About Ian Ferguson: ecommerce SEO consultant

Over 15 years in SEO

I found SEO in 2010, building a website for my sister's home furnishings shop in Sunderland, armed with Dreamweaver and a lot of HTML tables. I got it to number one on Google for "artificial lemons" with meta keywords and some questionable link building, and thought I'd cracked it. Textbook Dunning-Kruger.

In 2013 I moved to Bradford to work in-house, marketing vending and coffee machines for a family-run business. That's where the coffee obsession started.

In 2015 I came home to the North East and went agency side, where I stayed for ten years, finishing as Head of SEO. In that time I worked on close to 100 Shopify migrations.

In 2025 I set up on my own as Ferguseo. Now I work directly with ecommerce brands, mostly on Shopify, on the technical SEO, content and migrations that decide whether a store gets found.

How I think about SEO

If you're just doing something for SEO, it's probably not worth doing.

SEO that only exists for Google tends to get undone by the next update. So the changes I recommend are the ones that also make the site easier to use and easier to buy from. That's what lasts.

What I do Book a discovery call

Speaking and podcasts

I led the ecommerce SEO masterclass at BrightonSEO in April 2025, and talked about what AI means for online shops at the North East Expo later that year. These are the podcasts and streams I've been a guest on.