About Ivan So — SEO & Generative AI Consultant

Background & SEO Career

Ivan So is an SEO consultant and digital marketing specialist who has worked in search engine optimisation since 2004. The career began during a period when Google PageRank was the dominant ranking signal, meta keyword tags still carried weight, and link directories served as a primary off-page SEO tactic. Over two decades, the practice has evolved through Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, RankBrain, BERT, the Helpful Content Update, and the current AI-driven search paradigm — and each algorithm shift has informed the methodology applied to client projects.

Over 50 websites have been personally built and tested to validate SEO hypotheses before recommending strategies to clients. These test sites cover affiliate content, local service businesses, e-commerce catalogues, and multilingual portals. This empirical approach produces data-backed recommendations rather than theory-based speculation — a methodology that has delivered measurable ranking improvements across 400+ client projects.

Ivan graduated from the University of Southampton (2000-2003) and founded HDcourse, a digital consulting and education company. The client portfolio spans 100+ SMEs and listed companies from Australia, Hong Kong, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Project scope ranges from technical SEO audits and keyword strategy to full-scale WordPress builds, multi-channel digital campaigns, and AI workflow implementation.

The current focus is the Australian market — local SEO for service businesses targeting suburb-level search queries, national SEO campaigns for e-commerce and SaaS companies, and generative AI integration for businesses scaling content production and operational efficiency.

Generative AI Expertise: ChatGPT, Claude AI & Gemini

Generative AI — powered by large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT (OpenAI GPT-4o), Claude AI (Anthropic), Gemini (Google DeepMind), and open-source alternatives — represents the largest shift in digital marketing since mobile-first indexing. Ivan has integrated these models into client workflows since early 2023, covering SEO content production, email marketing automation, customer service chatbots, document processing, and internal knowledge management systems.

The approach to AI mirrors the approach to SEO: empirical and outcome-focused. Each AI implementation is measured against defined KPIs — content output velocity, editorial time reduction, customer resolution rate, or cost per acquisition. Deliverables include custom GPTs, AI-powered content pipelines with human-in-the-loop review, prompt engineering frameworks, and team training programs on responsible AI adoption.

The AI landscape evolves weekly — agentic AI, multimodal models, AI-powered search (Google AI Overviews, Perplexity AI, Bing Copilot), and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) are reshaping how customers discover and interact with businesses. Udemy courses and corporate training programs on generative AI for business are updated continuously to reflect current model capabilities, pricing, and enterprise integration patterns.

Speaking, Teaching & Published Work

Ivan is a recurring speaker at WordCamp conferences across Asia-Pacific — including WordCamp Hong Kong, WordCamp Singapore, and WordCamp Kuala Lumpur. Organiser roles include main organiser of WordCamp Hong Kong and co-organiser of the Hong Kong WordPress Meetup and Elementor Meetup.

Published work includes 5 Amazon bestselling books on digital marketing topics. Udemy instructor profile has accumulated 17,000+ enrolled students across courses covering SEO, WordPress, email marketing, and generative AI for business. Corporate training has been delivered to 40+ organisations including JobsDB (SEEK), Canon, and industry associations such as IAB Hong Kong.