Siddhesh Assawa profile photo 1 on Tal

Siddhesh Assawa

Head of SEO & Marketing Side Quests At Headout

Greater Bengaluru Area

11+ years of work experience

Headout
Oct 20251 yr 1 moPresent

• Own the global SEO mandate across 250+ domains, with direct responsibility for organic revenue growth • Work cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Content, Localisation, Platform, and Strategy teams • Ensure all launches are SEO-compliant via: Automated QA agents Uptime and regression-monitoring bots Pre- and post-release validation frameworks • Build and ship technical fixes directly: Rendering, crawl budget, indexing, schema, internal linking, and infra-level improvements AI-assisted MVPs to test and validate marketing solutions before full rollout • Create and execute quarterly organic growth strategies, including: Attraction-level prioritisation Performance diagnostics for existing inventory Mission-critical bug resolution Scaling content creation without compromising intent or quality • Act as the internal SEO “final gate” — balancing growth velocity with long-term search resilience
Welocalize
Sep 20234 mosDec 2023

While at Headout, I wanted to understand how search works from the inside, so I signed up as a search quality rater through Welocalize, one of Google's contractors. I only managed about two months alongside my full-time job, but it changed how I think about ranking. I learned how raters judge page quality and site quality, how main content (MC) is separated from everything else on a page, how "needs met" is assessed, and that human ratings are one of the ways Google checks whether its algorithms are returning good results. That sent me down the retrieval rabbit hole: BM25, TF-IDF, document indexing, vector embeddings and cosine similarity. I went deeper still after Google's internal documentation leaked in 2024, and I've applied that thinking to how we structure and evaluate pages at Headout.
Headout
Jun 20232 yrs 6 mosNov 2025

• Improve distribution to improve the brand recall • Working with Product teams to ship features like UGC to improve the user experience
Headout
Jun 20221 yr 2 mosJul 2023

Leading SEO for 150 domains to achieve $100 Mn Organic GBV in 2023. • Creating product-oriented solutions that improve acquisition by making the product search-friendly and enhancing the on-platform experience for all domains • Strategizing country-level opportunities basis user demand, partner supply, and competitor assessment • Simplifying publishing workflows to reduce TATs while ensuring content satisfies user intent
Performics India
Nov 20218 mosJun 2022

I went from doing the work to running it. A team of five reported to me (three analysts, two content writers), and I handled multiple clients at once. Nykaa Fashion This was my pet project, and I led it end-to-end while also advising the other Nykaa properties: Nykaa.com, Beautybook and Nykaa Man. It's where I learned how to work with product and tech teams. The Nykaa Fashion team had forgotten to migrate the SEO elements to the new CMS, so the React Helmet data was empty, and none of the titles, descriptions or tags came across. A site that had been getting 80,000 sessions a month fell overnight to only branded traffic. Working with some brilliant PMs (Akash and Udit), we rebuilt the content and restored every SEO element. Then we started building ecommerce category and collection pages programmatically, in a hub-and-spoke model. Within 8 months, monthly organic sessions were up 16X from 80,000 to over 1 million, and organic's share of revenue went from 6% to 27%. P&G I was the account manager for eight P&G brands across Australia, India, the Philippines and Thailand, in haircare, skincare and baby care, including Pantene, Head & Shoulders, Olay and Gillette. I also helped the London team serve European clients. I ran integrated campaigns with Publicis's Power of One team. I led client servicing; Pushkara ran paid, the content writers, and a junior analyst handled SEO. The client liaison sat in Singapore, the clients were spread across Sydney, Singapore, Mumbai and Sweden, and my managing partner Kunal Shah was in London, so I worked across all those time zones. One shared tech team (Mindtree) served every brand, and this is where I first raised a Jira ticket. In an integrated campaign, SEO's role is to improve traffic, quality scores and landing page experience. Over about 6 months, we cut blended CPCs by 15% and grew organic traffic by 250%. Kunal. During my time at Performics, he felt like my harshest critic, and he pushed me harder than anyone.
Performics India
Aug 20201 yr 4 mosNov 2021

