In this piece, totalsurf Founder and Managing Director Chris Brown offers up the invaluable industry insights he reveals in the latest E-Coffee with Experts. In this wide-ranging conversation, host Ranmay grills him on the deep SEO knowledge he has gained over more than 20 years at the forefront of the industry.
Chris opens up about his journey from building websites in the early days of the internet to running a results-focused SEO agency that cares more about real business outcomes than vanity rankings.
The conversation covers what has changed in SEO over the years (and indeed what hasn’t), why so many websites still get the basics wrong, and how things like schema, E-E-A-T, and search intent now matter more than ever, despite the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT.
Ranmay (interviewer): Hey Chris, tell us how you got started in the business and a bit about totalsurf.
Chris: I built my first website for my music degree in my second year. Then I got a master’s degree in multimedia, which was fantastic, as it taught me a great deal about object-oriented programming. I was working with director Lingo at the time. I went straight into a job as a web master in the UK’s first credit card company called Netbanks.
Very early on, before most people had the internet at home, I was actually building and looking after websites. Within about five months, they realised I was pretty good at what I was doing, and they put me in charge of a team of five people, which was quite a scary thing for a person who was 21 at the time. Through there, I worked on the agency side, worked in-house and then in 2004 had the opportunity to start totalsurf.
Chris: We didn’t start as an SEO agency because SEO just didn’t exist in 2004. You had a website, you put some content up, and you ranked, and it was all about meta keywords and everything at the time. And that transitioned probably around 10 to 12 years ago, when I suddenly realised that SEO was going to be the way forward for the agency rather than designing and developing websites.
As such, we pivoted to becoming more of a digital marketing agency. And over the last 10 years, it’s been quite a journey to the point where we now even have content writers in-house because I realised that that was what was going to be good for the business to actually have good quality, proper journalists in-house who were able to write engaging content that converts for people.
We’re based in Reading in the UK, a great location, very close to London and to the M4 corridor, where there are lots of tech companies. We work with clients all over the world. We’ve got clients in America, some in France. Most of ours are in the UK because they like to work with a local agency, and we basically rank them on Google for converting traffic.
Ranmayr: Quite a journey, I must say! Chris, you have seen enough summers and winters right in the industry now. So, what is that one biggest shift or any Google update that you feel was the most significant change before the AI era happened?
Chris: The biggest shift I’ve noticed is that it shouldn’t be about rankings so much anymore. While they’re absolutely critical to success, it’s about conversion. And the biggest shift is that’s what clients are now looking for. So, when we’re trying to engage with potential clients, it’s not so much talking about, oh, we’ll get you into position X, or on page one.
It’s what that’s going to do for the business and the intent of those types of searches and the intent of those rankings because, yes, you can be in positions one to three and you can be getting loads of traffic and zero conversions, and then it’s worthless for a business. That’s the biggest thing I’ve noticed: clients expect more than just position.
Ranmay: Starting your own agency: it is challenging keeping the lights on, getting the first clients in, wearing multiple hats, you’re selling, you’re delivering, you’re doing project management, quite literally everything, right? Even the support functions, hiring, recruitment, finances, handling books and all of that. So, how challenging were the first few days, weeks, months, to kind of stabilise your business?
Chris: It was extremely challenging at the start. I was getting pulled left, right, and centre, working every single possible hour and whenever an email came through, reacting to it instantly. I remember times when I was on holiday, and I missed days out and things because a client said, “I need this.”
Probably the most difficult thing is trying to set client expectations. A lot of the time, people want things quicker than, or they say they want them quicker than they actually do, and you can also take that innately and start to take it on as a very personal thing that you need to deliver it there and then, while it’s still important to do it promptly. Not everything is a critical rush, and it’s about planning things out right and pacing yourself.
Ranmay: Moving on to the AI era. Chris, how do you think the impact has been so far, and where do you feel it is going in 2026?
Chris: I’m going to say something a little bit controversial here. I don’t think it’s changed that much! I think there’s a fear that it’s changed a lot. I think you’ve obviously got the two sides to it. You’ve got the AI generation, which we don’t use as an agency. We use it for planning, but it’s awful at creating consistent, engaging, quality content, whether that’s the written word, video, or imagery. You can’t get an AI to make a tiny change to something.
We’ve run tests, and we’ve got it to produce an infographic. And it’s nearly got it right, and we’ve said, “Oh, can you make a slight tweak to that?” And it’s then totally changed it. It’s like suddenly dealing with another freelancer!
But I think from the GEO side of it, where people are actually using the LLMs for search, whether that’s something simple that’s baked into the browser like Gemini or chat, that’s where I don’t think it’s different.
And the reason for that is I think that’s basically almost like using a PA or a researcher, giving them a task and letting them go and get information and then delivering that to you in a cut-down and concise shortened version. Now, if you have a good quality website with all the right markup, the schema, everything that an AI agent needs to read that, you should be ranking well.
Now, that’s what Google has always said they’ve wanted. I say always, it obviously changes all the time, but the importance of things like schema and EAT and so forth has been at the forefront of everything that we’ve been doing for many years here now. Before EEAT, it was EAT. And we made sure that we were compliant with that.
