about seophia

i'm sophia kovatch. i've done all kinds of seo for all kinds of organizations, but i'm not interested in selling you my skills for a premium anymore. this website will soon contain as much of my seo knowledge as i can put into words and videos, and i hope it will help organizations who have critical information to share but tiny seo budgets to spend.

i take requests for custom seo trainings, and if you've got a real seo puzzle i can sometimes be tempted into doing a little ad-hoc consulting. for now, email hello@seophia.com. i'll have a form for requesting services soon.

for a standard look at my career, read my resume or LinkedIn profile. for a more narrative take on the work I'm most proud of, read on.

search consultant | seophia

March 2024 - present

I helped Dying Industry Films spruce up their Google presence. They let me go on their podcast and yell about how SEO works. Listen on Spotify or Apple Music.

audience editor, seo | propublica

August 2022 - March 2024

I used enterprise SEO tactics to help investigative journalists beat big brands like TurboTax and We Buy Ugly Houses in search results. 

What does that mean? Well, in my favorite example, I wrote a summary of ProPublica's TurboTax reporting and published it at the start of tax season 2023. It briefly (for like, 1 day) was the top story when you searched for [TurboTax], just behind the TurboTax homepage and however many paid ads Google managed to cram in there.

Disrupting TurboTax's branded search results was not my intention when writing this article. I was just doing an internal linking play where new content + fresh links = just enough rankings bump to get a few thousand more page views during tax season. That all worked just as I'd hoped, but with the added bonus of this glorious screenshot.

It fills me with absolute glee to think about the amount of money TurboTax dumped into sponsored content and paid ads for their own brand-name keyword only to have this happen in week 1 of the actual campaign launch. If I was their SEO director I'd be so mad at me.

Again: this particular screenshot existed for 24 hours, if I'm being generous. But it showed me how a little SEO can go a long way when it's built upon years of genuine authority. (And we got almost 200K views from this article alone, so that's not bad.)

See some of my other ProPublica work on my staff page.

content writer/editor | freelance

I quit my SEO agency job to go freelance in January 2020, which sound ominous but ultimately worked out for me because suddenly everyone needed to sell their stuff via online content.

One of my early major projects was a massive (~10K words) review of website builders. Wix, Squarespace, that sort of thing. It's one of the biggest freelance projects I've ever undertaken because I did literally build out dummy websites on so. many. platforms.

But, like many things on the internet, it's still a bit contrived: my findings were expected to align with whoever was paying Website Planet the most money to appear as an affiliate link in the ranking list. While I'm still proud of the work and organization that went into this project, it's increasingly a good example of how companies often backfill a selling point with manufactured authority rather than letting genuine expertise lead them to an actual finding.

Most of my work from this era is just like this, but less interesting. Still, churning out SEO content like this gave me a deep understanding of how companies build out content in an attempt to imitate authority for the purposes of ranking. It gave me the skills to beat companies like TurboTax at their own game.

seo strategist | inseev interactive

I ended up in SEO because I hated my nonprofit job and this agency needed a warm body to send hundreds of link building emails every week. Having a knack for writing fake quotes from marketing executives eventually led to running SEO strategy for brands like Rothy's and AutoNation. There aren't many projects I can show from this era – it was a lot of data analysis, phone calls, and NDAs – but this is where I learned it all.

And also worked on clients ProPublica would later investigate, like Intuit and Ygrene.