Dr James Davidson

James worked for five years as a doctor in NHS hospitals. An exhausting stretch on the COVID frontline, in A&E and intensive care, made him step back and think about what he wanted. He loved medicine, but he couldn't find much creativity in the day-to-day work, and he was burning out.

He left hospital medicine to build his own medical education startup, MedCourse, with friends, colleagues and trusted advisors. Working out how to bring users to MedCourse took it past 10,000 visitors a month through search, and that is where he found his brain clicked with SEO.

His first client was an orthopaedic surgeon. The work went well, and in 2024 James launched White Coat SEO.

James works from Manchester with healthcare businesses that sell high-value treatment. His clients are surgical and specialist clinics in the UK and US, plus medical education brands and national healthcare providers.

He handles the tech, strategy and SEO, and brings in his team when a client needs specialists. The technical side comes from his time as tech lead at medical education startups.

Clinicians who work with him don't have to explain their specialty, because he trained as a doctor himself. He knows what GMC guidance and the advertising codes will not let a clinic claim, and what needs sign-off before a page goes live.

In a controlled test, James found that longer page titles lowered the share of searchers who clicked through. He published the result with four limitations that argued against it.

Darren Shaw and Claire Carlile discussed the experiment by name on The Whitespark Local Update (episode 18, January 2026). Shaw said he would test his own long-standing advice against it.

Search With Sean invited James onto an expert panel on AI in healthcare as the clinical expert.