[work]
Alex Firdaus is a prop firm SEO consultant and Head of Media at FinMedia Group, publisher of FundedTrading. This page is the checkable version of that sentence: three pieces of work with the dates and the numbers attached, and a section on what I am not going to claim.
Most consultant work pages are a wall of logos and a traffic graph with the queries cropped out. I have no logos to show you because most of the work sits under other people’s names, and a graph without a query proves nothing. So here are three specific situations instead, with dates, taken from Search Console.
The media side of three properties runs through me: FundedTrading.com, the prop firm review and comparison site, FundedTrading.id, its Indonesian edition, and MyTradingReviews.com, which covers forex and CFD brokers. That means editorial direction, the search strategy, what gets published, what gets deleted, and the vendor relationships behind it.
The writing is mine too. I write the prop firm reviews and most of the blog. On 20 September 2026 FundedTrading.com listed 142 prop firms and 124 of those reviews carried my byline, with four under a colleague’s name and the rest showing no author. The unlisted reviews are not in that count. The site lists me as Head of Media and Lead Reviewer. I also run FundedTrading’s X and LinkedIn accounts, so the posts there are mine as well.
There is still a team, and the reviews run through a published testing process rather than one person’s opinion. What I own beyond the writing is the decisions: which searches these sites chase, which ones they leave alone, and how the pages are named.
The useful part for an operator is which side of the table I sit on. I run the review sites that outrank prop firms for their own brand names. When I tell you why a review site is above you, it is not a theory.
FundedTrading.com lost roughly two thirds of its Google visibility in January 2026 and is still climbing out of it. Here is the sequence, straight from Search Console.
In September 2025 I ran a large prune. On 12 September daily impressions fell from about 9,000 to about 4,200 while average position improved from 36 to 19.5. Halving your impressions is not usually the goal, but those impressions came from pages that were never going to be chosen. The position number is the one that mattered. Deciding what to cut is the first half of an SEO audit, and it is the part most people skip.
A rebuild followed in December 2025, including a move off WordPress. Between 12 December and 1 January the site went from 21 clicks a day to 144, impressions from about 4,000 to 12,400, average position to 18.6.
Then on 7 January 2026 it collapsed. Average position went from 16.2 to 35.9 in forty eight hours. The cause was a site-level problem I am not going to detail on a public page, because publishing the technical specifics of a company’s security history to win consulting work is not a trade I am willing to make. It was identified and fixed on 13 February 2026.
Then nothing happened for six and a half months. Traffic sat between 13 and 33 clicks a day from March through August 2026, average position drifting between 25 and 45. That wait is the part most recovery write-ups leave out. The published guidance on this kind of cleanup says plan for about five months before anything moves. It took me closer to seven.
Recovery started on 6 September 2026. Clicks went 29, then 43, then 53, then 75 within three days and have held between 40 and 59 since. Average position moved from 44 in late August to 16 by 10 September. Across the first seventeen days of September the site averaged 43 clicks a day against 17 in August.
What I cannot tell you is the trigger. The fix was seven months earlier, so the likeliest explanation is that the recovery lag finally closed. I am not going to claim a September action caused a September recovery when the data does not show one.
One thing that matters more than it sounds. Through the whole collapse, Bing held. FundedTrading.com ran between 17 and 35 Bing clicks a day for the entire period, and in July 2026 Bing sent more clicks than Google did. Almost nobody in this market looks at Bing, which is a mistake now that ChatGPT’s search layer leans on it. Checking what the answer engines actually say about a firm is a separate audit.
FundedTrading.id is the Indonesian edition of the same review site and it has a domain authority of 5. On 20 September 2026 it was on page one of Google in Indonesia for prop firm indonesia. Above it on that page: PropFirmMatch at domain authority 32 and WeMasterTrade at 53. Run the search from Indonesia and see for yourself.
