Tom Marriott has spent the past decade helping businesses of every size grow online — building their websites, growing their organic search traffic, and sculpting paid campaigns. Today he’s Digital Marketing Director at Ina4, a fast-growing agency based in Wigan and Leeds, but he’s better known across LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok as The SEO Punk: the voice calling out the misunderstood and the misinterpreted in search. In this Unscripted SEO conversation with Mark A Preston, Tom makes the case that the industry has a soundbite problem — that too much of what passes for SEO advice is either surface-level filler or deliberately overcomplicated to make the person saying it sound clever.
People can also overcomplicate SEO intentionally to make themselves sound more valuable.
Tom Marriott
His antidote is refreshingly plain. Tom boils SEO down to three pillars — technical, content and off-site — and argues the biggest lever today is content that genuinely resonates with an audience, not content produced at volume. He’s sanguine about AI, too: drawing a line back to the Industrial Revolution, he reckons the machines still need people to run them, and that human-written copy will keep outperforming AI output where rankings are concerned. Just as pointed is his take on how modern agencies should work — less production line, more trusted advisor.
We’re more consultative now than production line.
Tom Marriott
It’s a punchy, myth-busting listen from someone who’d rather strip SEO back to what actually moves the needle than dress it up. Tom’s parting soundbite sums up the whole philosophy in four words.
Watch the interview
The full conversation
You’ve got such a varied background — could you give an overview of who you are and what you do now?
Thanks so much for having me on. You might know me from blasting your feed as the SEO Punk. I’ve had about 10 years in the industry now — this is coming up to my decade. I started right at the bottom, in the dark underworld of SEO and digital marketing at a fairly questionable agency, and worked my way up from agency to agency. I’ve spent my whole career in agency world because I love the variation — different customers, different clients. Today I’m director of digital marketing for iNA4, a digital agency based in the north of England, in Wigan, with a second office in Leeds, working with everyone from small startups to FTSE 100 companies. And a bit like Bruce Wayne, I have an alter ego: when I’m not the marketing director at iNA4, I become the SEO Punk — my SEO persona on Instagram and TikTok. I’d dabbled in podcasting, and I moved into short-form video to teach people what SEO is actually about, because so much of what’s out there is surface-level nonsense. I wanted to be a bit more real and truthful. It started to take off, went a bit viral, and here I am.
You said you want people to understand SEO from a reality point of view. What do you actually mean by that?
Throughout my career there’s been this surface-level SEO — soundbite SEO — where people teach the easy things: do your meta titles, do your descriptions. They’re important, but it’s so surface level it never pushes into what SEO really is. And people over-complicate SEO too, almost intentionally, to make themselves sound more valuable. I didn’t like either extreme. SEO’s core principles can be very, very simple, and that’s what I wanted to create content about: breaking it down and introducing people to the reality of SEO.
You create a lot of content on SEO — how do you constantly come up with ideas of what to record?
This was a difficult process to work out, and my advice to anyone interested in content creation is this. Originally I just had ideas pop into my head and recorded them with a phone in my hand — and it was terrible. You’d have an idea but not be able to articulate it; it was messy and no one watched it. So I built a process and a system, the same way you would with SEO — we all have master spreadsheets for our SEO work, yet I had nothing for content. Now I start with the entity, the single point I want to get across. I put it into a Trello card (I still use Trello for this) and write the script out word for word, because you want it short, sharp and punchy. Then I record, edit a little, and post. It’s a repeatable process I can run through quickly, instead of the chaos I had before.
A lot of people say they won’t record videos because they can’t make them look professional. Does it need to look professional, or do people just want reality?
You’ve hit a gold mine there — people now just want reality. In the early days of Instagram and TikTok everything had to be finely polished, almost like it came out of a Marvel studio. That’s not the case anymore. My own content has moved to a much rawer form — I used to have the ring light and a nicely lit background, and I’ve deliberately moved away from that, because it’s about resonating with the individual. This is a lesson straight from SEO: you resonate with content you engage with; the principle is identical. As long as your point is made well, the production quality matters far less. That said, there are elements you do need — hooks especially. You have to say something in the first two seconds that makes people think ‘what does this person mean?’ rather than scroll past.
A lot of people ask how to future-proof their career because they think robots will take their jobs. What’s your take?
