Meet the speaker: Natalia Witczyk on the art of international SEO

Natalia Witczyk (picture below) is packing for a trip to China as we speak, where she will spend six months working on technical SEO and discovering local board games, albeit with a small break in iGBA Barcelona 2025 for her speaker session. 

The avid traveller traces her passion for adventure back to her childhood in post-communist Poland, a time when a world of opportunities opened up and international travel suddenly became a possibility. It’s no surprise that her favourite subject was geography, a topic that still influences her work today.

After completing a journalism degree in Poland, Witczyk followed her then-boyfriend to the UK in 2014, where she studied Chinese language at the University of Central Lancashire. The course opened her mind to how different languages are constructed and function. Digitally savvy and skilled in communication, she soon landed an SEO role at a marketing company, despite not initially knowing what SEO meant. Looking back, however, Witczyk believes the niche was love at first sight.

“I never thought I would do SEO when I grew up because it wasn’t even a thing,” she says. “But in the end, I do think I’ve ended up in my dream job. The international part is very fascinating to me because it connects my hobbies with my work.”

Ahead of SEO

Now, ten years on from her first SEO job, Witczyk has worked for marketing companies in both the UK and Spain. Two years ago, she took the plunge into self-employment and founded her own international SEO consultancy, Mosquita Digital, where her informal job title is “ahead of SEO.”

According to Witczyk, having strong international SEO strategies is more important than ever, and it isn’t something only big brands can pursue, as many of her clients initially believed. “Even if you just have a website in two languages, you are already doing it without realising it. Bringing international SEO on board as early as you have international ambitions is a very good idea. Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen that often,” she says.

For igaming affiliates in particular, she highlights that now is a crucial window of opportunity to scale websites as more global markets open up: “The tendency this year is that everyone is going to be more niche and more specific, so scaling up in other markets and adapting to alternative opportunities are the ways to go.”

Witczyk is often amazed by the stark differences in SEO strategies across regions and strongly recommends affiliates shift their focus from the overly saturated English language internet to smaller language regions.

“Every tiniest difference in backlinks can make a huge impact in English-speaking countries, while in many other markets with less spoken languages, it’s easy to stand out very quickly – this is all because Google's capacities in understanding languages vary,” she says.

With Google dominating around 90% of global searches, many equate Google with search engines. However, as a “huge indie search engine fan”, Witczyk encourages those in SEO to explore how things work beyond Google, especially in markets where users favour alternative search engines with different crawling and indexing systems. During her upcoming trip, she hopes to deepen her understanding of Baidu, the dominant search engine in China where Google is unavailable, and help Western clients tackle the unique technical barriers.

“Additionally, with everything that’s happening with Google’s anti-monopoly trial, now might be a chance for some smaller search engines to take away market share from Google. I don’t suspect it will be a huge change. I don’t think Google will lose its popularity, but it might slowly diminish its dominance, so it’s something interesting to see,” she adds.

Not just translations

For Witczyk, the biggest challenge when starting a new international SEO project usually comes from overambitious clients who underestimate market competition and ask to “copy strategies from big brands like Apple.”

“You cannot compare yourself to the established players because the bigger the brand is, the more it can get away with. So I think it’s important to match your expectations with reality,” she says.

When selecting a new market to enter, Witczyk advises affiliates to “cross-check factual possibilities of where they can operate and what they can afford” by conducting thorough database research and setting a realistic budget. She emphasises that the best approach when optimising a regional site is to “treat every market as a separate one.”

“You need to run keyword research separately. You need to write unique content, which can obviously be based on the same translation, but then you need to adapt it and localise it,” she explains.

Although Witczyk isn’t entirely opposed to using generative AI for content translation and keyword strategies, she strongly recommends hiring professional translators for international projects. “Letting native speakers do the translation would be the ideal case because they know the product and the language more on the user level. It’s not just translations. It’s about making the content more relevant to your audience,” she says.

While 2025 promises to be an eventful year with increasing regulations and frequent Google updates, Witczyk encourages affiliates not to be deterred by uncertainties.

“The igaming affiliate space needs to keep a close eye on all the ranking data because a lot can happen. Though Google is undoubtedly making it harder to navigate the market, we already know there might be new possibilities elsewhere. I would say 2025 will evolve into many more opportunities.”

Natalia Witczyk will be speaking at “Business Without Borders: Boost Your Affiliate Game with International SEO” on 22 January 2025 at iGBA Barcelona 2025.