SEO consultant · Dubai, UAE
SEO consultant in Dubai with 17 years in-house at global marketplaces
I’m Lorenzo Solís, an SEO consultant in Dubai who has spent 17 years growing organic traffic from inside the business, not from an agency desk. Eventbrite, Just Eat, bwin, EF Education First and now Privilee across six markets. If you need someone who has owned the number, not just reported on it, you’re in the right place.
17 years
in SEO, since 2009
12M+
organic sessions a month led at Just Eat
16
countries managed at bwin
Judge
Global, UK and MENA Search Awards
In-house at
Companies I have grown
Why me
Why an in-house SEO consultant, not an agency
The difference is simple: an agency sells you a process, an in-house consultant has lived with the consequences of the process. I’ve been on both sides. I co-founded a small digital marketing agency in Spain and ran it for five years, and I have hired and managed SEO and paid media agencies at almost every company I’ve worked for since. I know what a good agency looks like, and I know exactly where the gaps appear.
The gaps are usually the same. The agency owns the keyword list but not the product roadmap, so the recommendations that need engineering time never ship. The report shows rankings, but nobody ties them to orders, sign-ups or revenue. And when there’s a site migration, a CMS change or a new market launch, the people who understand the risk are not in the room when the decision is made.
Working in-house at marketplaces fixed that for me. At Eventbrite, Just Eat and bwin, SEO sat inside growth, which meant I had to argue for dev capacity against paid media and CRM, build the business case, and then prove it in the numbers. That is the discipline I bring to a client in Dubai: SEO as a growth channel with a P&L, not as a monthly deliverable.
When I work with a company, I’m not replacing your agency if you have one that works. I’m the person who sets the priorities, checks the work against the business, and makes sure the technical changes get built. If you don’t have an agency, I’ll tell you whether you need one at all.
Track record
17 years of SEO across marketplaces and global brands
My career has been a sequence of larger and more complex organic problems. Every role below is on my LinkedIn with the same figures.
2026 to today
Privilee
As Global Head of Growth & Sales at Privilee, a premium lifestyle membership platform, I lead growth across the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Singapore and Hong Kong, with more markets in the pipeline. The job covers organic, paid, CRM and analytics, so every SEO decision is weighed against the rest of the funnel. It also means I’m living the Gulf and Asia search landscape every day, not reading about it.
2023 to 2026
Eventbrite
I joined as Senior Growth Marketing & SEO Manager and finished as Head of Organic Growth. Eventbrite is the world’s largest events marketplace: 90 million unique ticket buyers, 800,000 event organisers and 284 million tickets sold in a year. At that scale, SEO is an engineering problem. My work was programmatic SEO: pipelines in BigQuery to decide which city, venue and category pages deserved to exist, page architecture that could scale without cannibalising itself, and coordination with the CMS and product teams so the pages shipped and got indexed.
2019 to 2023
Just Eat Takeaway.com
Two roles in almost four years. As Digital Marketing Manager for Spain, I owned the full acquisition mix: SEO, PPC, paid social, affiliates, promo codes and CRM. In 2021 that delivered +31% year-on-year organic traffic, +12% orders, +14% active customers, +14% app downloads and +15% new customers, for a +23% revenue increase. I then moved to Senior Growth Marketing Lead, Global, running growth strategy across eight key markets including the UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, a team of five, and more than 12 million organic sessions a month.
2016 to 2019
bwin
I started as Acquisition Manager for bwin Spain, where the job was pure SEO: technical and content audits, on-page optimisation, link building, page speed, mobile-first and site migrations in one of the most competitive verticals on Google. I then became Senior Marketing Manager for Iberia and Latam, overseeing marketing for bwin and Sportingbet across 16 countries. Net revenue grew 21% in 2018 and again 21% in 2019.
2014 to 2016
EF Education First and Groupalia
At EF Education First in London I was SEO Regional Manager on the international SEO team, working on a site that serves more than 50 countries. At Groupalia in Barcelona, one of the largest e-commerce sites in Spain at the time, I was the SEO and Web Analyst responsible for organic traffic, sign-ups and conversion.
2010 to 2014
ClickDirecto
Before any of that, I co-founded ClickDirecto in Asturias, a small agency doing SEO and PPC for local newspapers, hotels, estate agents and clinics. Five years of selling SEO to business owners, delivering it with a small team and teaching it in courses. It’s where I learnt that the client doesn’t care about rankings, they care about the phone ringing.
Where I help
What I can help your business with
I don’t sell packages. I take on problems where in-house marketplace experience makes a measurable difference, and those tend to fall into five areas.
International and multi-market SEO
If you run in more than one country or language, your SEO problems are structural before they’re about content: hreflang, domain and folder strategy, which market gets which page, how to launch a new country without diluting the existing ones. I have run organic across 8 markets at Just Eat, 16 at bwin, 50+ at EF and six at Privilee, including launching new ones. For a Dubai business expanding into Saudi, Qatar or Asia, this is usually the first conversation.
Site migrations and replatforming
Migrations are where companies lose years of organic growth in a weekend. I’ve managed them at bwin and I’m currently going through a CMS migration at Privilee. The work is unglamorous: URL mapping, redirect rules, rendering checks, index monitoring and a launch plan that lets you roll back. If you’re changing CMS, domain or site structure in the next twelve months, talk to me before the dev team starts.
Programmatic SEO for marketplaces and platforms
If your business has a database of listings, venues, products, properties or professionals, there is organic demand you’re not capturing. The Eventbrite approach applies directly: use the data to decide which pages should exist, build a page architecture that scales, control indexation so Google crawls what matters, and measure it in BigQuery rather than in a rank tracker. This is the work I enjoy most and where in-house experience matters most.