I get a lot of those questions — a big strand of my content is about AI and how it’s affecting marketing, and a lot of my day job is now wrapped up in it. Go back to the Industrial Revolution: there was a big shift in how the workforce worked, but you still needed people to manage and maintain the machines. AI is no different. Yes, AI can produce copy, and a fairly good job of it. But in SEO and rankings it’s the human-based copy that’s going to outperform AI copy — and we know that because of how Google set out its own principles: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. AI, without the right input, can’t replicate genuine, unique experience — that’s precisely why Google leaned into it. So we’re not out of a job; these machines still need human input. It’s a case of adapting, and SEO has always adapted. This is simply the next adaptation.
What is it about SEO that excites you? Why SEO?
A lot of people think SEO is manipulation — manipulating sites, content or backlinks to rank higher. I don’t like that framing, because it’s not strictly true. The way I see it, our end goal is to improve the websites in our care so they’re more valuable to the users who visit them; ranking higher and gaining traffic is a consequence of doing that well. And the thing I love in particular: paid ads and social can be a rollercoaster, but a good SEO strategy, done right, is growth and growth and growth — an upward hill. It can be a struggle to climb, but over a long period it just goes up. I’ve got a client meeting this afternoon with one of my favourite clients — three young lads who came to us as a startup, entrusted us to build their online presence, and three years later they’re a three-million-pound-turnover business from organic SEO alone. Granted they’re now driving Teslas while I’m still in my Volkswagen — but that’s the part I love.
Do you enjoy building something from the ground up more than working with big brands that have mastered budgets? Whereabouts in that spectrum do you like to work?
I work across all of them, but I particularly love taking a business that’s small and getting them that growth spurt up to the medium level. At the top level it’s fantastic — effectively unlimited resources, you can tap internal teams for content — but a lot of what you’re doing there is micro-optimisation, like tuning the fins on a Formula One car for a fraction of a second. It’s great, but there’s politics in large enterprises, and it becomes about budgets and money. At the other end you can go creative. Take a trainer company we worked with: there was a huge US market for sneakers — Jordans, Yeezys — that didn’t have a foothold here. Their competitors were all clean, modern and corporate, so we did the exact opposite with their content, SEO and social, because the audience buying these things is rebellious, not clean-cut. That’s the bit I enjoy — when we can be creative and edgy.
With brands nobody knows yet, what steps do you take in the initial stages to support them?
First you have to get to know them — the personality of what they want to achieve — because usually they don’t fully know yet. They have an idea they know is a money-maker, which is the business end goal, fair enough. But you have to strip back to the soul of it: what’s the motivation, what drives them? In the same way you’re asking me these questions to get at what drives me, I want to find that core idea and message, and build on it. Then we look at competitors in the same marketplace — what are they pinning their SEO hopes on — dissect it, and ask how we can take the same working concept but move in a different, more attention-grabbing direction. So I strip it down to understand where they fit in that bigger pool of bigger fish.
A lot of SEO professionals just don’t ‘get it’ — that’s why I’m now an SEO mindset coach. What’s your view on the mindset side of SEO?
I think a huge proportion of people see SEO as a recipe — and it is, to a degree. But you can follow a recipe and that doesn’t make you Gordon Ramsay; it just makes you produce the same thing everyone else does, because they’re all following the same recipe. Great chefs understand their ingredients and what each brings. It’s no different in SEO: I came into a 20-year-old business and had to sit down, observe, and work out where its strengths lay and how to turn them into a competitive edge. You have to identify those edges — in the client, the website, the content, the tone — and use them. The building blocks are the same; we all make bread with the same ingredients, but the quantities and method don’t have to be. So much SEO content is base-level regurgitation — ‘do your keyword research, go for high volume’ — when keyword research entirely depends on where you are in your journey. It’s SEO by numbers, and it doesn’t sit well with me.
What does the industry have to do to get out of that ‘SEO robot’ mentality?
I suppose I’m trying to be part of the answer — as are you and others trying to move the mindset on. Even in my little niche of Instagram and TikTok, I try to move people from easy-to-absorb content to something of actual value. There are more people doing that now than years ago, when few thought leaders were willing to change the dynamics of SEO. Hopefully, with AI and the changes Google’s bringing — a new form of search — we’ll get the shot of adrenaline the industry needs. We’ve had the same Google screen for 20 years; when that changes, people will understand that SEO is different now. SEO doesn’t go away — people keep saying it’s dead, and it’s not — it changes direction. Hopefully those changes shift the mindset both inside the industry and outside it, because there’s still a lot of negativity looking in.
