About Vlad, Technical SEO Specialist

I'm Vlad, lead SEO and co-founder of BigRed, and I'm the person who does the work when you hire us. Not a salesperson who hands you off. Me, logged into your server, reading the access log line by line while everyone else stares at the dashboard.

If you'd rather skip the reading and just ask me something, a consulting call starts with a short questionnaire. Otherwise, here's who you'd be working with.

The night-shift engineer

Every company has one. The person who gets the call when the site is down, the dashboards disagree, and nobody knows whose fault it is. They don't panic, they open a terminal.

That's the job I like. I've spent 20+ years in search marketing, doing SEO since the mid-2000s, along with PPC (pay-per-click ads) and affiliate marketing. A good part of that time has been spent below the website itself, in the server, where a lot of "SEO problems" actually start.

In practice, that means I'm as comfortable editing an .htaccess file (the Apache server's rulebook) as I am reading a Search Console report. Here's the kind of work I do most:

Technical SEO audits: crawling, indexing, speed and redirect problems
WordPress hack cleanups and hardening, including the spam Google still shows afterward
Whole-site migrations between hosts, with redirect maps built from real data
Server work on cPanel/WHM, Plesk, Cloudflare and Linux (LAMP) setups
Redirect rules and regex (pattern-matching code), plus server-side and browser caching
GA4, Google Tag Manager, Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools setup
Google Ads and Microsoft Ads management
AEO/GEO (getting cited in AI answers like ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews)
CRO (conversion rate optimization) and landing page testing

I've also done international SEO across sites in 14 languages. I speak English, French and Russian natively, which comes in handy for bilingual Canadian sites. And I've trained and led junior SEO specialists, so I know how to explain this stuff without the jargon. That's the plan for this whole website, too.

Why "I" and not "we"

BigRed is the business. I'm the one doing the work. When you send a question, I read it. When something on your site changes, I changed it, and I can tell you why.

I think that matters more than it sounds. A lot of owners have hired an agency, met a senior person on the sales call, and then never heard from that person again. I'd rather be the person you met and the person who does the work.

How I work

You own everything. Your domain, hosting, Google Analytics, Search Console, Google Business Profile and Google Ads account stay in your name. I'm added as a user. If we part ways, you remove me and lose nothing.

Prices first. Every service has a published starting price on the price list. After the questionnaire, I reply with a plan and a fixed quote within one business day.

Hours you can see. Monthly work comes with an hours log in the report. You shouldn't have to guess what a retainer bought.

Plain English. Every report says what I found, what I changed, and what it means for you, in words you can forward to your business partner without a glossary.

I treat your ad budget like my own. I've spent over $150,000 of my own money on paid ads over the years. Watching your own cash buy clicks that never call is an education. I'd rather you skipped that part.

Remote, on purpose. BigRed is online only. No office, no in-person meetings. We work by video call, email and shared docs, across the US and Canada, mostly during business hours in the Pacific and Eastern time zones.

What I won't do

A short list, because it tells you more than a long list of promises:

Promise rankings. Nobody controls Google. I'll tell you what I'll do and how we'll measure it.
Lock you into a long contract. Monthly SEO has a 3-month minimum, then it's month to month. One-off projects are one-off.
Hold your accounts hostage. Everything stays in your name, from day one.
Buy links from link farms. No PBNs (networks of sites built only to sell links), no spammy shortcuts that can earn your site a penalty.
Sell you something you don't need. If a free plugin, a one-hour call or the free website check solves it, I'll say so.
Invent results. You won't find made-up success stories, borrowed reviews or inflated client counts on this site. When I have real results to share, with permission, they'll be real.

Credentials, briefly

Certificates don't fix websites, but they show I keep learning. For the record:

Google Ads Search Certification (current, from Google Skillshop)
Semrush Academy Backlink Management course (completed)
Google Analytics Academy, Digital Analytics Fundamentals (2013)

The rest of my background is on LinkedIn, if you'd like to check I'm a real person. I am. Mostly coffee, partly regex.

Where I fit, and where I don't

I'm a good fit for small and mid-size businesses that want a senior specialist doing the work: contractors, clinics, law firms, local retailers and SaaS startups across the US and Canada. Especially if something is broken, or nobody can explain why the numbers dropped.

I'm not a fit if you need a 20-person team on call, an in-house hire, or someone to promise page one by next month. If that's you, I'll happily say so and point you in a better direction.

Curious what I'd do with your site? Have a look at the full list of services, or start with the free check.

Let's talk

If you'd like a second opinion, a plan, or just a straight answer about your site, book a consulting session through the short questionnaire. It starts at $100 an hour, or $150 for a 60-minute coaching session, and I'll reply with a plan and a fixed quote within one business day.