Mike the SEO guy

— About

I’m Mike. I make businesses easier to find.

Freelance since day one, doing this since 2016. No agency behind me, no team to manage, no account executive between you and the work — which is deliberate, and it is most of why the plans look the way they do.

Get a free audit See pricing
Mike Arnold, freelance SEO consultant, sitting on rocks holding a camera

How I ended up doing this

I started in 2016 as a copywriter, because I liked writing and somebody was willing to pay for it. What got me was the gap between the pieces that got read and the ones that did not — it was rarely about the writing. It was about whether anyone could find the thing in the first place.

That turned out to be an SEO question, and I have been answering versions of it ever since. Along the way I have worked with brands like Virgin Australia, TripAdvisor, UGREEN and Anker, and with dozens of businesses small enough that I was the entire marketing department.

The smaller ones are the ones written up on this site, for a boring but important reason: those are the engagements where I own the whole picture, so the Search Console data is clean enough to show you without a paragraph of caveats about what else was running at the same time.

I have never worked at an agency. I am not against them — there are good ones — but I have built a career on the assumption that the person you talk to should be the person doing the work, and that has never stopped being the thing clients say they wanted.

01 How I work

Four things I will not budge on

Results, not promises

Nobody can promise page one by Tuesday. What I can promise is honest work and reporting clear enough that you could fire me on the strength of it — every figure I show you traces back to a Search Console export you can open yourself.

Plain English, always

You will always know what I am doing, why, and what it means for the business. If I cannot explain a decision simply, I have not understood it well enough yet.

Month to month

No contracts locking you in. The work should keep you, not a piece of paper. If the numbers stop justifying the invoice, they will say so before I do.

You get me

Not a junior, not an account manager, not an agency that subcontracts the writing. I do the audit, the research, the writing, the code and the reporting. That is the main reason the plans are scoped the way they are.

02 What that produces

The numbers I am willing to put my name to

3.6×search traffic in six months
24%of all clicks from pages added in that time
91%of it from people who had never heard of them

One engagement, measured in Google Search Console, brand and Google Business Profile traffic excluded. It is a single client rather than an average, and it is labelled that way on purpose — an “average client result” is a number nobody can check.See the case studies

03 Tools

What I actually work in

Nothing exotic. The research and reporting stack is the industry standard one, and the build side is wherever your site already lives.

  • Google Search Console
  • Google Analytics
  • Ahrefs
  • SEMrush
  • Screaming Frog
  • PageSpeed Insights
  • WordPress
  • Elementor
  • Shopify
  • Astro
  • Webflow
  • Vercel

04 Questions

The ones people actually ask

What is your background?

I started in 2016 as a copywriter, because I liked writing. I got interested in why some pages got read and others did not, which turned out to be an SEO question, and I have been answering it ever since. I have always been freelance — no agency, no corporate ladder.

Who have you worked with?

Brands including Virgin Australia, TripAdvisor, UGREEN, Anker and MentorCruise, alongside dozens of smaller businesses who just needed the work done properly. The case studies on this site are the smaller ones, because those are the engagements where the search data is clean enough to show you.

Where are you based, and does it matter?

Mid Suffolk, and I work with clients worldwide. It matters if you want someone local — I work with businesses across Suffolk and can meet in person. Otherwise it does not: roughly half my work is US-based, and none of it needs me in the room. If you sell across borders there is a real technical layer to it — hreflang, country targeting, one canonical version of every page — and that is work I do rather than refer out.

What if SEO is not the right answer for me?

Then I will say so. Sometimes the honest answer is paid ads, or a better website, or fixing the thing that happens after someone lands. I would rather tell you that than take a retainer for work that will not pay for itself.

Why is there no team?

Because the work I am selling is judgement, and judgement does not delegate well. A larger operation would mean someone less experienced doing the research while I sold the next one. I would rather work with fewer clients properly.

Send me a domain

I’ll look at it properly and tell you what I would work on first, and roughly what it is worth. Specifics about your site, not a template. If the answer is “not much”, you get that too.

Get a free audit