Open to work
Utkarsh Gour
SEO and AI search · 9 years · IT, SaaS, e-commerce
The job of SEO is not just to Rank on SERPs. It is to be Seen, Cited and Chosen.
I am Utkarsh Gour, an SEO expert with nine years across IT, SaaS and e-commerce. Every recommendation I make has to survive one question: what does this do to the rankings the page already has? If I cannot answer that from the data, the change does not go on the sheet. Simple fixes before clever ones, because simple fixes are the ones that ship: find the one cause behind the mess, fix that, and leave everything that is working alone.
Since 2024 there is a second scoreboard. Google ranks your page. ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews decide whether to cite you, mention you without a link, paraphrase you without credit, or skip you. I track all four, and I check whether each answer retrieved your page or worked from memory and named someone else, because the fix is different for each.
The rest of the job has not gone anywhere. Technical SEO, migrations, keyword mapping, content, internal links and reporting still decide whether there is anything worth citing. Nine years of that work, from Neil Patel Digital to Head of SEO at Upbott Consulting, and the working shown on every project on this site.
I like the problems where the obvious answer is wrong. A site that lost 40 percent of its traffic. An index 300 times bigger than the catalog. A site which has been penalized by Google.
If you are a founder, a marketing lead or an in-house team with a question about a migration, on-page and content, internal links, or why ChatGPT keeps citing your competitor, get in touch and let’s talk it through. Speak to Utkarsh
Brands I have worked on 26
Group the same 26 brands three ways
Upbott Consulting Now SEO Head · 4 clients, 7 brands
Four concurrent SEO and CRO projects across e-commerce and B2B since January 2025, running a team of nine specialists. Closed 57% of a revenue shortfall in eight months and moved 300+ B2B keywords onto page one in five.
Propeller UK agency · 14 brands
SEO Head across multiple agency client accounts from October 2023 to December 2024, leading migrations at one to two sites a month. Authored the weekly SEO column on Propeller’s own Insights blog and built the templates the wider team still delivers against.
iMocha In-house SaaS · 1 brand
Rehired by the CEO in 2022 on the strength of an earlier stint here, then grew traffic 40% by scaling content to fifteen SEO articles a week. Migrated the whole site in a month via an audit-first Azure staging environment.
Neil Patel Digital SEO Manager 2021–22 · 2 brands
Owned strategy and execution for three unicorn-stage clients from September 2021, lifting organic traffic 15% month over month. Cut page load from six seconds to four and was recognised twice for the work.
RankUno IT & public sector · 2 brands
Ran on-page and content work on the Infosys account from 2019 to 2021, lifting lead flow 20%. Meta-tag optimisation, topic strategy, and a website migration alongside senior leads.
Shopify 6 brands · 4 on Shopify Plus
Six retail and lifestyle brands, four of them on Shopify Plus. The recurring problem here is discovery and conversion, not just rankings — the storefront has to sell as well as rank.
Magento Adobe Commerce · 5 brands, 3 clients
Five brands across three clients, all on Adobe Commerce. The common thread: catalogues that had outgrown their own information architecture before anyone touched keywords.
WordPress Multi-site & WPML · 8 brands
Eight brands spanning multi-site and WPML builds — hospitality, education and one video-production account, each needing localisation or attribute discipline the CMS doesn’t give for free.
Custom Bespoke build · 1 brand
One bespoke PHP build. No plugin ecosystem to lean on, so the basic SEO plumbing — sitemaps, schema, canonicals — had to be built by hand rather than configured.
BigCommerce Industrial · 2 brands, 1 client
Two industrial brands under one client, sharing a catalogue structure across cord-management and safety product lines.
Adobe Experience Manager Enterprise · 1 brand
Infosys’ enterprise stack. On-page and content work inside a CMS built for governance first and agility a distant second.
Headless & custom React front ends · 2 brands
Two React front ends — Gupshup on Next.js and WordPress, Hilton on an enterprise stack. The work headless setups drop by default: rendering, meta output, and sitemaps.
