2016, age 16. Where it begins.
In the spring of 2016, I was sixteen years old, sitting in a small room in Pakistan with a slow internet connection and a Blogger.com URL nobody had ever heard of. I'd started the blog because I'd seen kids on YouTube making money online, and I wanted in. I had no idea what SEO was. I just knew you wrote things and put them on the internet, and sometimes Google sent people to read them.
A week after I published my third post, it ranked on page one of Google. I refreshed Search Console (then still called Google Webmaster Tools) every twenty minutes for three days. Why this one? I thought. Why not the others? That question — the one I couldn't stop asking — turned into a decade of work.
I didn't fall in love with SEO. I fell in love with the puzzle of why some pages win and others don't.
2016 to 2021. The grind.
For five years, I taught myself SEO the way most self-taught people learn anything: badly at first, then less badly, then suddenly all at once. I read every Moz blog post twice. I listened to Search Off the Record episodes on slow walks. I built blogs that ranked, blogs that didn't, blogs that ranked and then got crushed by an algorithm update I didn't see coming.
I took on freelance SEO work for small businesses in Pakistan — local bakeries, fitness coaches, e-commerce startups trying to get noticed. Some of them paid. Some of them ghosted me. All of them taught me something. By 2020, I knew the difference between a content-thin site and a technically broken one. I knew why some backlinks moved rankings and others didn't. I knew I wanted this to be my career.
2021. First real job.
In 2021, I joined Triverce in Pakistan as an SEO Specialist. It was my first time working on a team, my first time being responsible for client outcomes I couldn't fully control, and my first time being told "no" by senior strategists who'd seen tactics fail that I hadn't yet. In a year, I helped lift portfolio visibility by 60% and grew domain authority across multiple clients by 40%. More importantly, I learned to communicate SEO to people who didn't think in title tags.
2022. Dubai.
In 2022, I moved to Dubai to join Brand Platforms as their SEO Manager. The city was loud, hot, and entirely new. The work was bigger than anything I'd done before — multi-brand portfolios, enterprise client expectations, and a competitive landscape where every local query had a dozen serious agencies fighting for it.
Three years there changed me. I drove an 80% lift in organic traffic across the client portfolio. I led the recovery of multiple sites hit by Google Core updates, rebuilding E-E-A-T from the ground up. I took local UAE businesses to Top-2 in the Dubai map pack, and ran the Google Ads campaigns that compounded with the organic gains. I went from "the SEO guy" to a manager other SEOs came to with questions.
Dubai taught me that SEO is never just SEO. It's a business problem dressed up in technical clothes.
2025 to today. Local SEO Manager.
In 2025, I joined Gold Barn International as their Local SEO Manager. I lead Local SEO and International SEO programmes across multiple brands, with additional iGaming SEO work in some of the most competitive verticals on the web. I have a team I'm responsible for, a roadmap I'm accountable to, and the most complex SEO challenges I've taken on in my career.
Ten years in. Still chasing the perfect SERP. Still refreshing Search Console too often.