Geir Halvorsen - Motillo's own wizard in SEO and SEM! 🧙♂️
Geir Halvorsen is (just as the name reveals) Norwegian. 🇳🇴 Besides that, he is also a snowboard, cycling and motocross enthusiast, husband, father of two, dog owner and SEO specialist. Despite his calm, reassuring demeanor, he is a man whose life is characterized by speed and risk-taking — at least in his spare time.
On an early March day in 1973, Geir saw the light of day for the first time. He grew up in various parts of Oslo and looks back on his childhood in the Norwegian capital with warmth.
– We first lived in Oppsal, then Furuset, and when I was 12 the family built a house in Mortensrud on the outskirts of Oslo. I spent a lot of time outdoors with friends and was very active. Of course we did a lot of cross-country skiing, but I liked speed so I found it more fun to build jumps and ski downhill. However, I didn't have alpine skis, so I jumped and went downhill on cross-country skis and it worked out fine, says Geir with a laugh.
Geir played football and other team sports with the other kids in the neighbourhood. Not because he was interested in those sports per se, but more for the social aspect that came with playing on a team. He preferred speed, jumps and adrenaline rushes! In the late 1970s, BMX started becoming popular and young Geir jumped on the trend. It was the beginning of a lifelong interest in extreme sports.
In the late 1980s, Geir started secondary school and chose the Commerce & Office programme, which involved a great deal of work on a typewriter — the "computer" of the time. The third year, however, focused on data and information processing, and Geir entered the digital world:
– We got a Tiki 100, an incredibly cool computer at the time. We worked with system design and learned basic programming — it was really hot and new in the early 1990s.
Got an IT job after two visits to the internet
After secondary school, Geir wanted to become a video photographer and started a course which he dropped out of after a year, due to the scarcity of jobs in that field in Oslo. Instead, he continued in his job as a security guard, which he had held alongside his studies. Fearing he would get stuck in that profession, he felt after a few years that he needed to do something different. He simply quit and contacted a temp agency.
– At first I was at a warehouse stacking groceries, and got various small assignments. One day I was asked if I could work as customer service staff at an internet company. The temp agency had seen that I had taken a media course in secondary school and figured it would suit me, says Geir. This was 1997 and I had only been on the internet twice when I got that assignment, he continues.
The industry turned out to suit Geir, and over the following years he worked on several different tasks at the company. His responsibilities shifted from customer service to becoming more operational, and he felt he had found his place.
A girl from Värmland took him across the border
But how did this Oslo lad end up in Sweden? It all started on New Year's Eve as the 1900s were turning into the 2000s — the Y2K millennium.
– I was at a New Year's party and there was also a Swedish girl named Linda. We chatted a bit and I thought she was cute and nice. Nothing happened then and there, but about a month later we ended up at the same party again and got to know each other better. The rest is history, says Geir.
During the first years of their relationship, Geir and Linda lived in Oslo. By this time, Geir's interest in extreme sports had developed and he was into motocross, mountain biking and snowboarding. The latter he also worked with, organising competitions alongside his nine-to-five job at kvasir.no:
– Thanks to the competitions I've been able to snowboard in incredibly amazing places. Chamonix in France and Whistler in Canada offered fantastic experiences. And Narvik near Riksgränsen is also magical.
Became a salesperson who hated selling
Like many other major cities, Oslo is expensive to live in. In 2004, Geir and Linda were asked if they wanted to buy Linda's father's house in Vålberg outside Karlstad, and the timing was right. Half a year earlier they had welcomed their daughter Nora, and they felt ready to leave their apartment in Norway for a house with a garden in Sweden.
It was no problem for Geir to find work in his new home country. Here he worked, among other things, in customer support for Norwegian customers at Aktiv24, and for a few years he ran his own web agency together with a friend. In early 2011 he was offered a job as a salesperson of SEO and SEM solutions, which he accepted.
– I realised fairly quickly that I was interested in the services we were selling, but that I hated selling, says Geir with a laugh. However, I learned a lot about SEO and SEM, so when Jajja was looking for an SEO specialist at the end of that same year, I reached out to them, he continues.
He got the job and was there from when the company's Karlstad office essentially consisted of just himself, through to the merger with Eurovator when they became significantly more. During that time he also got to work alongside Malin, Sebastian, Joakim and Anders, who today are his colleagues at Motillo.
Vitally important tasks
When Geir had been working with search engine optimisation at Jajja for almost 8 years, Motillo's CEO Jakob got in touch. Geir had not heard of Motillo but read up on the company and saw the advantages of working with SEO exclusively for e-commerce clients:
– Of course you can see results from SEO work on any site, but for e-commerce everything is measurable and very concrete. That appealed to me, so I said yes to Jakob's job offer and started at Motillo in 2019.
At first Geir worked solely with SEO, but after a while the service expanded to also include SEM (Search Engine Marketing), and in connection with that the Motillo Growth Team was born. Geir is thus the founding member of today's team of four. In his role as SEO specialist, Geir is also involved in almost all new development projects. It is clear that he is passionate about search engine optimisation when he describes thorough SEO work as "vitally important" for an e-commerce business to function well.
Good relationships internally and externally
I love what the Growth Team has become and that with it we can offer our clients a complete concept covering e-commerce development, SEO, analytics and digital advertising — all gathered at Motillo. We in the team complement each other very well and have a great relationship with our clients, which means a lot.
Things are moving both at work and in private
Besides enjoying his work tasks, Geir also feels very comfortable at Motillo in general. Things he particularly appreciates are the flat organisation and the fact that it is a company that invests and develops.
– Things are happening all the time! Just last year we grew by ten people, which also means we can take on bigger projects. And now we've moved to these "store, fete lokalene" (he actually said that in perfect Norwegian and it sounds cooler) and it feels awesome! says Geir enthusiastically.
In his spare time, Geir's focus is on his family, which besides Linda and Nora also includes son Teo. They enjoy forest walks with dogs Ozzy and Kaj, boat trips on Lake Vänern, and of course there is time for extreme sports. Teo has inherited his father's need for speed and they share an interest in mountain biking and motocross.
– Since Teo also likes mountain biking, I got involved in the club OK Tyr a few years ago. I helped start up their MTB enduro group for young people and am involved as a coach. Besides training sessions, we also go on camps a few times a year — it's really great to watch them ride. I have to admit I've become a bit more cautious with age, but Teo is completely fearless and rides in ways I would never dare to now, says Geir.
Speaking of age — since Geir was born in 1973, that means he is celebrating half a century this year. That is worth celebrating all year long!