You’re a director within an agency. How is the agency model changing — does the traditional model need to adapt?
It needs to adapt, a hundred percent, and ours already has. At a lot of agencies the mindset has always been production-line — SEO by numbers — where you put the same things on every website and it never really works. We work so closely with our customers that we’re essentially a resourceable extension of their business. Whether they’re FTSE 100 or a startup, we’re on client calls almost daily, effectively sat in the room as part of their team. That has to happen, because you need to understand all the facets of a company to pull the right strings and advise properly. Agency work now is more consultative than production-line — most of my job, and my peers’, is sitting on calls answering ‘what should we do next?’ and advising ‘we believe you should do X, Y and Z, and here’s how we can help.’ It’s an extension of the company rather than an arm’s-length partner you pay and leave alone.
Do you believe that approach creates a longer-lasting relationship?
It really does — and I’m giving away my secrets here. I read a couple of years ago that the average agency-client tenure was about two years, and I sat there thinking: mine is five to ten. Some clients have been with us from the very beginning. I broke down why, and it came back to those strong relationships — clients can’t envisage their business without us. And because people inevitably move on to other companies, they take us with them: ‘we worked with these guys, they’re amazing.’ That’s now how we generate most of our new business — word of mouth from people who saw us as part of their team.
Working that closely, do you still have to set boundaries — so they’re not ringing you on a Sunday afternoon?
Yes, you do — though what tends to happen is you get past that point. This weekend just gone I had three emails land on a Sunday afternoon, and to be fair to the guy, when I replied he said, ‘Why are you responding on a Sunday?’ They come to respect your time the same way they would a colleague’s: I wouldn’t call my colleague at that hour, so I won’t call Tom either. Occasionally it happens, and if it’s an absolute disaster I’ll always accept that — but the relationships are good enough that they respect us as peers helping them hit their goals, not just an outsourced partner.
Bringing it back to SEO — what part of SEO have you seen create the biggest impact for businesses?
I boil SEO down into three parts — the three pillars: technical, content, and off-site. It used to be a very technical-led industry, with a lot of weight on backlinks. I’m not saying backlinks are dead — they still have an impact — but what I really see making the biggest difference now, certainly in the startup and SME space, is content. And not the most content or the highest quantity — content that resonates with the audience and answers their questions. Because at the end of the day, all content is answering questions. That’s why I’m so fixated on how this changes as AI embeds itself into search. But to answer directly: content is the biggest lever in SEO right now — content that answers your audience’s questions. Though before you write it, you have to understand your audience.
What are your thoughts on the industry heavily focusing on content topic hubs?
It’s a strategy, a system — essentially the same thing: creating content that answers the question. Do hubs add authority to a topic? Probably, yes. But I’ve seen plenty of sites without that raft of content — without the tree of hubs — rank and generate huge traffic off a single, effective piece that answers a query better than anyone else. So I don’t think you always need a huge raft of content. It’s a cliché, but it is about quality — and quality content writers, sometimes supported by AI tools (nothing wrong with that), are a really powerful thing for companies right now.
What research tools should SEOs be using to work out what to write about?
I’m a bit old-school here — the best tool is Google. Type in the words and read what’s in front of you; identify the quality and the gaps. There are top-level tools that help you look at things from a height, but honestly, for most of what I do it’s: once you know you want to rank for something — maybe a low-volume but high-intent, high-converting niche term — start googling, start reading, and make notes. ‘This person hasn’t covered that; we’ve got expertise here, so we’ll talk about this; it’d be nice to add a video there.’ Sometimes manual is just better.
Lots of business owners can’t yet afford an agency. When it comes to growth — not just SEO — what can they do themselves?
I love this question, because I don’t like the idea that SEO is beyond people in the early stages of their business. We’re both passionate about Wix as a website platform — it has a history that tarnished it, which I think is deeply unfair, because as a platform to build on it’s incredible. SEOs will tear me apart for this, and I disagree with all of them — fight me — but you can build a genuinely complex website on Wix that ticks every technical box out of the box, more so than most WordPress sites. Then you focus on two things: writing content — about your expertise, what you know and do every day, again and again — and the off-page side, which should happen naturally over time. It might be a long burn, but you’ll pick up links from directories, Google Business Profile, local events and local press. What puts people off is the perceived technical barrier, which is exactly why I point them at a platform that removes it.
