About Me

Steve Ollington
Me with my son, Richie, and my daughter, Avery.

I’m Steve Ollington, and this is my quite empty site which currently serves no purpose.

Anyway I had best write some stuff I guess, so here’s my SEO relevant past:

I graduated from Southampton Solent University with a 1st (yay me), having done my final year project and dissertation on search engine optimisation. That was 2008, and a lot has changed in SEO now so I’m hiding that work since it’s so very outdated and amateurish.

Whilst at uni I was building small badly designed websites for friends of family, etc… but during my second year (2007) I’d started learning about some SEO basics and implementing that stuff into these sites too. Since there was a lot less competition, less SEO happening, and SEO was far easier back then, I managed to propel some small businesses into acquiring a lot more business through getting them onto page one of Google for relatively competitive terms. This led to more work through word of mouth.

I finished uni and went to work as an in-house SEO exec at a travel company, whilst continuing part-time (now with friends) with the web design and SEO for small businesses. After a few months I had to leave the in-house job, we had to get an office and employ more people… because we’d got more clients and somehow ended up with an actual business. At this point I found myself doing sales, admin, project management, training, and a bunch of other stuff I had no idea about too.

Whilst at this little agency I needed to ensure I kept learning, so read every decent book I could find, kept up with blogs, and did any SEO relevant courses I could find (which was quite a few).

After three years I decided I wanted to go and work at another agency so I could immerse myself in the expertise of others and diversify my learning. I moved to North Yorkshire and started working at Bronco, which was cool because it meant working under Dave Naylor who knows a lot of stuff. I met lots of other awesome people here too.

In 2012 I moved to London. I am a keen supporter of the British Humanist Association, a charity that campaigns for secularism and equality through science, reason, and ethics. I approached them with a list of stuff I thought would help them spread awareness and generate some more memberships and donations. Essentially it was a proposal for six months of working for them… they took me on as a Digital Strategist and I was there for eight months in the end. I implemented a bunch of stuff off the list and got the ball rolling with some others, plus new things came up whilst I was there. I enjoyed it immensely and got to meet some incredible and interesting people. The experience changed my perception about life in a positive way.

When my time at the BHA was over, I headed back agency-side working at Distilled (if you know about SEO, you know Distilled… they’re the guys that put on the great conferences!) before joining agenda21 Digital as an SEO Account Director in October 2013, and then becoming Head of Content.

I stayed at agenda21 Digital for five years, where I got to learn loads of good stuff from working with some very large brands, and having an awesome team of people who became like family.

I then moved to in-house role as Search Strategist at VMware. The work at VMware allowed me to experiment and innovate, and to delve far deeper into the data side of things than I had ever been, and as a result we built a cool system that helped to guide content creation based on need, while measuring its success in support ticket reduction and SEO (in this sense, people finding the right solutions to self-serve).

Three years later, In October 2022 I joined mobile network Three UK as the SEO Lead, where I plan to remain for a good while. It’s a great company with lovely people, and I’ve been able to create and pursue a strategy for search visibility which I am confident will have significant impact.

2023 saw the completion my Masters Degree. I graduated with an MSc in Business Analytics from Aston University.

At the start of 2024, I began my PhD at Swansea University – my research will be on neurodiversity in the workplace.

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