Mumbai

This is where I stopped being just an SEO and started working on everything around it. Clients. I handled a lot of them. One was Pernod Ricard India, the second-largest alcohol company in the world, where I worked on Whiskypedia with a content writer, Muhammad. Our goal was to have a ball of a time making content. I learned the craft properly: whisky vs whiskey, bourbon vs Scotch vs Irish, why a double malt isn't "better" than a single malt, and what a 12-year-old blend is next to a 16-year-old single malt. I bought a mixologist kit, enrolled in a course, and started an Instagram page on cocktails. I no longer drink, but the knowledge is still on the tip of my tongue. Pitches. I started working with the growth team on pitches for prospective clients, handling the technical solutioning, and for some of them I built the technical solution entirely myself. The most memorable was TikTok. With Gaurav Jhala, Kunal Shah and Anurag, I worked 40 hours straight: building the pitch from 5 pm to 7 am in the office, showering, presenting at ByteDance India at 10 am, lunch, back to the office until 9 pm, then home. Pitches I built solutions for and we won include TikTok, Hello India (ByteDance), ShareChat, Uniqlo India and ICICI Lombard. Technical CoE (alongside client work). My pitch role grew into the Technical Center of Excellence role. It was a mark of trust and a way to grow, on top of my client load. Ten of us, under Ajitesh, upskilled an SEO department of about 100 people on crawling, rendering and page speed, and on what an agency's recommendations should look like beyond a Lighthouse dump. We ran a session for the whole floor every other month. To explain to others why lazy-loading everything on first load hurts page speed, I had to go a level deeper myself, and that's where most of my technical learning accelerated.
Performics India
Jul 20182 yrs 2 mosAug 2020

Mumbai Area, India

I joined straight out of college in a batch of 10 and got put into SEO, partly by luck and partly because I was good at absorbing math and tech. After 15 days of training, I was sent to sit at a client location. I was the only one in my batch who was, and the client was Republic TV. My first corporate job was inside their newsroom in Worli, watching how news gets made every day. My job was to grow Republic World's editorial traffic, train their editors on SEO best practices, and help their product team build things like a live blog solution and article schema. I owe a lot to Jinesh (my manager) and Neeraj (my guide), who took me under their wings and taught me technical SEO and how to survive in a newsroom. At one point, I was thrown out of the studio over a small disagreement by its founder. I found it funny, and we still retained the client. We later won the contract for their evergreen, non-political content, and I ended up being the most-viewed writer on the site. I wrote about things people were clearly searching for that nobody was publishing, and lottery results were the best example. Kerala results are declared at 2 pm, but I noticed they reached the official server a few minutes earlier. I built a template and published the results before the official site did, so when traffic spiked at 2 pm the page was already live, cached and indexed. At its peak, we got around a lakh concurrent readers every day at 2 pm. Other news publishers copied the format. I also started the horoscope section. More traffic means more ad inventory sold, so this directly moved revenue. Election counting days were my favourite. For the 2019 Lok Sabha election, we built programs and automations to run live blogs across all 543 constituencies, and I was in at 6 am and out at 9 pm. As a university quiz medalist, I loved learning how news travels from the ground to a screen, and how fast it can go.
Jun 20155 yrs 5 mosOct 2020

