Who Is Tom Riley? The SEO Behind Growth in the UK's Hardest Niches

Tom Riley is a UK SEO and growth marketing specialist who builds organic visibility in the most competitive and heavily regulated markets in search.

He is the founder of HAKKEN, a specialist agency focused on insurance and fintech SEO, and the former SEO and AI/GEO Lead at Zego, the UK's first insurtech unicorn. His career has been spent winning ground in YMYL sectors like insurance, pensions, finance, and healthcare, where trust, intent, and authority decide who ranks.

What does Tom Riley do?

Tom works at the intersection of organic growth marketing, technical SEO, content marketing, digital PR, and social search, treating demand, authority, and distribution as one connected system rather than separate channels.

He is a hands-on operator rather than a manager who delegates the work away. He gets into site architecture, crawlability, indexation, internal linking, content creation and editing, experimentation, and optimisation himself.

He has also been early to the shift in search, applying AI SEO, GEO optimisation, social search, TikTok SEO, and YouTube SEO, and treating search as a distribution layer rather than just a traffic source.

Which niches does Tom Riley specialise in?

Tom focuses on the hardest verticals in search, the ones most consultants avoid.

His core specialisms are insurance, fintech, pensions, finance, and healthcare, all YMYL categories that sit under strict regulation and demand genuine topical authority. Alongside that, he has delivered results in ecommerce, high-intent commercial services, and local markets where intent and speed matter more than brand.

Tom Riley's success stories

Tom's track record spans some of the most competitive SERPs in the UK, repeatedly taking brands from low visibility to category-leading positions.

At Zego, he owned organic growth in the fiercely contested vehicle insurance market, competing directly with major insurers and comparison platforms. At Joslin Rhodes, an FCA-regulated pension firm, he outranked the likes of Which, Unbiased, HSBC, and MoneyHelper. At UK Smiles, he made the brand the national category leader for Turkey veneers and cosmetic dental tourism search.

Tom Riley's key achievements

A summary of results from across his career:

Grew organic clicks at Zego from around 60,000 a month to over 150,000 a month within 12 months.
Delivered a 250% increase in commercial-intent traffic and a 400% increase in total organic traffic in a highly competitive insurance SERP.
Increased annual organic traffic value at Zego from roughly £0.5m to £1.8m, enabling large reductions in PPC spend.