Olga Zarr.SEO Consultant
and AI SEO Consultant

In SEO since 2012. Agency, in-house, leadership, and independent consulting experience.

Much of my work begins with a question that doesn't have an obvious answer.

• Why did organic traffic fall?
• Why are important pages missing from search?
• What went wrong during a migration?
• What does the arrival of AI search actually change for this particular business?

I investigate those questions, explain what the evidence supports, and help turn the findings into work that can be implemented. That is the thread connecting my technical SEO audits, consulting, AI SEO work, writing, and teaching.

This website is a personal introduction to that work: how I became an SEO consultant, the problems I spend my time on, and where you can explore my professional experience. SEO Spy is the home of my consultancy and educational resources.

Here, the focus is on the person behind them.

• SEO practitioner since 2012 — experience built through hands-on work, not only through publishing about SEO.
• Hundreds of in-depth SEO audits — technical investigation across different websites, business models, and platforms.
• Agency, in-house, and SEO leadership roles — experience with both the analysis and the decisions needed to implement it.
• Founder, writer, speaker, and educator — the person behind SEO Spy, formerly SEOSLY, and SEO Audit Mastery.

From 2012 to 2020, I worked in agency SEO for large and local brands from all over the world. My professional background also spans in-house SEO, SEO management and director-level responsibilities, and independent consulting. I've experienced SEO both as the person investigating a problem and as someone responsible for deciding how that work should be prioritized and communicated.

Those settings gave me different views of what makes advice useful.

Agency, In-House, and SEO Leadership Experience

In-house work makes the consequences of a recommendation very concrete. A website has a development backlog, commercial priorities, content owners, and people who need to keep it functioning.

An apparently simple SEO change can touch several teams. Agency work adds a different perspective: similar symptoms can appear across websites with completely different underlying problems.

Agency experience also exposed me to different industries and ways of operating. An ecommerce store, a publisher, and a professional-services business do not need identical SEO advice. Their pages serve different purposes, their teams have different resources, and the consequences of a technical problem can differ considerably.

My experience in SEO management and leadership broadened that perspective beyond individual findings. It is one thing to identify a problem; it is another to evaluate its importance, explain the trade-offs, and help people agree on the next step.

That combination of technical detail and senior judgment remains important in my consulting.

Working across those settings helped me become more interested in diagnosis than in following a fixed checklist. A checklist can remind you what to inspect.

It cannot decide whether a finding matters to the website in front of you, or whether it explains the problem you were asked to solve.

Years of Practical SEO Investigation

Over the years, I've carried out hundreds of in-depth SEO audits. That repetition has been valuable, but not because it made every project predictable.

It showed me how often context changes the answer. A technical pattern that deserves immediate attention on one site may be intentional, harmless, or secondary on another.

My work includes crawling and indexing investigations, rendering and JavaScript questions, site architecture, migrations, organic traffic losses, and the relationship between content and search intent. I look at how these issues interact rather than treating the technical and editorial parts of a website as separate worlds.

This is the experience I bring to AI SEO as well. I am not starting again with a new job title. I am extending an established practice to include new search experiences, new questions about visibility, and new ways to use AI responsibly during research and analysis.

From SEOSLY to SEO Spy: Sharing the Work

I started SEOSLY in 2020 as a place to share the practical knowledge I was developing. Writing about audits, tools, and technical SEO made me explain my reasoning more clearly. Publishing also opened the door to conversations with other practitioners, teaching, interviews, and conference speaking.

SEO Spy continues that work with a clearer emphasis on investigation and evidence. The name fits the part of SEO I enjoy most: looking closely enough to notice what has been missed, then making the findings understandable.

Becoming independent also meant taking responsibility for the judgment behind my advice, not just completing an assigned part of a project. I've written about that transition in my Search Engine Journal article on becoming an independent SEO consultant.

My career has changed shape, but the practical work of understanding websites remains at its center.

Technical SEO appeals to me because it makes you examine the difference between what a website appears to do and what it actually does. A page can look perfectly normal in a browser while presenting a very different situation to a crawler, a rendering system, or a search index.

I work with crawling, rendering, indexing, canonicalization, redirects, internal linking, structured data, and site architecture. These are not isolated boxes to tick. They interact with the content, templates, navigation, and commercial purpose of a website.

Consider an ecommerce category that has lost visibility. As an illustrative example, the problem might involve a changed canonical, weaker internal links, unavailable products, a shift in search intent, or several changes happening together.

Rewriting the category description would not resolve every one of those possibilities. Neither would fixing every warning in a crawl report.

That is why I want to know what changed, which URLs are affected, and what evidence would distinguish one explanation from another. A useful technical SEO investigation connects the behavior of the website with the outcome being observed.

I also care about how the findings reach the people implementing them.

• Developers need examples and requirements they can reproduce.
• Content teams need to understand the purpose of a page.
• Business owners need to know what deserves attention and what can wait.

A technically accurate observation is only part of the job. The other part is making it useful enough that someone can act on it and check whether the change worked as intended.

My experience includes work across ecommerce, publishing, affiliate websites, legal and professional services, and other business websites. I work with international clients and with people who approach SEO from different starting points: business owners, in-house specialists, marketing leads, developers, and content teams.

A smaller business may need to understand a handful of important pages and choose what to do first. A larger organization may need to understand how one template or platform decision affects thousands of URLs. Both require careful reasoning, but the implementation constraints are very different.

I take those constraints seriously. Advice that depends on resources a team does not have is unlikely to be useful without a realistic sequence. Equally, a quick workaround may be inappropriate when it creates a larger architectural problem later.

I therefore spend time understanding how a website is maintained, who owns the relevant decisions, and what can actually change. That context is part of SEO consulting, not an administrative detail separate from it.

Education is a substantial part of my professional life. Consulting helps me encounter difficult questions; teaching requires me to explain how I think through them. I enjoy that exchange because neither activity lets me rely comfortably on vague language.

I share practical material through articles, videos, the SEO Spy Watch newsletter, the SEO Spy Podcast, and courses. The formats serve different purposes.

• A detailed article can work through a technical issue carefully.
• A video can demonstrate a process.
• An interview makes room for a perspective that differs from my own.

I launched my podcast in 2022. My interviews have included conversations with practitioners and industry figures such as Barry Schwartz, Aleyda Solis, Martin Splitt, and Lily Ray.

I value being able to ask not only what someone recommends, but why they recommend it and where the limitations are.

In 2024, I created SEO Audit Mastery, bringing my audit approach into a course format. Auditing is a particularly useful subject to teach because the difficult part is rarely finding something that looks unusual. It is deciding whether that finding matters and explaining what should happen next.

My educational work also includes AI SEO. I want to help people understand how search is evolving without suggesting that they must abandon everything they already know. The useful question is what needs to be learned, tested, or adapted for the situation in front of them.

You can explore my resources through SEO Spy. This personal website brings the professional background together; the main site is where those individual areas of work can be explored further.