About Julie Chodorge
My path as a technical SEO leadfrom Excel to data and AI
I have been doing SEO for well over ten years. I learned on the job, in agencies and in-house, and specialised in the technical side: log analysis first, then data, and more recently AI.
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Contents:
Today
Since December 2020 I have been Technical SEO Lead at North Star Network, an international network of 300 media and gambling websites, around fifty of them premium, published in about ten languages. At that scale you cannot watch everything by hand: I learned to make server logs talk, to cross-reference Search Console, GA4 and crawls in BigQuery, and to automate in Python whatever comes back every week.
Since 2026 I have also been relying on AI agents for part of the repetitive work. It is one more tool in the box, valuable as long as you review what it produces. I still train my colleagues in SEO, and this site extends that habit: it is a lab notebook where I write down what I tested, what worked, what broke, and what I took away from it.
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My background
My SEO experience began with an internship at Nodevo, a web agency in Chantilly, France, where I discovered web marketing: SEO, paid search and social media. I then spent two years on a work-study programme at COVIVO, a carpooling start-up in Nancy, as marketing and communications manager, followed by two years at CIBLO, a web agency in Paris, as head of SEO and social media, with a team of SEO and social media managers to grow.
During all those years, Excel was my main working tool. CONCATENATE, VLOOKUP, pivot tables: enough to handle any crawl or rankings export. It became my very first talk, at SEO Camp Day Lyon in 2018, just after I joined Korleon’Biz, an SEO agency, as a consultant. For almost three years, working remotely, I supported a portfolio of clients on on-site SEO: technical, structure and content, with audits and a lot of log analysis.
I studied the logs of 12 websites over 6 months, 200,000 URLs and 7 million hits, to isolate what really influences crawling.
That is the subject that fascinated me most: looking at what Googlebot actually does on a site instead of guessing. It became my talk at SEO Campus Paris 2019, and one of the most-read articles on this blog. At North Star Network the playing field changed scale and data became central. I first built dashboards that combine sources, so that teams decide on up-to-date figures; that was the subject of my talk at SEO Campus Paris 2022, on Data Studio at the time, on Streamlit and BigQuery today. Then came the big network projects: redirects by the tens of thousands, replacing deep pagination with monthly archives, QA on new templates, hunting down pages that bring nothing.
As for education, I hold a master’s degree from ICN Business School in Nancy and a master’s in entrepreneurship and business development from IAE Metz, after a bachelor’s degree at ESC Amiens.
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Passing it on, in class and on stage
If there is one common thread in my career, this is it. Since September 2021 I have been teaching digital marketing and e-commerce to undergraduate and master’s students: Excel and Google Sheets for marketing, e-marketing, social media and SEO, building a WordPress site, with coaching on real business cases. I also train my colleagues in SEO. And I have spoken at SEO Camp events: the slides and video are here.
So why this site, after several years without publishing anything? Because I have always preferred hands-on work to communication, and time was short. What changed is that I now have the tools to write down more easily what I already explain in class or on stage. The blog is the natural extension of all that: the same tips and the same field experience, written down once and for all.
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How I work
Test and learn. I would rather try on one site, measure, then roll out to the others than plan everything on paper. A baseline with figures before starting, a measurement afterwards, and a fair conclusion in between, even when it is not the one we were hoping for.
Always check what you believe. A hunch is a good starting point, not proof. Before stating that a page is indexed, that a redirect works or that a template is clean, I go and look: in the logs, in Search Console, on the live site. The same goes for what I am told, and for what a tool produces, AI included.
Rely on data rather than on personal intuition, mine included.
And the strength of experience. Ten years of SEO is mostly a collection of pitfalls already met: the cache serving an old page, the redirect rule that is too broad, the figure that is too good to be true. No tool replaces that memory, and it is what I try to share here.
Let’s talk
Follow me, get in touch
I share tips and field notes on LinkedIn and X. For a podcast, a peer-to-peer chat or a question, drop me a line.