That position is what survived a bad year. The site peaked at about 44 clicks a day in November 2025 at an average position between 8 and 11. By April 2026 it was down to 9 clicks a day at position 17 to 25, a loss of about 80%. Most prop firm review sites fell in the same window, and the ones that held had large backlink profiles. This one does not.
What I did to it was unglamorous. Pruned the thin and news content that was never going to rank. Noindexed pages that should not have been competing in the first place. Redirected what had a better home. Rewrote what was worth keeping. Recovery started in late May 2026. It now runs about 18 clicks a day, roughly 40% of the old peak, and average position has come back from 25 in late August to 11.8 on 17 September 2026.
It is not a finished recovery and I am not presenting it as one. It is a domain-authority-5 site holding page one in its home market against competitors six and ten times stronger, which is what naming documents properly buys you when you cannot buy links. The same work for companies selling into Indonesia is on the Indonesia page, and there is a Bahasa Indonesia version of this site.
Search seo for prop firms from the United States. alexfirdaus.com is on page one, at position 3 when I checked on 20 September 2026, on a domain authority of 10. The rest of that page runs from domain authority 4 to 35 and several are agencies with teams behind them.
Here is the part a normal work page leaves out. Over the ninety days to 17 September 2026 that query gave me 917 impressions and one click. Ranking and being chosen are two different things, and on that query I was being seen and not chosen. The page that was ranking was named like an article, on a results page where every competitor was named like an offer. I have renamed it since, and the page now reads as a service rather than a blog post.
That is the whole job in one example. The position was never the problem. The name was.
From 2012 to 2022 I worked as a web search evaluator, first at Leapforce and then at Appen after the acquisition, on the project known internally as Yukon. The work was rating live search results against Google’s published quality guidelines, through every audit, for a decade.
Raters do not change rankings and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. What ten years of it gives you is a trained sense of what Google rewards, built from judging real results rather than reading about it. The longer version is on the about page, including the part where Bing fired me first.
No percentage growth figures from a client dashboard you cannot check. No logos from work I cannot name. No sole credit for results a team produced. No case study built on a traffic chart with the queries cropped out. And no public write-up of a company’s security incidents, however good the story would be.
If a consultant shows you a graph going up, ask which queries moved and what those pages were named. Often the honest answer is that something happened elsewhere and nobody in the room caused it.
Priced after an audit, as a fixed project or monthly. Backlinks are budgeted separately, and what that costs and why there is no package is set out here.
Anyone who wants a guaranteed position. Firms that want forty articles a month instead of the right ten pages. Anyone who needs the copy to claim regulation or trader protection that does not exist. For the first two a good agency is a better fit, and I will say so on the first call. If the problem is the wider funnel rather than search, start with prop firm marketing.
Tell me the site and what you think should be ranking. I will come back with which searches are still winnable, which ones Google now answers itself, and whether you need me at all. If the answer is no, I will tell you that too.
The services themselves are on SEO for prop firms and forex broker SEO, or the full list if your business sits elsewhere in this market.
Alex Firdaus runs the media side of FundedTrading.com and FundedTrading.id, both of which compete in the prop firm market every day, and writes most of the FundedTrading.com reviews himself. FundedTrading.id holds page one in Indonesia for “prop firm indonesia” on a domain authority of 5, and alexfirdaus.com is on page one in the United States for “seo for prop firms”. All three can be checked by running the searches.
No. Most of the work sits under other people’s brands and naming them is not mine to do. That is a real limitation of hiring one consultant rather than an agency with a public client list, and you should weigh it.
Longer than anyone selling the service will tell you. On FundedTrading.com the underlying problem was fixed on 13 February 2026 and traffic did not move until 6 September 2026, six and a half months later. Published guidance on this kind of cleanup suggests planning for around five months. Anyone promising faster is guessing.
Alex Firdaus does the reading and the decisions himself: the search results, what is winnable, how pages should be named. Execution runs with your team, your agency or him. Pricing is agreed after a call, either per project or as an ongoing monthly arrangement, rather than picked off a published package.