About

I'm Colin McDermott. I've spent the last twenty years working in search, and I write here about SEO, GEO, and where the two are going next.

What I do now

I'm Head of SEO at Whop, where I lead the organic strategy across a fast-moving consumer marketplace. A big chunk of my work right now is GEO - Generative Engine Optimisation - and figuring out how brands earn visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and the rest of the LLM-shaped search landscape.

Previously

For the better part of a decade I ran Search Candy as an independent eCommerce SEO consultancy. Clients included The Times, CEF, Fired Earth, Lending Works, and Think Money, alongside dozens of smaller engagements.

Before consulting, I spent years in-house and agency-side across enterprise ecommerce, finance, and publishing. The constant has always been organic search.

What this site is

Search Candy is the masthead - the publication. I'm the person behind it. The things I publish here are notes from the field: what's actually working, what isn't, and the experiments I'm running on real sites with real traffic.

No course funnels. No certifications. No daily takes. Just writing about search when I've got something worth saying.

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Occasional notes on SEO, GEO, and where search is going. No fluff, no schedule, no promises.