Real work, real numbers.
What the challenge was, what I did, and what happened, across financial data, market infrastructure, and Web3. No invented outcomes: every number here is sourced and dated.
Selected work
Refinitiv: launching a $6B rebrand from a domain no one had heard of
In-house Global SEO Lead, 2019, working solo alongside one junior SEO hire inside a 20,000-person company.
Refinitiv launched in October 2018 as a spinout from Thomson Reuters, carrying zero search equity on its new domain while the market kept searching for the old brand. Blackstone, the new majority investor, expected fast returns. The mandate: out-rank Bloomberg and 20-year-old incumbents from a standing start.
Audited every legacy domain and mention, consolidated dozens of legacy sites into one architecture, and shifted the strategy from brand-heavy to customer-focused: translating thousands of products into plain-language, generic-term content, prioritizing four core languages via hreflang, and building the internal process, scorecards, workshops, monthly reporting, to get a 20,000-person company producing SEO-ready content at scale.
"I was working for a $6 billion startup that no one knew about yet."Aaron Barefoot, on the Refinitiv brand launch
Over 1,500 leads came from the new local-language sites alone, roughly $1M in annualized revenue. Refinitiv was later acquired by LSEG at a valuation $7B above its Blackstone price months earlier, a 35 percent uplift leadership attributed in part to this visibility and performance. As featured in Mastering In-House SEO, edited by Simon Schnieders.
Source: SEMrush Domain Overview, refinitiv.com. Shown through January 2024, when refinitiv.com redirected into LSEG as part of the domain consolidation covered in that case study below, not a loss of performance.
LSEG: redirect mapping that turned a merger into a traffic peak
SEO lead at LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group), Feb 2021–2024, following LSEG's acquisition of Refinitiv.
Consolidating Refinitiv onto the LSEG domain without losing years of accumulated search equity. Every legacy URL needed a deliberate, accurate destination, or rankings and traffic collapse.
Led the redirect mapping for the Refinitiv-to-LSEG domain consolidation, as SEO lead at LSEG.
Both jumped sharply starting January 2024, coinciding directly with the redirect rollout, a sudden, dated step change rather than a gradual content-driven climb. Left LSEG shortly after this peak.
Source: SEMrush Domain Overview, lseg.com, all-time view. Shown for full historical context; my work concluded in 2024, and the site's performance after that point isn't part of this case study.
Independent analysis, not part of my 2021–2024 engagement. AI Overviews didn't exist as a meaningful SERP feature when my work at LSEG concluded. Pulling current SEMrush data shows what that layer looks like on the domain today.
84.7% of lseg.com's Google positions are still traditional organic listings, with 8.6% now going to AI Overviews. In that same topic space, lseg.com is cited 1,200 times by AI answer engines, with yahoo.com (997) and youtube.com (850) close behind — a general news portal and a video platform each pulling near-equal citation share to LSEG itself. Owning the SERP and owning the answer aren't the same fight, and this is a gap that opened up after my time on the account.
Source: SEMrush Domain Overview and AI Search Visibility, lseg.com, pulled August 23, 2026. Independent analysis; not affiliated with or endorsed by LSEG. Read the full breakdown →
Oasis Protocol: migrating a domain without losing ground, while building AI-search visibility from scratch
Independent SEO consultant, Feb–Jul 2025.
Oasis Protocol needed SEO support to get through a domain migration without losing search visibility, while also building organic and AI-search presence for its privacy-preserving, AI-security-focused technology and brand, from a comparatively thin starting base.
Led SEO strategy through the migration to protect existing rankings and traffic, and built out target-keyword coverage for Oasis's brand and technology across both traditional search and AI answer engines.
Organic traffic grew 31% over the engagement, driven by newly ranked keywords and improved positions across target terms. The site crossed 500+ ranking keywords and began surfacing in Google AI Overviews and LLM-generated answers for target queries. Oasis Protocol migrated off oasisprotocol.org to a new domain after this engagement concluded.
Source: SEMrush Domain Overview, oasisprotocol.org, February–July 2025. Oasis Protocol migrated to a new domain after this engagement concluded, so performance beyond this window isn't part of this case study.
From financial data to Web3 search
I started out working on organic search and marketing inside fintech and financial data, including market infrastructure at the level of the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG). That's a world defined by accuracy, compliance, and slow-moving trust signals, and it shaped how I think about content and credibility.
When I moved into Web3, I found a category with the opposite problem: fast-moving, thinly regulated, and because of restrictions on paid advertising, almost entirely dependent on organic and community channels to be found at all. I've spent the years since building SEO and content programs for blockchain protocols including Polkadot, and founded ColdChain to run that work at agency scale.
More recently, that's extended into AEO, GEO, and LLMO: making sure fintech and Web3 brands are the ones actually cited when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or an AI Overview a question in this space. I write about this regularly for Cointelegraph and speak about it on podcasts like Web3 CMO Stories.
Selected background
Fintech & financial data
Mastering In-House SEO
Blockchain protocols
Founder, ColdChain
Guest, Web3 CMO Stories Podcast
Contributor, Cointelegraph
Thought Leadership, Athens SEO
Podcast Guest, Web3 SEO (Spotify)
Where I focus
Fintech & Financial Data
Payments, market infrastructure, and financial data platforms: content and technical SEO built for regulated, trust-sensitive categories.
Crypto Exchanges & DeFi
Centralized and decentralized exchanges, DeFi protocols, and stablecoin platforms navigating volatile SERPs and thin paid-media access.
Blockchain Protocols
L1s, L2s, and infrastructure projects: building organic visibility for highly technical audiences and fast-moving categories.
Web3 Communities & NFTs
Turning Discord- and Telegram-native communities into an organic and search advantage most Web2 competitors can't replicate.
My approach
SEO over paid, by necessity
Crypto faces heavy regulatory limits on paid advertising: accounts get suspended, ads get rejected. That makes organic search the most reliable, durable channel available, not just the cheapest one.
Long-tail, zero-search keywords add up
Some of the best-performing content I've built targets keywords with reported zero monthly search volume. In an emerging category, the data lags reality. Write for where the questions are heading, not just where the volume already is.
Community is a search channel
Web3 projects can galvanize an audience through Discord and Telegram far faster than most Web2 brands can build one. That community engagement feeds directly into organic visibility and digital PR.
Beyond Google
Web3 SEO means being discoverable across Brave, Presearch, DuckDuckGo, and AI answer engines, not just ranking in traditional search. As decentralized and privacy-first platforms gain share, that surface area only grows.
Let's talk SEO, AEO, and the growth it drives.
The best way to reach me is LinkedIn or email, happy to discuss how this applies to your search visibility, traffic, and leads.