WTSFest 2025: Join our conference
📅 1 Full day 🎤10 Speakers 📍5 locations
WTSFest 2025: Join our conference
📅 1 Full day 🎤10 Speakers 📍5 locations
Welcome to a new WTSInterview edition, where we interview brilliant SEOs in our industry and share their stories with the world! Anyone is welcome to share their story by simply filling this form, we encourage folks from all walks of life in our industry to do so.
Introducing Alexandra Tachalova! Based in The Netherlands, Alexandra is the founder of the link building agency Digital Olympus. She also organizes the DO event in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Besides that, she regularly contributes to leading digital marketing blogs, including Moz, SEJ, Salesforce, SMExaminer, and many others.
We asked her everything from how she first got into SEO to what empowers her to be the brilliant SEO she is 💪🏽
It was a bit of an unexpected match. I joined the Semrush team to help them integrate Salesforce into their business processes. After some time, Oleg, one of the co-founders of Semrush, suggested I help with marketing, and that’s how my SEO journey began. I still recall how my knees were shaking when I delivered my first speech at BrightonSEO in September 2014. At that time, I wasn’t very experienced in SEO, but time flies, and now, ten years later, I sometimes feel that I’ve seen almost all possible scenarios in SEO.
I love working with numbers and analyzing current successes and failures. The most exciting moment is when, based on this analysis, you can brainstorm a completely different approach. SEO, like any marketing initiative, requires a lot of innovation if you want to achieve substantial growth over time. The most effective SEO campaigns are the ones that do not follow any rules or templates.
It's definitely a combination of Ahrefs and Semrush. These tools complement each other very well!
Like many SEO experts, we've known for ages that having fewer low-performing pages typically results in better performance for the remaining pages. However, putting this into action isn’t always easy. Recently, we successfully pitched the idea to a client of deleting a significant portion of low-performing content pages. Guess what? We immediately saw a 30% growth in organic traffic across the most important pages. It’s not rocket science, but it was so satisfying to see this strategy in action.
I still pinch myself from time to time since running a business for almost a decade in the SEO niche is quite an achievement. You couldn't imagine how many times I wanted to give up, but I made it through. Also, we have our own SEO event for 300 in the Netherlands. The next edition will be held in September 2025 in Amsterdam.
Finding a promising startup and growing with it was one of the best career decisions I have made. I was a bit terrified of going from a well-known company to a 10-person startup, but the knowledge that I gained at Semrush is invaluable and unique!
For me, it's definitely Aleyda Solis. She is my biggest source of inspiration and go-to role model!
A good sense of humor has helped me get through many situations. I recall being accepted to speak at one of the best SEO events in the industry. But then they changed their mind, and I was, without a doubt, devastated. On my way home, the road was slippery, and I fell into a puddle. Initially, I burst into tears while sitting in the middle of the puddle, but after a few minutes, I realized it was too funny and started to laugh uncontrollably.
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Thanks, Alexandra, for a truly insightful interview! You can connect with Alexandra on LinkedIn.
Check out our Interviews page for more interviews. If you've enjoyed reading this, we'd love for YOU to share your story with the world! Simply fill this form here, we welcome brilliant SEOs from all walks of life! 🙌🏽