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Getting Started Now!Tom Riley is a North East England-based AI search consultant with 10 years in SEO and growth marketing, educated at Teesside University and now working from the Greater Middlesbrough and Stockton area while travelling regularly to London for client work. His LinkedIn following sits at over 5,400, built almost entirely on documenting real campaign results rather than generic advice content.
Tom Riley is based in Stockton-on-Tees in the North East of England, and studied at Teesside University. That North East base has stayed the operating hub throughout his career, with trips to London built around client meetings rather than the consultancy being run from a London office.
Tom Riley started out in sales inside an agency, not in a dedicated SEO seat. SEO itself was self-taught, learned first through rank and rent, building and ranking small local websites, then renting them out to local businesses for a monthly fee. That model forces a direct kind of accountability: a ranking that does not convert into leads is a ranking nobody pays for.
That commercial instinct carried straight through into client consultancy. As he describes it on his own LinkedIn profile, he has applied himself across some of the hardest markets in search and growth, including YMYL sectors such as insurance, pensions, finance and healthcare, ecommerce and high-intent commercial services, and local markets where trust, intent and speed matter more than brand recognition.
Tom Riley describes himself as a hands-on operator who does not sit above the work and delegate it away. His own summary states that he gets into the trenches on site architecture, internal linking, content creation and editing, experimentation and optimisation, working closely with product, engineering and commercial teams while keeping his default mode as building, testing, shipping and measuring.
His stated track record includes taking platforms from a few hundred clicks a month to tens of thousands, securing number one positions for highly commercial keywords in ultra-competitive SERPs, and replacing large paid media dependency with scalable organic demand. He positions himself ahead of the curve on AI SEO, GEO optimisation, social search strategy, TikTok SEO and organic YouTube SEO, treating search as a distribution layer rather than just a traffic source.
Tom Riley's published client results, listed on tom-riley.co.uk, include Zego, an insurance and fintech client, where organic traffic grew from around 60,000 to over 150,000 monthly organic clicks, a 400% increase in total organic traffic, with number one rankings for food delivery insurance, private hire insurance and hire and reward insurance. Amy Dunn, Head of Growth at Zego, is quoted saying: "Tom is genuinely one of the best SEO minds I've come across."
At Joslin Rhodes, a financial services client in the competitive pension planning niche, monthly visitors grew from around 400 to 30,000. Peter Chadwick's testimonial states: "He implemented a strategy that took us from 400 to 30,000 visitors." At Beams, a proptech client, organic search traffic increased by 300% over 6 months. Further client work spans GoJoe, SimplyQuote, Technically Creative, UK Smiles and Anglia Decor.
On LinkedIn, Tom Riley has also documented live campaign progress rather than only finished results, including a Series A-funded startup that went from flat organic traffic to 10,000 organic visits within 8 months of consultancy work, and an ecommerce client where he grew the monthly SEO budget tenfold into five figures, targeting 2,000 clicks a day and six-figure monthly revenue from organic alone.
Alongside client consultancy, Tom Riley builds and acquires his own commercial assets as a way of testing methods before applying them to client work. Recent projects documented on LinkedIn include acquiring an underperforming ecommerce site to rebuild its CRO, design and SEO from scratch, and launching an eSIM travel product built and shipped in around 48 hours using Claude, fully connected to Shopify Checkout with automated delivery and lifecycle messaging.
He has also been running free AI visibility video audits for brands, covering how they currently appear inside ChatGPT and other LLMs, and posted publicly about "doing a 180" on AI search, moving from scepticism to going all in on AI search as a core part of his consultancy offer.
Tom Riley's methodology is openly built on Koray Tuğberk Gübür's holistic SEO framework, and he regularly reposts and engages with Koray's content directly. He has also publicly credited Victoria Olsina, describing her as one of the best people to follow for SEO and AI visibility in fintech and crypto, after she gave him a shout-out from the main stage at the Masterminders conference.
He attends and speaks at UK SEO mastermind events, including sessions run by Kasra Dash in Manchester alongside figures such as James Dooley, Fery Kaszoni, Mads Singers and Craig Campbell, positioning him inside the working practitioner circuit rather than as a purely online commentator.
Tom Riley's move into AI search consultancy grew directly out of his semantic SEO methodology. Entity-attribute-value structuring, the foundation of his Google ranking work, is the same structure large language models rely on to retrieve, ground and cite information. As ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews began reshaping how UK searchers find brands, the underlying skill set carried over directly, building content entities can be extracted from cleanly, which both search engines and AI systems reward.
Today, Tom Riley works with brands across competitive commercial sectors, applying AI search and entity optimisation, SEO consultancy, content strategy, digital PR and organic growth strategy, operating from the North East with regular trips to London for client work. He offers a free video audit covering technical SEO, content gaps, AI visibility analysis, a competitor breakdown and a 12-month growth roadmap, with no sales obligation attached.