About Rankly, and About Me
I am Arbaz. I have spent ten years doing search, split between local search for businesses that need a phone to ring and international search for businesses selling across borders. Rankly is the practice I run under my own name, working with businesses in Qatar.
It is one person, deliberately. The model where a director sells the work and a junior delivers it is the most common complaint I hear about agencies in this region, and it is not a problem I can solve by hiring my way out of it early.
How you actually deal with me
What you are paying for is the person doing the work rather than a lease in West Bay. An SEO provider is worth judging on the work and on who answers when something goes wrong.
That argument is only worth anything if it comes with commitments, so here they are. The prices are published. The terms are month to month with thirty days' notice. You deal with me directly instead of with an account manager relaying your questions to someone you never meet. And I am reachable through the Qatar working day, Sunday to Thursday, not for a two-hour window at the end of it.
Work runs over video, email and WhatsApp. In practice that is how most of this gets done anyway, including by providers with a building.
What ten years actually bought
Not certifications. Google's are free and prove nothing, and the paid ones prove you paid.
What it bought is pattern recognition. Knowing which technical problems actually suppress rankings and which ones are warnings in a tool that nobody should spend a week on. Knowing roughly how long a category takes before you commit a client's budget to it. Knowing when the honest answer is that there is not enough search behind a business to warrant a retainer at all.
The proof I can point at today is my own properties. I build and rank websites in competitive markets, with my own money at risk, which is a harder test than spending someone else's budget. I would rather show you that than a logo wall.
What I believe, and what it costs me
These are positions with consequences, not values on a wall.
Prices belong on the website
It loses me the clients who would have been talked up to a bigger number, and it filters out the ones who were never going to afford it. Both are fine.Nobody can guarantee a ranking
Saying so loses deals to whoever will guarantee one. I am not interested in competing for that client, because the same person will leave in month three when the guarantee does not land.A flat month gets reported as a flat month
Reports that only ever contain good news are not reports.Some businesses should not hire me
If your category has almost no search volume, or you need enquiries this week, or your website cannot be changed, I will say so in the first conversation. It costs me a sale and saves you six invoices.Limits are worth publishing
I deliver Arabic design and layout, not Arabic copywriting. I do not shoot photography or video in Qatar. Creative work runs through a vetted production network, with me reviewing everything before it reaches a client. I describe it exactly that way rather than implying those designers sit in Doha working for me.
What the proof on this site is
Thirteen projects are written up on the case studies page, each built from the Ahrefs panel it came from, with the dates it covers and the two that did not work included. The reviews are the ones clients left at the end of a contract, quoted without editing.
What you will not find is a client count, an award, a logo wall or a statistic in a coloured box, because those are the parts of an agency site that cost nothing to invent.
The first three clients here get a substantial discount in exchange for a documented case study, agreed in writing before the work starts.
Questions we get asked
Why Qatar, if you are not there?
Because it is a market with real money, high internet use and remarkably weak search competition, and because most of the commercial search happens in English. I can add genuine value here in a way I could not in a saturated market. I would also rather serve one country properly than claim the whole Gulf.
What happens when you are fully booked?
I stop taking clients and say so. Capacity is the real constraint in a one-person practice, and the alternative is hiring quickly and quietly, which is how delivery quality drops.
Are you going to register a Qatar entity?
Possibly, eventually. It is not needed to invoice, and retainer SEO does not create a permanent establishment on its own. It would be a credibility and market-access decision rather than a legal requirement, and it would open up government-adjacent work that is closed to me now.
Who do I talk to if something goes wrong?
Me. That is the entire escalation path, which is either the best or the worst thing about working with a one-person practice depending on your temperament.
If that suits you
Send your website and one line about what you sell. I look at it myself, by hand, and reply inside two working days with what is actually wrong, what you can fix without me, and what you cannot. There is no call attached to it.
The free audit asks three questions. Or message on WhatsApp, which I read faster than email.