How Space’M Online connects international SEO across markets
Bram Vermolen is founder of Space’M Online, an agency that provides connected international SEO for eCommerce brands and websites operating across multiple countries. The conversation looks at how AI is helping with keyword clustering, why human judgment still matters in outreach, and how clear, corroborated proof can help businesses get found.
Use AI for structured first passes, such as clustering search queries, but keep human judgment in work that depends on relevance and relationships. For visibility in search and AI assistants, build clear, verifiable proof across your own site and other sources.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
I started Space’M Online after spending years inside SEO work where international projects fell apart because responsibility was scattered across freelancers, plugins, and disconnected agencies: one person did technical fixes, another did keyword research, and nobody owned how the markets connected. The origin was simple, build an agency where international and multi-geo SEO is the core discipline rather than a bolt-on service added after a domestic strategy is already set.
What makes it genuinely different is that we sell one connected system instead of a menu of tasks, so market research, site structure, hreflang and technical foundations, on-page content, and linkbuilding all follow the same decisions rather than contradicting each other. That is also why the proof we lead with is documented outcomes, such as a client growing from €400K to €4 million in three years or ranking number one for a major keyword within three months, because a connected system is what makes those results repeatable across more than 500 international websites.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Most new business today comes from referrals and word of mouth within the eCommerce and international brand network we have built over 13 years, which is a strong signal of delivery quality but a fragile single channel because it depends on other people remembering us at the right moment. I wish a larger share came from deliberate inbound, where brands find our own content and case studies while actively researching multi-geo expansion and arrive already understanding why a connected international strategy matters.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
I handed over first pass keyword and SERP clustering, where AI can group thousands of queries into intent based themes in minutes and give the team a structured starting point that a human then validates. I tried AI on link prospecting and outreach judgment and went back to doing it the human way, because the output looked plausible but was shallow on relevance and relationship context, and a bad prospect list quietly wastes weeks of outreach effort.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Yes, prospects now arrive pre educated and ask much sharper questions, often naming specific decisions like ccTLD versus subfolder, hreflang implementation, or how to sequence market entry, which shortens discovery but raises the bar because vague positioning gets filtered out immediately. A small but growing number mention that they first came across us through AI assistants like ChatGPT, which changes the job: the facts about our results and services have to be corroborated across the web, not just claimed on our own homepage.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Build verifiable, corroborated proof about your business and your clients, meaning documented case studies with real numbers, consistent brand mentions across third party sites, and technically clean pages that state clearly what you do and who you do it for, because both Google and AI assistants reward facts that are confirmed in multiple places. Ignore the pressure to chase every new AI tool and tactic that appears each month, since the teams that win the next 12 months will be the ones with the discipline to keep executing a coherent strategy while everyone else rebuilds their process around the latest launch.
Thank you to Bram Vermolen and the team at Space’M Online for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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