🥨 12 days until WTSFest Philly
⏳ & London early bird tickets close end of month
🥨 12 days until WTSFest Philly
⏳ & London early bird tickets close end of month
Welcome to a new Weekly Interviews edition where we interview brilliant women in our industry and share their stories with the world! Anyone is welcome to share their story by simply filling this form, we encourage women from all walks of life in our industry to do so.
Introducing Olga Tsimaraki! Olga is an SEO, content and knowledge systems strategist based in the Netherlands. She helps businesses turn expertise into useful content, better processes and systems people can actually use. Originally trained as an engineer, she somehow ended up in marketing, discovered SEO along the way, and never really stopped asking questions. Her work now sits somewhere between SEO, content strategy, training, documentation and knowledge transfer.
We asked her everything from how she first got into SEO to what empowers her to be the brilliant woman she is 💪🏽
Mostly by accident. I studied engineering, decided I wanted to work in marketing, moved from Greece to the Netherlands, and started looking for a remote job. I found a junior marketing role at an agency where a big part of the work was SEO. So I basically started learning SEO on Day 1. What surprised me was how well it suited the way my brain works. SEO sits somewhere between research, psychology, writing, data, problem-solving and figuring out how complicated systems work. I liked that there was always another question to investigate. Several years later, SEO is still a big part of what I do, although my work has expanded into content strategy, training, documentation and knowledge systems. Apparently I just kept following the questions. :)
I still love keyword research, although I probably wouldn't describe it as keyword research anymore. My favourite part is figuring out what people are actually trying to understand. That can start with keywords, Search Console data, Reddit threads, sales conversations, AI search results, competitor pages or ten browser tabs I absolutely intended to close three hours ago.
I like getting underneath the search volume and asking: What problem is this person really trying to solve? What do they already know? What are they confused about? What would actually be useful here? Once you understand that, the content strategy becomes much easier.
Probably still Google Search Console. There are much shinier tools, but Search Console gives you something I find incredibly valuable: evidence of what is actually happening between a website and the people finding it. I particularly love digging beyond the obvious top queries and looking for patterns, unexpected searches, pages appearing for things nobody intentionally targeted, and opportunities hidden in the data. My other slightly less sensible answer is my notes. I save examples, questions, screenshots, ideas, client observations and things people say. A surprising amount of good strategy starts with something I wrote down months ago because I thought, huh, that's interesting.
One of my biggest realizations was that knowing the right thing to do and getting the right thing done are completely different problems. You can create the perfect SEO strategy, audit or content plan. But if nobody understands it, remembers it, trusts it, owns it or knows how to implement it, it doesn't matter how clever it was. That changed how I work. I became much more interested in what happens after the recommendation: documentation, training, decision-making, workflows, ownership and knowledge transfer. It also made me realize that a lot of what looks like an SEO problem isn't really an SEO problem. Sometimes the SEO knowledge already exists inside the company. The real problem is getting that knowledge to the right person at the right moment.
I'm still going to give an annoyingly non-award-shaped answer to this one. I'm proud of the career I've built. I started in SEO knowing almost nothing, eventually managed international clients, developed strategies, trained other people, mentored, consulted, taught and gradually built a career around the parts of the work I care about most. I'm especially proud when something I've created makes another person better at their job. A strategy is nice. Rankings are nice. But seeing someone understand something they were intimidated by, make a better decision because of something you taught them, or use a system you created without needing you there is incredibly satisfying. In my first WTS interview, I said I couldn't imagine where I would be four years later. Turns out she was right about that.
Learn the fundamentals, but don't become obsessed with finding the correct SEO checklist. SEO is full of people confidently explaining the one thing you absolutely must do. Eventually you realize that the answer to an irritating number of SEO questions is: it depends. Learn how search engines work. Learn technical SEO. Learn content. Learn how to use the tools. But more importantly, learn how to think. Ask why something is happening. Look at the SERP. Talk to the people you're trying to reach. Question your assumptions. Test things. Learn enough about the business to understand what actually matters. And don't panic because you don't know everything. Nobody knows everything. The industry changes too quickly for that. Being good at learning is much more useful.
I have to keep Areej AbuAli here. I mentioned her in my original WTS interview, and years later I think the fact that this interview even exists is a pretty good explanation of why. Women in Tech SEO didn't just create another SEO community. It created visibility, opportunities, friendships, mentorship and a place where thousands of people could see others like themselves doing brilliant work. I also want to keep Kathryn Monkcom in this answer. She helped me when I first joined the WTS mentorship programme as a mentor, and I remember looking at her career and thinking about what might be possible for mine. There are many more people I could add now, which is probably one of the nicest things about having been in this industry for a few more years.
It feels a little bit like having grown up alongside it. When I gave my first WTS interview, I was still relatively early in my SEO career. I had also just become a first-time mentor in the community. Since then, my career has changed enormously, but WTS has remained one of those places where you can look around and see people at every possible stage: learning their first technical audit, managing teams, starting companies, speaking at conferences, changing specialisms, having children, moving countries, burning out, coming back and figuring out what they want their career to look like next. I think that matters. Careers don't move in straight lines, and it's reassuring to belong to a community that makes room for that.
Curiosity. Which is both my greatest strength and the reason I currently have approximately 400 things I would like to learn, build or investigate. I genuinely love understanding things. I like discovering how something works, connecting it to something completely different and then thinking, wait, what if we did this instead? As I've gotten older, though, I've realized that empowerment isn't just about having endless possibilities. It's also about choosing. You can't read every book, pursue every idea, master every skill or build every project. Knowing what matters enough to get your attention is a skill too. I'm still working on that one. 😬
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Thanks Olga for a truly insightful interview, you can learn more about her through her website and connect with her on LinkedIn.
To view more interviews with brilliant women, check out our Interviews page. If you've enjoyed reading this interview, then 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! 🙌🏽