Introducing… James Euinton, Technical Account Director

James chats to us about his role and why tech SEO is so important (as well as what he thinks the biggest challenge in 2026 is!)

Please introduce yourself…

Hi there – my name’s James, and I’m the Technical Account Director here at The SEO Works!

I joined the agency way back in 2015 as an Account Executive – working on client accounts within our SEO team. Since then, I’ve progressed through more senior roles on client projects, to managing a small team, to now leading our approach to Technical SEO! 

 What does your role involve?

I essentially specialise in all things Technical SEO! My responsibility as an Account Director is to drive our approach to Tech SEO, and ensure we are not only keeping up with best practice but are at the forefront of the industry.

This includes instigating process change, as well as upskilling and supporting the wider team on their technical SEO approaches. I’m also the technical lead on some of our key accounts, and am available to assist with technical solutions during key campaign points – such as during a migration.

What’s the most rewarding part of your role?

Fixing a difficult technical issue and immediately seeing the positive results for the client is the most rewarding part of the job.

Although SEO is definitely a medium-term investment and results are more about consistent improvements over time, the technical side of SEO can literally provide overnight results in some cases (unfortunately, the downside of this is that it also works in reverse when something goes wrong!).

It’s especially satisfying when you have to jump through several hoops and levels of approval, and you get to finally show them that it was the right thing to do! When it comes to making technical changes, trust is so important.

What’s the biggest technical challenge in 2026?

This will always depend on the site – each different type has its own issues. But the problem on everyone’s mind is how to ensure their website is accessible by AI! But for me that is all about getting the basics right… providing quality information, which is bot accessible/machine readable and relevant to the query.

Despite all the improvements in technology that we are hearing about, it is incredible how much the basics are still neglected, leading to numerous SEO issues. Incorrect Hreflang comes to mind – with international SEO clients, we always seem to find issues with that, and it can really cause a lot of headaches.

Why is tech SEO also so important for AI?

Technical SEO is crucial for AIs and LLMs because everything starts at crawl level – so if something is inaccessible for Googlebot, it is likely inaccessible for LLM crawlers too. So fundamentals are even more important when it comes to AI SEO.

I’ve always said that it doesn’t matter how good your content, branding and off-site signals are – if your site is inaccessible, then “that’s it”. If the door is locked to the bots then forget it.

I’ve also noticed quite an increase in poor technical SEO advice coming from LLMs. I think this is a result of a lot of content being published quickly, fed back into the LLM for new insights and then regurgitated by another AI tool. This results in all sorts of weird and wonderful queries from both clients and prospects!

In order to cut through the noise we need to be able to qualify what the original source of the information is and refer to official documentation where possible.

Thanks for speaking to us, James

Thanks for having me, it’s been great to chat!