About Tarik Najeddine

I have worked in search for more than a decade: inside a publisher during a network-wide brand relaunch, at an enterprise agency, in-house at venture-backed startups, and on contract for eBay and a consumer-focused private equity firm.

OSF Solutions is the consultancy I have run alongside that work since 2012, with about two dozen clients to date.

How I got here

I started in research. At Johns Hopkins School of Medicine I coordinated NIH-funded studies at the Center for Mind-Body Research and presented first-author work at the American Pain Society's annual meeting. After an M.A. at Columbia, I worked as a research scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and as a case manager for veterans in transitional housing.

In 2011 I started writing as Terry Gotham. Over seven years that grew into a transmedia project with its own audience, and it led to presentations at the American Anthropological Association, the Society for Applied Anthropology, and the Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research in Amsterdam. It is also where I learned distribution firsthand: what people search for, what they share, and what platforms reward.

In 2014 I joined About.com's expert support team as the company was rebuilding itself as Dotdash. I moved into SEO analysis, then was embedded with the Verywell brand team as Senior SEO Analyst and Content Strategist. I built the competitor content analysis framework later adopted across Dotdash properties while Verywell grew from 12 million to 33 million monthly unique visitors in 18 months. Searchmetrics ranked Verywell sixth among its top 100 Google winners of 2018.

Since then I have been SEO Manager at Ai Media Group, Associate Director of Search Strategy at iQuanti, SEO Director at Albert, Growth Marketing Lead at Bridge Money (now Yield), an EdgeSEO engineer and then technical SEO strategist for eBay through Torque Partnership, and Head of Search Strategy at ModeSens. I now run the Profound integration on contract for TSG Consumer Partners and advise its portfolio brands on optimizing for AI answer engines.

Expert witness

In 2021 I testified as an expert witness on search and recommendation algorithms in a Palm Beach County, Florida criminal trial. The testimony covered how platform algorithms shape what people find, and the difference between what someone searches for and the results they are steered toward.

CBS12 coverage of the testimony

Education and research

• M.A., Clinical Psychology, Teachers College, Columbia University. Certificate in Conflict Resolution and Negotiation.
• B.A., Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University. Minors in Entrepreneurship and Management, and Theatre Arts.
• NIH Research Supplement to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
• First author, "Correlates of work productivity loss in TMD patients," American Pain Society 26th Annual Scientific Meeting.
• Conference presentations: Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research, Amsterdam (2016); Society for Applied Anthropology, Vancouver (2016); American Anthropological Association, Denver (2015); Generation PsYchedelic, Evergreen State College (2015).

Tools

SEO and analytics

Screaming Frog, Botify, Lumar, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, SISTRIX, Conductor, BrightEdge, SimilarWeb, comScore, Google Search Console, GA4, Google Tag Manager, Looker Studio, SQL

AI search

Profound, Peec AI

Paid media

Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Apple Ads

CDN and edge

Fastly, Akamai

Platforms

WordPress, Drupal, Shopify, Webflow, Adobe Experience Manager, Squarespace