About Me and HockeyStick.Biz
The Short Story
Hi, I’m Rich, and I’m an E-commerce Store Owner and SEO Consultant.
I specialise in ranking product and service pages in competitive SERPs – the pages that actually generate revenue.
Consulting for American CEOs and CMOs, and competing across financial services, cybersecurity, durable goods, and hospitality SERPs has honed my ability to deliver results where they matter most.
I started in SEO by growing a portfolio of blogs in 2019, before upgrading my websites to also sell products online.
I have been an SEO consultant since 2023, first at an agency, before setting up HockeyStick.Biz to focus on the strategies I have found to be most effective.
I’ve documented what I have learned in my “SEO 101” series of articles and share case studies too.
My aim is to explain how SEO really works, as the SEO industry has no barriers to entry, which allows charlatans to pose as experts and take advantage of unsuspecting business owners.
The Long Story
My journey with websites began in 2000, writing HTML and CSS to create profile pages for my Neopets (if you, you know… back when Macromedia Flash was king).
That early exposure to web development gave me the technical foundation to create my website portfolio – though I must admit that I’m leaning heavily on WordPress now, rather than hand-coding everything in Notepad like before.
After studying a distinctly non-technical bachelor’s degree, I worked as a Trader in London, first trading options on stock indices, then trading physical oil across Europe.
In 2016, I then had the grand idea of trading goods B2B between Asia and Europe, setting up in Hong Kong (trading is trading, right?). That’s when I learned what sales cycles and lead times were, and I (slowly) figured that life would be much easier if I could work out how to do inbound marketing and improve scalability.
By 2019, I had found a couple of guys on YouTube explaining how they did “content SEO”. I wrote a couple of articles for my B2B website, and I saw traffic arriving within a couple of weeks. The Pandora’s Box had been opened.
The Beginning: Content-First Approach
I immediately built my first content website and followed the conventional wisdom of the time. I took an SEO course that preached “content is king” and focused on targeting long-tail keywords with minimal competition. The approach worked brilliantly – at first.
What I didn’t realize then was that I wasn’t really doing SEO. I was simply avoiding competition by being the only relevant result for ultra-specific queries. I was winning by default, not with a real strategy.
The Harsh Reality Check
My perspective changed dramatically when competition arrived in my niches. Despite having created sites with hundreds of high-quality articles and supposedly establishing “topical authority” – in one case, I even had a website with over 1,000 blog posts – I watched in confusion as newer sites with objectively inferior content began outranking mine.
The pattern became undeniable: sites with higher domain authority consistently outranked mine despite having lower-quality content. The conclusion was simple: authority is the most important ranking factor.
Professional Evolution
Determined to understand authority-building and rescue the main website in my portfolio, I joined an SEO agency as a consultant. I advised C-level executives on SEO strategy and achieved great results through meticulous keyword research, on-page optimization and a healthy dose of backlinks.
My Approach Today
Now I own a portfolio of e-commerce stores and content websites – all of which I’ve built and optimized myself. This hands-on experience across different business models has refined my simple approach to SEO:
- I meticulously analyse competitor authority
- I build high-quality backlinks using scalable processes
The journey from hand-coding HTML to harnessing SEO authority has given me both technical depth and strategic perspective. I don’t just apply SEO techniques – I understand the underlying principles that make search engines work, allowing me to adapt as algorithms evolve.
When you work with me, you’re getting someone who learned the hard way that authority trumps all – and who knows exactly how to build that authority for lasting results.
Crucially, you will be working with a business owner who understands your perspective.
This is where I’m supposed to tell you that you should hire me… Nope! Read all my SEO 101 articles before you contact me… Please! I only work with clients that really understand SEO. Fortunately, if you read my articles, you will qualify, because SEO is not rocket science! Also, there aren’t that many articles to read, so it won’t hurt. Put it like this, if you contact me, and you don’t mention that you have read all my articles (which I have put a lot of effort into), I may not reply, or if I do, I will simply ask you to read all my articles.