I’ve been lucky to work with sharp founders, good agency leaders, and a few very patient marketing managers over the last fifteen years. Here’s what some of them have said, unedited, attributed, and linkable on LinkedIn where possible.
“Zakria ran SEO for Movinghub across one of the most complex real-estate platforms in the country. He doesn’t just do keyword work, he thinks like an operator. We’d end up discussing margin, sales cycle, and funnel data as often as we did rankings. The results spoke for themselves and, frankly, I miss having him in the room.”
“I hired Zakria at Rank First in 2018 and he stayed with the agency for nearly seven years. He ran SEO delivery across some of our biggest retainers, retail, eComm, law firms, healthcare. He’s one of the few SEOs I’ve met who can both run the strategy and actually do the work. If you’re an Australian business that’s serious about organic, talk to him.”
“We’d been burnt twice before we found Zakria. He was the first person who actually looked at our product margins before suggesting a strategy. Three years in, organic is still our largest acquisition channel and our biggest cost lever.”
“Zakria helped us scale QLD Bullion from a quiet little website into a recognised brand in the precious-metals space. He gets eCommerce, gets Google Ads, and doesn’t get defensive when you push back. That’s rare.”
“We were getting maybe two leads a week when we started with Zakria. Six months in we were booked out three weeks ahead and had to stop advertising. He knows local SEO cold.”
“Zakria did the hard thinking on our migration. We kept almost all of our organic visibility through what could have been a disaster of a replatform. Would hire again without hesitation.”
“I appreciated that Zakria pushed back on our brief. We thought we needed more traffic. He convinced us we needed better traffic. Enquiry quality improved within the quarter.”
“Fast, responsive, commercial. That’s the short version. He treats your money like his own and doesn’t pitch ideas that sound impressive in a slide deck but don’t actually move revenue.”
I’m not going to fabricate testimonials and I’m not going to scrape fake ones off Fiverr. If you want to verify any of the above, I can put you in touch with the person directly, most of them are happy to take a 10-minute call and vouch (or not) for how I worked.
That’s probably the best reference check you can do on any marketing specialist. If they won’t put you in front of their past clients, that tells you something.