I spent five years as a trainee accountant before I ever touched SEO. Reconciling ledgers, chasing numbers that had to balance by five o’clock. It taught me to think in evidence – if you can’t show your work, you don’t actually know the answer, you’re guessing with confidence. That habit never left. Fifteen years later I’m still doing the same thing, just with search data instead of balance sheets.
I’m Gus van der Walt. By day I’m a Senior SEO Specialist & AI Executive at MCM, based in Cape Town. That’s the job title. This site isn’t about the job.
My main site, gusvanderwalt.com, covers the SEO and GEO work – technical audits, AI search, the stuff clients pay for. This one is different. This is where I write about the things that don’t fit neatly into a client deliverable: produc tivity, AI as a tool rather than a trend, and the general experience of trying to pay attention to anything in a world built to fragment it.
Why does an SEO write about productivity? Because the two problems are the same shape.
In SEO, everyone chases rankings and keywords and misses that rankings are half the story – being seen isn’t the same as being useful. In productivity, everyone chases tools and automation and misses that more output isn’t the same as more focus. Both industries have a tell: they optimise for the metric that’s easy to measure instead of the outcome that actually matters. I’ve spent fifteen years watching that mistake happen in search. I’m watching it happen again in how people think about AI and their own attention.
My honest take on AI, since it comes up in nearly everything I write here: it should extend focus, not fragment it. Most of what gets sold as productivity – the notifications, the always-on tooling, the assumption that automating a task automatically buys you deep work – works against the thing it claims to protect. I use AI daily. I’ve built custom GPTs, connected data workflows, automated pieces of my own process. None of that makes me an expert on AI. It makes me a practitioner, which is a different and more useful thing – I’m building with the tools while the ground is still moving, not writing theory from the sideline.
That’s the throughline on this site: human first, platform second. Same principle that’s run through every SEO strategy I’ve built since 2011 – understand the person, not just the mechanism they’re using. It applies whether the platform is Google, ChatGPT, or your own to-do list app.
Outside of work I’m on the streets of Cape Town with a camera most mornings, before the traffic and the noise start. Street photography and SEO have more in common than people expect – both are about noticing what everyone else walks past. I write about that too, when it’s relevant. Mostly it isn’t. Mostly I just write about what’s actually true, based on what I’ve seen work and what I’ve watched fail, without the hedging that makes most content on this topic forgettable.
Two things a week, roughly. Monday and Thursday. No content calendar chasing trends, no posts written because the topic is hot. If it’s here, it’s because I had something to say about it.
Where to from here? Start with whatever’s on the homepage this week. Or don’t – just know that when I write “I think,” I mean it, and when I cite a number, I can show you where it came from.