Nikulin Pavel

Moscow +7 (903) 255-8728 i@pavelnikulin.com
R&D manager, analyst, reverse-engineer, startup founder, data scientist, product manager and a little SEO for fun.

Who am I? A developer in the distant past who transitioned into SEO through data engineering and analytics. I connect SEO, product, and technology from hypotheses to measurable business outcomes. I think systematically, prioritize tasks based on their impact on product and revenue, and bring ideas to implementation. I value experimentation, transparency, and growth.

How can I help you? I can audit your project in regard to SEO. I will help competently develop a promotion strategy in Yandex, Google, Bing, including for foreign markets. If you have an idea in the sector of machine learning, I can analyze the code, idea, market, and assume whether the idea will succeed or not. I will help with Unit-economics and advice which direction to "dig in" and where to look for customers. I will advice on how and where to get data for ML in relation to your task, which software frameworks to choose and whether ML is even necessary in your task.


Experience

SEO Team Lead

Centerex (ecosystem of projects under Google Search, USA)
  • Led a team of several SEO specialists and numerous outsourced professionals, developing and implementing an SEO strategy for a network of projects totaling 100M pages and attracting up to 750K users per day.
  • Achieved a 4× increase in organic traffic, raised the share of core pages in the Google index to 80%, and reduced supplement pages to 20%.
  • Implemented page and content quantization for indexing analysis, built traffic forecasting models, and expanded semantic coverage based on historical data.
  • Created a system for reallocating crawl budget and competitor analytics to establish SEO best practices and scale successful hypotheses.
  • Organized A/B testing of SEO hypotheses, coordinating cross-functional teams (developers, designers, link builders, Reddit/Quora/Stack Overflow/GitHub PR managers, content managers for brand SERM).
  • Product impact: launched AI-powered site search to improve UX and brand perception, rolled out multiple features to optimize both on-site behavior and search behavior.
  • Monitored AI brand visibility (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity) and implemented measures to strengthen it.
  • Developed numerous SEO dashboards for comprehensive channel performance evaluation and strategic planning.
  • Result: systemic growth of traffic and revenue, building a scalable SEO platform integrated with product analytics and ML tools.
2022 - Present

HEAD OF SEARCH ENGINE ANALYTICS DEPARTMENT

Demis Group

- Reverse-engineering of search engines: Yandex, Google, Bing, from SEO perspective.

- Management of analysts department.

- Adjustment of instructions and regulations, radical change in the production strategy in the promotion department.

- Study of search engine algorithms (hypothesis creation / terms of reference / search, creation of platforms for test / monitoring, interpretation and analysis of the results).

- Creation, testing and debugging of fully-featured prototypes for further highly loaded services of automation of production processes.

- Audits of client projects, creation of tests and resolving of complex cases, monitoring of results, development of further strategy.

- Conducting trainings and seminars for company employees.

- Delivering reports at specialist conferences (see Public activities).

- Creation and support of the Nigma service accredited in the Skolkovo innovative Russian center for evaluation of site designs using computer vision.

2014 - 2022

HEAD OF SEO-DEPARTMENT

Several small companies

Work in several unremarkable companies, on average nearly a year in each. Promotion of small and mid-sized projects. From online stores and service sites to adult sites. Development of tools for promotion processes. Introduction of search engine optimization in code of projects.

2010 - 2014

HEAD OF INTERNAL RESOURSES DEPARTMENT

RBS Corporation

- Development of automation of the department SEO processes.

- Management of development personnel.

- Setup of tests in order to have the possibility for massive impact on search engine algorithms.

- Creation of internal CRM.

- And, in order to stay competent in SEO - promotion of several projects on Google and Yandex.

2009 - 2010

Education

KATANOV KHAKASS STATE UNIVERSITY

Qualified expert
Information systems
1998 - 2003

Skills

Participation in SEO projects
  • badoo.com
  • molotok.ru
  • quto.ru
  • ... etc.

Programing languages
  • PHP
  • Python
  • JavaScript
  • SQL
Languages
  • Russian - native
  • English

Data Science and development
  • Programming languages: PHP, Python, JavaScript
  • Libraries and software frameworks for Data Science:
    PyTorch, XGBoost, CatBoost, Scikit-Learn, Pandas, Numpy, CuPy, Matplotlib and many more
  • Writing shell scripts
  • Github, Gitlab, Docker
  • DBMS: MySQL, Percona, Redis, PostgreSQL
  • Graphics software etc: Blender, ffmpeg, Prusa, FreeCAD, OpenSCAD


Interests and hobbies

- Studying startups and everything related to them - from development to product-management. I am fond of robotics, prototyping on Arduino/STM32/ESP32/etc. I love challenging myself to search for and find answers for solving practically insoluble problems.

- Wing Chun Kunf fu Master (current level Muk Yan Jong)

- Hobbies: running, guitar

- Developing my hobby project in the field of GEO/AEO - EchoLytix - Brand Visibility Check.


Rewards

- Participant of Machine Learning competitions on the Kaggle platform and others (as a hobby)

- Winner of Machine Learning hackathons

- Resident of Skolkovo innovational Russian center in the Nigma service project team for the evaluation of site designs using computer vision

Download resume