Mumbai Metropolitan Region

I started this with Sanket in college after we noticed how messy it was for colleges and corporates to buy sports goods for their events. We became the one-stop supplier for equipment, jerseys and clothing for college sports fests and corporate sports days. The B2B side crossed ₹10 lakh a year in GMV. In 2018, I launched the D2C side, TrendoCraftz.in, while working at Publicis, and did everything myself. I built the WordPress site, learned WooCommerce, listed inventory, set up payments via Cashfree and shipping through Shiprocket, ran Facebook and Instagram ads, set up the GTM tags and the Facebook pixel, handled warehousing and shipping, and managed post-purchase. D2C sold about ₹5 lakh of jerseys a year. I also got into dropshipping for other sellers. What it taught me: running a live store showed me what actually breaks, and my recommendations at Publicis got much better because I had shipped [the full performance marketing stack] the things I was recommending. What went wrong: two people with full-time jobs were doing physical operations and procurement, and it was too much. Worse, we pre-bought jerseys in bulk, and you can't buy only the sizes that sell. I still have 50+ jerseys at home that I give away for free, including a size S 2017 Manchester United one that nobody wants. My mother is not a fan of the clutter. We shut it down in 2020. Margins were thin, and we spent our time better on our full-time careers. https://web.archive.org/web/20191126044624/http://trendocraftz.com/
GitHub
@sidass26
Personal portfoliosid.assawa.com

Siddhesh’s AI Stack

deepseek
deepseek
replit
replit
claudecode
claudecode
hermesagent
hermesagent
OpenRouter
OpenRouter

Education

Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology

Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Electronics and Telecommunications

Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology

20144 yrs2018

Join Siddhesh and 10k+ other professionals on

Tal Boss

Tal is the app where bosses meet engineers & builders directly, without middlemen

Download Tal Boss

Siddhesh Assawa on Tal

Headline

Head of SEO & Marketing Side Quests At Headout

About

Distribution is being rewritten. At Headout, I lead SEO and co-own organic revenue planning across 250+ global domains. Yes. 250. To manage that scale, we build our tools: page auditors, internal dashboards, and root-cause-analysis agents wired directly into our analytics stack. But the part of my job that doesn't fit the title: every time Headout opens a new acquisition channel, I'm the one who incubates it — defining the playbook, setting up processes, clearing legal, finance, and data blockers, and partnering with Product, CRM, PR, creator partnerships, and paid marketing until it's a channel someone can own. My job, in one line: keep increasing the surface area where Headout meets customers. My depth is SEO - technical, programmatic, product-led. My range is everything around it: → Made SEO invisible by design — every release ships compliant by default, with automated QA agents catching regressions before humans notice → Stepped outside the mandate when growth needed it — built our anti-phishing program, partnered with TikTok and Google on events, helped crack B2B deals → Learned channel economics the hard way: ran a one-man e-comm operation in college — sourcing, Meta and search ads, fulfilment, customer support (receipts: https://web.archive.org/web/20191126044624/http://trendocraftz.com/) Before Headout: Business Manager at Performics (Publicis Groupe), winning mandates for TikTok India, P&G APAC (Haircare, Skincare, Femcare), Uniqlo, and ICICI Lombard, and training teams on technical SEO. I'm at my best where growth doesn't have an owner yet — the zero-to-one channel, the unsexy infrastructure, the problem nobody's mandate covers.

Location

Greater Bengaluru Area

AI stack

deepseek

replit

claudecode

hermesagent

OpenRouter

Work experience

Head of SEO at Headout, Oct 2025 - Present · 1 yr 1 mo, • Own the global SEO mandate across 250+ domains, with direct responsibility for organic revenue growth • Work cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Content, Localisation, Platform, and Strategy teams • Ensure all launches are SEO-compliant via: Automated QA agents Uptime and regression-monitoring bots Pre- and post-release validation frameworks • Build and ship technical fixes directly: Rendering, crawl budget, indexing, schema, internal linking, and infra-level improvements AI-assisted MVPs to test and validate marketing solutions before full rollout • Create and execute quarterly organic growth strategies, including: Attraction-level prioritisation Performance diagnostics for existing inventory Mission-critical bug resolution Scaling content creation without compromising intent or quality • Act as the internal SEO “final gate” — balancing growth velocity with long-term search resilience

Search Quality Rater at Welocalize, Sep 2023 - Dec 2023 · 4 mos, While at Headout, I wanted to understand how search works from the inside, so I signed up as a search quality rater through Welocalize, one of Google's contractors. I only managed about two months alongside my full-time job, but it changed how I think about ranking. I learned how raters judge page quality and site quality, how main content (MC) is separated from everything else on a page, how "needs met" is assessed, and that human ratings are one of the ways Google checks whether its algorithms are returning good results. That sent me down the retrieval rabbit hole: BM25, TF-IDF, document indexing, vector embeddings and cosine similarity. I went deeper still after Google's internal documentation leaked in 2024, and I've applied that thinking to how we structure and evaluate pages at Headout.

