For this episode of E-Coffee with Experts, Ranmay Rath interviewed Maxim Koulakov, Head of SEO at Your Easy Web Solutions, an Advertising Services Agency located in Woolloongabba, Queensland. Max shares his fascinating journey from a tech-obsessed child to a leading expert in SEO and AI. He delves into the seamless integration of AI into SEO strategies, highlighting how AI has revolutionized their agency’s workflows, client communication, and overall effectiveness. Max discusses the synergy between PPC and SEO, emphasizing their complementary roles in digital marketing. Watch the episode now!
The best education is hands-on. You take the technology, play with it, push it to its limits, and find out what is possible.
Maxim Koulakov
Head of SEO at Your Easy Web Solutions
 | Hey, hi everyone. Welcome to your show, E-coffee with the Experts. This is your host, Ranmay, here. And today we have Max, the head of SEO and AI at Your Easy Web Solutions with us. Hey, Max, how is it going, man? |
| Awesome. Very good, thank you. Thanks for having me, Ranmay. I’m honored to be here. |
| Lovely. Max, before you move forward and pick your brains on SEO and AI, why don’t you talk us through your journey so far? Let’s get to know the human behind the mic. And also more about your agency, and Your Easy Web Solutions. What do you guys do? What do you guys specialize in? And then we kick it off from there. |
| Yeah, nice. Awesome. I guess I’ll start with my journey. I’ve always been into technology since I was a kid. When I was eight, I got my Windows 95 computer, up to Windows 98. Plenty of computer games. That was me. I loved it from an early age. I guess when I was in university, I managed through just family connections to meet who’s the owner of the current agency I’m working at, Alexi. I’ve known Alexi for a very long time, and he’s the founder of YEWS. Essentially, he was the founder of YEWS. He ended up getting me a job while still studying at university. I had to study IT, so I started to build websites. Then from that point on, going from websites, went to SEO, and then from SEO to AI, it was a natural progression. But the agency itself, Uri’s Web Solutions, he started that back in, I believe it was 2014, if not earlier. So it has been quite a while, quite a journey for him. I joined the team when I was only a handful of people on the team. I was just supporting all the websites. About five years ago, we decided to go all in on the SEO. I made a big change going from web design to SEO. I found some mentors who started to download and criticize everything that we were doing. At the time, our SEO Department was quite tiny. Google Ads was our bread and butter, predominantly. It’s funny. All of us in the company at that time, me, Alexi, Gregory, we’re all techs, so we all come from an IT background. You’re And gradually, we all evolved from the IT background to start doing Google Ads and working for some entrepreneurs. And then now we’re focusing predominantly on SEO, Google Ads, and websites. We’re doing some CRM setups for clients as well. So we’re helping clients grow. We’re a fairly boutique agency, but we cover clients anywhere from small to medium businesses to national operations. We found that the company is the biggest shipping container operation in Australia. We’ve got quite a few high-level clients as well, so good range. |
| Lovely. The migration or shift of strategy from paid to SEO happened at your agency. I cannot stop myself from asking this. What is your take on PPC versus SEO? |
| Well, that’s interesting that you asked that. That’s a great question. We choose a completely different frame. We don’t put them as versus at all. We actually say PPC plus SEO, it’s like one plus one equals three. We try to encourage them to do all of it. We say that SEO can help with PPC and PPC can help with SEO. That’s our approach to it. If you want a more basic breakdown, we’ll say, Well, SEO is a long-term game, and PPC is a fast game. That’s the basic. |
| Right. I relate to And Max, you mentioned being a bold and practical AI implementer, right? Can you elaborate on your approach to integrating AI into your projects? And how do you ensure its effectiveness and ROI for your end client? |
| That’s a great It’s a great question. So when I say bold and practical AI implementer, I say that this is something I wrote last year when I was looking at a lot of people calling themselves AI experts. I had this thought like, well, true AI experts are probably the guys that are building the thing. I’m more of an AI implementer. My approach is totally practical. I look at it like this. I think the best education is hands-on. You take the technology, you play with it, you push it to its limits, you find out what is possible, stretch it as far as you can go. Back early last year, my employer, Alexi, actually mentioned to all of us in theoneam, he’s like, I challenge you, I challenge all of you, replace yourself with AI and see how far you can go. I was the one that took that seriously. So here I am now. A year into it. We are fully adopted into our business. And yeah, it’s a game-changer. I’m happy to campaign for AI. So yeah, you should adopt it. |
