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I closed a chapter in 2026: nearly four years at Groove Digital, from employee number three in a shared office to the SEO strategist behind a dozen-plus accounts across three continents, right as the agency merged into a larger group.
I'm writing this up not as a client case study — there's no single client here, no before-and-after chart. It's the track record behind why I now work the way I do: as one senior operator in-house, instead of a team you rent by the month.
Groove Digital started as three people in a shared office. By the time I left, it had grown into a 100m² studio, and in January 2026 it merged with Chase Marketing and Neuro — a CRO agency — to become Unify, a combined performance-marketing group.
I joined executing other people's campaigns. I left architecting the systems other people executed — leading accounts, owning the SEO function end to end, and tying it directly to revenue rather than rankings for their own sake.
Groove Digital didn't hire people who wanted to follow a playbook. It built people who could write one. Leading through chaos, shipping under pressure, and thinking like the business depends on it — not like a vendor waiting for the next brief — is not something a course teaches. You get it by being handed more than you're ready for and figuring it out anyway.
The lesson I took out of four years running SEO for a dozen-plus accounts: most businesses don't need an agency's overhead, they need the one strategic operator who used to sit inside one. Someone who can execute, architect the roadmap, lead the account and own the full funnel from rankings to revenue — without the account-manager layer in between.
That's what I built at Groove Digital. It's what I bring in-house now.
If you're building a team that needs someone who can execute, strategise and scale — or you're deciding between hiring an agency and hiring the person who used to run one — let's talk.
Mohamed Sahardid — SEO & GEO Specialist
mo@sahardid.com · LinkedIn