Anton Shulke

It's all started in 2015, I used to live in Spain but we had some economical difficulty during that time and moved to Kyiv. I have a PhD in Mathematics and was employed by a small company there working on a IT project between Russia and Ukraine. After the relations between the 2 countries sored, I started teaching English and Spanish in Ukraine. Later I joined WebPromo, a company mainly focusing on SEO Marketing. I started doing SEO Marketing webinars in English and was later head hunted by Semrush.

I was doing a webinar with a guy from Google about RankBrain algorithm. During this webinar the speaker mentioned that ranking factors are affected by RankBrain, links and content. Although everyone knew it, but google never admitted it and it was the first time on record. Barry Schwartz, one of the main source of SEO news watched that webinar and he immediately wrote a article about our webinar and published it on his page. The next day I decided to check the webinar, it had 30,000 views. I thought it was some kind of glitch because the views a day before were only around 300. I only expected it to go up for only another one or two thousand. That was very memorable.

Obviously you have to find the right field where you want to put your efforts. At Semrush, we were mainly doing SEO and PPC. Semrush is well known in the industry and the focus was more on converting brand awareness to brand loyalty. When I moved to Duda, which is CMS, I tried to get into various communities like that of web designers. Going to Wordpress community and saying, hey guys lets try duda, you will annihilated, completely destroyed! For Duda, brand awareness is very very important. We bring people from Google or Bing on webinars, let them talk about what they are passionate about. They don't talk about Duda platform but still there is some level of associate and usually it builds up a loyal audience. It builds up trust for Duda among your audience. I call it influencer marketing the SEO way. It has nothing to do with SEO but just takes longer time like how SEO works, to get something tangible it takes 3 or 6 months.

KPI is difficult, and also finding the right influencers is very difficult. There are plenty of platforms trying to help you find the right influencers but they are very mechanical. A lot of data can be easily manipulated, and it can't necessarily be a metric for choosing influencers. With AI on the market right now, I'm sure it will not be long before we can do much better evaluation of influencers for a particular industry, or particular direction. Attribution is also extremely difficult to track. If you could attribute direct traffic to word of mouth or anything connected to influencer marketing, that would be good to have.

Generally, of course AI is a huge factor that would play a lot of role. People's views on AI are divided into 3 groups, the haters, the ones who think that if it goes well, then there are waiters, they're fine with AI being around, and last one are the people who immediately try to use it. The last groups of people would be the ones who are likely to master AI and would be on the top. With AI we can easily and safely scale a company measures on something. I would say that AI is expected to be very precise and straight to the point in the future. The ability to familiarize itself with the users will be one of the key points to help the industry.