If you can hit all of those check boxes and those check marks, everything should get picked up by an AI agent, a large language model, to the point where we’ve got clients who’ve actually achieved really good rankings without us actually making a decisive shift to go, let’s target ChatGPT. And we had a client who recently got a £15,000 deal, which was the first of many deals that are going to come from this client through GPT.
Now we hadn’t done anything different, anything that we would normally do, which we consider best practice to rank for a human being.
Ranmay: What adjustments or recalibrations have you done from a tech SEO standpoint now, especially with LLMs reading content differently, the way it used to be with Google search engine crawlers?
Chris:.I think there’s more of an emphasis on schema for us now. Ensuring that every single possible type of schema that is suitable for that page, that piece of content and any supporting elements are on the site. This is also really important, where EEAT comes into it. That’s an important part and sends those right signals to Google so that it can see that authority, that expertise, that trust. If you get that all right with the correct schema markup, doesn’t matter what you’re doing, whether it’s all the basic stuff of organisational schema, that’s really basic to do.
But if you’re on a product, making sure that you’ve got all the correct product schema in. If it’s a medical site like a biopharma site, making sure that you’ve actually got research paper schema on there, you’ve got schema about the person’s qualifications. If it’s an e-commerce site, again, taking all that stuff and making sure that you’re listed in Merchant Centre.
We’ve noticed that has made the deeper, more complex technical stuff that the majority of people can’t do in the back end using Yoast or something like that on a website or Shopify as easily as employing expert consultants like us to do that.
Ranmay: Overthe past 20 years, you have worked across hundreds of sites. So, what is the single biggest technical issue which you have come across still affecting rankings in 2026?
Chris: I think there’s something that we see on every single site that we audit, and it’s an internal term that we use, but we call it the Holy Trinity, which always makes people laugh because I always get to say whether you’re religious or not, so it can fit anybody.
Everybody understands what the Holy Trinity is: the Son, the Father, and the Holy Ghost. It’s the same entity, and it’s said in three ways. Now, we coined that phrase around the URL, the title, and the H1 on the page.
Now, every single site that we see has a repetition of all of those three or a very close repetition. It’s rare that we don’t see an identical title to an H1 and a pretty close URL structure. And it’s amazing just in the first pass technical changes that we do. The difference that we can make by actually saying, look, you’re missing opportunities here by shouting at Google, you’re saying the same thing in three different critical elements. Because we all know those are the first three things that Google looks at, even before it starts to download schema and look at the sitemap and everything else.
Google gets the sitemap to find the pages, but it looks at those top-level elements, and if you can start to vary those up and actually bring in the keyword research and start to thread through all the different semantic words that people are looking for across that, say we call it the Holy Trinity check. We’ve noticed that’s probably the most consistent thing that everybody gets wrong, but it can make a big difference even if that’s the only thing you’re going to do on the site.
Ranmay: Chris, from your experience, how important are backlinks from an SEO standpoint?
Chris: Yes, it’s in the mix, but it’s massively been dialled down in terms of its importance. Up until around about two years ago, link building wasn’t even anything that we actually did internally in totalsurf. It was always quite a dark art, and things were changing all the time to the point where Google was starting to de-list people and give them manual warnings for going out and buying links. Google actively says, never mind paying for one, you shouldn’t even ask for a link. The reality is, everybody knows that’s not true. Everyone is going to ask for one.
So, although link building is still important, it’s shifted very much into what we now phrase as digital PR. It’s actually all about good quality content. It’s about creating things like polls, infographics, and quick checklists. We’ve got an EEAT checklist on our website, which does really well. We do well for HTTP status codes because we’ve got a list of all the HTTP status codes, and we appear when someone’s looking for “what’s a 503 status code?”
Ultimately, I think the backlinks are still an important part, but there are other, far more important things.
Ranmay: You touched upon a very important thing there about digital PR. Doing that needs a lot of specialisation and also kind of understanding how it is being done, and it can get expensive as well, right? Because you’re targeting the high-end media outlets there. And at what stage do you recommend a digital PR campaign to a client?
Chris: That’s a good question! We break link building down into kind of two or three different categories. So, you’ve got the really basic, easy stuff to do right at the start of the project, which we do like citations. But I mean good quality citations. I’m not talking about getting lists from random websites, but being in all the right places like Yelp, Cylex, Google My Business, Apple Maps, Bing Places, all of those sorts of areas.
That is often where we quite often find errors. We’ll find out that there’s a citation using an old logo. They might have changed their logo three years ago or even longer, and we come across some really old logos or incorrect phone numbers. Businesses have moved address, we need to go and correct all those things.
The second thing that we start to do fairly early on as well is we actually do the blackbook stuff. So, actually reaching out to the client, saying:
And as part of that second part, we also have an ongoing active watch, and we use tools like Google Alerts, Talker, Press Pulse, Press Ranger and so forth to look out for client mentions.
Ranmay: Has anybody mentioned that client anywhere online where there isn’t a link?