Webflow 1 brand
One brand, iMocha’s own choice of design tool rather than a technical constraint the SEO work had to route around.
Retail, D2C & lifestyle 6 brands
Six Shopify and Magento brands where product discovery and cart conversion decide the outcome as much as rankings do.
Appliances & industrial 6 brands
Long-consideration purchases with a technical-audit problem underneath — U-Line and Marvel Refrigeration both needed a pre-migration index cleanup before anything else could move.
Hospitality & venues 4 brands
Four UK venues and hotel groups, with WordPress multi-site and WPML doing the heavy lifting across locations and languages.
SaaS, IT & public sector 4 brands
Infosys, Voyatek, Gupshup and iMocha — enterprise sales cycles where technical credibility and international structure matter as much as keyword coverage.
Compliance & regulated 2 brands, 1 client
Two labor-law compliance retailers that compete in the same SERPs, each needing a different growth lever — rankings on one, informational content on the other.
Education & property 3 brands
Three brands where trust signals and a long research cycle matter more than a fast add-to-cart.
Marketing, media & creative 1 brand
Studio52, a UK video-production brand — the first case in this sector, added in 2026.
Recognition
Recognised twice for research depth and execution quality, Neil Patel Digital
Both came during my seven months as SEO Manager at Neil Patel Digital India, September 2021 to March 2022, under CEO Pradeep Kumaar. The role covered three unicorn-stage clients and a team of ten.
Ranking gets you found. Trust gets you quoted.
Ranking still counts in AI search. It just no longer decides who gets quoted. In one study of 1,311 pages, classic SEO metrics explained only 4 to 7 percent of the variation in which pages AI answers cited.
So a page has to pass two checks. First it has to be found: crawlable, indexed, ranking and quick to fetch. Then it has to earn enough trust to be used: the answer stated early, facts a model can lift cleanly, a date that shows the page is current, and a brand the model cannot mix up with the one next door.
Most sites work on one check and wonder why nothing changes. Solving SEO problems in simple ways means finding the one that is failing, fixing only that, and showing the working so your team can follow it.
Speak to UtkarshThe pattern
Flat traffic has a cause
When traffic sits flat for months, the content is rarely the problem. Something structural is holding it back: filter URLs eating the crawl, two pages fighting for one keyword, strong pages that no internal link points to. On one e-commerce store, 99.7 percent of the 70,637 URLs Google had indexed were filter pages nobody meant to publish.
The newer version shows up in Search Console as steady rankings and falling clicks. Usually an AI Overview is now answering above your result. Across 53 brands, Seer Interactive found organic click-through is 2.4 percent on queries with an Overview, against 3.8 percent without one, and pages cited inside it get more than twice the clicks of pages left out. So I find the queries where this is happening and rework the top of those pages so Google has a clear passage to quote.
Where most sites go wrong
- Content written against a keyword list instead of a subject, so none of it adds up to authority
- Link building that runs for one quarter and then quietly stops
- Pages slow enough to lose the visit they just earned
- Technical defects left in place, so the index fills with URLs nobody meant to publish
- Ranking well and still being invisible, because the answer above you was assembled from someone else
- No audit rhythm, so problems are found by a traffic drop rather than by looking
If that reads like your site, the cause is usually cheaper to find than to outrun.
What the sites that compound get right
- Topical authority built around what the product actually does, not around search volume
- Links earned continuously, off assets other people have a reason to cite
- Speed treated as a conversion problem rather than a score to pass
- The technical layer fixed first, so the content has something solid to rank from
- Named inside AI answers, and measured there, not only in the ten blue links
- Audited on a schedule, so the fix lands before the drop reaches revenue
None of it is exotic. It is the same six things every time, and the order you do them in decides whether they work.
Skills
Everything under SEO, and the parts either side of it
SEO does not stop at the crawler and it does not stop at the ranking. Here is what I actually work on, and where I go looking when the obvious answer is wrong.
Technical SEO
Crawl budget, indexation, migrations, rendering, site speed and the templates that quietly generate 300 duplicates per product.
