Over twenty years in search, still hands-on_

I have spent over 20 years in SEO, ecommerce and growth marketing, with senior roles at Expedia, Cheapflights and eDreams ODIGEO before founding Olivepods in 2018. Along the way I have led globally distributed teams of 20 and cross-functional groups of up to 40, and I have owned channels responsible for hundreds of millions in revenue. During 2010 I grew Expedia.com SEO revenue by 66% YoY bringing total SEO gross bookings to $1.2 billion.

These days I work primarily at Intrepid Digital as Senior Director, Strategy & Capabilities, leading the team that handles analytics, data science, AI and proprietary tool development, while providing strategic leadership on enterprise SEO for brands including Skyscanner, SKIMS and AG1. Through Olivepods, my own consultancy, I built senior pods of specialists around clients so they gained real expertise without the agency overhead.

AI is used extensively in my work across all areas. I help brands win visibility in SEO and grow share of voice in AI-driven search, positioning them in the answers that LLMs and search engines serve, and enjoy building tooling that automates the heavy lifting.

I am transparent, strategic and deliberately hands-on. I like setting direction, and staying close to delivery, analysing data and shipping technical work myself. I'm particularly fond of building solutions at the CDN level, with edge SEO and split testing SEO changes at scale on templated websites to drive iterative growth.

Outside work, I am a husband, father, dog person and petrolhead.

Speaking

A few places I've spoken at:

• ionSearch. Search marketing conference, talking enterprise SEO and AI search.
• SearchNorwich. The Norwich search community meet-up.
• SEO for Shopify. Practical ecommerce SEO for Shopify merchants.

Find me elsewhere

• LinkedIn @ajsmithseo
• Substack @smithydo
• X @smithyseo