Mark Excell - SEO Strategist and Digital Creative

A digital practitioner with twenty years of hands-on experience across search strategy, GEO, UX design and web development.

Based in Witney, Oxfordshire, with twenty years of hands-on experience across technical SEO, Generative Engine Optimisation, UX design and web development. I think in strategy, work in craft, and understand search, design and code as a single connected discipline.

Explore my work

Disciplines

What I do

Search strategy

SEO and Generative Engine Optimisation

Technical SEO, AI-driven search strategy and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). I work across the full search landscape, from crawlability and structured data to optimising content for Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and ChatGPT Search. Search has changed fundamentally. The strategies that drive visibility today look very different to those of five years ago.

Explore SEO and GEO

Design

UX, UI and Graphic Design

User experience design, interface design and brand-quality graphic design. From wireframes and Figma prototypes through to full visual identity systems and print-ready artwork. Good design is not decoration; it is the difference between something that works and something that is merely present.

Explore design work

Development

Web Development

Front-end and full-stack web development across React, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL and WordPress. I build things that are fast, accessible and semantically correct, because the quality of the underlying code is as important to search performance as the content it delivers.

Explore web development

Education

Teaching and Curriculum Design

Computing and digital curriculum design, lesson planning and classroom delivery at further education level. Currently lecturing at a College, with a Level 3 Award in Education and Training from City and Guilds. Knowing a subject deeply and being able to teach it well are two very different skills.

Explore teaching work

Evidence

Selected work

SEO

Four consecutive years of 400% organic growth

Freelance SEO strategist

Working as a freelance digital consultant, I grew a client's customer base by 400% year on year for four consecutive years through organic search alone, with no paid advertising. The strategy combined technical SEO, keyword architecture and content planning, built and refined over time rather than deployed as a one-off fix. Sustainable organic growth at that rate, maintained consistently over several years, is the result of understanding search as a system rather than a checklist.

Read the full story

An abstract illustration of organic growth.

UX and design

Designing this site from the ground up

UX designer and brand lead

This site is a live example of the design process in practice. Starting with brand strategy, I developed the full visual identity including the colour system, typographic hierarchy and component logic before a single page was built. Previous client work across brand identity, print and digital campaigns informs the approach, but the decisions made here, and the reasoning behind them, are documented in the UX and design section of this site.

Explore the design process

Web development

Rescuing a £100k legacy platform with no source access

Full-stack developer

A client's entire digital platform had been built on a proprietary .NET system. When the relationship with the original developer ended, the source files were inaccessible. Working from a raw database export alone, I rebuilt the platform in WordPress using custom PHP to map and integrate the legacy data structure seamlessly into the new system. The client retained all historical content and functionality, reduced their annual development and hosting costs by 90%, and gained full ownership of their platform for the first time.

Read the full story

Teaching

Building a computing curriculum from first principles

Computing lecturer, further education

Currently lecturing at a local college of further education, I design and deliver curriculum across web development, game design and object-oriented programming at Level 2 and Level 3. Designing a curriculum well requires the same skills as designing anything else: understanding the audience, mapping a clear journey from where they are to where they need to be, and removing everything that gets in the way. The materials I produce are built to be taught, not just written.

Explore teaching work

Background

Twenty years of doing this properly

I started out in design studios and print production, learning the craft properly before the industry shifted decisively towards digital. That grounding in how things are made, both physically and digitally, has shaped how I approach every project since. When I joined Racoon Digital I worked across some genuinely big accounts, including Cartoon Network, Unilever and McDonalds, which taught me how large organisations think about brand, consistency and quality at scale.

Running my own consultancy for fourteen years gave me a different kind of education. You learn quickly when the results are yours to own. Growing a client's customer base consistently year after year through organic search, rescuing a platform from a six-figure technical dead end, reducing operating costs by 90% on a project that had been haemorrhaging money. Those are the kinds of problems that teach you more than any certification, though I have collected a few of those along the way too.

More recently I have been lecturing in computing at a local college of further education, which has been a genuinely interesting change of pace. Teaching something well forces you to understand it at a deeper level than simply doing it. I am a better practitioner for having had to explain what I know clearly to people encountering it for the first time.

20+

Years of hands-on experience

Years running own consultancy

90%

Cost reduction, legacy platform rescue

400%

Organic customer growth, sustained over four years

What people say

Recommendations

"Mark worked with us on the creation of a WordPress website for Dorset County Council's Low Carbon Dorset initiative. The development of the site was handled with complete competence and authority, making our job of client handling very smooth and easy. Mark provided quick answers to any issues and added valuable input to questions asked by the client. His involvement considerably enhanced our approach to the project. The website was delivered to our specification on time, on budget and with an uncomplicated, expert smoothness that you don't always see in the world of websites. It was an excellent partnership."

Nick Morris, Wallis Agency

"Mark's advice and guidance have seen our website rise in the global rankings from around 1,150,000 to 229,000. This is an absolutely incredible statistic to achieve with our limited budget and diverse audience needs."

Stefanie Unland, The Recycler

"Pennies from Heaven can highly recommend Mark to any company wanting to grow or expand its reach. We have always been impressed by the very high-quality service we have received, and in particular the focus on security."

Kate Frost, CEO, Pennies from Heaven

Pennies from Heaven is the UK's largest micro-giving scheme, having raised over 420 million pennies for 265 charities.

"Creating my site was far less painful than I thought it would be, thanks to the expert workmanship from Mark. It is great to have knowledge, but a completely different asset to have the ability and skill to walk someone through the steps necessary to accomplish the task. Mark fielded all my questions without hesitation, and was very willing to find a way to explain things so that I understood. He accomplished the task professionally, efficiently and within the stated timescales. Much sooner than I expected, I found myself on Google. He left me in no doubt at all that the creation of the site was in good hands."

Mary Hopper, Inyanga Counselling Consultancy

Qualifications and certifications

Always learning

Twenty years of experience teaches you a great deal. So does making the deliberate choice to keep studying. The certifications below reflect areas I have invested time in formally, either to validate what I already knew or to get properly up to speed with disciplines that are moving fast. SEO and AI-driven search in particular are changing quickly enough that staying current is not optional.