Sam Gooch

Advice For Anyone Joining The Industry

• Don’t build your career around one marketing channel. Build it around solving business problems. The different Marketing channels will always evolve, but if you truly understand your customers, and you’re able to demonstrate how your work drives growth, you’ll always be valuable. That’s been true throughout my career, and I think it’s even more important now.

Areas Of Interest

• I’ve always enjoyed tech SEO the most. I love getting into the weeds with crawling, indexing, site architecture and figuring out the technical challenges that help websites perform better in search.
• I spent over 15 years focused almost entirely on SEO before moving into Performance Marketing a couple of years ago, where I now get to look at the bigger picture and how SEO fits alongside paid media, demand generation and the rest of the customer journey.

Education, Awards, Certifications

• BSc (Hons), Computing – De Montfort University, UK
• Google Ads Certification (Google)
• Google Analytics Individual Qualification
• Advertising Fundamentals, Advanced Search, Advanced Display
• Google Ads Advanced (JellyFish)
• UX Fundamentals

Affiliations & Past Work

• I’m currently Head of Performance Marketing at Kinsta, where I lead the SEO, Paid Media and Demand Generation teams, while also supporting the growth of Kinsta’s sister brand, Sevalla.
• I also advise Confinity and XESO on growth, search and go-to-market strategy.
• I spent more than 15 years specialising in SEO, working across agency and in-house roles before moving into leadership positions at WooRank and Nominet. Today, as Head of Performance Marketing at Kinsta, I still draw on that SEO background while leading a broader growth strategy across SEO, paid media and demand generation.
• I’m always open to consulting opportunities where there’s a good fit.

Published Work & Inclusions

• A Deep Dive into Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
• Kinsta the Wordsmith of WordPress
• How Kinsta Secured a Google Knowledge Panel and Boosted Brand Visibility [Case Study]
• WooRank Blog – Sam Gooch

Any Results/Highlights From Your Work You Want To Promote? Any Impact You’re Proud Of?

• I’m proud to have started my SEO career when Google was still evolving rapidly. Over nearly two decades I’ve worked through every major algorithm update, adapting as search has changed and learning what actually stands the test of time.
• I’ve seen tactics come and go, but the fundamentals have always been consistent: understanding what users are looking for, creating useful content, building technically sound websites, and earning trust over time. As AI reshapes search again, I think having experienced those previous shifts gives me a useful perspective. It’s easy to chase the latest trend, but understanding why search has evolved the way it has makes it much easier to separate what’s genuinely important from noise.

Favorite Articles/Publications You Share/Follow

• Search Engine Roundtable
• Search Engine Land
• Google Search Central Blog
• SparkToro Blog
• iPullRank Blog
• WordLift Blog
• Lily Ray Blog
• Ahrefs Blog
• Marie Haynes Blog
• Search Engine Journal

First Job

• The website I first started working on back in 2008 (which4u.co.uk) no longer exists, but you can still find it on Archive,org.
• During my time there I helped it reach page one of Google for highly competitive keywords including “credit cards”, “savings accounts”, and “business accounts”. Not a bad achievement for my first SEO gig, although this was back in the day when SEO was much simpler and we were only competing for those famous ten blue links.

Cool Fact

• Fun fact: although we all live in Portugal, my family has three nationalities under one roof: I’m British, my wife is Brazilian, and our daughter is Portuguese. It makes travelling more entertaining when we reach customs… pick a passport, any passport!

Favorite Food And/Or Restaurant

• All the food