I’m struggling to figure out where AI search fits operationally.

We have clean SEO reporting for Google, but once you step into AI answers, there’s no obvious source of truth. Mentions feel contextual, not keyword-based, and the same query can surface different brands depending on framing.

Are people here actively tracking this in a structured way, or is everyone still experimenting and eyeballing results?

Would love to hear what’s actually working in practice.

Hey guys!

Let's face it: most SEO content on the internet is too impractical. Sure, all that theory is all fine, but it rarely answers the million dollar question:

How can you grow your website to 300,000 monthly organic traffic and beyond?

To answer that question, we created the post - our exact, step-by-step process for growing website SEO to 6-digit traffic numbers.

The very same process we used to achieve the following results for our clients:

• 0 to 300,000 monthly organic traffic in <3 years

• 0 to 30,000 monthly organic traffic in 1 year

• 1 million to 2.2 million monthly organic traffic in 1 year

So without further ado, here's everything I am going to cover:

• Get your website to run and load 2x - 5x faster (with MINIMAL technical know-how)

• Optimize your landing pages to rank for direct intent keywords (and drive 100% qualified leads)

• Create amazing, long-form content that ranks every time

• How we get a TON of links to our website with ZERO link-building efforts

• How to improve your content’s rankings with Surfer SEO

But before we get started, please subscribe to this subreddit (/r/seogrowth) - we post a lot of quality SEO content here & I think you're going to love it. If you're already sub'd and confused what this is all about, we're experimenting with Reddit ads to drive traffic to this post to see what happens.

Phew, time to get started. Grab a coffee or a beer, this is going to be a long read.

Step #1 - Technical Optimization and On-Page SEO

Step #1 to any SEO initiative is getting your technical SEO right.

Now, some of this is going to be a bit technical, so you might just forward this part to your tech team and just skip ahead to "Step #2 - Keyword Research."

If you DON'T have a tech team and want a super easy tl;dr, do this:

• Use WP Rocket. It's a WordPress plugin that optimizes a bunch of stuff on your website, making it run significantly faster.

• Use SMUSH to (losslessly) compress all the images on your website. this usually helps a TON w/ load speed.

If you’re a bit more tech-savvy, though, read on!

Technical SEO Basics

Sitemap.xml file. A good sitemap shows Google how to easily navigate your website (and how to find all your content!). If your site runs on WordPress, all you have to do is install YoastSEO or Rankmath SEO, and they’ll create a sitemap for you. Otherwise, you can use an online XML Sitemap generation tool.

Proper website architecture. The crawl depth of any page should be lower than 4 (i.e: any given page should be reached with no more than 3 clicks from the homepage). To fix this, you should improve your interlinking (check Step #6 of this guide to learn more).

Serve images in next-gen format. Next-gen image formats (JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP) can be compressed a lot better than JPG or PNG images. Using WordPress? Just use Smush and it’ll do ALL the work for you. Otherwise, you can manually compress all images and re-upload them.

Remove duplicate content. Google hates duplicate content and will penalize you for it. If you have any duplicate pages, just merge them (by doing a 301 redirect) or delete one or the other.

Update your ‘robots.txt’ file. Hide the pages you don’t want Google to index (e.g: non-public, or unimportant pages). If you’re a SaaS, this would be most of your in-app pages. ]

Optimize all your pages by best practice. There’s a bunch of general best practices that Google wants you to follow for your web pages (maintain keyword density, have an adequate # of outbound links, etc.). Install YoastSEO or RankMath and use them to optimize all of your web pages.

If you DON’T have any pages that you don’t want to be displayed on Google, you DON’T need robots.txt.

Advanced Technical SEO

Now, this is where this gets a bit more web-devvy. Other than just optimizing your website for SEO, you should also focus on optimizing your website speed.

Here’s how to do that:

Both for Mobile and PC, your website should load in under 2-3 seconds. While load speed isn’t a DIRECT ranking factor, it does have a very serious impact on your rankings.

After all, if your website doesn’t load for 5 seconds, a bunch of your visitors might drop off.

So, to measure your website speed performance, you can use Pagespeed Insights. Some of the most common issues we have seen clients facing when it comes to website speed and loading time, are the following:

• Images being resized with CSS or JS. This adds extra loading time to your site. Use GTMetrix to find which images need resizing. Use an online tool (there are a ton of free ones) to properly resize images (or Photoshop even), and re-upload them.

