Afkars Digital Marketing

Leading a team at 23, in a market that barely had SEO yet.

My roleSEO Team Leader

WhereSaudi Arabia

When2013-2015

afkars.net

The business

A Saudi digital marketing agency where the technical foundation was learned, leading an SEO team across agency accounts in a market that was years behind the Gulf on search.

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The brief

Run SEO delivery across multiple agency accounts, and build the team standard that made it repeatable.

What was in the way

Leading an SEO team at 23, in a Saudi market that was years behind the Gulf on search and had almost no local expertise to draw on.
Multiple agency accounts with different industries, different maturity levels and no shared standard between them.
Output quality varied by whoever happened to be executing, which is the default failure mode of every agency team.
Arabic search behaves differently from English, and treating it as translated English was, and still is, the most common and most expensive mistake in the region.

What I did

Built a team standard, not a task list
Process, priorities and a definition of done that the team executed against, so output stopped depending on who picked up the ticket.
Learned Arabic search on its own terms
Query behaviour, dialect variation and intent patterns treated as their own discipline rather than an English strategy with the words swapped.
Standardised the technical baseline
Every account was brought to the same technical floor first, because no amount of content strategy survives a broken foundation.
Delivered remotely across three years
A distributed team serving Saudi accounts, which built the remote working discipline every later engagement depended on.