Top SEO Experts from the Netherlands

The Netherlands has firmly established itself as a vibrant hub for digital marketing innovation, with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) being a particularly dynamic field. Within this competitive landscape, a cadre of experts consistently pushes the boundaries of SEO strategy, technical execution, and forward-thinking adaptation. This report profiles seven such leading figures from the Netherlands: Simon Vreeman, Julian Aijal, Koen Leemans, Arnout Hellemans, Jarno van Driel, David Iwanow, and Linda Hogenes. Their diverse backgrounds, specialized expertise, and distinct philosophies collectively illuminate the sophistication and future trajectory of SEO in the region and offer valuable perspectives for the global digital marketing community.

Together they cover the full spectrum of the profession: in-house SEO specialists at major publishers and retailers, independent SEO consultants, and SEO strategists who have led search for global brands. And their work no longer stops at the classic search results. Most of them are also shaping how search changes with AI, through Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and Artificial Intelligence Optimization (AIO).

Each expert has a dedicated page with a full profile and Q&A. For broader context, read the articles we have written, such as Agentic commerce and News SEO in the age of AI and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Research Report. Four of these experts were at brightonSEO on 8 and 9 October 2026.

Last updated: October 2026.

Simon Vreeman

Navigating the Intersection of Growth, AI, and Technical Marketing

Freelance Growth & Technical Marketing Advisor and Growth Advisor at Eidra, Simon Vreeman excels in Growth & Technical Marketing, blending CRO, SEO, Web Analytics, and AI. He builds AI tools and agent-ready websites, champions becoming a "semantic architect for the AI age," and is a community speaker at Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Europe 2026.

Read the full profile and Q&A with Simon Vreeman

Julian Aijal

Merging Technical Acumen with Strategic SEO Growth

Senior SEO Specialist at DPG Media , Julian Aijal merges his front-end development background with technical SEO, web performance, and publisher SEO. He drove significant organic growth at DPG Media and authored key TNW articles on Schema and Knowledge Graphs, focusing on user-centric, high-performing sites. Since 2026 he is also Website Strategist for TEDxAmsterdam and builds AI tools like PvdAI.

Read the full profile and Q&A with Julian Aijal

Koen Leemans

Pioneering SEO Innovation through A/B Testing and Edge Technologies

SEO Innovation Lead at Follo Agency (formerly OrangeValley) and Lumenlab, Koen Leemans specializes in technical SEO, A/B testing, and Edge SEO. He develops tools like the "SEO A/B Test Analyzer" and the "AIO Impact Analyzer" to democratize data-driven experimentation and advocates Edge SEO for rapid, validated optimization deployment.

Read the full profile and Q&A with Koen Leemans

Arnout Hellemans

Query Satisfaction as a Business Strategy

Freelance SEO, PPC and analytics consultant at OnlineMarkethink, Arnout Hellemans champions user-first SEO, CRO, and analytics, focusing on "query satisfaction." He uses tools like Sitebulb strategically and discusses how his ADHD enhances his analytical, puzzle-solving approach to holistic optimization.

Read the full profile and Q&A with Arnout Hellemans

Jarno van Driel

Demystifying Structured Data with a Semantic Web Veteran

Independent Structured Data and Semantic SEO Consultant from Rotterdam, Jarno van Driel has worked on the web since 1998 and participated in schema.org since 2013. Publishing as The Invisible Graph and teaching at SEO Pro Academy, he urges SEOs to read the primary sources instead of the hype.

Read the full profile and Q&A with Jarno van Driel

David Iwanow

Scaling Search Strategy Across Global Brands and Platforms

Founder of The Lost Agency and former Head of Search at Reckitt, Amsterdam-based David Iwanow has led search at Marktplaats, Schibsted, Danone, and Reckitt. He specializes in global SEO at scale, ASO, and reporting automation, grounded in measuring before deciding.

Read the full profile and Q&A with David Iwanow

Linda Hogenes

Leading In-House SEO at E-commerce Scale

Head of SEO at Coolblue, Linda Hogenes has spent more than a decade at one of the largest e-commerce retailers in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. She worked on merging 360 domains into coolblue.nl and coolblue.be and on the expansion into Germany, and argues that Coolblue practiced E-E-A-T long before it became an SEO buzzword.