| Lovely. And from an agency standpoint, Max, Since we were talking about it in the green room, from an agency perspective, how influential has been AI in terms of you guys using it and minting that effectiveness in terms of also helping you achieve better top line in terms of revenue versus doing it manually earlier? |
| That’s a great question. I mean, it’s a practical approach, and it’s one step at a time. If you’re talking about how you measure ROI with something like AI, I just say, Keep it simple. I say it’s not different from any other tool that you measure within your profit and loss. It ultimately comes down to your profit and loss, and you simply just add the element of time into it as well. So The way that we look at it is we end up mapping out all the SEO processes that we’re doing. I started a lot firstly by asking myself, Can we replace any of these processes, human efforts with AI? How far can we take it? So this whole journey led me to a couple of conclusions. Yeah, good. Go back to the previous question as well, how do you make this bold and practical implementation philosophy? My suggestion for that is you have to understand that you’re going for quality of output. Anyone can do an AI output that’s 2 out of 10 quality or 3 out of 10. But how can you get to 10 out of 10 consistently? How do you train other team members to do that? How do you scale that up? 10x or 100X. That’s the way we approach it. |
| And then talking about AI, in this early stages, we had a lot of misconceptions and people getting scared about the jobs, content folks, and all that stuff. But in your experience, what are the most common misconceptions about AI? And in particular, its role in SEO that you would have come across? |
| That’s an amazing question. So both sides of it, people underestimate AI, and then people overestimate AI, and for different reasons. So that’s probably the biggest thing. |
| I’m glad you said that. Yes. |
| So the answer is somewhere in the middle. This is why I say you have to take a practical approach and test it, push it, and be practical with it. It’s real-world stuff. It’s just like a calculator or, I don’t know, it’s a tool. A lot of people have this. I don’t know, they watch The Matrix or Terminator, which I love those movies. But these are science fiction. We’re hearing Elon Musk talk about AGI and things like that, which I don’t think helps, to be honest. I try to ignore that talk and just say, Let’s just keep it basic. Let’s see if we can save time. Let’s see if we can save money. Let’s see if we can save brainpower. To me, that’s the value of implementing AI. |
| Lovely. And quite clearly, Max, you and your agency have factored in terms of implementing it successfully for your clients and also at an agency level, leveraging AI to your benefit, be it in terms of ROI or other parameters. As for you, what are the best practices for integrating AI into existing SEO workflows and strategies? |
| Good question. Our approach to SEO is there is no guesswork. The entire thing is reverse engineering the existing top three. That’s our philosophy for SEO. You could look at any single SEO metric. You can take the top three competitors of anything. If you can pull the data from that and then compare it to whichever client you’re working on or if it’s on your site, the AI can essentially analyze that rapid speed for you. That’s the first thing I would say. The second thing I’d say is producing content. That’s one of the ways, though, that we’ve changed our business. We took the entire content in-house. We used to have a lot of writers and a lot of people that did it for us. Now we’ve got a content team, and it’s all using our in-house software that we’ve coded with AI. The way that we do SEO, there are a lot of checkboxes that we have to tick in our content that a lot of people don’t even look at. With the AI, we were able to systemize to get it to a point where we can pump out 100 pages with all of those boxes ticked in and they rank. That’s been a complete game-changer for us. Finally, this is the less common one, but this is one that people give you a lot of good feedback about, communication. So Communication. So communication. Client retention seems to be a big problem for a lot of agencies. We decided to address that from a different angle compared to a lot of other agencies. We decided to increase the amount of communication that we did. We used to have a monthly call with We’ve support during that month. Now it’s weekly. Now weekly, clients get an email from us, about what we’re doing, and what we’re working on. We use AI to produce that quickly within an hour and a half or something, getting out to all the clients. So yeah, we’re trying to improve multiple areas with it. I mean, that’s what I mean. It’s a case-by-case scenario. But when you add up the time spent on all of these things, I mean, the quality of the result that you get, let’s say if you’re getting a five out of 10 result and you could bring it up to a 10 out of 10 result, for me, that’s a worthwhile investment. Absolutely. |
