About Me

I didn’t come to SEO through marketing courses. I came from a pediatric clinic.

2010–2012. First website

I studied "General Medicine," graduated from medical university in 2011, and worked as a district pediatrician. In the evenings, I made my first website on WordPress — about childhood disease syndromes. I digitized a reference book, wrote articles, and figured out why people visited some pages and not others.

The traffic was small, the earnings — about 500 hryvnias. But it was precisely then that I first saw that the text on the page and the position in search are somehow connected.

Three weeks of Ctrl+C and three thousand dollars

My husband had an educational website — pure HTML, without a CMS. He was offered to place advertising banners: the block had to be inserted manually on each page, after the second paragraph from the top and before the two bottom ones. Automation was not possible — the pages differed in structure.

Three weeks of manual copying, my entire vacation. At the same time, I learned HTML and CSS because I was also putting together landing pages.

In the end, my husband said that I had earned three thousand dollars. At that time, I was an intern earning 1,500 hryvnias a month — I wouldn’t have seen that kind of money in a hospital even in a year. At that moment, I thought: 'It seems I am doing the wrong thing.'

Maternity leave and the decision not to return

When I went on maternity leave, the family needed money. I decided not to go back to the hospital and stayed freelancing. It all started hard: I took on any job I could find, juggling household chores and the child.

Once, I had to write unique descriptions for product cards — paint brushes that differed only in size. Nothing else. Anyone who has written such texts will understand me. They paid one hryvnia per text. Comments on websites went for 50 kopecks — and that was already considered creative work.

Then I sold my website on Telderi and used that money to buy an internet marketing course. The course provided a toolkit map, and out of all the directions, I chose SEO — because I found in it the same meaning as in medicine. A doctor circumvents the rules of nature to prevent a patient from dying. An SEO specialist heals websites and circumvents the search engine's rules. Only a website can be restored from a backup, but a person cannot. Therefore, I had a lot of courage to take action.

Fifty interviews in two months

After the course, I realized that what I lacked was not theory, but a system and hardcore practice. So I went to interviews — there were about fifty in two months, sometimes three a day: from furniture companies, where you need to manage a single website, to large agencies like Netpeak. With a small child and all household responsibilities on me, I chose the mid-level segment.

No one ever asked me which courses I took. They asked something else: how you gather semantics, how you do technical tasks, what a cyclic redirect means. They hired based on these answers.

At the first agency, I was given fifteen websites — from reinforced concrete products to grills and baby strollers. I really loved it: an SEO specialist inevitably begins to understand things that normal people don't even suspect exist.

Hebrew, drones, nursing homes

Next came the English-speaking segment and Israel: websites in English and Hebrew, projects for selling drones and military equipment, huge budgets. After Hebrew, I didn’t care anymore which language to promote the site in — I already knew how to gather semantics in an unfamiliar language and how to check it.

Then — foreign projects in education and a freelance exchange. Then an agency with a medical specialization: clinics, nursing homes, medical equipment, pharmacies. At the same time, for many years I managed a freelance project — an events listing, where I started as a copywriter and ended up managing social media and applying everything I managed to learn in SEO.

By this point, the work has ceased to be a set of tasks and has become a system: your own templates, your own techniques, understanding how to do it better and faster.

2018. Own team

In 2018, I assembled a small team of people I had already worked with on projects. This is how I started working outside of employment — and gained my first leadership experience: eight people, more than thirty projects simultaneously. Today, this is CASTA.Agency.

War and what came after

When the war started, we lost almost all our clients: businesses were closing or cutting development budgets. That’s when I delved deeper into IT and FinTech, and later — into SaaS, e-commerce, iGaming, and international projects.

I believe that this entire path is not accidental. And I am grateful to everyone who went through it with me.

Today

Twelve years in SEO. I develop my own projects alongside client projects and spend a lot of time on what in a couple of years will become mandatory for everyone: optimization for neural network answers.

The logic is the same as in 2012 — understand how the system makes a decision and make it choose you.

• Only "white hat" methods. Click farms and gray schemes give a short spike and long problems
• No guarantees of 'top 3 in a month.' Whoever promises that is either being dishonest or plans to risk your site.
• All accesses and developments are yours. Semantics, texts, reports remain with you in any scenario
• No more than five projects under personal management so that there is enough attention for each.
• I make decisions, not the contractor for me. Even when the work is done by a team.

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