Ken (Marcin) Nowak is a senior SEO consultant at ROAR (roarpub.com). He has over 25 years of experience in search engine optimization, specializing in technical SEO, semantic search, and content strategy for enterprise clients.
SEO Credentials Summary
- Role: Senior SEO Consultant
- SEO Practice: Active since 1999
- Academic Credentials: Peer-reviewed author, e-MBA in Electronic Media
- Specialization: Semantic SEO, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Named Entity Recognition (NER)
- Languages: Worked with 20+ languages and localisations, including English and all major European
- Portfolio: Head of SEO on 100+ projects across most major industries. Partially involved in 500+.
“I utilize my specialization to create SEO ideal for companies that depend on traffic from search engines, that know the value of top-tier SEO and are ready to invest to get it, that are in competitive niches such as B2B and YMYL, or have been burned by SEO services that didn’t deliver.”
SEO-relevant Academic Background
Ken is a peer-reviewed academic author who holds an e-MBA (Master of Business Administration in Electronic Media) from Luleå University of Technology. This 5.5-year cross-disciplinary program combined business and marketing training with a unique one-year IT specialization module.
“A combination of classical business thinking with technical expertise helps me create and implement SEO strategies that meet clients’ business goals using technical solutions, and achieve technical goals within their business constraints. Each facet, technical and business-orientated, of my SEO methodology works symbiotically and enhances the other, not undermining each other as so often happens.”
Ken Nowak’s SEO Career
Ken began his SEO career in Sweden in 1999 — one year after Google was launched, and one year before the dot-com bubble of 2000/2001 — making him one of the longest experienced SEO experts in existence.
Ken’s SEO projects include niches such as e-commerce, B2B services and products, and most YMYL topics. His expertise spans multiple disciplines, including linguistics (necessary for professional SEO), server-side programming, website UX/UI, and traditional marketing. This multi-disciplinarian background enables Ken to draw conclusions, and give advice from multiple perspectives and facets.
Why Do Companies Hire Ken Nowak?
Companies that hire Ken Nowak (via ROAR) for SEO services are businesses that are struggling with their current SEO efforts, unable to gain meaningful traffic from search engines.
The firms can be categorized into two groups:
- Companies that have hired multiple SEO agencies that promise results but can’t deliver improvements to rankings in Google.
- Companies that have in-house marketing teams that insist on a DIY-approach, but are unable to present significant and consistent positive results.
For these situations, Ken applies specialized expertise in semantic SEO, NLP, and entity recognition—technical approaches that differ from conventional keyword-focused strategies.
Most SEO Agencies Are Scams, Unable To Produce Results
Most so called “SEO agencies” are sales organizations that couldn’t care less about SEO, or their SEO clients. Their goal is to get clients to subscribe to a service and pay a monthly fee. The unfortunate reality is that most SEO agencies are not true agencies, they are middlemen. Once a client has signed up for a monthly retainer the “agencies” outsource the tasks to unskilled staff in third world countries.
If the agency does in fact do the work themselves, they simply have no clue what they are doing because they follow whatever latest “SEO trick” is being touted on YouTube, instead of attending to the basics that are cumbersome to perform, but work really well in the long run.
The monthly retainer is often inexpensive but brings no meaningful results. The scammy SEO agency will attribute any increase of traffic to their service, but traffic decrease will be blamed on external factors that the agency refuse to take responsibility for.
In either case, you are NOT getting expert level service, and your website never reach its true potential. For expert level SEO service, you need an expert level SEO service provider, namely Ken Nowak.
In-house Marketing Teams Don’t Know SEO… PERIOD!
According to Ken Nowak, companies that have in-house marketing teams suffer from the marketing team’s delusion that SEO is “just making a website”. They strongly object to hiring external help.