Read the full profile and Q&A with Linda Hogenes

From SEO to GEO, AEO, and AIO

Search optimization has grown from one discipline into several overlapping ones. The SEO experts on this page work across all of them:

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Improving a website's technical setup, content, and authority so it ranks in the organic results of search engines like Google and Bing.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

Structuring content so generative AI search experiences such as Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot retrieve it, cite it, and attribute it correctly. Read more in our GEO research report.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

Optimizing content to be selected as the direct answer to a question, whether in a featured snippet, a voice assistant, or an AI chatbot.

AIO (Artificial Intelligence Optimization)

The broadest of the three: making a brand's content, data, and technical setup easy for AI systems, from large language models to AI agents, to find, understand, and represent accurately. Note that "AIO" is also used as shorthand for Google's AI Overviews.

How these SEO specialists, consultants, and strategists approach the shift differs:

• Simon Vreeman turned his own website into an agent-ready site with a WebMCP tool, an MCP server, and an llms.txt file.
• Julian Aijal offers llms.txt, AGENTS.md, and Markdown versions of his pages for AI agents, and built an open-source RAG tool.
• Koen Leemans built the AIO Impact Analyzer to measure how Google's AI Overviews affect clicks and visibility, and discussed GEO versus SEO on the FolloTalks podcast.
• Arnout Hellemans advises comparing the rendered and raw HTML of pages, because a lot of AI crawlers do not render yet.
• Jarno van Driel explains what structured data can and cannot do for LLMs and AI agents.
• David Iwanow counts AI in search among his specializations and urges SEOs to cut through the noise of an ever-growing number of search surfaces.
• Linda Hogenes shows that helpful, customer-first content and E-E-A-T were the foundation long before they became buzzwords.

Articles we have written

Beyond the profiles, the experts on this page write in-depth research articles for SearchConsole.nl. Each article has full source links, structured data, and an author block, and each author's profile lists their articles.

• Agentic commerce by Simon Vreeman: What agentic commerce is, which protocols and surfaces are live, what the Adobe, Salesforce, Shopify and Accenture data show, and a checklist for webshops.
  Published 15 October 2026
• News SEO in the age of AI by Julian Aijal: How AI Overviews, AI Mode, Discover, ChatGPT and Claude changed news SEO, with data from Chartbeat, Pew and Press Gazette and a 2026 checklist.
  Published 7 October 2026, updated 15 October 2026
• Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Research Report by Simon Vreeman: What Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is, how it differs from SEO, and a framework, checklist and schema guidance to earn citations in AI answers.
  Published 16 December 2025, updated 15 October 2026

Conferences and events where you can meet us

The experts on this page are regulars on the conference circuit, on stage and in the audience. These are the events where you are most likely to run into several of them at once:

brightonSEO (Brighton, United Kingdom, April and October)

The largest search marketing conference in Europe, held twice a year at the Brighton Centre. All seven experts on this page have attended brightonSEO, most of them several times, and some have spoken there: Koen Leemans and Jarno van Driel both presented at the April 2025 edition. Simon Vreeman, Koen Leemans, Julian Aijal, and Arnout Hellemans were at the October 2026 edition on 8 and 9 October, where Julian's DPG Media colleague Sophie Winkels and Charles Meaden spoke.

MeasureCamp Amsterdam and MeasureCamp London

The free analytics unconferences where the schedule is built by the attendees on the morning itself. Simon Vreeman has presented at MeasureCamps in London, Amsterdam, and Bucharest. The 2026 editions were Amsterdam on 18 April at House of Watt and London on 26 September at etc.venues Fenchurch Street.

Search 'n Stuff (Antalya, Türkiye, October)

A four-day SEO, PPC, analytics, and AI search conference on the Turkish coast, with a community that values the conversations between talks as much as the talks. Simon Vreeman spoke at the 2024 edition and Arnout Hellemans at the 2025 and 2026 editions, the latter from 1 to 4 October 2026.

