SEO Is a System, Not a Channel: Lessons from Zalando, Omio, and idealo (Norman Nielsen)

🗓 Wednesday 1st April • 5 pm BST / 12 pm ET / 9 am PT

He helped take Zalando from 30M to 300M organic visits across 15 markets.

Norman Nielsen has spent 18 years building organic growth engines for marketplaces at scale (Zalando, Omio, Axel Springer), and is now VP Organic Growth at idealo.

In this conversation with SearchPilot founder Will Critchlow, he shares the systems behind growth that hold up across countries, channels, and leadership scrutiny. You will learn what it takes to lead organic growth in 2026.

Norman has lived the journey Will predicted years ago: early SEO practitioners becoming marketing and growth leaders.

This conversation is for you if you run organic growth on a large site, you manage teams across markets, or you need a clearer way to explain SEO value to product leaders, execs, and investors.

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The shift from SEO specialist to growth leader

Norman shares what he wishes he knew 10+ years ago, and why an SEO background is still one of the best training grounds for marketing leadership: intent, UX, tech, and business model all in one.

How to scale organic across markets without copying everything

From retail to travel to marketplaces, Norman breaks down what stays consistent across countries, what truly needs localization, and why organizing teams by function often beats organizing by country.

Building a testing program that compounds

Not every win adds up cleanly. Norman explains how he ties testing to strategy, avoids changes with a short 'half-life', and builds a business case that makes sense to leadership.

Making SEO credible to product, engineering, and the board

Testing turns SEO from 'I heard this at a conference' into something you can defend. Learn how to frame work in effort, impact, confidence, and rollout logic so decision-makers lean in.

Who Should Attend?

SVP Digital & Ecommerce
VP of Marketing / Global Head of Marketing
Head of SEO
Director of Ecommerce, Director of Digital Marketing
Head of Product
Anyone responsible for ambitious SEO targets who needs a practical, proven framework

Who's Norman Nielsen?

Norman Nielsen leads Organic Growth at idealo, one of Europe’s best-known shopping platforms. Previously, he was VP of Growth at Omio and has led large-scale SEO programs in roles spanning travel, retail, and real estate, including multi-country expansion work at Zalando. Norman is known for treating SEO as a product system, using testing to earn stakeholder trust, and building teams that can scale across markets.

Who's Will Critchlow?

Will Critchlow is the CEO and co-founder of SearchPilot, the SEO experimentation platform that helps enterprise websites, specifically large ecommerce, take search out of React Mode and put it into Control Mode. After 15 years running Distilled, an agency he built into a global search powerhouse, Will founded SearchPilot in 2020 to give marketing and engineering teams a way to run statistically-rigorous SEO A/B tests across thousands of pages and see uplift in weeks.

Today, the platform powers rapid-fire testing for $100M+ ecommerce, marketplace, and travel brands, safely optimising millions of product pages through controlled testing. Will’s data-driven approach has helped hundreds of companies turn their biggest, least-understood channel into a controllable performance engine with provable ROI.