Before I ever opened Search Console, I spent four years walking groups of strangers through Karnak and Saqqara for Memphis Tours. It is not the background people expect from someone who now runs SEO for a Cairo agency and teaches Generative Engine Optimization. But it is the reason I am reasonably good at this job, and I want to explain why, because the lesson generalizes past my own CV.
The tour guide’s problem is the search engine’s problem
A tour group of thirty people has roughly nine real questions. How old is it. Who built it. Why is that part broken. Where is the bathroom. Is the price on the sign the real price. What should I not miss. Is this safe. What does that symbol mean. When do we eat.
They arrive in an unpredictable order, from different people, phrased differently every time, and about eighty percent of the value you deliver is answering them before anyone has to ask twice. Do that and the group relaxes and listens. Fail and you spend the afternoon repeating yourself while nobody hears the actual history.
That is a search results page. It is also, now, an AI answer. The queries are finite, they cluster, they arrive phrased a hundred different ways, and the site that wins is the one that answered cleanly before the user had to reformulate.
When I moved into digital marketing in 2012, I did not experience keyword research as a new discipline. I experienced it as the tour briefing, written down.
What the first years actually looked like
I want to be honest about the shape of the transition, because “career switch” stories usually get compressed into a single brave decision, and mine was not that.
From 2012 I was doing both. Tourism paid, digital marketing was the thing I was learning at night and on the side, and the Egyptian tourism market in those years made the decision progressively easier. By 2015 I was taking freelance SEO work seriously — that freelance line on my profile has run continuously since November 2015 and still does. In 2021 I took a full-time SEO and Google Ads role at Engosoft Middle East in Saudi Arabia, which was the first time SEO was the whole job rather than most of it. In March 2022 I joined Eye Advertising in Cairo, where I now lead SEO. Along the way there was a stint at Zaher.AI as a query engineer and then SEO head, which is where a lot of my thinking about how retrieval systems actually behave got sharpened.
Roughly: three years overlapping, six years building, and only then a title with SEO in it. If you are two years into a switch and it feels slow, that is what it looks like from the inside.
Three things that transferred, and one that didn’t
Transferred: reading the room before you talk. A guide who launches into the Eighteenth Dynasty before working out that the group is exhausted and hungry has lost them. Most bad SEO content has the same failure — it is technically correct and arrives at the wrong moment in the user’s need. Search intent is not a keyword attribute. It is a guess about what state the person is in.
Transferred: the answer goes first. In a group, you give the answer and then the context, because half the group stops listening after the answer and that is fine — they got what they needed. Written down, this is answer-first structure, and it is now the single highest-leverage formatting decision for both featured snippets and LLM citation. I was doing it verbally for years before I knew it had a name.
Transferred: you are accountable to a real outcome. A tour either went well or it did not, and you found out that day. It made me allergic to metrics that cannot be traced to something a client actually cares about. I have written more than one report explaining that a ranking improvement did not matter.
Did not transfer: the technical layer. Nothing about tourism prepared me for log files, crawl budget, JavaScript rendering, hreflang, or schema. That part I had to learn the ordinary way — slowly, on real sites, breaking things. Anyone selling you a shortcut through it is selling you something.
Where the numbers came from
Across those years I have created or optimized content for over 120 sites, implemented foundational SEO on more than 200, and run extended programmes on more than 40. The average organic traffic increase across client work has been around 590%, and a handful of sites went from effectively zero to over 400,000 monthly organic visits within a year.
I quote those numbers with a caveat I would want quoted back at me: percentage lifts from a low base are the easiest numbers in this industry to make look impressive. A site going from 400 to 2,800 monthly visits is a 600% increase and may be commercially irrelevant. The projects I am actually proud of are the ones where the traffic curve and the revenue curve moved together, and those are the ones documented in my case studies.
What I am doing now
Two things, in a deliberate order.
The first is still classical SEO — technical health, information architecture, content that deserves to rank. The second is GEO: optimizing that same content for how large language models retrieve, summarize and cite. I teach both at Learn N’ Digital, where I run the AI-Assisted SEO & GEO programme.
The order is not decorative. A site an ordinary crawler cannot reach, parse and trust will not be quoted by an answer engine either. Every retrieval system in production is still standing on the same foundations, and I have watched a lot of people try to skip step one because step two is more interesting to talk about.
For anyone considering the same switch
The industry is unusually open to people arriving from elsewhere, and the reason is that SEO is not really one discipline. It is editorial judgement, technical debugging, statistics, and persuasion, sharing an office. Whatever you did before, some part of it is a component. Teachers understand information hierarchy. Journalists understand the lede. Salespeople understand objection handling. Tour guides understand that the question is going to be asked again in twenty minutes by someone who was standing right there.
What you cannot skip is the boring technical foundation and the years of doing it on real sites where being wrong costs someone money.
Amgad Salem is SEO Head at Eye Advertising in Cairo and SEO & GEO Instructor at Learn N’ Digital. You can review his portfolio and client case studies, or connect with him on LinkedIn.
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