🎙️ Unscripted SEO Podcast
Misunderstood SEO: Tom Marriott, The SEO Punk, Reveals All
Digital Marketing Director at Ina4 on cutting through surface-level SEO advice, why authentic short-form content beats polished production, and his take on AI’s real impact on search.
Tom Marriott, Digital Marketing Director at Ina4 — The SEO Punk
Tom is someone who truly loves everything digital. For the past 10 years, Tom has been helping businesses of all sizes with their growth through digital marketing — from building their website, to helping them grow their organic search traffic, and sculpting paid ad campaigns.
Tom is currently the Digital Marketing Director at Ina4, a fast-growing digital agency based in Wigan & Leeds. Although Tom works with top brands, he has a personal passion for helping start-ups transform from having no brand presence into multi-million pound turnover businesses.
Tom Marriott is also known as The SEO Punk, talking about the misunderstood and misinterpreted when it comes to SEO, sharing his advice across LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok.
“Measuring Content Marketing Results with Brie E Anderson” — founder of Beast Analytics on the metrics that actually matter, what most teams measure wrong, and how to prove content ROI to stakeholders.
— Brie E Anderson, Beast Analytics | Listen: Brie E Anderson on Content Measurement →
Key Highlights from the Episode
On why he created “The SEO Punk” persona: All the way through my career, I thought there’s this surface-level, soundbite SEO — people saying the easy things when they’re teaching SEO. Do your meta titles and descriptions, and these are all important things, but it was so surface level. People can also overcomplicate SEO intentionally to make themselves sound more valuable. I wanted to break this down and introduce people to the realities of SEO at its core, which can be very, very simple.
On AI and SEO careers: Let’s go back to the Industrial Revolution. There was a big shift in how the workforce worked. Yes, there was change. But there still had to be people to manage and maintain these machines. When we’re talking about AI and copywriters worried about their jobs — yes, AI can produce copy. However, when we’re talking about SEO and rankings, it’s going to be human-based copy that outperforms AI copy. These are entities which AI, without appropriate input, can’t really replicate. We’re not out of a job yet.
On the three pillars of SEO: I boil SEO down into three parts: technical, content, and off-site. The biggest impact nowadays is content. It’s not about creating the most amount — it’s about creating content which resonates with the audience and answers their questions. Before you do that, you’ve got to understand your audience.
On the agency model: The agency model that we implement is that we work so closely with our customers that we are essentially an extension of their business. We’re more consultative now than production line. Our job is sitting on calls, advising on where people need to go — not just doing tasks and collecting a fee. That shift is what creates five- to ten-year client relationships instead of the industry average of two.
His SEO soundbite: Keep it simple, stupid.
Connect with Tom Marriott
- Agency: ina4.com
- Twitter/X: @theseopunk
- LinkedIn: Tom Marriott
- TikTok/Instagram: @theseopunk
The Unscripted SEO Podcast features candid, unscripted conversations with SEOs and digital marketers. Hosted by Mark A Preston, now by Jeremy Rivera.
