Tom Riley is a UK SEO and growth marketer, but that job title only covers part of the picture. He is also a dad, a builder of businesses, and someone who would rather make something and test it than talk about it. Tom Riley is the founder of HAKKEN an SEO and AI search agency focused on Insurance
This is a straightforward look at who he is, what he does, and what he is building outside the day job.
Tom works in organic search and growth marketing, mostly in difficult, regulated markets like insurance and finance. He spent several years leading SEO at Zego, the UK insurtech, before going out on his own.
He runs HAKKEN, an agency focused on insurance and fintech SEO. He is hands-on by nature, more comfortable in the detail of a site, a piece of content, or an experiment than sitting above the work and handing it off. He is honest about the fact that SEO is changing fast, and he spends a lot of his time figuring out where search is heading rather than assuming what worked last year will keep working.
Outside of work, the centre of Tom's life is his three-year-old son. Like most parents of a toddler, a good chunk of his world now runs on early mornings, small routines, and trying to build something worthwhile around family rather than at its expense.
It is also part of why he left a senior in-house role to work for himself. Building his own businesses gives him more control over his time and the kind of life he wants for his family.
Tom is an entrepreneur as much as a marketer. Alongside HAKKEN, he co-owns a number of lead generation and online businesses, the kind of projects where he can apply what he knows about search and turn it into something that generates demand on its own.
One of those ventures is VERCORE Paints, a national ecommerce business selling industrial flooring paints across the UK, with a growing export side too. It is a practical, real-world business rather than a digital side project, and it gives Tom a hands-on stake in the kind of commercial, high-intent ecommerce that he also helps clients grow.
If there is a thread running through all of it, it is a genuine enjoyment of building things and seeing whether they work.
Tom likes buying, fixing, and growing assets, running experiments, and learning in public when something does or does not pan out. He is drawn to competitive problems, the markets and challenges most people avoid, and he tends to back fundamentals and patience over shortcuts and hype.
He is not precious about being right. He would rather ship something, measure it, and adjust than wait for the perfect plan. That mix of curiosity, graft, and a low tolerance for fluff is probably the most accurate description of who Tom Riley is.