We build technical and agentic SEO programs
Waverider SEO helps large companies solve complex organic search challenges. We combine deep technical infrastructure work with agentic workflows to increase traffic and measure LLM citations across large content estates.
Origin
Built out of technical frustration
Marina Castellanos ran organic search at a marketplace receiving 40 million monthly sessions. Her team kept delivering long audit reports that sat in engineering backlogs for months without implementation. In 2019, she left to build a company focused entirely on technical execution, starting Waverider SEO in Carlsbad, California, as a three-person shop.
As organic discovery expanded beyond traditional search engines, our clients faced new indexing and retrieval challenges. In 2024, we launched our agentic SEO practice to track LLM citations and automate technical fixes. Today, our team of eleven manages millions of URLs using our proprietary Tidewater™ method.
What we believe
Principles that guide our work
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Audits are not deliverables, fixes are
We measure our success by code shipped to production rather than recommendations left in documents.
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We say no to work we cannot measure
We require clear baseline metrics and revenue attribution before accepting any enterprise engagement.
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Senior specialists stay on accounts start to finish
The experienced strategists and engineers who plan your program execute your technical work every day.
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AI answers are search to be measured
We structure content for LLM retrieval using the same technical rigor as search engine crawling.
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Slow is fine, wrong is not
We test technical changes thoroughly on staging environments before pushing code to live production systems.
Our impact by the numbers
- 2019
- Founded in Carlsbad
- 38
- Enterprise engagements
- 4.2M
- Pages under management
- 94%
- Client retention
- 11
- People across three time zones
Leadership
Experienced search leaders
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Marina Castellanos
Founder & CEO
Marina founded Waverider SEO in 2019 as a three-person technical shop in Carlsbad. Previously, she ran organic search at a marketplace handling 40 million monthly sessions. Her focus is setting agency strategy and ensuring client engineering teams ship our technical recommendations.
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Theo Nakamura
Head of Enterprise SEO
With twelve years of experience managing complex technical programs in retail and travel, Theo leads enterprise migrations and platform re-architecture. He designs crawling, indexing, and international governance systems for sites with millions of URLs.
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Priya Raghunathan
Director, Agentic SEO
Priya joined Waverider SEO to launch our agentic practice in 2024 after working in ad tech data science. She built our proprietary agent workflows and LLM citation measurement tools, enabling clients to analyze share of answer across AI search platforms.
How we work
A distributed team with a physical home
We operate as a remote-first agency with our headquarters at 1902 Wright Place, Suite 200, Carlsbad, CA 92008. Our team works across Pacific and Mountain time zones to align with enterprise clients. Every quarter, we gather in person to review technical roadmaps, refine our workflows, and collaborate on agency strategy.
Join our team
We hire experienced technical SEO strategists, data engineers, and content directors who value systematic execution and clear measurement.
We only contact candidates from @waveriderseo.com addresses and never via messaging apps.