People don’t like change — you’re effectively telling them Wix does the stuff they pay a lot of money for. Doesn’t the industry need to accept things rather than fear them?
A hundred and ten percent. Look at Shopify — for years our e-commerce options were Magento and PrestaShop, which were complex, convoluted and needed developers and huge amounts of time. Then Shopify came along and changed everything. Wix is no different: it takes the technical burden away so you can focus on making something that looks great, add your content, and go. Over the past couple of years I’ve been pushing our agency to build on Editor X — I know this sounds like a Wix advert, and it isn’t intended to be, but I genuinely believe it. It lets us build small, simple, low-cost sites with complex features when needed — the starting-block website smaller clients want to grow into — and makes everything responsive easily, while still supporting blogs and stores. For context, I was probably the first SEO to move his own site onto Wix, got absolutely blasted for it five years ago, didn’t listen — and now I’m on their advisory board.
Why do genuine bloggers who know nothing about SEO drive so much organic traffic?
This goes right back to mindset. People assume SEO is technical and complicated and therefore has to be handled a certain way — and it’s really not. In its simple form it’s those three pillars, and if you take away the technical pillar (less impactful than it used to be) and the off-page pillar (which comes naturally over time, especially for a blogger writing about experiences people connect with and link to), you’re left with creating content that resonates with the audience you want to attract. Then Google does the rest, because at the level it’s now at, it understands what good-quality content is. I’ve worked with a lot of bloggers who hit incredible organic numbers and don’t have a Scooby-Doo how — they usually only come to me because their site’s been hacked, or they’ve read some soundbite advice and are panicking about a tiny metric. Focus on the core principles, provide them, and you’ll be rewarded. Don’t over-complicate it. Keep it simple, stupid.
What should the industry and business owners be reading about SEO, and how do they know it’s right?
One of my biggest bugbears with SEO education content is that there’s no context — and context is everything. ‘Where are you in your journey?’ is the question to ask before implementing anything. Personally — and this is something I’m working on — I think SEO education is best done in communities of people. That’s why I did the podcast: to build a community that wanted to learn. It’s why I’ve created a Discord community called the SEO Hangout, which I’d invite anyone onto — expert or beginner — because we all learn from each other. I’ve learned loads from you, Mark, over my career, and from many others, and that community has made me a better professional. The industry is far more open than it used to be; we should be building communities that help each other learn SEO.
Is there anything we haven’t touched on that you’re passionate about and the audience should know?
I’m hugely excited about how AI is going to affect search. It’s partly scary — we’re seeing generative AI arrive — and people ask whether Google will just be replaced by ChatGPT. I really don’t think it will. I don’t believe we, as humans, will accept purely generative AI responses in search, because we crave options — it’s why we have multiple news channels and newspapers. If it did go fully down that path, there’s a real concern about content creation: content creators keep this delicate ecosystem of the web alive, and if they get no credit or traffic they’ll stop creating. It would be self-sacrificial for search engines to let that happen. I think we’ll see a hybrid between generative AI and traditional search results — a balance, similar to how featured snippets and zero-click searches played out — and within a year or two, not some distant future. That’s what I’ll be chronicling on my channels.
You’ve given your time freely and dropped some real bombs — is there anything the audience can do to say thank you?
If you’ve enjoyed this, go and follow me — it’s the SEO Punk on TikTok and the SEO Punk on Instagram. Mark’s right that I’ll bombard your feed, but hopefully you’ll enjoy it. And if you want to learn SEO, or you’re an expert who wants to give back, come over to the SEO Hangout — it’s free to join. I’m developing it with collaborative and even co-working sessions where we can work on our websites together and share ideas — maybe Mark will join us on the stage one day. Come and join us; we’ll welcome you with open arms.
To finish — what’s your SEO soundbite?
Keep it simple, stupid.
Connect with Tom Marriott
- Agency: ina4.com
- YouTube: @theseopunk
- LinkedIn: /in/digitalmarketingpunk
- X: @theseopunk
More from the Unscripted SEO Podcast
- Patrick Stox on Building in the GEO Era
- Rob Bonham on Running an SEO Agency in the Agentic Age
- Kevin Indig on Becoming a Fortune 500 Growth Advisor
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The Unscripted SEO Podcast is produced by SEO Arcade. If you want expert interviews working as an SEO and link-building engine for your brand, explore podcast-powered link building or book a call with Jeremy Rivera.
