Our Story

Spark founder and CEO Fion McCormack used to work in a fancy SEO agency in Hertfordshire. Let’s call this Agency X.

It was a pretty average day for the Head of Technical SEO – hunched at the screen, tipping away at the keyboard, working his SEO magic on a portfolio of blue-chip clients.

The office landline started ringing. It was lunchtime, the office was mostly empty, the receptionist had gone out and Fion was the closest one to the phone. He picked it up and reeled off the usual, “Hello Agency X, how can I help you?”

A woman’s shaky voice introduced its source as Linda, the owner of a small online business, concealed here for privacy’s sake. she went on to tell her story:

Not long ago, Linda quit her job and invested her savings in setting up a business. It was a venture that she had dreamed of for a long time.

As any smart business owner would do, she hired an SEO company to drive customers to her website. And naturally, as any business owner might do, Linda chose an agency with low costs and big promises .

Agency Y’s monthly fee seemed reasonable considering the return on investment she anticipated.

A couple of months later, Linda's customer base had not increased. Agency Y told her she needed to implement a long list of technical changes to her website if she wanted more customers. So she contracted a website developer to do exactly that.

9 months later, all her money spent on Agency Y and the associated development costs, yet no new customers to show for it. Linda was now desperate.

Fion could barely discern the details at this point of the story as it was choked out between sniffles and anguish. But his intuition gathered the gist of it anyway; her business was collapsing, and she saw her vocation, her life long dream sinking with it.

She asked Fion if Agency X could help. But her budget fell significantly below the minimum threshold accepted by Agency X. Fion had to say, “no, sorry we can’t help you”.

Moved by her circumstances, he went on to say that he would take a look at her website with her on the call. He started to audit her website with his specialist tools and promptly diagnosed the fundamental issues. He concluded with clear step-by-step guidance for Linda on how she could start to gain traction as quickly as possible.

With every word of direction, Linda felt herself being pulled out of that dark place crammed with doubts and hopelessness many business owners would know all too well. At the end of it, Linda thanked Fion profusely. Her voice was chirpier. She sounded hopeful.

Fion returned to his desk with certain unease – he had wished Linda every success with her business and yet, was frustrated that he could not do more to help.

He pondered over the matter, thinking about the limitations; Agency X’s thresholds, Agency Y’s failures, web development, the losses, costs, Linda, SMEs, dreams…

All these bounced around in his mind, picking momentum, formless energy shifting and building up to a point where they connected. Taking shape. Gaining form.

Bam! A collision of concepts. A spark of genius.

Spark SEO was conceptualised – a company of high caliber marketing experts offering high impact services, but at affordable rates.

Fion spent the next two years engineering his idea and crafting it into fruition.

The result was a unique 'bloatless' agency model. What was not essential, he discarded from his model – sales teams, offices, administrators. His model was an officeless agency comprising a remote team.

Our Mission

Our mission is give national scale ecommerce and service based businesses better results at a more affordable price.

Our Founder

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Fion McCormack - Founder & CEO