Dinesh: Crafting Binance’s Search-First Future
Main Takeaways
Dinesh Sivapragsam, the Head of Organic Growth and SEO at Binance, started his career writing travel features. This blog tells the story of his unconventional path into crypto.
As the first SEO hire, Dinesh transformed Binance’s organic growth engine, turning search into a mission-critical function.
Today, as the SEO field faces disruption from generative AI, Dinesh doubles down on differentiation, storytelling, and frameworks that prioritize long-term impact over hype.
The first time Dinesh met CZ, Binance CEO at the time, he was barely a week into his new role. The message from the CEO’s office had come abruptly, asking for his SEO strategy, even though he’d only just begun mapping out the landscape. There was no onboarding manual, no organization chart to lean on, and no formal SEO team in place. At the time, the marketing department at Binance had only been starting to take shape, operating almost grassroots-style, and as Binance scaled, Dinesh was brought on to implement an SEO strategy.
Dinesh leaned into what he knew well: how to build from scratch. He put together short, mid, and long-term roadmaps grounded in his experience and instincts. He also started relationship-building right away. When he did sit down with CZ, a meeting that was admittedly intimidating, he was candid about the fundamental gaps Binance needed to address. In return, he got CZ’s trust, the freedom to experiment, the resources to build, and the rare green light to define a discipline still foreign to crypto.
That encounter set the tone for his trajectory at Binance, and, in many ways, crystallized the culture he would come to embody. At Binance, theories don’t survive without proof. Hierarchies are flattened by execution. And those who dare to move boldly to deliver concrete results often move the farthest.
Today, Dinesh leads a global SEO team overseeing one of the most complex and fast-evolving digital properties in fintech. He is a passionate leader: meticulous, resourceful, collaborative, proactive in continuously training himself up in perfecting the SEO strategy for a brand-new industry.
However, the path that led him here, through missteps, reinventions, and a quietly subversive curiosity, was anything but conventional.
The Long Arc: Lufthansa to Binance
Dinesh began not as a digital strategist, but as a storyteller. He wrote travel features for air carrier Lufthansa, creating narratives that sold cities through mood and movement. He penned essays for Esquire, relying on tone, detail, and human connection – not keyword density. It wasn’t until a clerical mix-up at an agency interview steered him into an SEO internship that he first considered translating narrative skills into the logic of machines, or, in his own words “writing for robots instead of people.” He found it “strangely fascinating” – the idea that creativity and data could meet in such an unexpected way.
The seed had already been planted: during his time at Lufthansa, he’d started picking up SEO basics, drawn to the mechanics of how machines interpret and rank content.
While many enter SEO through analytics or tech, Dinesh’s route was rooted in meaning. He wasn’t interested in formulaic optimization or plug-and-play checklists. What captured him was the challenge of writing not just for people, but for algorithms, finding clarity in the translation layer between human intention and machine logic.
In agency roles, he quickly advanced into strategic positions, serving consumer brands like Unilever and GSK. But he also grew disillusioned with how narrowly SEO was understood. Too often, he delivered audits that sat unread, strategies that died in the backlog purgatory, and opportunities dismissed by decision-makers who saw SEO as decoration rather than infrastructure.
Dinesh (on the far right) with Binance CMO Rachel Conlan and Marketing Team colleagues at Binance Clubhouse in Dubai. Source: Binance.
To cut through that noise, he started hosting workshops with senior clients, reframing SEO as a form of business alignment rather than a niche tactic. His presentations were less about backlinks and meta tags, and more about psychology, intent, and relevance. Still, the routine remained: build decks, justify budgets, wait for approvals that took ages and nudges to come through.
A Leap into the Unknown
When Binance recruiter first reached out, Dinesh was skeptical. Crypto, in 2020, was still the domain of speculation and headlines. However, the more he learned and spoke to people in the company, the more the appeal shifted. This new role won’t be about riding a trend, but rather, about building something foundational in a space where playbooks didn’t exist.
In his final interview, he found himself speaking not in terms of deliverables, but in terms of conviction: that SEO could become a serious, scalable growth engine for Binance, by shaping how people discover, understand, and trust crypto. Dinesh joined as an individual contributor, with no reporting lines and no predefined scope. His main tools were instinct, experience, and a willingness to navigate ambiguity.
Within weeks, Dinesh had created multi-phase roadmaps, broken into short-term credibility wins, mid-term stakeholder education, and long-term systemic transformation. He took meetings, tested hypotheses, built alliances with developers and product managers. He learned quickly: theory gets ignored but results get noticed. He didn’t wait to be invited into rooms to start getting the results that he wanted.
