Sourabh Thakur — SEO & Organic Growth Expert

How I got here

My SEO career started in 2016 as an SEO Executive at CogCulture Pvt. Ltd., and moved through progressively senior technical and strategy roles — SEO Specialist at The Global Helpdesk, SEO Expert at Krivik Global Solutions, and Senior Technical SEO Specialist at Briotech Websolutions — before I joined Virtual Employee Pvt. Ltd. in December 2021, where I now lead SEO delivery for a portfolio of international e-commerce and experiential-travel clients as Assistant Team Lead — SEO & Organic Growth.

Three engagements best describe how I work. End-to-end ownership of an Australian wine e-commerce brand's SEO program drove +141% organic revenue growth in 12 months, alongside +121% website traffic growth, +276% Search Console clicks, and +52% sales pipeline growth — I also built the client's conversion tracking from scratch, turning previously invisible traffic into 32 attributable leads. As part of a 4-person team, I delivered content-led SEO across 30+ US tourism and attraction websites, contributing to a flagship site profile with 674.8K estimated monthly organic traffic. And a WordPress information-architecture rebuild grew a New Zealand e-commerce brand's traffic by ~110% over 15 months. Full breakdowns of all three are in the case studies.

I also report losses, not just wins. On the wine brand engagement, I flagged slipped rankings with recovery plans as they happened, and surfaced an 88.8% lead-form drop-off as the next priority rather than letting a good top-line number hide a real UX problem — I'd rather a hiring manager trust my reporting than be impressed by it.

My methodology

1. Audit first. Every engagement starts with a full technical crawl (Screaming Frog), a Search Console health check, and a content/keyword gap analysis — no fixes before diagnosis.
2. Prioritize by impact. Issues get ranked by traffic and revenue impact versus effort, not by what's easiest to fix first.
3. Instrument before reporting. If conversion tracking doesn't exist, building it comes before any growth claim — traffic without attribution isn't a result yet.
4. Monitor daily during risk windows. During migrations or major structural changes, I monitor GSC daily and isolate issues like failed or double redirects within a day of detection.
5. Report against business outcomes, including bad news. Reporting is tied to organic revenue, traffic-to-lead conversion, and ranking movement — wins and losses both, via SEMrush, GSC, GA4, and Looker Studio.

Leadership & mentorship

Beyond individual delivery, I lead an 8-member direct-report SEO team within a 28-person unit, and mentor team members while establishing the workflows, SOPs, and QA standards that keep delivery consistent across dozens of client sites — the kind of process work that scales past what any one person can execute alone.

Expanding into paid media

SEO is where I'm strongest, but it's not the whole picture anymore. I've been building real Google Ads and Meta Ads experience alongside it — not yet at the depth of my SEO track record, and I'm upfront about that, but genuinely growing. I've contributed to a Google Ads account restructuring and a full-funnel Meta Ads programme as part of a team (both documented in the case studies), and I'm actively working toward having my own independent paid-media results to show. See the Google Ads & Paid Media page for what that looks like today.

AI automation & programmatic SEO

I built an automated AI-visibility monitor using Make.com and the Google Gemini API that logs whether a brand is cited in AI-generated answers to buyer-intent queries, and which competitors and sources show up instead — a working v1 I'm actively expanding, not a finished product. I also use ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Genspark daily to speed up audits, content drafting, and research, with judgment and QA staying mine. Separately, I'm experienced in template- and data-driven programmatic page generation at scale. Full detail on the AI Automation & Programmatic SEO page.

Tools I work in daily