Senior Manager, Marketing at Headout, Jun 2023 - Nov 2025 · 2 yrs 6 mos, • Improve distribution to improve the brand recall • Working with Product teams to ship features like UGC to improve the user experience

SEO Manager at Headout, Jun 2022 - Jul 2023 · 1 yr 2 mos, Leading SEO for 150 domains to achieve $100 Mn Organic GBV in 2023. • Creating product-oriented solutions that improve acquisition by making the product search-friendly and enhancing the on-platform experience for all domains • Strategizing country-level opportunities basis user demand, partner supply, and competitor assessment • Simplifying publishing workflows to reduce TATs while ensuring content satisfies user intent

Business Manager at Performics India, Nov 2021 - Jun 2022 · 8 mos, I went from doing the work to running it. A team of five reported to me (three analysts, two content writers), and I handled multiple clients at once. Nykaa Fashion This was my pet project, and I led it end-to-end while also advising the other Nykaa properties: Nykaa.com, Beautybook and Nykaa Man. It's where I learned how to work with product and tech teams. The Nykaa Fashion team had forgotten to migrate the SEO elements to the new CMS, so the React Helmet data was empty, and none of the titles, descriptions or tags came across. A site that had been getting 80,000 sessions a month fell overnight to only branded traffic. Working with some brilliant PMs (Akash and Udit), we rebuilt the content and restored every SEO element. Then we started building ecommerce category and collection pages programmatically, in a hub-and-spoke model. Within 8 months, monthly organic sessions were up 16X from 80,000 to over 1 million, and organic's share of revenue went from 6% to 27%. P&G I was the account manager for eight P&G brands across Australia, India, the Philippines and Thailand, in haircare, skincare and baby care, including Pantene, Head & Shoulders, Olay and Gillette. I also helped the London team serve European clients. I ran integrated campaigns with Publicis's Power of One team. I led client servicing; Pushkara ran paid, the content writers, and a junior analyst handled SEO. The client liaison sat in Singapore, the clients were spread across Sydney, Singapore, Mumbai and Sweden, and my managing partner Kunal Shah was in London, so I worked across all those time zones. One shared tech team (Mindtree) served every brand, and this is where I first raised a Jira ticket. In an integrated campaign, SEO's role is to improve traffic, quality scores and landing page experience. Over about 6 months, we cut blended CPCs by 15% and grew organic traffic by 250%. Kunal. During my time at Performics, he felt like my harshest critic, and he pushed me harder than anyone.

SEO Associate at Performics India, Aug 2020 - Nov 2021 · 1 yr 4 mos, Mumbai, This is where I stopped being just an SEO and started working on everything around it. Clients. I handled a lot of them. One was Pernod Ricard India, the second-largest alcohol company in the world, where I worked on Whiskypedia with a content writer, Muhammad. Our goal was to have a ball of a time making content. I learned the craft properly: whisky vs whiskey, bourbon vs Scotch vs Irish, why a double malt isn't "better" than a single malt, and what a 12-year-old blend is next to a 16-year-old single malt. I bought a mixologist kit, enrolled in a course, and started an Instagram page on cocktails. I no longer drink, but the knowledge is still on the tip of my tongue. Pitches. I started working with the growth team on pitches for prospective clients, handling the technical solutioning, and for some of them I built the technical solution entirely myself. The most memorable was TikTok. With Gaurav Jhala, Kunal Shah and Anurag, I worked 40 hours straight: building the pitch from 5 pm to 7 am in the office, showering, presenting at ByteDance India at 10 am, lunch, back to the office until 9 pm, then home. Pitches I built solutions for and we won include TikTok, Hello India (ByteDance), ShareChat, Uniqlo India and ICICI Lombard. Technical CoE (alongside client work). My pitch role grew into the Technical Center of Excellence role. It was a mark of trust and a way to grow, on top of my client load. Ten of us, under Ajitesh, upskilled an SEO department of about 100 people on crawling, rendering and page speed, and on what an agency's recommendations should look like beyond a Lighthouse dump. We ran a session for the whole floor every other month. To explain to others why lazy-loading everything on first load hurts page speed, I had to go a level deeper myself, and that's where most of my technical learning accelerated.

