Mattias Hagman
PhD · SEO Consultant · University Lecturer
15+ years working in the most competitive and regulated search environments in the world. Founder of AlphaSERP Tools. I work directly with every client — no account team, no handoffs.
AlphaSERP is an independent SEO consultancy. There is no account team, no junior staff handling your project, and no handoff between the person you speak to and the person doing the work.
I also build and maintain AlphaSERP Tools — an AI-native SEO intelligence platform I use in my consulting work. Several of the free tools are available to anyone without an account. I built them because I needed them.
Background
Built in the hardest
environments in search
I have spent more than 15 years working in SEO across technical and strategic dimensions — from large international operators and high-volume affiliate businesses to financial services, online pharmacy, and complex e-commerce. The pattern is consistent: I have spent most of my career in environments where the margin between ranking and not ranking has direct commercial consequences, and where generic approaches simply do not work.
Alongside client work, I teach SEO at university level. I lecture on Strategic SEO and Content Marketing at the University of Malta — a postgraduate programme in the Faculty of Economics, Management and Accountancy. I also guest lecture in Statistics and Probability at DIS Stockholm — an international study-abroad institution with academic partnerships with KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Karolinska Institutet, and Stockholm University.
I hold a PhD from the University of Sydney and was conferred the title of Associate Professor (Docent) by Stockholm University in 2017. In a field where a lot of advice is based on anecdote, pattern-matching, and correlation-as-causation, an evidence-based approach to diagnosis and strategy is genuinely different.
Specialisation
Sectors I specialise in
The sectors where I have spent most of my career are the ones where the stakes are highest and the SEO problems are hardest. That depth does not come from reading about them — it comes from working in them for a decade.
iGaming — online casino, sportsbook, and affiliate
During my time at a major iGaming group, I was part of the core SEO team that launched Casinos.com — leading the SEO strategy across several competitive markets from day one.
In a previous role as SEO Director, I contributed as subject matter expert on SEO requirements during a €65.5 million acquisition process — advising on the organic value and technical integrity of the assets being acquired.
iGaming involves challenges unique to the sector: near-identical competitor content, aggressive link environments, frequent algorithm sensitivity due to YMYL classification, and geo-targeting complexity across regulated markets where the rules change by jurisdiction.
Online pharmacy and healthcare
Health and pharmacy content operates under the same YMYL scrutiny as finance — with the additional complexity of different regulatory frameworks across markets. I have worked on the technical and structural challenges specific to these sites, including the particular indexing and content quality signals Google applies to health queries.
See the online pharmacy SEO case study for a detailed example: +145% traffic, 444 top-3 rankings in 9 months.
Finance
One of Google’s highest-scrutiny categories. E-E-A-T signals matter more here than almost anywhere else — a technically excellent page on a low-authority domain will not rank for competitive financial terms regardless of how well it is optimised. My experience in finance SEO includes working with compliance departments, legal review requirements, and the particular challenge of satisfying both regulatory standards and search intent at the same time.
E-commerce and complex websites
Faceted navigation, URL proliferation, duplicate content at scale, crawl budget problems, multi-market hreflang — the technical SEO challenges that large e-commerce sites generate are different in kind from smaller sites. My background includes complex international architectures and sites with significant JavaScript rendering requirements.
How I work
Direct. Honest. No overhead.
I work remotely with clients worldwide, on a project or retained basis. Most engagements start with a technical SEO audit — a structured analysis of what is actually limiting a site’s performance — followed by a strategy agreement or ongoing support to work through implementation.
I work directly with the people responsible for the website. I do not outsource work or use junior staff to deliver it.
I am direct about what I can and cannot help with. If the honest answer is that you do not need a consultant right now, I will say so. That approach produces better working relationships and better results than telling every prospect what they want to hear. For a fuller look at the tradeoffs, see the guide on SEO consultant vs agency.
Core services
- Technical SEO Audit — structured analysis, clear prioritised brief, actionable findings
- Technical SEO Consulting — ongoing senior support for crawlability, architecture, migrations, CWV
- SEO Strategy — prioritised direction built around search demand and business objectives
- AlphaSERP Tools — free AI-native SEO tools built and used in my own consulting work
Credentials
Background & qualifications
Free initial consultation
Got a search problem
worth solving?
Let’s talk.
No pitch. No obligation. Just a direct conversation about your situation and what would actually help.
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