Meet the advisors: Marat Gaziev

Senior Director of SEO for Ziff Davis

Marat Gaziev cuts an impressive figure in the world of media and marketing, not least in his current role as Senior Director of SEO for Ziff Davis, the media giant behind industry leading publications such as IGN, Mashable, PCmag, ExtremeTech, Geek and Ask Men. We’re fortunate to count him among our ranks here at KeyoCoin, so wanted to take a moment to celebrate his contribution to our cause.

Marat joined KeyoCoin as our media and search advisor in March 2018, bringing with him an impressive track record of leading teams to create stand-out content, exciting collaborations, and long-lasting revenue generation for some of the world’s most influential media brands. His career in SEO reaches back almost a decade, but it was his work since 2016, first for IGN, and then for parent company Ziff Davis, that really caught our attention.

Under his stewardship the Ziff Davis media group now generates over 140 million monthly visitors, a combined 15 million app downloads, and 10 million YouTube subscribers across its brands, and building on this success Marat has become a well-known SEO expert and keynote speaker for SEO conferences in Silicon Valley and beyond.

There’s no two ways about it, SEO is absolutely crucial to the success of our mission here at KeyoCoin.
If we want to banish unwelcome intermediation from the booking process, giving power back to travel providers on the one hand, and giving great value to travelers on the other, we need to beat online travel agents at their own game. These tech giants (Expedia, Booking, TripAdvisor etc.) emerged as winners from the internet boom precisely because they mastered the art of online distribution, capturing travelers attention and converting that into bookings. It’s a practice that relies heavily on SEO. Rising to the top of search rankings for every item in a travel inventory numbering in the millions, is no mean feat.

There’s a well worn cliche in the SEO space that the best place to hide your dirty laundry is on page two of Google. And as with all cliches, there is a painful truth to it. In a world where Google search packs the greatest punch (organic Google searches led to nearly 50 percent of travel brands’ revenues in 2016, while Google cost-per-click ads yielded 20 percent of revenue), hitting the first page of search results is vital.

Our ultimate ambition is to create an all-encompassing travel ecosystem, one where all stakeholders are incentivized to use the KeyoCoin marketplace (and the KeyoPass app) as the trusted ‘route one’ tool for discovering, booking and experiencing their trip. However we must be realistic about the role that metasearch engines, including Google, will continue to play in this evolving marketplace. Our answer is to arm independent travel providers with the tools they need to promote themselves better, both through our platform, and through search engines.

It’s for this reason that Marat’s contribution is such an instrumental one, optimizing how we, and over 100,000 providers in our ecosystem, appear in search engine results. Time and again, Marat has demonstrated his ability to create winning search strategies for both Fortune 500 companies and startups, which puts him in an ideal position to support the next stage in our development, from the well established startup we are now, to the lean global travel ecosystem we aspire to become.