At Sitebulb, our tool scales with you. Whether you’re doing SEO for freelance clients, a large ecommerce business, small or large agency, we support SEOs at all stages of their career. And we want to shine a spotlight on some of the superb SEOs that are out there. Some you may have heard of, and some perhaps not… not yet anyway!
Today, we speak to Ulrika Viberg, CEO and Senior SEO at Unikorn.
To get started, briefly give us an intro to you:
I am the CEO and the senior SEO at my agency, Unikorn. We are a Sweden-based boutique SEO agency. We're focusing on user-centric SEO, which means we always take the user's point of view in all our projects.
SEOs have varied backgrounds, in PR, web development, marketing, content and more. How did you get into SEO?
I am an SEO by chance! I actually studied linguistics and communication. But I needed a job so I got a job with an online casino. I worked with the developers and they had a startup doing sponsored links. They built a system for it and then they took me with them. So I started as a campaign manager with them doing paid search and realized that if I also optimize the landing pages, my paid search campaigns would pay off much better and perform better. So that's how I got into on page optimization! Then I got a job at a web agency and I started doing really technical SEO migrations right away.
What do you like most about the work you do?
I really like to do the agency thing and the business side of it as well, like when I'm invited into the rooms with my clients where the decisions are made. Because I've been doing this for such a long time and I understand almost all aspects of it, I get to be innovative. I get results for clients, they trust us and so we get to do some crazy stuff. When you're working with these huge websites and you crank up the numbers by 25% and it's millions of sessions every day, that’s really amazing.
What do you like least about your work?
When clients and other SEOs come up with old-fashioned SEO, and I have to argue that that’s not the way we do it anymore. I really hate that. I’m like, can everybody just get with the program with how SEO is today?!
What sort of SEO topics, issues, and techniques are you obsessing over right now?
At the moment, I'm really into entities, structured data, and the whole AI thing and combining it with my knowledge from linguistics. So I started learning something called Universal Grammar or Generative Grammar and it fits really well into machine learning. Back in 2006, they already had this machine learning Linguistics program. And they’d come a long way already back then but they didn't crack the last 5% until now. So I studied the basics of what machine learning is based on. And I can really see the resemblance between how that works and how the machines are now understanding language. I understand maybe better than most what an entity is, that it’s not just a noun or whatever. It's more a bucket of meaning. And what does that mean? How can you use that? And how do the machines use that? And how do you optimize for it with other meanings around it? Because when you change the proximity between the entities, you also change the meaning between them.
What do you think we should be talking about more as a community?
If you had asked me a couple years ago, I would say there's not enough women talking about SEO. But I think we fixed that. I mean, we are talking about it. The Women in Tech SEO community has been super helpful with that.
What are your go-to SEO tools, and what do you use them for?
Screaming Frog. I also use Sitebulb’s website audit tool. alsoasked.com. SISTRIX. SE Ranking.
What’s your top tip for superb SEO?
I know this sounds like I'm paid by Google but always have the user front of mind. Whatever you're doing, always put yourself in the user's shoes. And have their needs as your goal. Whatever it is you're going to do, do it for them not the search engines because that lasts longer. It will give you more money in the end.
Are you an SEO with a passion or project to share? Get in touch with us about writing an article or doing a Q&A.
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Ulrika Viberg is a Senior SEO consultant and founder of the Sweden based SEO agency Unikorn, working with larger e-commerce B2Cs and medium B2Bs with the common goal of creating a solid experience for the end-user and to achieve their organic search goals.
Ulrika focuses on user-centric SEO where technical; content and strategy SEO meets UX and customer journeys. She has also developed the model of the Search Customer Journey.
Ulrika is also a speaker for conferences such as BrightonSEO and SMX Advanced and podcasts such as Digital Marknadsföring and Majestic’s SEO in 2023.
