Currently Head of SEO & Community @ AsiaRooms.com an online travel agent specialising in hotels. Whilst much of my background falls around SEM (PPC & SEO) I have a broad experience in eCommerce, digital marketing and social media. I am not just a manager of a ‘digital team’ though, I can and do get hands on across SEM and Social on a daily basis.
I get a real kick out of developing people, and find it to be one of the most rewarding aspects of work. I like to believe my style of developing and empowering people is a key reason for never losing an employee to another external company.
My roles in recent years have focused on identifying new opportunities, defining a strategy to target them, driving internal stakeholder buy-in and building teams from the ground up to attack those opportunities.
I did this at Premier Farnell Plc, building a global SEO function and strategy from scratch, and more recently with AsiaRooms.com driving buy-in for 4 new headcount and implementing a new community site to drive natural link acquisition, social media, brand voice to market and foster improved relationships with our hotel partners.
Having worked in a global role and managed individuals of various nationalities and backgrounds for a number of years I am very comfortable working in this kind of environment. I’ve managed people from the UK, US, Lithuania, Malaysia and Singapore.
You can review more details on my roles and key achievements by using the toggle boxes below.
Head of SEO & Community @ AsiaRooms.com – October 2012 till present
- Made significant progress on improving SEO friendliness of the transactional sites.
- Drove Community element from concept to execution, embedding into the social media calendar.
- Implemented strategy focusing on blogger, photographer and videographer outreach to drive brand through extended network and source additional content. For example, around 40% of our content is written for free by external travel bloggers, whilst most of our photoblogs are produced by professional photographers from all across Asia.
- Hired and developed an excellent team of 4 individuals within a period of 5 months (Online Editor, Travel Writer, Community Manager & Link Acquisition and Outreach Manager).
Head of SEO @ AsiaRooms.com – February 2012 till October 2012
- Made significant progress on improving SEO friendliness of the transactional sites with over 50 unique development tickets delivered within the first 10 months.
- Drove internal buy-in of the Community site to allow for a natural focus on acquiring links and social shares via value add travel content.
Global Head of SEO @ Premier Farnell Plc – November 2010 till February 2012
- After convincing the C-Suite to invest in SEO I built up a small team of 3 highly skilled SEO specialists to cover the 3 regional hubs.
- Implemented a highly successful blogger outreach program to drive brand exposure and natural acquisition of links.
- Drove understanding and buy-in of SEO within the development process – SEO was embedded in all developments, not looked at as an after thought. This included some major functional developments across elements such as Endeca search.
- Improved collaboration, communication and consistencies across the regional PPC teams.
Global SEM Secondment @ Premier Farnell Plc – July 2010 till November 2010
- Aligned all 3 regional businesses to a common tracking and reporting model.
- Convinced C-Suite to sign off on a central SEO function, which I later headed up.
- Implemented basic attribution modelling to allow for improved tracking and reporting of various online channels.
- Recommended centralising PPC functions globally, which has ultimately been completed since my departure.
eCommerce Project Specialist @ Premier Farnell Plc – March 2009 till July 2010
- Initial product owner working through new platform requirements involving major IT investment to switch from ATG to Websphere.
- Accountable for collecting and prioritising all small project requests globally resulting in a significant increase in output and value taken from each increment.
- Certified SCRUM master.
Search Engine Marketing Lead @ Premier Farnell Plc- May 2008 till March 2009
- First real PPC headcount in Premier Farnell – built the account/campaign/ad group framework that ultimately supported expansion into new markets and languages and remained largely intact for the 5.5 years I was at Premier Farnell.
- Grew PPC investment by over 700% over the period of 1 year.
- Hired and developed internal PPC team from the ground up.
- Grew markets covered by PPC team from 3 to over 35, covering 10 unique languages.
- Implemented improved analytics and reporting to better understand ROI.