My daughter’s favourite colour is yellow.
I spent twenty years adrift.
SEO Consultant | Ultra Runner | Bolocano Owner
Twenty years
of not settling.
I was a university dropout. This isn’t a cool entrepreneur story. I was just bored by a subject I didn’t care about to begin with. On top of that, I couldn’t bring myself to keep taking my dad’s money simply to keep sitting in lectures waiting for the student union to open.
What followed was a long run of not staying put. I started in a bakery, moved onto buyer’s assistant for a supermarket chain, followed up with contract engineering and project management. Insurance sales. Account executive, and redundancy. I went travelling and came back with a t-shirt from a well-known Thai brewery and type-1 diabetes — how’s that for a full moon party hangover?
I broke up with perfectly good girlfriends. Bought a house and moved out. Every time I told myself the next job, next girlfriend, the next…thing would be the one.
I spent time in social and residential care, then sixteen years as a personal trainer and performance coach, taking endurance athletes to European podiums. That one stuck. Working for myself, helping people chase something — it was the first thing that fitted.
It was also a brutal career to build on: unsociable hours, a body clock that belonged to other people, burnout everywhere you looked.
I wasn’t job-hopping. Not on purpose, anyway. I was looking for a calling — something to sit me down and say ‘this is you’.
I came into SEO at 46, through a content writing internship taken while I wound my training clients down over the course of a year. The creative side I expected to love, and did. The shock was the data. The problem-solving. The puzzle of it.
The clues had always been there, I guess. Chess club. Rock climbing. Fifteen years chasing marginal gains through other people’s training logs (as well as my own). It was the same pattern each time: find the constraint, remove it, measure what happens next.
Then, in 2020,
I didn’t need to look.
My daughter arrived, and the question I’d been carrying around since my twenties answered itself.
I was trading as Click Lion at the time — named for what search was five years ago, when a click was the entire KPI stack. Search changed and so did I.
Yellow, because it’s her favourite colour. Lava, because she had a fascination but could never quite pronounce volcanoes. They were bolocanoes, and it was far too amusing to even contemplate correcting her.
She’s my anchor.
I know myself well enough by now. I chase the next shiny thing.
So I needed a name I could never walk away from.
It worked. Yellow Lava is better than anything I’ve built before — in what it earns, and in how much I enjoy doing it. A business named after a four-year-old’s bolocano fascination turns out to be very hard to quit.
Coaching and SEO are the same job.
I’m not trying to be clever and pull transferable skills closer together for some website copy. There are three things that carry over and, I think, they’re three things most agencies get wrong.
Assess before you programme
No coach worth paying writes you a plan in the first session. They test, assess your posture, your strength. They watch you move and find the thing that’s actually limiting your performance. Most SEO starts with deliverables. I start with a diagnosis, because the fix for a technical problem is not more blog posts.
The early weeks are meant to feel slow
Base training is boring but it’s the reason you can race hard later. The same is true here: the unglamorous structural work in months one to three is what makes months six to twelve compound instead of plateau. Agencies that skip it get a spike and then vanish.
You only learn from what you measure
Fifteen years of training logs teaches you to distrust how a week felt and look at what actually happened. I do the same with your numbers, including the ones that say something I tried didn’t work.
Pinned and labelled.
- Who
- Rick Ashworth, founder of Yellow Lava
- Where
- Wilmslow, Cheshire. Clients across the UK
- Who I work with
- Recruitment agencies and ambitious SMEs
- What I do
- SEO strategy, AI search visibility, content architecture
- Method
- NSEO — Negative Split SEO. Diagnosis first, then acceleration
- Background
- 16 years performance coaching. MSc Applied Psychology
- Size
- One person. You get me, not an account manager
Want to know what I’d do with yours?
Send me your site and I’ll record a video going through it — what’s working, what’s costing you, and what I’d fix first.
Get Your Free WalkthroughFree, about 15 minutes, and no call unless you want one. I do four a month.