Alex Johnson's Linkedin Analytics

I have been in the digital marketing space for over 20 years now. Starting my entrepreneurial journey in the North East of England, I was one of the founding members of the Design Studio, within the outstanding Lord Lawson of Beamish Academy, based in Durham. With 7 years experience of running a design studio under my belt, in 2008 I began freelancing as a web designer and a digital marketeer. In 2013, a chance to move to Dubai was too good to miss. The opportunity to set up new company, producing artificial plants and trees, saw me take a step back from freelance work and learn the ropes of company management, tree building and warehouse logistics as well as sales and delivering projects to well known, huge global companies. While still keeping true to my passion for marketing, I helped grow the Foliages brand from a small villa showroom in Jumeirah, into a multi million dollar manufacturer in Dubai Investment Park. In 2015, I stepped down from the day to day running of Foliages and went back to building a digital marketing agency. It was during this period I started my side hustle, pursuing my life long passion for rugby, as well as creating a playground to experiment and perfect my search engine optimisation techniques. Yalla Rugby began as an informational website, to help fellow expats moving to the United Arab Emirates, find local rugby clubs to join. The website exploded and soon became the only place for up-to-date rugby news, images, results and fixtures and is often featured in The National newspaper and the Asia Rugby website. The brand also became the official media partner to the UAE Rugby Federation, who are the governing body for the sport in the UAE. Before Covid-19 hit the planet, the Yalla Rugby website would frequently attract over 20K unique users per month. With no rugby fixtures to report on, and undeterred by the pandemic, the website has still continued to thrive, with an online shop and virtual league to keep the rugby fans entertained. It is still the leading website in the region for Gulf rugby information and frequently referred to as the ‘Home of Gulf Rugby’. I currently run my successful SEO Agency - Search Shack, which sees client’s websites climb the ranks of Google Search Engine, as well as continuing to develop Wordpress websites as an additional service.