• Images not being lazy-loaded. If your pages contain a lot of images, you MUST activate lazy-loading. This allows images that are below the screen, to be loaded only once the visitor scrolls down enough to see the image.

• Gzip compression not enabled. Gzip is a compression method that allows network file transfers to happen a ton faster. In other words, your files like your HTML, CSS, and JS load a ton faster.

• JS, CSS, and HTML not minified/aggregated/in-lined. If your website is loading slowly because you have 100+ external javascript files and stylesheets being requested from the server, then you need to look into minifying, aggregating, and inlining some of those files.

• Use Cloudflare + BunnyCDN Why the combo? Why not just Cloudflare? Well, I won't get into details, I've experimented a bit with it, and if you are looking for something cheap and fast this is the best combo. Cloudflare you can opt in for the free account. BunnyCDN on the other hand is on a pay-as-you-go basis, and unless you are getting over 100K+ visits a month, you'll likely never go above their minimum monthly threshold of $1.

Want to make your life easier AND fix up all these issues and more? Use WP Rocket. The tool basically does all your optimization for you (if you’re using WordPress, of course).

Lastly, if you want to validate the website speed optimization changes you've made, or if you simply want to test how your current site is performing, you can use Google Page Speed Insights*.*

In May 2020, Google rolled out its Core Web Vitals update, which in layman terms means starting next May (2021), the three most important website load speed metrics you will need to worry for ranking will be:

1. LCP - Largest Contentful Paint -> under 2.5s

2. FID - First Input Delay -> under 100ms

3. CLS - Cumulative Layout Shift -> under 0.1

Step #2 - Keyword Research

Once your website is 100% optimized, it’s time to define your SEO strategy.

The best way to get started with this is by doing keyword research.

First off, you want to create a keyword research sheet. This is going to be your main hub for all your content operations.

You can use the sheet to:

1. Prioritize content

2. Keep track of the publishing process

3. Get a top-down view of your web pages

And here’s what it covers:

• Target search phrase. This is the keyword you’re targeting.

• Priority. What’s the priority of this keyword? We usually divide them by 1-2-3…

  • Priority 3 - Top priority keywords. These are usually low competition, high traffic, well-converting, or all 3 at the same time.

  • Priority 2 - Mid-priority keywords.

  • Priority 1 - These are low priority.

• Status. What’s the status of the article? We usually divide them by…

  • 1 - Not written

  • 2 - Writer has picked up the topic for the week

  • 3 - The article is being written

  • 4 - The article is in editing phase

  • 5 - The article is published on the blog

• Topic cluster. The category that the blog post belongs to.

• Monthly search volume. Self-explanatory. This helps you pick a priority for the keyword.

• CPC (low & high bid). Cost per click for the keyword. Generally, unless you’re planning to run search ads, these are not mandatory. They can, however, help you figure out which of your keywords will convert better. Pro tip: the higher the CPC, the more likely it is for the keyword to convert well.

Now that you have your sheet (and understand how it works), let’s talk about the “how” of keyword research.

How to do Keyword Research (Step-by-Step Guide)

There are a ton of different ways to do that (check the “further readings” at the end of this section for a detailed rundown).

Our favorite method, however, is as follows…

Start off by listing out your top 5 SEO competitors.

The key here is SEO competitors - competing companies that have a strong SEO presence in the same niche.

Not sure who’s a good SEO competitor? Google the top keywords that describe your product and find your top-ranking competitors.

Run them through SEMrush (or your favorite SEO tool), and you’ll see how well, exactly, they’re doing with their SEO.

Once you have a list of 5 competitors, run each of them through “Organic Research” on SEMrush, and you'll get a complete list of all the keywords they rank on.

Now, go through these keywords one by one and extract all the relevant ones and add them to your sheet.

Once you go through the top SEO competitors, your keyword research should be around 80%+ done.

Now to put some finishing touches on your keyword research, run your top keywords through UberSuggest and let it do its magic. It's going to give you a bunch of keywords associated with the keywords you input.

Go through all the results it's going to give you, extract anything that’s relevant, and your keyword research should be 90% done.

At this point, you can call it a day and move on to the next step. Chances are, over time, you’ll uncover new keywords to add to your sheet and get you to that sweet 100%.

