💻 Simon Cox on Legacy SEO, Replatforming Chaos, Building the HSBC SEO Team, and the Joy of Model Railways - Episode #27

In Episode 27 of The Page 2 Podcast, hosts Jacob Stoops and Jeff Louella welcome British technical SEO legend Simon Cox for a wide-ranging conversation that spans nearly three decades of SEO, web development, corporate bureaucracy, and personal reinvention.

Simon reflects on his journey from art school and graphic design to hand-coding HSBC’s first global site in Notepad—before “SEO” was even a term. He shares stories about building the bank’s first SEO team, fighting for implementation in a regulated industry, surviving a platform migration gone wrong, and eventually walking away to start a boutique freelance business with his wife.

🚂 In this episode: 

• What SEO looked like in the AltaVista days
• Running global enterprise SEO across 30+ countries and languages
• Why content migration—not just redirects—breaks sites
• What to do when dev teams say "no" for 12 straight months
• Building a world-class SEO team inside a global bank
• Screaming Frog, log files, site speed, and tool geekery
• The truth about replatforming: it’s never just a redesign
• Simon’s secret life as a narrow-gauge model railway builder
• How personal burnout led him to pursue autonomy and joy
• The myths of rankings, the need for better SEO dashboards, and why C-suite data must be curated

Simon also shares hard-earned advice on keeping SEO simple, staying technical, and prioritizing what actually moves the needle.

Sponsored by Moving Traffic Media

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