I didn’t arrive at this work in a straight line. Nobody who does it honestly does.

Before I was a search strategist, I spent 55 hours-a-week in a house full of teenagers the system had already written off.

LAC kids – Looked After Children – with emotional and behavioural histories that meant trust wasn’t something they gave. It was something you had to survive not getting, for long enough that they eventually stopped testing you. It was tough, but I enjoyed it in a masochistic sort of way.

Some of them went off the rails. Badly. I had conversations with the local police. I sat in magistrates courts. I didn’t want to, for me, but I showed up for them. It was my job, but it was more than that.

And I learned something that has never left me: you cannot rush the trust timeline. You can only stay consistent inside it.

I didn’t know it then, but I was learning the only version of SEO that actually works – the kind built on trust, structure, and systems. Not tactics and shortcuts, however compelling the promises around them may be.

After that came gym floors, running tracks and a different type of resilience training.

I started off searching for any old client, but soon clients began to come to me not because they wanted to get fit, but because something had broken – cancer, obesity, divorce, the slow collapse of self-esteem that nobody talks about until it’s already happened. A 32-year-old who told me he didn’t expect to be fit anymore because he was in his thirties with two young kids, and it was probably too late (I did just about manage to stop my jaw making too much noise on the floor).

What I learned quickly, and it’s essential for any decent personal trainer/coach as much as anyone else, changing one thing in isolation never works. You couldn’t fix the training without fixing the sleep. You couldn’t fix the sleep without understanding the stress. The whole system had to move together – and the person in the middle had to trust that you understood all of it, not just the visible part. It was never perfect, there’s too much temptation out there to begin with, but chasing perfection leads to procrastination and excuses, and that never leads anywhere good.

I didn’t know it then, but I was learning technical SEO.

Along the way I kept formalising what I was learning. Psychology degrees. Fitness certifications. Triathlon coaching. And slowly, in my spare time, Technical SEO qualifications, Google marketing courses, and online Content Strategy diplomas from leading American Universities. I eradicated the chip from dropping out of Uni. at age 20, now every time I learned something new it drew me further in. I loved it.

For most of my career, I kind of thought I was a jock – sure a skinny one – distance running, triathlons, coaching athletes to top-five European finishes for Team GB. But the data obsession, the pattern recognition, the relentless analysis? There was something that didn’t fit the letterman jacket ideal. That wasn’t coaching. That was just me.

When AI started reshaping search – and everything else – I didn’t panic. I’d seen systems disrupt before and, after all, you can only do what you can actually do. And what I could do was to understand it properly. Not skim the surface. Not repost someone else’s take. Get inside the knowledge base.

Because my daughter was going to grow up inside it. And I owed her a father who could speak to her world with true understanding – help with algebra homework might be out, but AI has a prompt for that!

So I built Yellow Lava.

I’m Rick Ashworth. I’m a search strategist based in Wilmslow, Cheshire.

I work with recruitment agencies, founder-led consultancies, and ambitious SMEs where one strategic client materially moves the meter. My methodology is called NSEO (Negative-Split Search Engine Optimisation) – built on the logic of the negative split in endurance sport. Meaning to do the hard structural work first. Fix the foundations properly. Then accelerate from a position of strength.

Results I’m proud of: a therapy practice with 300+ AI citations and 700% organic growth. A medical startup scaled to 200,000+ monthly readers through a Google core update. A recruitment agency holding ground through the industry’s worst downturn in twenty years. A wedding band that received a booking through ChatGPT within six weeks.

If you’re reading this as a founder or CEO trying to make the right call about your website – I understand the position you’re in. High stakes. Constant noise. No clear way to separate signal from sales.

I don’t oversell (hell, ask me for a quote and find out!) I don’t dress up bad news. I don’t tell you what’s easy to hear when what you need is what’s true.

Your website is probably not doing what you think it’s doing. Not because you’ve done anything wrong – but because the system it sits inside has changed. Most advice treats symptoms. The real issue is structure.

That’s what I work on. It’s what I love to do.

The lighthouse in all of this is still my daughter.

She still calls them bolocanoes, or maybe that’s just what I hear.

And I’m still trying to be worth her trust.