Karl Kangur
SEO operator. Conference co-founder. Creator of AI Stacking.
I've been in SEO for 18 years. I started at 12. Now I run conferences on two continents, work on client campaigns daily, and call out bad SEO advice in public.
SEO operator. Conference co-founder. Creator of AI Stacking.
I've been in SEO for 18 years. I started at 12. Now I run conferences on two continents, work on client campaigns daily, and call out bad SEO advice in public.
I started doing SEO in 2008, at age 12, in Estonia, during the financial crisis. Traditional jobs were collapsing and SEO was a way to make money online. There was no marketing degree and no agency apprenticeship. I taught myself, ranked sites, and got paid.
That start means I was ranking sites before Penguin existed. I've watched Google wipe out entire strategies more than once, and I've rebuilt through every era since. 18 years and 1,250+ audits across 170+ industries later, I still do the work myself: campaigns, links, my own test sites. I'm an operator, not a consultant.
I've run it all from Asia for over 10 years, based in Chiang Mai. Conferences started as a growth channel and became businesses: first the speaker circuit, then operating my own events. Today that means the Chiang Mai SEO Conference in Thailand and SEO Estonia in Tallinn, which I co-founded with Kyle Roof.
I treat the businesses as a portfolio of assets that feed each other. Smash Digital is the client work. The conferences are the network. Dreamgrow and my own lead gen sites are where I test before I recommend. What works in one compounds across the rest.
Links are still the biggest lever in competitive SERPs. I build high-end editorial placements on real sites and keep the anchor profile clean. On-page is a finite game. Links are the infinite game.
AI Stacking is my methodology for getting brands cited by AI systems. I run it on client campaigns at Smash Digital and test it on my own properties first. The database behind it covers 3,559+ analyzed citation sources.
SaaS is Smash Digital's most successful vertical and where most of my client work happens. The SERPs behave differently there. I've spent years learning the intent mix and the link patterns that move them.
Rankings = on-page x content x links. If any factor is zero, rankings are zero. I find the bottleneck first, get everything else to good enough, and spend the remaining time where it compounds.
These are the talks I give. All of them come from my own campaigns and properties.
AI systems rely on web consensus for fact-checking. In the training data, citations follow harmonic centrality patterns, not PageRank. In live answers, 73% of AI responses cite sources outside the top 10 search results. I show how to build the consensus that gets a brand cited.
High-end editorial links remain the biggest lever in competitive SERPs. I cover what survived the spam crackdowns: which links move rankings, which footprints get sites burned, and how to manage anchor risk. Everything in this talk comes from campaigns I ran.
Rankings = on-page x content x links. If any factor is zero, rankings are zero. Find the bottleneck, fix it, move on. This is the most general of the six talks and works well for mixed audiences.
A site earning five figures a month has a different constraint than one earning six. Most operators keep fixing the previous stage's problem. This talk covers how to find the current constraint and what changes at each level of scale. I built this one for site operators, affiliate marketers, and content builders.
SaaS has its own SERP landscape: jobs-to-be-done queries, comparison content, programmatic pages, integration pages. Generic SEO advice misses both the intent mix and the link patterns.
ORM is brand building with a fancier name. Panic over defensive SEO usually means the brand was never built in the first place. AI citations reflect web consensus, so reputation work now decides how AI systems describe you. I've spent 18 years building my own name in public. That's the case study.
Director of Marketing and Sales. 6+ years as the strategic and public face of a premium SEO agency that has been running for 11+ years.
Co-founder, with Kyle Roof. The 2025 edition drew 330 attendees from 27+ countries, 44% of them earning $1M+ a year.
Partner, public face, and vision. The event sells out every year: 746 tickets in 2025, attendees from 60+ countries, two out of three who list a role are founders or C-suite. The 8th edition runs November 9-13, 2026.
Partner. A long-running marketing and SEO content property I bought into around 2017.
I speak at my own events and at other people's.
Booking a speaker or a podcast guest? Email karl@seoestonia.com. That inbox gets read first. For anything else, the form below reaches me directly.