About · Jamie McKaye
Search keeps reinventing itself. I’ve been here for all of it.
I’m Jamie McKaye — an independent SEO and AI search consultant, working with businesses across the UK from a base in Surrey. Nineteen years in, I’ve learned to distrust certainty about search, to focus on the fundamentals that survive every upheaval, and to build the things I advise on rather than just talk about them. This page is who you’d actually be working with.
Jamie McKaye · Surrey, UK
What nineteen years in search actually teaches you
I started doing this in 2007. Long enough ago that the job has been declared dead, or completely reinvented, more times than I can usefully count.
I worked through the updates that wiped out the link-buying and content-farm era almost overnight. Through the panic when search went mobile-first. Through the shift from matching keywords to understanding intent, when an entire industry’s tactics stopped working inside a single quarter. Through the rise of the answer box, and the slow realisation that ranking number one no longer guaranteed a click. And now through AI — assistants answering the questions that used to be searches, and a fresh wave of certainty about exactly what it all means.
Here is what every one of those moments had in common. A genuine shift happened. A great deal of money was then made selling certainty about it — new rules, new playbooks, guaranteed results. And when the dust settled, the fundamentals were still standing: be genuinely useful, be technically sound, be the source worth trusting. The specifics changed every time. The fundamentals never did.
Search history — the moments that mattered
Every shift was sold as a revolution. Every shift, the fundamentals survived.
Nineteen years didn’t teach me search. It taught me to distrust the people who claim they’ve got it figured out.
Why I build, not just advise
Most people who advise on technical SEO have never built the thing they’re advising on. I think it shows — and not in a good way.
I run four software products of my own, live in production. LessonLoop — management software for music academies, on the web and on iOS. Klarvo — AI-transparency and compliance tooling for websites. VeloPress — productised website performance optimisation. Vintifi — bespoke commerce product built end-to-end. These are real businesses with real users, not weekend projects.
I didn’t build them to diversify. I build them — and keep building them — because it is the most honest way I know to stay genuinely current. You cannot bluff your way through Core Web Vitals, crawl efficiency, schema, or how an AI system parses a page when you are personally responsible for software that lives or dies on exactly those things. Every week I’m solving the technical problems I advise clients on, in my own codebases, with my own money on the line.
So when I tell you what’s wrong with your site and how to fix it, that isn’t theory I read in someone else’s article. It’s work I do. And it’s the reason I can implement the fix myself, rather than handing you a document and hoping your developer eventually gets to it.
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LessonLoop
Management software for music academies. Live on the web and on iOS.
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Klarvo
AI-transparency and compliance tooling for websites.
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VeloPress
Productised WordPress performance optimisation.
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Vintifi
Bespoke commerce product built end-to-end.
What working with me is actually like
Yes, it’s just me. That’s deliberate, and for the work I do it is a feature, not a limitation.
The agency model has a quiet flaw: the senior person who wins the work is rarely the person who does it. You’re sold expertise and delivered juniors. Your project becomes a ticket in a queue, and your messages travel through an account manager who relays them to someone you’ll never actually speak to.
Work with me, and the person who diagnoses the problem is the person who implements the fix and the person who answers your email. No relay. No translation layer. No seniority bait-and-switch. When a project genuinely needs a skill outside mine — design, occasionally a second pair of development hands — I bring in specific people I’ve worked with and trust, and I stay your single point of contact throughout. You always know exactly who is doing your work, because it’s me.
The other thing worth knowing up front: I will tell you the truth. If your budget is better spent somewhere other than where you assumed, I’ll say so. If a fashionable tactic won’t work for your situation, I’ll say so. If we’re not a good fit, I’ll say that too. I would rather lose a project than win it on a promise I can’t keep. Nineteen years in, my reputation is worth considerably more to me than any single piece of work.
I think in public
If you want to know how I think, I’ve made it straightforward: I publish it, most days.
I write about search — what’s genuinely changing, what’s hype, and where I think the industry is fooling itself. Not listicles, not reheated news. Arguments, with the reasoning shown. I do it for two reasons. Writing something down forces a rigour that talking doesn’t — you cannot hand-wave in public. And I would rather show you how I think than ask you to take nineteen years of experience on faith.
It also means that by the time most clients get in touch, they already know whether they agree with how I see things. That tends to make for a far better working relationship. Have a read before you contact me — it’s the most honest version of what you’d be buying.
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I’m based in Hersham, in Surrey, with my partner Lauren and our young child. Lauren teaches music — she’s also, as it happens, the person who tested the first version of LessonLoop and told me, accurately, everything that was wrong with it.
Running a consultancy and four products around family life keeps me honest about one thing in particular: time. I’ve no interest in work that exists to look busy — retainers that fill hours, reports nobody reads. I would rather do the thing that genuinely matters and get back to my family. I suspect most of my clients feel the same way about theirs.
If that’s the kind of person you want in your corner —
— let’s talk. No pitch, no pressure. A straight conversation about where you are and whether I can genuinely help.