Alexander Kalinin: From SEO Craft to the Architecture of Scalable Digital Platforms
Alexander Kalinin: From SEO Craft to the Architecture of Scalable Digital Platforms
In today’s tech industry, what matters are not just specialists, but visionaries capable of connecting marketing, analytics, development, and product thinking. Alexander Kalinin is one of these leaders. Having traveled the path from SEO implementer to founder of platform-based digital aggregators and head of his own studio, he confidently belongs to those the industry calls“architects of digital ecosystems.”His current strategy is to build scalable platforms, form strong teams, and move toward international recognition as an expert with outstanding capabilities.
Alexander, when was the moment you felt you had stopped being just an SEO specialist and started thinking like a digital systems architect?
It happened when I left corporate employment and began working independently. Inside large companies, you’re responsible for a specific fragment: a project, a set of queries, reports. But you don’t see the “system.” At some point, I realized that I could—and wanted to—take responsibility for everything as a whole: from the idea and website architecture to monetization, traffic, UI/UX, and the business model. When I started building my own projects, I had to learn everything over again: how CMS work, how databases are built, how data flows are organized. That shift became the turning point: from SEO tasks to thinking as a digital product creator.
Your early years were with Demis Group and other large companies. What exactly became the limitation there that pushed you toward an independent path?
Large SEO companies provide discipline but almost no freedom. Everything runs on a production line: strict regulations, minimal experimentation. You can propose an unconventional solution, but it won’t be supported—no budget, no time, it doesn’t fit into the processes. At some point, I realized: if the result directly depends on me, I want to take full responsibility for it. When you work independently, nobody forbids you from trying, testing, or stepping outside the box. That’s where both professional and financial growth began.
As soon as you went independent, you rather quickly started building a team. What was your main principle in creating Kalinin Studio?
The key was teachability and personal involvement. I understand that no SEO course will produce a ready specialist. So I always hired people who were willing to learn on the go, make mistakes, and turn those mistakes into skills. My role was to convey the logic: to think about the client’s business as if it were your own. Gradually, we expanded: programmers, an account manager, a second SEO analyst. But the core has always been the inner attitude toward a project—as if you’re building it for yourself.
You launched your own platform-based projects—in the niches of rolled metal and a discount aggregator. Why did you choose these directions?
I was looking for niches where you can generate large volumes of organic traffic based on ready-made content. If you take classic content sites, they require thousands of articles, copywriting, which is expensive and time-consuming. Aggregators, on the other hand, are about taking existing data, packaging it better than others, creating a user-friendly interface, and driving traffic. In rolled metal, contextual advertising is very expensive, and competition is high. If an aggregator provides convenient search, filters, and analytical blocks, it quickly attracts 100–200 thousand visitors per month. The same goes for discounts: people search daily for current promotions in stores in their city. The semantic field there is enormous, and everything is demand-driven.
What is the fundamental difference between working on client websites and building your own platforms?
Products are much more complex: starting from the engine architecture to where you source data and how you update it. There’s no “constructor”—you need to design the database schema, category structure, and integration with advertising systems. In client projects, there’s often an existing site, and our job is to optimize it, expand the semantics, and improve rankings. With a product, you act as a CTO: you must understand monetization, the technical model, business processes, analytics. It requires a different level of control and a different type of thinking.
Today everyone talks about neural networks. What have they changed in your work?
Recently, we upgraded our project: we had the task of filling tens of thousands of pages with text. Hiring copywriters would be long and very expensive. Manual generation via a neural network is cheaper, but still takes a lot of time. We developed a solution that connects to the neural network via API: a script automatically checks the page and, if there’s no text, generates it and saves it to the database. This way, pages gradually fill up with content. The key factor here is a well-crafted prompt so that the resulting text is adequate and matches the task.
What mistakes in SEO audits do you see most often from other specialists?
The most common is that people don’t see the strategy and limit themselves to a small set of queries. They don’t build a new site structure, don’t create deep semantics. Plus, they often don’t clean up duplicates, forget to make pages unique, or fail to develop the site further. Sometimes it’s a lack of knowledge, and sometimes just a lack of interest in the project. For me, quality SEO is always about strategy and depth, not just a formal checklist.
How do you build relationships with clients? Are there rules you never break?
First, I give recommendations as if I were building the project for myself. This applies to everything: hosting choice, CMS, development logic. Second, transparency: the client should understand what we are doing and why. And third, long-term vision. It’s important to me to build a system that will work not for 3 months but for years. In this sense, I treat the project almost as my own.
Looking at your journey, what do you consider the most valuable point of professional growth?
That I learned to combine multiple roles. Not just an SEO specialist, but someone who understands developers, can manage a team, design product architecture, and speak with clients in the language of business. That’s probably my main strength: I see a project as a system—completely, from idea to implementation and monetization.
One new question. What does being a technology leader mean to you today?
A leader is not necessarily the person who does everything hands-on. It’s someone who sets the direction, builds a knowledge system, and grows the team. I try to create an environment where, after a year of working with us, a person reaches a completely new professional level. A technology leader is someone who doesn’t hide behind processes, but is ready to try new things and challenge industry templates.
Do you plan to bring your platforms to the international market?
Yes. Right now I’m applying for foreign talent status to gain access to the international environment—especially in the U.S. The market there is on a completely different scale, with different levels of investment in platforms and higher standards. I don’t just want to launch websites—I want to build technological products that can compete globally. In the next couple of years, that’s my main goal.
And the last question: if you imagine your career in 5 years, what do you see as the “next level”?
I’d like to leave behind not just projects, but a culture—perhaps an academy or a lab where young specialists are taught not only SEO but systemic digital thinking: how to build products, how to connect data, technology, and marketing. At the same time, I want to run an international product that ranks at the top in terms of traffic or technology. For me, this is not just business—it’s a contribution to the industry.