On 28 September 2024, a hall at the National Aerospace Science and Technology Park on Shahrah-e-Faisal filled up with marketers, agency owners, freelancers and students for something Pakistan had not had much of: a full day about search, and nothing else.
The SEO International Conference ran from 9am to 5pm. It was organised primarily by Mehboob Ali Shar, with iCreativez Technologies as Platinum Sponsors. Zera Creative came on board as a Gold Sponsor and co-organizer, and our founder Noushad Ranani MC’d the programme alongside co-host Rida Farrukh.
Two years on, it’s worth writing down what actually stuck — and which parts of the conversation have aged well.
Why a search-only event mattered
We get plenty of general tech and startup conferences here. What we almost never get is a room where everyone already knows what a canonical tag does.
Small difference. It changes everything about how a day runs.
At a general marketing event, you lose the first hour to definitions, and the depth of the whole thing gets capped by whoever in the room knows least. SIC didn’t have that problem. Speakers could open where they’d normally be closing. The questions from the floor were better because of it.
A specialist room does something else too. It makes the local stuff visible.
Most of the SEO material Pakistani marketers learn from is written for the US or Europe, and it quietly assumes conditions we don’t have. It assumes card payments work smoothly, so the advice skips right past cash on delivery and how differently people research a purchase when they’re going to hand over money at the door. It assumes a crowded, mature SERP. Plenty of categories here are still thin enough that a small site with genuinely useful pages can beat an established one. It assumes everyone searches in one language, when a lot of what we see arrives in Roman Urdu, or half Urdu and half English in the same query.
You won’t find any of that in an imported guide. It came up within twenty minutes of people sitting down together.
Hosting the Day: Noushad Ranani Alongside Rida Farrukh
Hosting an eight-hour programme is not the same job as speaking at one.
Noushad and Rida Farrukh split MC duties across the day. Introducing speakers, moving the room between sessions, running Q&A, trying to keep a full agenda somewhere close to schedule. Anyone who’s done it knows the schedule stops being real around eleven in the morning. The actual job after that is absorbing the overruns quietly enough that nobody in the audience notices.
You learn things from the podium that you can’t learn from a seat. You see which sessions people lean forward for and which ones they start checking their phones through. You notice when forty people reach for a camera at the same slide. And you hear the same handful of questions come back in every single break, which tells you where the industry actually is far better than any survey would.
What Was on the Agenda
The programme covered what you’d expect. Technical SEO, content, local search, paid media. The sessions that earned their slot were the ones that got specific about doing this work from Pakistan, for clients who are usually sitting somewhere else.
A Panel on Women in Tech
The session people were still talking about in the breaks was the panel on women empowerment and women in technology.
Dr. Lalarukh Ejaz, who directs IBA’s Centre for Entrepreneurial Development, talked about the barriers women run into in this sector, and where those barriers actually sit. Some are built into how institutions work. Some are cultural. Her argument was that self-belief is what gets people through them, and she made it alongside a panel of women drawn from a real spread of industries.
That spread mattered. Panels on this subject here are usually filled entirely from tech, and the conversation gets narrow fast. This one didn’t.
IBA wrote up the session themselves, here.
What We Took Away
The gap was never the tactics
People in that room knew their stuff. They knew the tools, the frameworks, the current advice.
What kept surfacing in conversation was the boring layer underneath. Crawlability. Site structure. Page speed on the connections Pakistani users are actually on, not the ones in the case study. Whether anyone had opened their own Search Console coverage report in the last six months.
You can absolutely have a sharp content strategy sitting on top of a site Google is struggling to crawl. We see it constantly. It’s a frustrating way to lose.
Everyone was measuring rankings. Almost nobody was measuring revenue.
Questions from the floor were about positions. Hardly any were about what those positions were worth.
That gap hasn’t closed much since, and it hurts in both directions. It lets a weak agency look effective by reporting on keywords that were never going to convert anyone. It also makes a good agency look ordinary, because the work that moves money is rarely the work that produces a nice-looking ranking chart.
Content was still being priced, not planned
The question we kept getting was some version of “how many blogs do we need.” Almost nobody asked what their customer actually needs to know before deciding to buy.
That framing gets you volume. Volume was already a losing bet in September 2024. It’s a considerably worse one now.
How Search Has Changed Since September 2024
Two years is a long time in this business, and September 2024 sits on one side of a fairly hard line.
AI Overviews were rolling out then, but no Pakistani client had walked into our office worried about them. Two years on, a real share of informational queries never produce a click at all, and plenty of buyers now start inside an AI assistant instead of a search box. The question we field most often these days is “why doesn’t my brand come up when someone asks ChatGPT.” Nobody was asking that in September 2024.
Some of what got said that day hasn’t held up. There was an assumption running under a lot of the tactical advice, ours included, that traffic would keep showing up as clicks, and that ranking well and being visible were basically the same thing. They’ve come apart. You can sit at position one on a query that sends you nothing.
What has held up is the boring answer. Solid technical foundations and actually knowing your subject still beat volume, and AI has made that more true rather than less. A thin page could always park at position seven and pick up a few visitors a week. It can’t get cited.
Ads stop the moment the money stops. SEO keeps working while you sleep.
– Noushad Ranani, SEO International Conference 2024
What’s Next for Pakistan’s Search Community
What we’d want from the next one: fewer frameworks, more numbers. Somebody putting a real account on screen, saying what they changed and what happened, including the months where nothing happened. That’s the material that’s genuinely hard to get hold of, and a room full of practitioners is about the only place it gets shared honestly.
The search community here is bigger and better than it was in 2024. It deserves more than one day a year. If you’re putting something together in this space, we’d like to hear about it. Get in touch.
About Noushad Ranani
Noushad Ranani is the founder and CEO of Zera Creative, a digital marketing agency in Karachi serving clients across the US, UK, Canada, UAE, Australia and Pakistan. He co-hosted the SEO International Conference 2024. Connect on LinkedIn.