Chris: We’ve achieved some great links for people with that. It will depend on whether it’s something that we then get in touch with the website for or whether we think the client should reach out.
We had a really good example of someone who was selling home wares, and someone had mentioned the company name on Mumsnet, which is obviously one of the biggest forums in the world. They mentioned the company name, but there was no link to the URL.
We told the business owner, she went on Mumsnet and said, “Oh, hi. I actually own that business. Thank you very much for answering, and this is actually a link to the product you’re talking about.” And we saw massive traffic from that and actually sales.
The longer-term stuff, where we’re talking about skyscraping, we’re talking about content promotion, all of those sorts of elements, you’ve got to get your content done first, because what are you going to reach out for?
So by then your technical’s fixed because the technical issues usually get fixed fairly quickly, and obviously, you need to keep on top of it because with content management systems and changes as people make changes on sites, things go wrong. But you’ve got to get that content right.
If you write a good piece of content, that’s when you can start to think, right, how can we leverage this? If it’s a skyscraping piece, for example, for one of our clients, an educational recruitment company called Always Flourishing, we wrote an article on how to get your first job in education.
We discovered it happened to be our local university, which is a total coincidence, but we discovered that they’d got an article that was linked to a competitor that was 5 years out of date. So we wrote to the university and said, “We’ve spotted this. Is this actually factually incorrect information? Would you mind linking to our client’s article?”
Because it was such a well-written article, the university actually said, “We’d actually love the article. Could we actually host it and put a link and a credit to you?” Which was even better because we became a resource then for any future teaching staff.
So we had the good content, and content takes a long time to write. So it’s almost better to get your content aligned first of all and then see what opportunities there are in that before you then go right, what other opportunities are out there, and what do we now need to write on top that’s going to work.
Ranmay: Very nicely put, Chris. I really, really love the way you kind of use that analogy. Perfect. So, looking at 2026 and beyond, what do you think is that one single trend that will redefine what good SEO means?
Chris: A very interesting question! A friend of mine was asking how we’re going to trust anything that’s produced now, with AI getting better in two or three years? How are we going to know that something’s good? So I think it’s going to be very person-centric. I think it’s very much about basically backing up their EEAT. So writing good human-generated content that’s consumer-centric that gives them good advice, but importantly, actually having that aligned with an expert in the business.
Now it doesn’t matter who’s writing that. The reality is that a CEO of a company isn’t going to be writing a blog article. But if it’s attributed to that person, the content needs to be stellar! It needs to be the best article, the best guide or post that a potential customer of yours has seen. I think that’s what’s going to lead to success over and above AI-generated content.
Ranmay: Chris, this has been a great conversation, but before we wrap this up, you have been in the business for so long. You have clearly made it big now and are successfully running your agency. So what is that one piece of advice you would want to give to a young listener today who is trying to make a mark in the digital marketing niche or trying to start their own agency now?
Chris: That’s a difficult question to answer because it’s changed so much. I almost wonder if things have come around to the way they used to be. When I first started an agency, I was lucky enough to come out with a master’s degree in something that nobody did.
It was the first one in the whole of the UK. So, going along with a degree saying, “I know how to build websites.” People were like, that’s a degree? I think that’s so easy to fall into now, and anybody can build a website online; they can use AI tools and so forth.
What I noticed when I was really young in the business was that there were lots of apprentices and work experience working in graphic studios and design studios, going along and working for free for three to six months, maybe getting some expenses, getting their lunch paid for, and their transport paid, so that they weren’t doing out of their own pocket.
But I do wonder if someone wants to move into the agency model, if that is going to be the best way to actually show some passion. Come with some ideas and some things that you want to do, and actually say I want to come and learn from you. I’m not expecting to get paid because let’s face it, no business owner at the moment is going to probably pay someone who has no commercial experience because there are so many people out there who do it. And I think that’s probably a good way in.
If people are going to start their own business, they’ve got a ‘Catch-22’ scenario, which I was very lucky with. When I started my agency, because I’d already been working for someone else, I was able to go, here’s proof of my work. I built a website for the DVLA, for example, the UK’s very first online theory test, which was a practice system. And I built that, and I was able to show them the code, talk through the code and say that that was me who put all that front-end together. Backend was done by the backend team back in the day, but I did all the front-end coding.
So, they’ve got to come now, I think, with a model and a concept. And I think they should probably try to steer away from AI building it, not using vibe coding, because anybody can do that.
Actually come up with something even if it doesn’t look great, just show the functionality and talk about the limitations of it and where you want to take it and how it’s going to go forward, what you think you could do better if you had another month to spend on it, another six months, however long it might be, but give that vision for how it could grow and what you could do with it, and what its faults are as well.
Ranmay: Perfect. Chris, thank you so much for the insightful conversation today. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this with us. For our audiences, if they want to reach out to you, how would they do that?
Chris: Yes, there are a number of ways. You can go to our website, which is totalsurf.net and if people want to get in touch, message me on LinkedIn.
It’s very simple. Just fill in the form and we will be in touch with your reports. We will also ask you to book a 30 min call with us so we can run through the report and explain what the issues are with your site, what your goals are and how we can help you.
