Welcome to my personal blog and thank you for taking the time to read this. Having a personal blog is something that I have thought about for a long time, but never got to actually do it.
This feels good because, I started writing this first post from Chiang Mai in Thailand on the way home to Sydney, Australia. In case you are wondering, what I am doing here; I was here to attend the Chiang Mai SEO Conference 2023.
You may not know me, so lets get to know each other. My name is Pulkit Agrawal and I have been involved in the SEO industry since 2007 with a sabbatical in between. Back in 2005, I was working as a Network Engineer in Sydney and during my long commutes to work, I got into a habit of reading. It started with newspapers, which then led to books (mainly autobiographies) and then I had a chance read of a book published on Google. It sparked an inquisitiveness and I wanted to know more as to how Google ranks websites. One book led to another and after about 6 different books, I was confident that I knew a thing or two about how Google works. Although, that statement is no longer true as nobody knows how Google works.
In mid-2006, I moved back to India and in 2007 setup my own soft skills finishing and IT training company URADICS in Ahmedabad, India. I do not remember what I was thinking when I was doing this. The business had some traction but nothing that could be exciting. Fast forward 2008 / 2009, I started approaching some businesses locally to see if they wished to do SEO and were willing to trust me. After multiple failures, one business East International decided they were willing to work with me. Even though the money was not great, but it gave me the start that I was looking for. I worked with them for 8 months and I did get some good results for them.
In the mean while, I kept on acquiring some local customers here and there. Money was tight, but I was getting by. My first big break came, when the owner of a Armenian Dating Site based in the US approached me as he need some help with SEO, but he wanted me to train him on how to do it, which was fine by me. Due to the time zone difference, I used to wake up at 3 AM for our training sessions at 4 AM every week day.
Then a large publisher in Ireland (I will not name them here, they are seriously large) found out about me online and reached out and I did some work for them as well. Then came my first big challenge; a German company based in Berlin reached out and wanted me to do SEO for them for their 8 websites and the money was seriously good. Here is the catch, all their sites were in German and all of their customers were in Germany. I had never worked on a site in a language that was not English. That is the thing about SEO, core concepts remain the same. I entrusted the help of a German friend to help me overcome the language barrier.
Things were going great and in 2011, I acquired a small Australian account and that ended up being our largest ever account. More on this in Part #2 of my journey.
Leave a Reply