Nikki Lam is senior vice president and head of earned media at NP Digital, the performance marketing agency co-founded by Neil Patel, where she oversees organic and AI search, content, digital PR, influencer relations, and organic social for the agency's U.S. clients. She has spent more than a decade in search, starting at the San Diego, California, agency Covario, and has run SEO programs for brands including Adobe, Lenovo, Samsung, Levi's, and T-Mobile. She writes for Search Engine Land, sits on the SMX programming committee, and argues that search has become "search-everywhere optimization."
Starting at Covario in San Diego
She started at Covario, later part of iProspect, where she worked as an SEO specialist, senior specialist, and SEO lead from 2013 to 2017. She then joined NP Digital, where she rose from senior director of SEO to vice president and head of SEO, and later to senior vice president.
In those roles she ran a U.S. organic search team that grew past 45 people. Her LinkedIn profile lists the work behind that title: scoping and pricing SEO contracts, and building out international SEO, technical SEO, app store optimization, and YouTube SEO offerings for enterprise and Fortune 1000 clients.
Writing and Speaking on AI Search
In November 2023 she published a long guide on preparing for Google's Search Generative Experience, based on her talk at brightonSEO San Diego. She has returned to that conference with a talk titled "Adapting to the new era of search everywhere optimization," writes as a contributor to Search Engine Land, and teaches a course for the Digital Marketing Institute.
Measuring Search Beyond Rankings
In a March 2026 interview with The CMO Wire, she said, "Search is becoming less about search engine optimization and more about search-everywhere optimization. People engage with brands across more surfaces than ever." She told the publication that teams should stop judging earned media by traffic and keyword positions alone. "We need to look at revenue, customer lifetime value, and other measures that show real business impact," she said.
She described a three-step habit for reporting: say what happened, then explain why it matters to the business, then name the next action. "You have to ask 'so what' and 'now what,'" she said. She also argued that a consistent brand message across social posts, reviews, and forums is now how a company protects itself in AI answers, calling it "a defensive moat around your brand in the age of AI."