| You touched upon a very important point there in terms of content. How do you balance the use of AI-generated content with the need for humanization of, human creativity, editorial oversight, and SEO content creation? |
| That’s a great question. This is another one of, the misconceptions that people have about AI. They think that AI is doing all the work for you. But that’s not what I say to people. I say it needs a pilot. It’s a machine that needs a pilot. So that’s what our content team does. They’re highly trained to pilot this thing to get high-level results. So we’re aiming to get 10 out of 10 as close as possible with the resources that we have on a systematic basis. So, yeah, my understanding of Google is see, Google doesn’t care how you get the output. It cares what is the output, how valuable is it to the searches, and how unique is it in the way that it’s delivered. So I don’t believe that AI is a block to that requirement. I believe that AI is a tool that can help you meet the requirements. |
| Absolutely. And then, Max, from your perspective, I mean, what are the top three AI platforms or tools that you or your agency have got to use day in and day out? |
| Yeah, straight away, I’ll tell you, ChatGPT, is still the daddy, the winner. We can’t beat it at the moment. True. That one. We use it a lot in particular because it’s got robust It’s a coding functionality. We do a lot of custom coding as well. So that one is our preferred tool. Also for video, we like to use OpusClip. For all the promotions and stuff, OpusClip, we recommend it to everyone. If you So trying to build a brand, you’re trying to build expertise and authority for what you’re doing, you can easily do your research, come up with the FAQs, record a one-hour video, chuck it into OpusClip, and boom, you’ve got a video campaign for social that you can run. So that’s another one I like to recommend. And finally, I guess, finally, it depends on what you’re doing. But really, I’ve got Gemini and Claude as well to back me up with certain things. Where I don’t like GPT’s output, I’ll drop it to Gemini and Claude and give it a go on there as well. So at this stage, GPT is still the granddaddy, and I’m standing by it until we get something better. |
| Right. We also use ChatGPT quite regularly because of obvious reasons. So yeah. All right. And Max, I know you have gone through the grind and have now grown. You have stepped onto those steps there and you have grown up the ladder now, quite clearly, and are now experimenting with AI, SEO, and a lot of other techniques. So what is that piece of advice that you’d want to give to our young listeners today who are trying to make a mark in this SEO space? I will not include AI. I would rather focus on the SEO space, which again comes up with something new or the other every quarter or every year. So what is that piece of advice you’d want to give to them today? |
| Straight away, find a great mentor learn from them, and implement their stuff first. Sometimes you might take several mentors before you find the right one. Or maybe in that journey, you’ll find the average of the mentors that you looked at. But if you want to save yourself time, definitely step on the shoulders of giants. There are a lot of good mentors out there. I mean, even on your guys’ podcast, you have a lot of amazing mentors. So, yeah, these people are generous to give out the information, and often they’ll offer courses. So, yeah, take up the courses, do the information, and fail fast. Achieve as many failures as quickly as you can so you can get to success. That’s what I would say to my end myself. |
| Lovely. And then talking about mentors, for our listeners, if they want to reach out to you, how do they do that? |
| Yeah, look, the easiest way is to go to max@us. Com. U, Y-E-W-S. Com. U, or if you just look up, use Your Easy Web Solutions, reach us out through there. I mean, I’m on LinkedIn as well. Always, always keen to hear. If you want to reach out and have any ideas to share, or anything to ask me, I would love to help in whatever way I can. |
| Lovely, Max. This has been a brilliant conversation. But before we let you go, I would like to play a quick rapid-fire with you. I hope you’re game for it. |
| All right, let’s do it. |
| All right, since you are the head of SEO, let’s start with the Google search. What was your last one? To be honest, I think it was probably something like it. |
| It would be a keyword in a location that I did for a client. |
| Could have imagined that coming from an out-and-out SEO guy, right? All right. Your celebrity crush? |
| Oh, celebrity crush. Let’s go send you Sweeni for now. |
| Okay. Favorite sport? |
| Favorite sport? To mix martial arts. Let’s go. |
| That is lovely. What did you do with your first paycheck, Max? First paycheck of your life. |
| First paycheck of my life? I bought myself tickets to a concert and a new monitor to play games on. |
| That must be a good one then. |
| At the time. |
| Yeah. Lovely, Max. We’ll not grill you any further. Once again, thank you so much for taking the time to do this with us. I appreciate it, man. Cheers. |
| No, it’s an honor to be here. Thank you for having me. |
| Thank you. |