PAUL STEPHANI - Founder, Digital Marketing Growth
My digital marketing career began making WordPress websites just like this one at small boutique web dev shop called Marketing Relevance. While I knew about and had a basic grasp of search engine optimization, working with WordPress trained me on all the basics and eventually advanced content and technical components of SEO. From there I moved to Performics (now Publicis Collective) as an SEO strategist working on large fortune 50 websites. There a grew a team of analysts and specialists totaling at one point 10+ FTEs supporting all our SEO engagements. I then transitioned to client solutions lead on various accounts including Miracle-Ear, Equinox, and Verizon Business. In 2019 we acquired Google as a client and I was placed on Google's internal growth team as an internal resource to all product teams. I was assigned to lead strategy for Google Store, Wireless (Fi), Google One, AdSense, and Stadia to start. Incredible experience that was as enlightening as it was mildly ironic. We had several direct consultation meetings with John Mueller and Lizzi Sassman as the Google Webmaster Central rebranded and reorganized to its present name as Google Search Central. Wild time in my career.
I was then persuaded to join Numerade to lead their SEO growth strategy, a venture-backed, education technology startup based in Pasadena. Spectacular 10x traffic and revenue growth led to incremental decline as Google AI overviews solved our students queries directly in the search results and simultaneously, the wide adoption of LLM chat bots by our student base. Extremely sad to see our business so massively disrupted by AI but that's the reality of today's disruption with AI technology on a narrow market segment. The disruption is spreading and your business will need to adapt or face similar declines in visibility in this new world.
Now I'm giving it all I got to grow my agency Digital Marketing Werks beyond a handful of small consulting and paid media engagements to growing my favorite market: local small and medium businesses. Contact Us to see if we can help your business grow visibility online.
Career Resume
Growth Lead, SEO > Numerade > Pasadena (Remote) > 2021 - 2025
- Led STEM education tech startup immediately after a series A fundraising round, assigned to 10x acquisition through the SEO channel. Head of content and technical strategy.
- Drove 30M annual recurring revenue through subscription model to STEM subject student cohort.
- Led engineering group to fast track technical overhaul of the entire website by scaling internal linking, crawl efficiency, rendering speed, dynamic XML, and structured data applied to millions of question answer pages.
- Directed paid media reports in Google Ads, META, LinkedIn, and TikTok advertising acquisition campaigns.
- Concept to creation imported thousands of AP flashcards for a freemium gamification component.
- Applied a variety of LLMs to provide text enhancements across 100M question answer pairs.
- Leveraged vast video asset library to prominently display in SERPs through structured data and dedicated video-first page templates.
- Indexed 80 million URLs to capture student homework questions with extreme long tail demand.
- Peaked at 450k daily clicks and 4k registrations, captured and personalized experiences to students at every stage of their journey—from awareness to advocacy—to maximize engagement, retention, and lifetime value.
- Fed YouTube with 5k daily video shorts of educator solutions to capture demand, send referrals.
- Created Parent Guardian portal for paid marketing acquisition for gifting Numerade subscriptions.
Director, SEO > Publicis Collective (fka Performics) > Chicago > 2010 - 2021
- Contracted to Google's Growth Lab as a TVC, serving as an internal liaison consultant for multiple product including AdSense, Store, One, Stadia, and Wireless among others. Led strategy for international search alignment, content development, technical bug repairs from 2019 to 2021.
- Client services lead for enterprise clients developing strategy and implementation of content development and technical optimizations.
- Matched pre-covid levels of appointments to healthcare franchises through content and local SEO messaging adaption to extraordinary circumstances.
- Established and led technical SEO team hiring, training and distributing talent amongst enterprise clients, local SEO and content support for the organizations vast client portfolio.
- Created content and tech strategies for ecommerce, healthcare, telecom, finance, and retail clients.
- Led agency-client success initiatives, including quarterly business reviews and client feedback programs, ensuring sustained engagement and performance improvement.
- Directed and collaborated with cross-functional, global teams across the U.S. and India, integrating paid and organic search initiatives for Fortune 500 brands.
- Expert in workflow management tools for project execution, reporting, and client communication in a fast-paced agency setting.
Technology Stack Proficiency
- SEM Tools & Platforms: BrightEdge, SEO Clarity, Google Ads, Adobe Analytics, DeepCrawl, Botify, Screaming Frog, SEMrush, AHREFs, MOZ Tools, Bing Ads, Meta Ad Manager, Chrome Lighthouse, BrightLocal, AllLocal, Salesforce, Tableau, Redash, Jira, Unbounce
- Google Suite: Ads (14 years), Analytics, Search Console, Workspace, Display Advertising, Tag Manager, YouTube Advertising, Sheets, Chrome DevTools, Looker Studio
- Web Hosting & Development: WPEngine, Server Management, WordPress CMS Management and Development, Microsoft Sharepoint, Domain Configuration, Basic PHP, JavaScript, CSS, SQL, Adobe InDesign
Education > DePaul University BS Computer Information Systems > Chicago IL