Employment

• 2021 – To date
  Freelance Digital Marketing Consultant adrianhemsley.com

  • SEO consultancy for clients across various B2B and B2C industries, including Disquiet Dog, Click Intelligence, Codacomms, Holodigital, Process Insights, Hummingbird Technologies, Servomex, PurbeckDigital; other work protected by NDA. Regularly scoring 100 on PS metrics (Core Web Vitals, CLS, LCP, FID).
  • BAU: SEO audits, content audits, keyword & competitor research, CDNs, and over 200 ranking signals.
  • Designed and deployed HTML e-shots, updated e-commerce platforms (WooCommerce, Magento, WordPress), and trained Digital Marketing Executives.
  • Using AI and SEO tools (ChatGPT, GSC, GA4, Looker, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, Moz, etc.) to deliver actionable insights and performance improvements.
  

• 2018 – 2020
  Team Member National Trust

  • Front of house for National Trust’s Corfe Castle; maître d', barista, cashier, junior chef, COVID-19 procedure trained.
  • Renovated cottage: painting, decorating, building, plastering, landscape gardening, built summer house.

• 2016 – 2018
  Digital Consultant adrianhemsley.com

  • Digital marketing for various blue chips, multinationals, SMEs and sole traders: Portfolio.
  • Short-term SEO & business development contracts to build out for SEO offering, branding, website redevelopment, tools, analytics, tone of voice, content marketing & strategy.
  • Web dev & SEO for local businesses; retail, finance, construction. Cleaning up toxic links, disavowing & reconsideration requests using LRT & Ahrefs.
  • Successful site migration of the largest waste recycling facility in South East & local citation clear-up. Pagespeed improved from 60% to 99%. Successful transfer of all locale rankings from Sussex to Essex.
  • Technical recommendations & implementation for large site migrations, including Sealskinz.com, thelovelygarden.co.uk, Sextoys.co.uk with bespoke CMS, WordPress, Magento, Joomla.
  • Online Reputation Management (ORM) campaign for a construction company with negative PR by promoting positive content. Successfully pushed down negative press releases using social media profiles, blogs, videos, news content & social media schema to take up real estate on page 1.
  • Pitched and sold a new mobile-responsive, optimized website to a stable company, generating £7K of new business.
  • Other SEO work protected by NDA, including technical SEO audits, ad-hoc XHTML/HTML, CSS, jQuery front-end development, website deployment, and WordPress optimization using plugins.
  • Sales & pitching to clients, administration & accountancy: Payroll, PAYE, cashbook.
  

• 2014 – 2016
  SEO Marketing Manager Fidelity Investments

  • First SEO Manager hired globally, managing a team of 5-20 + offshore developers.
  • Generated £43 million (Jan 2015-16) from Organic: YOY 25% increase in Revenue, 14% increase in New Users, 20% increase in Transactions. Managing a budget of 140k per year.
  • Training in Financial Service & Standards, FCA, Compliance, ISAs, Investment Funds, SIPPs & Trusts.
  • Spearheaded SEO development project to map and rewrite 2,500 funds and share classes. From complete invisibility of over 2,500 funds and shares to page 1 for short and long-tail share and fund search terms.
  • Drove project to optimise SSL cipher list, substantially reducing page load time by 3 seconds and subsequently increasing NPS and projecting a YOY 30% increase in revenue.
  • Providing support minimizing CPA for PPC, reducing spend on brand terms for PPC, leveraging analytics insights to increase social signals, directing and developing outreach strategy, executing email marketing, liaising with CRO, ensuring synchronicity between above and below the line marketing to ensure a holistic approach towards SEO.
  • Educating stakeholders within analytics, technology, systems, infrastructure, development, UX, web content, digital marketing, customer, broadcast, PR, on the enabling nature of SEO.
  • BAU - meta & URI optimisation, canonical errors, redirect chains, semantic markup, broken link fixes, WMT error fixes, internal anchor text optimisation, XML slim content, page consolidation & cannibalisation solutions. Content optimisation - keyword/competitor/ranking analysis, developing business cases for rollouts. Risk mitigation for "mobilegeddon" - disseminating Google mobile best practices across the business.
  • Social - oversaw production of viral content with over 2k FB shares, 200 tweets, via Outbrain & explainer videos: 7k YouTube views for each video.
  • Emphasising the importance of MVT, A/B split testing & CRO and AGILE-based methodology to inform web content and marketing strategies.
  • Substantially increasing social media engagement metrics & developing native advertising & content marketing strategy for Sky News and BBC commentators, Tom Stevenson, Maike Currie.
  • Represented Fidelity at BRIGHTONSEO talk: Corporate Stakeholder SEO – getting things done
  • Found the commute quite arduous (South London) so decided to find work closer to home.
  

• 2012 – 2014
  Digital Marketing Consultant SEOBrighton

  • Achieved #1 Google rankings for high-value local search terms “Brighton SEO” and “SEO Brighton.”
  • Secured contracts with major clients like Cheapflights, Grazia, and Bentley, delivering comprehensive SEO and outreach strategies.
  • Provided full-cycle SEO services, including audits, technical implementation, and link-building.
  • Contract work in Dubai for Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank & dubizzle.

