Amos Weiskopf

I built my first website in 2000. I was sixteen, the internet was still making that dial-up screech, and I had no idea what I was doing. But I remember the moment I uploaded that first page and realized that anyone in the world could theoretically find it. That feeling stuck with me. Not the building part. The finding part. How does anyone find anything in this infinite mess of pages?

That question has basically driven everything I've done since.

In the early days I didn't call it SEO. I didn't call it anything. I just kept building sites and kept trying to figure out why some of them got traffic and others didn't. I was running experiments before I knew that's what they were called. Trying things, watching what happened, trying other things. The scientific method applied to a problem nobody had properly defined yet.

The Winding Path

Since 2007 I've been doing this professionally. That's almost two decades now, which frankly makes me feel old. In that time I've worked with retail brands, advertising agencies, Fortune 500 companies, sold-out music festivals, and more startups than I can count. Some of those projects were massive successes. Some were spectacular failures. I learned more from the failures, as you do.

For twelve years I was CMO of the Jerusalem Beer Festival, one of Israel's largest cultural events. That meant owning everything: brand positioning, audience growth, vendor relationships, sponsor acquisition, the whole marketing operation. Running a festival isn't like running a SaaS company. You have one shot per year. No A/B testing your way to success when 30,000 people show up on a specific night and either have a great time or don't. That pressure teaches you things.

More recently, from 2023 to 2025, I served as CMO at Lonesome Labs, leading marketing strategy for a company in the Amazon seller tools space. Different industry, same challenge: figure out how to cut through noise and reach the people who matter.

At Altria, a Fortune 500 company, I spent three years in roles that shaped how I think about marketing at scale. For the first two years I was Customer Acquisition Manager for their e-cigarette division, owning SEO, CRO, and the affiliate marketing program. I quadrupled conversion rates in that segment. Not incrementally improved. Quadrupled. I also handled product analytics, customer analytics, and competitive intelligence. Then they moved me into Strategy & Planning as a special researcher, where I introduced text analytics and NLP capabilities to the entire organization. I was serving multiple departments: marketing, R&D, and strategy. That role taught me that marketing problems are often data problems in disguise, and that most organizations are sitting on insights they don't know how to extract.

I also built a 250,000-member Facebook community for the Israeli Government's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Community building for a government ministry is its own strange beast. You're not selling anything. You're trying to shift perception at scale, which is harder than selling.

At OurCrowd, I took them from essentially zero non-branded organic traffic to thousands of keywords ranked. Seventy-something in the number one position. 300x growth over two years. Beyond SEO, I also owned product analytics, customer analytics, and competitive intelligence. These numbers sound made up but they're not. You can see the case study if you don't believe me.

I've also advised from the outside. Samsung, SanDisk, JLL, Manfrotto, and dozens of smaller companies you've never heard of. When you're outside the building you see different things. You're not stuck in the politics or the resource constraints or the "we've always done it this way" thinking. Sometimes that perspective is exactly what a company needs.

The Technical Edge

Here's something that sets me apart from most marketing people: I code. Python, Golang, JavaScript, R. I write scripts to automate analysis that would take weeks to do manually. I build custom tools when the off-the-shelf options don't cut it. I can look at a technical SEO problem and actually fix it myself instead of writing a ticket for someone else.

This matters because the line between marketing and engineering keeps blurring. The best opportunities are often at that intersection. When I introduced NLP to Altria, it wasn't because I read about it in a marketing blog. It was because I could actually build the systems to make it work. When I do competitive intelligence, I'm not relying on what tools show me. I'm writing code to extract signals those tools miss.

I also have OCD. The clinical kind, not the "I like things neat" kind. In most contexts that's a liability. In a field where the difference between ranking and not ranking can come down to obsessive attention to detail, it's an edge. I catch things others don't. I can't let something go until it's right. That's not always comfortable, but it produces results.

What I Actually Do

These days I work in two modes. Sometimes I'm a fractional CMO or strategic advisor, embedded with a company's leadership team, helping them figure out not just SEO but the whole go-to-market picture. Other times I'm doing deep SEO and competitive intelligence work, the kind of analysis that reveals opportunities competitors haven't spotted yet.

The common thread is that I help companies become findable. "Findable" contains multitudes. Sometimes it means fixing technical problems preventing Google from crawling your site properly. Sometimes it means building a content strategy that targets what people are actually searching for instead of what you wish they were searching for. Sometimes it means understanding that your real competition isn't who you think it is. Sometimes it means telling a CEO that their pet project is never going to rank and they need to accept that.

I don't have a proprietary methodology or a branded framework or a twelve-step process I put on slides. I've always found that stuff embarrassing. What I have is twenty years of pattern recognition, the ability to build whatever tools I need, and a willingness to say uncomfortable things.

The Part Where I Say What I Believe

I believe that context beats content. Anyone can write ten thousand words on a topic. The question is whether you actually understand the topic better than the other people writing about it. If you do, you'll probably rank eventually. If you don't, no amount of keyword optimization is going to save you.

I believe that most SEO problems have boring solutions. Fix the technical issues. Create content that deserves to rank. Get links from sites that have actual traffic. The basics work if you actually do them, which most people don't, because the basics are boring and hard and unglamorous.

I believe that Google's incentives align with yours more than you think. They want to rank the best answer. Your job is to be the best answer. Everything else is noise. There's a whole industry built on making this seem more complicated than it is, because simple advice doesn't justify retainer fees.

I believe that the best SEO is not needing SEO. The companies that dominate organic search are usually the companies that would be successful without it. SEO is a lagging indicator. It reflects what you've built, not what you're building. Get the fundamentals right and the rankings follow. Try to get the rankings without the fundamentals and you're building on sand.

Why I'm Still Doing This

Twenty years is a long time to spend on anything. People ask if I get bored. I don't. The game keeps changing. When I started, Google was a simple PageRank machine and you could game it with keyword stuffing and link farms. Then they got smarter. Then mobile happened. Then featured snippets happened. Now AI is happening. The specific tactics that work have changed completely, multiple times. But the underlying question hasn't changed at all.

How do you get found?

I still find that question interesting. I suspect I always will.

Working Together

These days I'm selective about who I work with. Not because I'm trying to be exclusive. Because I've learned that the fit matters more than anything else. I work best with companies where someone in a position of authority actually cares about organic search. Not "cares" in the sense of wanting good numbers to report. Cares in the sense of understanding that this is a long game and being willing to invest accordingly.

If that sounds like you, get in touch. I'd like to hear about what you're building.