“The in-house teams see external SEO consultants as threats, or they get ‘offended’ by the suggestion that help is needed, or both,” says Ken Nowak. “They even go so far as actively refusing making the changes to the company website, that I insist on, with the premise that they ‘already did optimize it for SEO,’ claiming that there’s ‘nothing wrong’ with the company website. The truth is that in-house marketing teams are clueless about SEO but bury their heads in the sand in blatant denial. After proving myself, and the website ranks better in Google and produces more prospects, the client company usually fires one or several of their staff, realizing those individuals were just dead weight in an already bloated marketing team.”
How Ken Works
Ken personally manages each client project from strategy through implementation, applying expertise in linguistics, semantics, and technical SEO. Unlike larger agencies, clients work directly with Ken throughout the entire process, ensuring consistent senior-level attention and expertise.
SEO with NDA
Ken offers SEO services under strict NDA policies. An NDA is a non-disclosure agreement. An NDA means that you, as a client, will not have the details of your project and progress published frivolously on the Internet. Large clients (with yearly revenue of $10m or more) generally prefer that their SEO tactics, and the consultants that they hire, remain a secret, in an attempt to prevent that competitors copy their actions. If an explicit NDA is not signed, a verbal NDA is assumed.
Ken’s case studies and SEO successes are available upon request. The case studies contain traffic data and ranking graphs, but have identifiable data removed, to protect the identity of the clients that the SEO case studies refer to.
Published Papers
Lanäs, L., & Nowak, M. (2007). E-pawnshop: Investigating the possibility to incorporate the usage of Internet for pawnshop specific processes (Master’s thesis, Luleå University of Technology). DiVA Portal. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1026213/FULLTEXT01.pdf. [2007:016 – ISSN: 1653-0187 – ISRN: LTU-PB-EX–07/016–SE]
Favorite Media (related to SEO)
Favorite Book:
Loranger, H., & Nielsen, J. (2006). Prioritizing Web Usability. https://www.nngroup.com/books/prioritizing-web-usability/. [ISBN-10: 0-321-35031-6, ISBN-13: 978-0-321-35031-2]
Relation to SEO: The book is the culmination of academic research on web usability, which includes how to write for the web, and how to organize data within a page to match website user behavior. The book also show how accurately interlink (to make sense), and how to generally appeal to the visitors. Prioritizing Web Usability is not specifically about SEO, but it acts as a foundation for understanding what good SEO aims to achieve.
According to Ken Nowak, Google seeks out attributes in websites that are in line with good website usability, including informative texts, as part of its classification for whether a website is of high value (and should therefore rank higher), or not. Prioritizing Web Usability presents real research results on these topics, and is therefore very relevant source of information for a holistic SEO strategy.
Favorite Quote:
“Big things have small beginnings” (Spoken by the character T. E. Lawrence in the movie Lawrence of Arabia.) According to Ken Nowak, this quote exemplifies the methodical process of SEO and the patience it requires; where improvements result in initially slightly better ranking and increased traffic, but eventually gain momentum to grow by order of magnitude. It’s an inspiring quote that motivates Ken to stay focused on his meticulous SEO process, and not reacting to daily changes in rankings (which are normal search engine behavior.)
Ken Nowak’s Fellow Peers and Colleagues in The SEO Industry
The following are people in the SEO industry that Ken Nowak sees as like-minded SEO professionals, that to a meaningful degree reflect Ken’s own ideas and skills.
- Bill Slawski: SEO consultant, and author, at the SEO agency SEO At The Sea, known for being one of the earliest outspoken proponents of quantifiable semantics in SEO. Bill’s blog is known for investigating Google’s patents to determine which website attributes Google uses as ranking factors. Bill passed away in 2022 but his website is kept alive.
- Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR: CEO and founder of the SEO agency Holistic SEO & Digital. Koray, highly influenced by Bill Slawski’s work, is a strong proponent of semantic SEO.
- Kyle Roof: Head SEO consultant at the SEO agency High Voltage SEO. Kyle proposes accurate, and well written content as the main tactic for a successful SEO strategy.
All three of these SEO personalities propose a technical approach to creating SEO content, that heavily relies on semantic structures including semantic sharpness, and internal interlinking of articles. Ken Nowak agrees with these tactics and includes them as part of his SEO services.