From software engineer to SEO expert
I grew up in Mullingar, Co. Westmeath, and my first career wasn't SEO at all: I was a software engineer at Slack.
The websites were the side project. I started building my own sites about audio gear and audiophile equipment, a hobby that got out of hand, and with zero SEO knowledge began testing, breaking and learning until they grew into a portfolio of sites across a whole range of topics. Somewhere in there, I fell in love with search.
Eventually the side project won. I left engineering to become an SEO Manager at Ireland's largest agency, then moved to Sydney to join one of its leading digital agencies, home to Australia's first OpenAI agency partnership.
"Making a change and watching the graph go up was addictive. It still is."
Across those years I've worked with every kind of business: ecommerce, B2B manufacturers, professional services and more. The results on the homepage come from that work. And the engineering background never left: it's why the technical side of SEO holds no fear, and why everything is data-driven and tested rather than taken on faith.
That testing habit now points at AI search. As ChatGPT and Google's AI reshape how customers find businesses, I run the experiments so Irish businesses don't have to guess. Webtrix is the result.