The Making of a Search Engine
If SEO is often framed as a long game, Dinesh was working with a shot clock. Regulatory restrictions in marketing around a new fintech industry limited Binance’s ability to rely on paid acquisition, and SEO became a lifeline to get discovered online. But Binance wasn’t like other companies – the scope was truly global. With over 100 million pages indexed on Binance.com, it would be impossible to optimize every single one.
He prioritized what could move quickly. Pages like “How to Buy Crypto,” designed with clear intent and evergreen demand, became core assets. He focused on information architecture, user flow, and trust signals.
When Binance launched its now-flagship “Price Prediction” pages, the idea initially sounded speculative. But Dinesh reframed it: what if Binance didn’t make predictions, but facilitated user sentiment instead? What if the content was dynamic, community-driven, and transparent in methodology? The compliance team signed off. The pages soared to the top of Binance’s organic traffic charts. They have become one of Binance’s first SEO products, a dynamic content engine driven by real user input. Today, those pages are among the top four most visited on Binance.com via organic search.
He also introduced internal metrics that better mirrored stakeholder expectations. Instead of presenting raw volume, he emphasized traffic share: how Binance performed relative to the market. The reframe worked. Stakeholders saw relevance, not just reach, and bought in.
Failure as Fast Feedback
Binance’s culture often demands experimentation at an uncomfortable velocity. It rewards quick pivots over polished decks. Dinesh’s early crash course came via a decentralized NFT project he was tasked to help launch, despite having no prior exposure to NFTs. While the initiative ultimately didn’t succeed, the experience reshaped how he approached failure: not as a black mark, but as a learning experience.
Another lesson emerged from an ambitious plan to capture long-tail search via Reddit posts. The content was meticulously crafted, plugged into popular threads, optimized for discovery. It flopped: the return was negligible. Undeterred, Dinesh shared the post-mortem openly, reinforcing the idea that transparency and learning cycles trump perfection.
These moments weren’t setbacks. They were muscle-building exercises in testing, synthesizing, and adapting. His leadership style evolved with them: action-oriented, data-driven, and always ready to recalibrate.
Bringing Order to the Chaos: Frameworks That Endure
According to Dinesh, his biggest contribution to Binance’s growth strategy wasn’t a single campaign or product, but a mental model. He championed the impact vs. effort matrix as a decision-making framework. Every potential SEO initiative, no matter how exciting, had to pass the filter. Was it actionable? Was it worth the resource trade-off? Could it scale?
Almost 5 years at Binance, and multiple promotions along the way, reflect how well Binance’s values align with Dinesh’s own. Hardcore gives him the drive to keep pace in a market that never sleeps. Freedom empowers him to take risks and own the outcomes. Humility reminds him to seek feedback, acknowledge blind spots, and collaborate without ego.
SEO in the Age of Generative AI
As large language models began reshaping the search landscape, many SEO teams spiraled into tactical panic. Dinesh did the opposite. He paused. Then he started writing. He authored internal white papers to clarify how AI would impact search behavior, how teams should adapt without overcorrecting, and where automation could amplify, rather than replace, human insight. His perspective was simple: if everyone automates the same way, there is no competitive advantage.
“When AI exploded onto the scene, the pressure to jump on trends was huge. But I knew we couldn’t just automate everything. If everyone’s using the same tools, where’s the edge? So I distilled the noise and focused on what was actually relevant for Binance,” he explained. “I wrote white papers, laid out our strategy in plain terms, and told the story behind our decisions. That’s how we evangelize SEO internally: not through jargon, but through narrative.”
A Mission Rewritten
Coming into five years since that blank-slate beginning, Dinesh is still building, iterating, and treating each search result as an interface between user needs and mission clarity.
In his early career, Dinesh measured success by page views and rankings. Today, it’s about impact: how many users his team helps onboard into the world of crypto, and how that education shapes financial access. His team is one of the few within Binance that touches almost every product line, from educational content to acquisition funnels.
“Binance’s goal is to give one billion users safe and secure access to cryptocurrency. I’m happy my team is one of the core contributors to achieving this mission,” he says.
Dinesh representing Binance to give talks at Web3 conferences. Source: Binance.
"I’m still here, and still in SEO. It all started with an accidental job offer early in my career, and since then, my sense of purpose has evolved in ways I never expected. I never imagined I’d be leading SEO at a global company, let alone speaking at conferences about my journey. It’s both surreal and an honor."
The search, it seems, is far from over.