One of the reasons I love agency life is the buzz of knowledge you get from the people internally—those you can learn from, those you can help mentor, and that unanimous feeling of support that drives the business forward.

I've come to Fresh Egg now looking for a challenge, to be part of a company looking to grow and expand, and to contribute to shaping its direction of growth.

I bring experience working with and helping to shape/grow an SEO department. Over the years, SEO has lost some favour compared to disciplines such as paid search, where you can track direct business impact on spending.

We want to do that a bit more with SEO, creating a trackable ROI model that demonstrates the business impact of SEO efforts.

As with many, I fell into SEO a bit. Part of a smaller team without a marketing budget, I looked at ways I could positively impact the company websites. Early wins came from simple things like adding new pages to target specific phrases, and seeing a direct impact with new customers from this helped grow my interest.

The evolution of SEO has kept me here. I love creative thinking and adapting to new landscapes.

Build a relationship based on trust. We often work with a main contact within a business. In most cases, this person is solely responsible for the website's success. Our job should be to demonstrate ROI, provide meaningful stories, and help provide ammo to our contacts to shine a light on SEO internally at the business. The best relationships we have are when the client contact becomes a true advocate for the agency. 

One of the biggest misconceptions about SEO is that it's just about adding keywords to a page's core elements. While keywords are important, SEO is about understanding your audience and answering their questions. It's about creating content that speaks to user intent, solves problems, and provides value. By tailoring your content for your audience's needs rather than just focusing on keyword placement, you build a more engaging, meaningful experience that resonates with users and performs better in search results.

AI is not a replacement for an expert, but a tool we can leverage to create efficiencies and help soundboard ideas. I'm using AI more to assist with tasks and help shape my thoughts while training it to pick up heavier lifting on more labour-intensive tasks. Some AI advancements open the SEO world to creating tools, interactive content and other elements without big budget requirements, which sometimes come with those types of bigger thinking. Sometimes, this can be a great way of testing an idea before getting a developer involved to build a fully fledged interactive element for a site. 

We're a team, and there are no egos. We should constantly want to learn and adapt our techniques and debate what works and what doesn't. I encourage conversations within the team, giving creative freedom to individuals to help shape how we do SEO.

Gigs and festivals. A couple of years ago, my now fiancée said I needed a cool fact about me, so I set myself the task of going to 52 gigs in 52 weeks. I probably saw over 150 bands that year and drank too many cans of Red Stripe. By the end of the year, it was getting tough with 3-4 gigs a week, but I managed to get it done. We won’t be repeating that, but I still average 30+ gigs a year and 2+ festivals.

2x Poached on toast with hot honey halloumi and avocado.