AI search, AEO and GEO
Getting a brand named inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews and AI Mode, measuring it with a fixed prompt set and Search Console’s generative AI report, and fixing the pages the answers are built from.
Keyword strategy and on-page
Keyword maps that match how a site is actually built, cannibalisation cleaned up, and pages written to win the intent rather than the phrase.
Off-page and authority
Link acquisition that survives an audit, digital PR angles worth pitching, and a clear read on whether authority is really the blocker.
Data, metrics and reporting
Search Console and GA4 pulled apart properly, log files parsed, and dashboards that answer a question instead of listing every number available.
The parts either side of SEO
Traffic is only worth what it converts. I check what PPC is already buying, what a live A/B test is doing to rankings, and where email should be picking up the slack.
Projects
What the fixes actually did
Numbers pulled from Search Console and crawl data, not from a dashboard screenshot with the axis cropped off.
WorkWise Compliance
Compliance training and postersSeven months on a compliance catalogue. Tracked top-three keywords went 16 to 93, and the write-up shows both halves rather than stopping at the peak.
Read the project →Labor Law Posters
Labor-law compliance postersA compliance catalogue that had been losing ground for a year. The demand sat one step before the product, and the pages that answered it did not exist.
Read the project →Marvel Refrigeration
Appliance e-commercePre-migration audit across 70,637 indexed URLs. Canonical mismatches mapped, a 404 redirect plan built, and internal link equity modelled before a single URL moved.
Read the project →Gupshup
Conversational SaaSInternational SEO strategy built early in their global expansion, so market pages did not end up competing with each other as new regions launched.
Read the project →U-Line
Premium appliancesCannibalisation audit across overlapping product templates, a keyword map driving social content, and a new serial number landing page set.
Read the project →Propper
Tactical and workwear apparelA category where buyers ask an assistant before they open a search box. A fixed prompt set across ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews, and the pages the answers were built from rewritten answer-first.
Read the project →iMocha
Skills assessment, B2B SaaSTwo in-house stints, rehired by the CEO for the second. A content engine at fifteen articles a week, 200+ bottom-of-funnel keywords mapped in month one, and the site migrated inside a month.
Read the project →LEAD School
EdTech, K–12One of three unicorn-stage clients owned end to end at Neil Patel Digital. The lever that moved fastest was not content, it was the render-blocking work underneath it.
Read the project →Infosys
IT services and consultingTwo years on an enterprise Adobe Experience Manager site, where nothing is a one-line change and every template edit has an owner. The win came from pages that already existed.
Read the project →Propeller
UK agency, migration programmeMost migration case studies describe one migration. This is the other problem: running them twice a month across four platforms with a small team, and making them repeatable.
Read the project →Collegiate AC
Student accommodation, UK and EuropeNear-identical location pages, each competing in its own city, in more than one language, for a product that is full half the year and empty the other half.
Read the project →Industville
Lighting, e-commerce (UK)People search by room and by look rather than by product name, which makes the gap between catalogue structure and real demand unusually wide.
Read the project →Voyatek
Government technologyA much smaller search footprint than the business behind it. Published thin on purpose: the engagement detail is being reconstructed from records rather than invented.
Read the project →Tools I work in daily
- Google Search Console
- GA4
- Screaming Frog
- Sitebulb
- Semrush
- Ahrefs
- Looker Studio
- BigQuery
- Python and pandas
- Google Tag Manager
- Ahrefs Site Audit
- PageSpeed and CrUX
- Rank Math and Yoast
- ClickUp
How I work
Diagnose, then treat. In that order.
Four steps. No 200 point checklist, no deliverable that sits in a folder unread.
01
Take the vitals
Search Console, GA4, log files, a full crawl and CrUX field data. I want to see what Google and your users actually do, not what the theme claims.
02
Find the bleed
One ranked list of what is costing traffic or revenue right now, sized by impact and by how hard it is to ship.
03
Fix in priority order
Every change is risk checked against the rankings already held. If a suggestion carries doubt or no clear upside, it gets dropped rather than padded in.
04
Prove it
Before and after in Search Console on the exact URLs we touched. Clicks, positions and conversions, not impressions theatre.
