Most SEO problems are structural.
I'm Haris Jilani, an SEO strategist. I work on multi-location and multi-language sites where traffic has stopped growing and nobody can say why. It's rarely a content problem. Usually the site is competing with itself.
Six years agency-side. Around 30 accounts at a time, across ten industries. This is a portfolio of work I've led — four accounts written up in full, with the reasoning rather than just the outcome.
Haris JilaniSEO strategist
Vancouver, BC
Proof of work
Selected results
Client names are withheld. Every figure was read from GA4, SEMrush or Search Console and reported to the client at the time.
| Account | The problem | Result |
|---|---|---|
| National youth activity brandCanada + US · ~300 locations | Traffic flat for two years. Duplicate URLs, competing pages, content stranded on subdomains. | +61%organic revenue, 6 months |
| Employment & injury law firmUS · single market | Invisible on its own head term in one of the most competitive verticals in search. | #103 → #3on the primary term |
| Culinary instituteCanada · education | Outranked locally by competitors with weaker programmes and better structure. | #1organic and local pack, category term |
| National pest control groupCanada · bilingual · 9+ regions | Thousands of near-duplicate pages inherited from the previous agency, all competing with each other. | 8,400+non-branded keywords, top 100 |
| Junk removal & dumpster rentalGreater Toronto Area | Four systems reported four different lead counts for the same month, ranging from 15 to 207. | +622%leads from organic, YoY |
| Plumbing contractorUS Midwest · home services | Thin service-area coverage and almost no referring domains. | +117%referring links, traffic up 3× |
Work delivered agency-side. Happy to talk through the reasoning in more detail.
Case studies
Four written up properly
Four problems, four different diagnoses. Each one shows the reasoning, not just the outcome.
Capabilities
Where I'm strongest
Four areas, and on most accounts I work through them roughly in this order.
Technical & architectural SEO
Crawl and indexation audits, canonical strategy, cannibalisation, URL hierarchy, subdomain and site consolidation, migrations. The unglamorous work that decides whether anything else lands.
Topical content strategy
Silo design, keyword sets built on intent rather than volume, briefs a writer can actually use, and internal linking that makes a cluster reinforce itself instead of leaking.
Local SEO at scale
Multi-location business profiles, category and naming strategy, NAP integrity, citation quality, and rollout sequencing that doesn't trigger mass re-verification.
Measurement that survives scrutiny
Revenue by channel, not sessions. Year-over-year for seasonal businesses. Dashboards a team will actually open. Attribution I'm willing to defend when someone pushes on it.
How I work
I came to SEO from engineering
Mechanical engineering first, then a master’s in industrial management in Germany, then product marketing at a European car manufacturer. Most people arrive at SEO through content or advertising. I arrived through systems.
That’s the whole reason my case studies are about hierarchies, signal flow and order of operations rather than keyword lists. A website is a system that distributes authority. When it stops growing, the interesting question is almost always where that authority is leaking, not how many blog posts you published last quarter.
The interesting number is rarely traffic
On the account above, organic delivered 19% of sessions and 35% of revenue while paid delivered 56% of sessions and under 30%. That finding moved more budget than any ranking chart could have, and it came from an afternoon in the client's analytics rather than an SEO tool.
I plan around the constraint, not past it
Most teams don't control their own deployment. If work sits in a third-party dev queue for weeks, the answer isn't a bigger roadmap. It's smaller changes, written as tickets a developer can execute without knowing any SEO.
I'd rather scope down than overpromise
I've talked a client out of a 300-location rollout in favour of 100, and out of a page per venue in favour of a page per city. Both times the smaller plan was the one that worked.
Background
Where the thinking comes from
The case studies are the argument. This is what sits underneath them.
- M.Sc. Industrial ManagementHochschule Mittweida, Germany · accredited programme
- B.E. Mechanical EngineeringNational University of Sciences & Technology
Six years of being trained to look for the system before the symptom.
- Product marketing, Volkswagen AGGermany · market and competitive analysis
- Six years agency-side~30 accounts at a time, ten industries, Canada and the US
Thirty accounts a year is how you learn which problems repeat.
- Analyzing & Visualizing Data with Power BIMicrosoft / edX verified certificate, 2020 · used in case study 04
- Local SEO Audits for Multi-Location BusinessesBrightLocal Academy, 2021 · used in case study 02
- Local Keyword ResearchBrightLocal Academy, 2021
I've left the free platform badges off this page. I've collected my share of them and none say anything the case studies don't. Certificates and transcripts available on request.
Get in touch
This site exists so that the work speaks before I do. If you’re hiring for a role where someone needs to find the structural reason a site has stopped growing, read case study 01 and then email me. I’m happy to talk through the reasoning, the decisions I got wrong, and what I’d do differently.