Technical SEO with an engineering mindset
Crawl budget, rendering, Core Web Vitals, structured data, indexation. I’ve done the audits since bwin in 2016, and the difference now is that I write the ticket the way a developer needs to read it and I know how to get it prioritised against the product backlog.
SEO inside a growth team
Most SEO fails because it’s isolated. I’ve led growth teams where organic, paid media, CRM and analytics shared one target. If you want SEO to actually line up with your paid spend, your CRM flows and your GA4 reporting, I can set that up because I’ve run all four, as I explain on my digital marketing consultant page.
Not sure which one you need?
Send me your website and the problem you’re trying to solve. I’ll tell you which of these it is, or whether it’s something else entirely.
Method
How I work
01
Data before proposals
Every engagement starts with the data, not with a proposal. Before I recommend anything, I want Google Search Console, GA4 and, if it exists, your data warehouse. At Eventbrite the decisions came out of BigQuery, and I bring the same approach to a client of any size: what is actually driving organic revenue today, what is the realistic upside, and what would it cost in engineering time to get there.
02
Ten things that ship, not eighty that don’t
A typical audit produces 80 recommendations and ships five. I’d rather hand you 10 ranked by expected impact and effort, with the business case written so that your CTO or product lead says yes. I’ve sat on the growth side of that argument for years, so I know what gets approved.
03
Directly with your team
I work directly with your product, tech and content people. No account managers, no hand-offs, no outsourcing. If I’m on the project, I’m the one in the meeting and the one in the spreadsheet.
04
Business metrics, not rankings
Rankings and clicks are inputs. Orders, leads, sign-ups and revenue from organic are the output, and that’s what you’ll see in the monthly review.
Local context
SEO in Dubai and the GCC: what actually changes
Most of what works in Europe works here, but three things change the plan.
Multi-market by default
A Dubai company rarely stays a Dubai company. The expansion path runs to Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Doha and often Singapore or Hong Kong, each with its own search demand and often its own domain or folder decision. Getting the international structure right on day one is far cheaper than fixing it after launch. I’m running exactly this at Privilee across the GCC and Asia.
Two languages, one structure
English dominates many commercial searches in Dubai, but Arabic demand is real, and in Saudi Arabia it is the majority. The honest answer is that Arabic SEO needs native content people. What I bring is the architecture: how to structure bilingual sites, when to use hreflang and when to use separate properties, and how to measure both without one cannibalising the other.
SEO as product work
Dubai has a lot of agencies competing for the same clients with the same promises. The businesses that win organically here are the ones treating SEO as product work, not marketing spend: platforms, marketplaces, real estate portals, clinics with booking flows, membership and subscription businesses. That is the kind of company I work best with.
Judge
Global, UK and MENA Search Awards
In 2025 I served as a judge for the Global Search Awards, the UK Search Awards and the MENA Search Awards, reviewing and scoring international search marketing campaigns. Sitting on the other side of the entry form, you learn quickly which results are real and which are presentation.
Professor
Master in Digital Marketing, IEBS Business School
Between 2014 and 2017 I was a professor of SEO on the Master in Digital Marketing at IEBS Business School, teaching three editions covering e-commerce, mobile and local SEO. I also hold a master’s degree in SEO. A good consultant should be able to explain the why to your team, not just deliver the what.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What does an SEO consultant in Dubai do that an agency doesn’t?
A consultant gives you one experienced person who sets the strategy, works directly with your product and tech teams, and is accountable for the outcome. An agency gives you a team and a process, which is useful for volume work like content production or link building. In my case, I’ve hired and managed agencies at most of the companies I’ve worked for, so I can also tell you whether you need one and manage it if you do.
What kind of businesses do you work with?
Companies where organic traffic is a growth channel, not a brochure: marketplaces, platforms, e-commerce, subscription and membership businesses, real estate and property portals, and services with online booking. Most have a product or tech team I can work with, and most operate, or plan to operate, in more than one market.
Do you work with companies outside Dubai?
Yes. I’m based in Dubai, and I’ve worked across the UAE, the wider GCC, Singapore, Hong Kong, the UK and most of Europe. International and multi-market SEO is the core of what I do, so a client with offices in Riyadh or London is a normal engagement, not an exception.
How long does SEO take to show results?
It depends on where you start. Technical fixes and migration recoveries can move the numbers within weeks. Building a new programmatic section or entering a new market is typically a six to twelve month investment before it compounds. I’ll tell you which one you’re looking at in the first conversation, and I won’t promise rankings, because nobody can.
Can you work alongside our existing agency or in-house team?
That’s often the best set-up. I define the priorities and the technical roadmap, your agency or team executes, and I review the work against the business numbers. It’s the same role I played in-house at Just Eat and bwin with the agencies we hired.
Do you cover Arabic SEO?
I cover the structure and the strategy for bilingual and multi-country sites, including hreflang, domain decisions and measurement. For Arabic content itself I work with native-speaking writers and editors, and I’ll say that plainly rather than pretend otherwise.
What about AI search, AI Overviews and ChatGPT?
The fundamentals that get you cited in AI answers are the ones that have always mattered: clear entities, structured data, pages that answer a question directly, and authority on the topic. I track AI visibility alongside classic organic metrics so you can see both, and I’m cautious about anyone selling guaranteed placement in AI answers.
How do we start?
Fill in the form below with your website and the problem you’re trying to solve. I’ll reply within two working days with an honest view on whether I’m the right person for it and what the first step would look like.
Get in touch
Tell me about your project
Your website, the market you’re in, and the problem you’re trying to solve. That’s enough for a first answer.
Based in Dubai. Working with companies across the UAE, the GCC and Asia.