What people say
Colleagues on working with me
Recommendations from LinkedIn, from people who managed me and people I managed.
Five recommendations, shown one at a time. Use the arrow keys to move between them.
I highly recommend Utkarsh for his exceptional SEO skills and expertise. What sets him apart is his ability to resolve SEO issues with simplicity, offering straightforward solutions that deliver impactful results. With his strategical skills and knack for simplification, Utkarsh is a valuable asset to any team or project.
He is the person who can go in-depth of a particular task and he makes sure that, the issue is resolved and a perfect strategy is brought in place for better results.
I had a privilege to work with Utkarsh in RankUno. I am really amazed to see how he digs down to understand the clients requirements and achieving the results beyond expectations. He doesn’t leave any stone unturned when it comes to 360 degree approach. The strategy which he implements are well thought through and brings value to the organization. I can vouch on him anytime and if anybody is looking for an SEO expert then don’t hesitate to try him once.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with Utkarsh for a brief period of time at iMocha. He is meticulous and strategically sound. I strongly recommend his SEO skills, team handling abilities, and clarity of concepts that he brings into his work. He is an excellent mentor and a great team player at the same time. It was a pleasure working with you, Utkarsh!
I have had the privilege of working under Utkarsh’s leadership for almost an year now, and I can confidently say that he is a remarkable professional who has had a significant impact on our team’s success. Not just work, he also encourages the team to up-skill by conducting SEO Updates session and suggesting the course to adapt the ever-changing market growth. Speaking of my experience, Utkarsh has guided me through every task on 1:1 calls with patience. He has made sure all his team members are satisfied with his behaviour and skills as a manager by conducting quarterly feedback sessions.
Questions
Before you send the first message
What kind of SEO work do you actually do?
All of it. Technical is where I am strongest and what people call me for, but a ranking is rarely a single-discipline problem. On a normal month I am in Search Console and GA4 pulling apart what changed, building or fixing keyword maps, rewriting on-page, planning link acquisition, and running a fixed prompt set across ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Mode to see whether the brand gets named. I also look outside SEO when the data points there: which terms PPC is already paying for, whether a running A/B test is costing rankings, whether the page converts at all once it gets the click.
Is AI search a separate service?
No, and anyone selling it as one is selling you the acronym. Google says there are no extra requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet, and since May 2026 its spam policies cover attempts to manipulate AI answers. What is different is the measurement and the page structure: a prompt set instead of a rank tracker, and the first 150 words written to be the answer. I did that for WorkWise Compliance and the write-up shows the method.
Are you a technical SEO or a strategist?
Both, and the split matters less than people think. I run strategy across multiple accounts as SEO Head at Upbott, and I still do the hands-on work: crawls, log files, redirect maps, schema, keyword clustering. I would rather build the plan and then be the one who has to ship it, because that keeps the plan honest.
Can I see the projects in detail?
Yes. The project cards above have the short version. The resume has the full history, and on a call I can walk through the actual audits, crawl exports and Search Console views for anything not covered by an NDA.
Are you available for full time roles, or freelance and contract?
Open to all three. I am currently SEO Head at Upbott Consulting, and I take on consulting and contract work alongside it. The resume link at the top has the full history, and I am happy to talk about remote or hybrid arrangements.
What tools do you work in?
Search Console and GA4 daily. Screaming Frog and Sitebulb for crawls, Semrush and Ahrefs for keyword and link data, Looker Studio and BigQuery for reporting, and Python when the data is too big or too repetitive for a spreadsheet. I am comfortable in most CMSs and I write my own SQL.
Where are you based and which time zones do you cover?
I am based in Pune, India and work with teams across the US, UK, Europe and Asia Pacific. In practice I hold overlap hours for US Eastern mornings and UK afternoons, and work async outside those.
Open to consulting, contract and full time roles
Want to talk through a site?
Twenty minutes, screen shared, your Search Console open, including the new generative AI report. You will leave with at least one thing worth fixing whether or not we end up working together.
Typical reply time: within one working day