Gayan Rathnayake · Sri Lanka, and remote

I Open Google Search Console for Fun.

Black-and-white portrait of Gayan Rathnayake

Technical audits, local search and web analytics at Vendo Digital, with automation underneath so the repetitive work runs itself. What I care about most is the part after the audit: whether the fix shipped, whether the number moved, and whether it can be proven.

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Focus: Technical SEO, local search, Google Business Profile, SEO automation
Tools: Search Console, GA4, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Screaming Frog, WordPress, Apps Script, Claude Code
Industries: Dental and healthcare, e-commerce, local service businesses

What does an SEO actually do?

Everyone has met an SEO who sells dashboards. Since the job title covers everything from spam to strategy, here's my take on what the work really is.

Fixing it for real

An audit that ends in a slide deck is homework, not work. The job is the shipped change: the rewritten title, the corrected schema, the redirect that actually returns 301. If it didn't reach the site, it didn't happen.

Data over gut feelings

Every claim should trace back to Search Console, GA4 or a crawl. Insights, not assumptions. When a number can't be verified, it doesn't go in the report, however good it would look there.

Local is won on details

Map-pack rankings are decided by unglamorous things: the right GBP category, review velocity and replies, and content that survives health content policies most people don't know exist.

Automate the repetition, never the judgement

Review replies, audit checklists and backlink monitoring can run on pipelines. Deciding what matters can't. The craft is knowing where that line sits.

Search is changing faster than at any point since I joined it, and the boring fundamentals are quietly becoming the differentiator. Sites that are technically clean, locally trusted and provably improving win in both the old results and the new AI ones.

More of this on the blog →

technical local content automation

Where I come from

It started with a question that wouldn't leave me alone: why do some websites pull in thousands of visitors while others stay invisible? Chasing the answer pulled me from a marketing degree at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura into SEO, web analytics and the mechanics of search.

Professionally it moved quickly: an internship at Antyra Solutions became a full-time digital marketing seat within six months. Then Vendo Digital, a UK agency, took me on as an SEO Executive, working remotely from Sri Lanka on dental practices and service businesses across Britain. Intern to UK-agency SEO in fourteen months; curiosity turns out to be a decent career strategy.

Along the way I kept building the tools I wished existed: review reply pipelines, audit engines, backlink verifiers. Part marketer, part builder, fully convinced the two belong together. Off the clock I'm on the badminton court, recharging between crawls.

Companies I've worked with

Vendo Digital UK Antyra Solutions LK

Latest writing

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