Conversion Hotel (Texel, the Netherlands, November)

A three-day evidence-based growth conference at Grand Hotel Opduin on the island of Texel, with keynotes, deep-dive sessions, and an unconference, for about 200 optimization professionals. Simon Vreeman and Arnout Hellemans are regulars and have both hosted multiple unconference sessions, on SEO and CRO as well as on personal topics such as working with ADHD. Friends from the UK search scene, including Charles Meaden and Tim Stewart, have joined them on the island. The 2026 edition runs from 20 to 22 November 2026.

SEO Brein community events (the Netherlands and Belgium)

SEO Brein is the largest Dutch-speaking SEO community, founded by Jeroen Stikkelorum, with free membership and a private platform where members share experiments, questions, and jobs. Around it runs a calendar of free meetups in Dutch and Belgian cities such as Utrecht and Ghent, masterclasses, round-the-table sessions, coworking days, and SEO workations. The community also travels: it co-hosted a coffee meetup with Search 'n Stuff in Amsterdam in October 2025 and gathers the Dutch and Belgian attendees of brightonSEO at the Seven Stars pub on the Thursday evening of each edition. Several of the experts on this page are members and regulars at these events.

Closer to home, several of the experts speak at and judge Friends of Search in Amsterdam: Linda Hogenes presented there in 2024 and Jarno van Driel in 2025, and Linda Hogenes and Arnout Hellemans sit on the SEO jury of the Friends of Search Awards 2026. Simon Vreeman is a community speaker at Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Europe 2026 in Barcelona, and Arnout Hellemans also appears at SearchNorwichXL, the Belgrade SEO Conference, and SEO On Stage in Athens.

The Vanguard of Dutch SEO: Collective Strengths and Future Trajectories

The collective expertise of Simon Vreeman, Julian Aijal, Koen Leemans, Arnout Hellemans, Jarno van Driel, David Iwanow, and Linda Hogenes paints a compelling picture of the Dutch SEO landscape, characterized by profound technical depth, unwavering data-centricity, a strong focus on user experience and conversion, and proactive adaptation to emerging trends like AI. All seven experts exhibit a robust foundation in technical SEO, whether it's Vreeman's broad technical marketing scope, Aijal's background as a developer informing his SEO work, Leemans' specialization in A/B testing and Edge SEO, Hellemans' emphasis on speed optimization, van Driel's deep specialization in structured data and schema.org, Iwanow's experience running search across hundreds of websites, or Hogenes' large-scale e-commerce migrations and internationalization at Coolblue. Data and analytics are clearly paramount in their methodologies; Vreeman leverages Web Analytics and GA4, Aijal demonstrated significant data-driven results at DPG Media, Leemans champions A/B testing with methods like Causal Impact, Hellemans relies heavily on Google Analytics and other data points for CRO, and Iwanow advises to "measure, wait and make decisions based on data where possible".

There's a shared understanding that attracting traffic is only part of the equation; converting that traffic and providing an excellent user experience are equally, if not more, critical. This is evident in Vreeman's and Hellemans' explicit focus on CRO, Aijal's emphasis on UX, Hogenes' focus on helpful, customer-first content at Coolblue, and Leemans' work on testing the tangible impact of changes on traffic and, by implication, user engagement. The evolving role of AI in search is another area where these experts show foresight and adaptability. Vreeman is particularly vocal about AI's transformative potential and develops AI-powered tools, Leemans incorporates AI into his PAA generator and measures the impact of AI Overviews with his AIO Impact Analyzer, and Hellemans actively discusses AI's role in content creation and its impact on indexing strategies, van Driel clarifies what structured data can and cannot do for LLMs and AI agents, and Iwanow counts AI in search among his core specializations. Beyond their individual practices, all seven experts demonstrate a strong commitment to community engagement and knowledge sharing through speaking at conferences, writing articles, developing publicly available tools, or maintaining an active online presence, thereby contributing to the advancement of the SEO field as a whole.

While it may be an oversimplification to define a singular "Dutch school of thought" in SEO, the work of these individuals suggests a professional culture marked by pragmatism, exceptional technical rigor, a direct and honest approach (as exemplified by Hellemans), and a spirit of innovation (clearly visible in the work of Leemans and Vreeman). The consistent emphasis on data, measurable results, and ROI could reflect both cultural predispositions towards efficiency and the maturity of the digital market in the Netherlands.