• 2010 – 2012
  Digital Marketing Manager SiteVisibility

  • Managed a team of 5 multilingual Digital Marketing Executives, overseeing corporate campaigns with £20k monthly budgets.
  • Delivered #1 rankings for “bingo” (Gala Bingo) and “hotels” (Hotels.com), P1 for all target KW phrases.
  • Clients included AVIS, Hotels.com, Spaseekers, Scribbler, Scottish Television, Sussex Wildlife Trust, and more.
  • Contributed to the creation of BrightonSEO, the world’s largest digital marketing conference.
  • Generated £200k in e-commerce revenue for AVS in 2011 (from £0 in 2010).

• Other Work
  Digital Marketing Roles

  • Led SEO strategies for prominent companies.
  • Head of SEO at CWT (2009–2010), secured top search rankings for EasyJet, NCL, and HolidayTaxis.
  • Search Developer At White Hat Media (2007–2009), optimized e-commerce platforms and built W3C SEO-compliant websites for clients like Peter Reed Luxury Linens and Dragon’s Den winners.
  • Web Developer / Content Creator At Cactus Language (2004–2007), spearheaded web development and SEO efforts, achieving #1 Google rankings for nearly all [LANGUAGE] course [LOCATION] keyword searches. N1# image for ‘London’ in G image search. Language Courses UK passed yearly budget mid July 6 months ahead of schedule. Expanded Cactus Language’s online presence into the U.S. market.
  

Education & Training

• 2025
  TQUK Digital Marketing TQUK

  Pass: Email Marketing, Digital Marketing for Business, Search Engine Optimisation for Business, Social Media for Business

• 2003 - 2004
  National Council For the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) Brighton MET

  City College Brighton. Post-Grad NCTJ, (Pass) Photoshop, Magazine production; PR, B2B, marketing copywriting, copyright law, magazine layout & design, sub-editing.

• 1998 - 2001
  BA English Literature Univeristy of Sheffield

  2:2 Philosophy & Eng Lit

• 1995 - 1997
  A levels    BHASVIC   

  A Levels - English (A) Govenment & Politics (A) History (C)

Skills

• Onsite

  • Meta tags (title, description, multilingual), HXs, semantic URL architecture, internal anchor text optimization, image (alt & title tags) and link optimization.
  • PageSpeed Insights: Removing inline CSS, minifying CSS & JS, CSS sprites, preprocessors, eliminating render-blocking JS & CSS with async, progressive enhancement & graceful degradation for DOM creation.
  • SSL cipher optimization, leveraging browser caching, removing 3XX redirect chains, fixing canonical errors, removing legacy code, fixing broken links & crawl errors.
  • XML sitemap creation, canonicalization, reducing DNS lookups, optimizing content and semantic markup, removal of boilerplate, slim & duplicate content, PR sculpting.
  • Google entity, structured data markup/Wikidata for knowledge graph, Google Answers Box, redirects & regex rewrites in htaccess, robots.txt, Rich Snippets, microdata & schema.
  • W3C validation for XHTML, CSS, HTML. Page consolidation & cannibalization solutions. Site migration best practices. CDNs: Akamai, CloudFront, Apache mod_rewrite, IIS.
  

  Offsite

  • Backlink analysis, successful disavowing of toxic links, generating authoritative topical trust flow links.
  • Content marketing, Digital PR, paid/owned/earned content marketing: blogger outreach, Textbroker, Upwork, infographic production, surveys (OnePoll), Whitespark, 3-way linking, blog commenting, forum outreach, badge marketing, app outreach.
  • Conceptual understanding of link juice and PageRank.
  

  Code

  • HTML, CSS, jQuery, Regular Expressions, WordPress, Themeforest, Magento.
  • Creation of responsive, UX-driven & mobile-friendly websites derived from a sleek, elegant code base.
  

  Marketing

  • Running social media channels via Hootsuite, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.
  • Increasing user engagement through animated videos, Open Graph, UTM URL tracking in analytics.
  • HTML creation, e-newsletter production & distribution, cross-email client testing (Dotmailer, Mailchimp).
  • Native advertising (Taboola, Outbrain), Digital PR (Gorkana), Apple Store optimization.
  • Advertising campaign ideas, storytelling, minimizing CPA for PPC, guiding affiliate strategy.
  

  Content, Design & UX

  • Content generation from competitor analysis, SEMrush, AdWords keyword planning, analytics & PPC data.
  • NCTJ-qualified journalist, English literature degree.
  • Adobe Creative Cloud (Photoshop, Illustrator), graphic design & typography ensuring brand compliance.
  • Responsive CSS for viewports, cross-browser testing (BrowserStack), Visual Web Optimizer, CRO, split A/B testing (Google Experiments).
  

  Corporate

  • Stakeholder training & engagement, providing business cases, 5-year strategy, leading SEO dev projects in India & UK.
  • Risk mitigation ("Mobilegeddon") - disseminating Google mobile best practices.
  • Leading Tax Year End digital marketing campaigns.
  • Understanding corporate culture & financial services requirements (Fin Proms, Dual Prominence, Risk Warnings, Treating Customers Fairly, CSO, SSO).
  

  Tools

  • Ahrefs, Google Analytics, Keyword Planner, Webmaster Tools, Google Trends, Xenu, Majestic, Screaming Frog, Link Research Tools, URLProfiler, SEMrush, Comscore, Brandwatch, Radian6, Twitterfeed, Moz, Brightedge, Hootsuite, AWRCloud, PI Datametrics, CognitiveSEO, SearchMetrics, Scrapebox, Excel (VLOOKUPs, Macros), Regex, Chatgpt