Author
Roman Makuev

Roman Makuev

Founder & Search Architect, Neon

Founder of Neon. Award-winning digital experience designer and SEO specialist with 10+ years in product design and UI/UX, and creator of custom analytics platforms — like SEO Algorithm — built for high-scale interfaces.

I've spent the last decade at the intersection of search and engineering — moving from classic on-page SEO into the mechanics of how modern retrieval systems actually read, rank, and cite content. My work centers on algorithmic semantics: vector distance, passage-level information gain, entity coverage, and the retrieval constraints that decide which pages get surfaced in AI answers.

At Neon I architect the systems behind that work. That means designing crawlable, render-safe front-ends, mapping search demand into information architecture before a line of code is written, and building the analytics platform — Algorithm — that lets our clients see what search engines see in real time, instead of a month-old export from someone else’s crawler.

Proof & Digital Footprint

Where the work lives. Profiles, platforms, and published research you can verify independently.

Known Projects & Research
Proprietary SEO intelligence for agencies and in-house teams — link quality, information gain, content scoring, and visibility across Google and AI search.
Why DR breaks as a link-vetting metric, and the on-page signals that actually predict whether a backlink is worth pursuing.

Latest Articles & Research

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Guide

Mobile SEO Checklist

A mobile SEO checklist is a set of checks that confirm the mobile version of a site can be crawled, rendered, indexed, and used on a phone, in that order. Since Google finished the move to mobile-first indexing, the mobile version is the one in the index, and whatever Googlebot Smartphone fetches at your URL […]

Analysis

Website Rankings Loss Audit: The Update Is a Date, Not a Diagnosis

The call usually starts the same way: “We got hit by the update.” A drop in Search Console, a date that lines up with something on the Search Status Dashboard, and a conclusion. Then the decomposition shows brand queries flat, non-brand down across one folder, and the folder’s canonical tags pointing at a staging domain […]

Guide

What to Do After Keyword Research: The Spreadsheet Isn’t the Plan

After keyword research, the next step is clustering. Group the list by which queries return the same URLs, and a few thousand rows become a few dozen intents; everything that follows works on those intents, not on the raw export. The last market entry I sized came in at 1,400 rows. Clustered, it was 30 […]

Analysis

301 Redirect SEO Penalty: The Redirect Isn’t Punished. It’s Ignored.

A site gets “pushed” through a redirect pipe: a few thousand forum and web 2.0 links aimed at a layer of throwaway domains, each of those 301’d into the money site. Three months later nothing has happened. No drop, no manual action in Search Console, no warning of any kind. And no growth. The owner […]

Guide

Technical SEO Audit: Reading the List, Not Generating It

Any tool generates the 170-issue list. The audit is reading it — which failures on the path from discovery to retrieval actually bind.

Guide

B2B SEO Audit: Why Your Traffic Isn’t Reaching the Pipeline

Rankings up, pipeline flat. The audit that finds why good traffic never becomes deals.

Guide

International SEO Audit: Where the Top-Ranking Guides Stop

What an international audit actually checks — and where the top-ranking guides stop.

Guide

Ecommerce SEO Audit: How to Triage a Store’s URLs

Millions of URLs, and almost none should rank. An audit as triage across a system, not a page inspection.

Guide

Enterprise SEO Audit: The Template Is the Unit, Not the Page

At enterprise scale you audit the template, not the page — one fix ships across thousands of URLs.