Search Engine Optimization Analyst at Performics India, Jul 2018 - Aug 2020 · 2 yrs 2 mos, Mumbai Area, India, I joined straight out of college in a batch of 10 and got put into SEO, partly by luck and partly because I was good at absorbing math and tech. After 15 days of training, I was sent to sit at a client location. I was the only one in my batch who was, and the client was Republic TV. My first corporate job was inside their newsroom in Worli, watching how news gets made every day. My job was to grow Republic World's editorial traffic, train their editors on SEO best practices, and help their product team build things like a live blog solution and article schema. I owe a lot to Jinesh (my manager) and Neeraj (my guide), who took me under their wings and taught me technical SEO and how to survive in a newsroom. At one point, I was thrown out of the studio over a small disagreement by its founder. I found it funny, and we still retained the client. We later won the contract for their evergreen, non-political content, and I ended up being the most-viewed writer on the site. I wrote about things people were clearly searching for that nobody was publishing, and lottery results were the best example. Kerala results are declared at 2 pm, but I noticed they reached the official server a few minutes earlier. I built a template and published the results before the official site did, so when traffic spiked at 2 pm the page was already live, cached and indexed. At its peak, we got around a lakh concurrent readers every day at 2 pm. Other news publishers copied the format. I also started the horoscope section. More traffic means more ad inventory sold, so this directly moved revenue. Election counting days were my favourite. For the 2019 Lok Sabha election, we built programs and automations to run live blogs across all 543 constituencies, and I was in at 6 am and out at 9 pm. As a university quiz medalist, I loved learning how news travels from the ground to a screen, and how fast it can go.

Co-Founder at Trendocraftz, Jun 2015 - Oct 2020 · 5 yrs 5 mos, Mumbai Metropolitan Region, I started this with Sanket in college after we noticed how messy it was for colleges and corporates to buy sports goods for their events. We became the one-stop supplier for equipment, jerseys and clothing for college sports fests and corporate sports days. The B2B side crossed ₹10 lakh a year in GMV. In 2018, I launched the D2C side, TrendoCraftz.in, while working at Publicis, and did everything myself. I built the WordPress site, learned WooCommerce, listed inventory, set up payments via Cashfree and shipping through Shiprocket, ran Facebook and Instagram ads, set up the GTM tags and the Facebook pixel, handled warehousing and shipping, and managed post-purchase. D2C sold about ₹5 lakh of jerseys a year. I also got into dropshipping for other sellers. What it taught me: running a live store showed me what actually breaks, and my recommendations at Publicis got much better because I had shipped [the full performance marketing stack] the things I was recommending. What went wrong: two people with full-time jobs were doing physical operations and procurement, and it was too much. Worse, we pre-bought jerseys in bulk, and you can't buy only the sizes that sell. I still have 50+ jerseys at home that I give away for free, including a size S 2017 Manchester United one that nobody wants. My mother is not a fan of the clutter. We shut it down in 2020. Margins were thin, and we spent our time better on our full-time careers. https://web.archive.org/web/20191126044624/http://trendocraftz.com/

Education

Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Electronics and Telecommunications, Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology

Public links

github: https://github.com/sidass26

sid.assawa.com: https://sid.assawa.com/