The dynamism of SEO in the Netherlands, as personified by these experts, is undeniable. Their collective focus on AI, advanced data-driven testing methodologies, and unwavering user-centricity positions them not just to navigate the future of search but to actively lead and shape it.

The profiles of these seven experts suggest that top-tier SEO leadership in the Netherlands is increasingly characterized by a "full-stack" model. This model transcends traditional, siloed specializations, demanding a holistic integration of deep technical knowledge, sophisticated analytical prowess, a nuanced understanding of CRO and UX principles, and agile adaptability to new technologies, particularly AI. Vreeman’s work spans technical marketing, AI, CRO, and analytics. Aijal masterfully blends his front-end development origins with technical SEO, web performance optimization, and data analysis. Leemans is at the forefront of technical SEO, A/B testing, Edge SEO, and AI tool development. Hellemans merges SEO, CRO, analytics, technical site health (like speed optimization), and sharp business acumen. Van Driel connects accessibility engineering, front-end development, and Linked Open Data into a semantic approach to search. Iwanow combines SEO, ASO, paid search, and reporting automation at global scale. Hogenes leads SEO for a major e-commerce retailer across the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, spanning technical SEO, migrations, internationalization, and helpful content. None of these experts confine themselves to a single traditional pillar of SEO, such as focusing solely on content or link building. Instead, they each demonstrate a multifaceted skill set that addresses the technical, analytical, and user-facing dimensions of optimization in an integrated fashion.

Furthermore, while all these experts are innovators, their innovation is predominantly pragmatic and often tool-oriented. They focus on developing or effectively utilizing tools to solve tangible, real-world SEO challenges and to empower the broader professional community. Vreeman’s creation of the "Marketing Insights Guru" GPT and practical UTM builders , Leemans’ development of accessible A/B testing tools and PAA generators , Hellemans’ strategic application of tools like Sitebulb and MS Clarity to resolve client issues and enhance communication , Aijal’s articles that often detail the practical application of complex technical concepts like Schema or running Screaming Frog in the cloud, van Driel's teaching and talks that separate structured data facts from myths, and Iwanow's early push to automate SEO reporting ("Automate or DIE!") all point to this characteristic. This emphasis on building or leveraging tools to address concrete problems and to disseminate knowledge suggests an innovation style that is deeply rooted in utility and widespread applicability, rather than one that prioritizes purely theoretical or abstract advancements.

The following table provides a concise overview of these seven leading Dutch SEO experts:

At-a-Glance: Netherlands' Leading SEO Experts, Profiles and Philosophies

Conclusion

The Netherlands stands as a significant contributor to the global SEO discourse, largely due to the caliber of experts like Simon Vreeman, Julian Aijal, Koen Leemans, Arnout Hellemans, Jarno van Driel, David Iwanow, and Linda Hogenes. Their collective work underscores a Dutch SEO identity characterized by profound technical expertise, a rigorous data-driven approach, an unwavering focus on user experience and conversion, and a forward-looking embrace of technological advancements such as AI and Edge SEO.

These professionals are not just practitioners; they are innovators, educators, and thought leaders. Vreeman's vision of SEOs as "semantic architects" in an AI-driven world, Aijal's seamless integration of development prowess with publisher SEO strategy, Leemans' pioneering efforts in democratizing advanced A/B testing and leveraging Edge SEO, Hellemans' championing of user-first principles and holistic optimization, van Driel's insistence on understanding structured data from its primary sources, Iwanow's experience scaling search strategy across global brands, and Hogenes' customer-first leadership of SEO at Coolblue collectively push the boundaries of the discipline. Their commitment to sharing knowledge through tool development, speaking engagements, and publications further amplifies their impact. Whether they work as in-house SEO specialists, independent SEO consultants, or SEO strategists for global brands, they show that the expertise behind classic SEO is exactly what GEO, AEO, and AIO now build on. As the search landscape continues its rapid evolution, the pragmatic innovation and comprehensive expertise demonstrated by these Dutch SEO leaders will undoubtedly play an influential role in shaping best practices, not only within the Netherlands but across the international SEO community.