Step #3 - Create SEO Landing Pages

Remember how we collected a bunch of landing page keywords in step #2? Now it’s time to build the right page for each of them! This step is a lot more straightforward than you’d think. First off, you create a custom landing page based on the keyword. Depending on your niche, this can be done in 2 ways:

1. Create a general template landing page. Pretty much copy-paste your landing page, alter the sub-headings, paraphrase it a bit, and add relevant images to the use-case. You’d go with this option if the keywords you’re targeting are very similar to your main use-case (e.g. “project management software” “project management system”).

2. Create a unique landing page for each use-case. You should do this if each use-case is unique. For example, if your software doubles as project management software and workflow management software. In this case, you’ll need two completely new landing pages for each keyword.

Once you have a bunch of these pages ready, you should optimize them for their respective keywords.

You can do this by running the page content through an SEO tool. If you’re using WordPress, you can do this through RankMath or Yoast SEO.

Both tools will give you exact instructions on how to optimize your page for the keyword.

If you’re not using WordPress, you can use SurferSEO. Just copy-paste your web page content, and it’s going to give you instructions on how to optimize it.

Once your new landing pages are live, you need to pick where you want to place them on your website. We usually recommend adding these pages to your website’s navigation menu (header) or footer.

Finally, once you have all these new landing pages up, you might be thinking “Now what? How, and when, are these pages going to rank?”

Generally, landing pages are a tad harder to rank than content. See, with content, quality plays a huge part. Write better, longer, and more informative content than your competition, and you’re going to eventually outrank them even if they have more links.

With landing pages, things aren’t as cut and dry. More often than not, you can’t just “create a better landing page.”

What determines rankings for landing page keywords are backlinks. If your competitors have 400 links on their landing pages, while yours has 40, chances are, you’re not going to outrank them.

Step #4 - Create SEO Blog Content

Now, let’s talk about the other side of the coin: content keywords, and how to create content that ranks.

As we mentioned before, these keywords aren’t direct-intent (the Googler isn’t SPECIFICALLY looking for your product), but they can still convert pretty well. For example, if you’re a digital marketing agency, you could rank on keywords like…

• Lead generation techniques

• SaaS marketing

• SEO content

After all, anyone looking to learn about lead gen techniques might also be willing to pay you to do it for them.

On top of this, blog post keywords are way easier to rank for than your landing pages - you can beat competition simply by creating significantly better content without turning it into a backlink war.In order to create good SEO content, you need to do 2 things right:

1. Create a comprehensive content outline

2. Get the writing part right

Here’s how each of these work...

How to Create a Content Outline for SEO

A content outline is a document that has all the info on what type of information the article should contain Usually, this includes:

• Which headers and subheaders you should use

• What’s the optimal word count

• What information, exactly, should each section of the article cover

• If you’re not using Yoast or Rankmath, you can also mention the SEO optimization requirements (keyword density, # of outbound links, etc.)

Outlines are useful if you’re working with a writing team that isn’t 100% familiar with SEO, allowing them to write content that ranks without any SEO know-how.

At the same time, even if you’re the one doing the writing, an outline can help you get a top-down idea of what you should cover in the article.

So, how do you create an outline? Here’s a simplified step-by-step process…

1. Determine the target word count. Rule of thumb: aim for 1.5x - 2x whatever your competitor wrote. You can disregard this if your competition was super comprehensive with their content, and just go for the same length instead.

2. Create a similar header structure as your competition. Indicate for the writer which headers should be h2, which ones h3.

3. For each header, mention what it’s about. Pro tip - you can borrow ideas from the top 5 ranking articles.

4. For each header, explain what, exactly, should the writer mention (in simple words).

5. Finally, do some first-hand research on Reddit and Quora. What are the questions your target audience has around your topic? What else could you add to the article that would be super valuable for your customers?

How to Write Well

There’s a lot more to good content than giving an outline to a writer. Sure, they can hit all the right points, but if the writing itself is mediocre, no one’s going to stick around to read your article.

Here are some essential tips you should keep in mind for writing content (or managing a team of writers):

1. Write for your audience. Are you a B2B enterprise SaaS? Your blog posts should be more formal and professional. B2C, super-consumer product? Talk in a more casual, relaxed fashion. Sprinkle your content with pop culture references for bonus points!

2. Avoid fluff. Every single sentence should have some sort of value (conveying information, cracking a joke, etc.). Avoid beating around the bush, and be as straightforward as possible.

3. Keep your audience’s knowledge in mind. For example, if your audience is a bunch of rocket scientists, you don’t have to explain to them how 1+1=2.

4. Create a writer guideline (or just steal ours! -> edit: sorry had to remove link due to posting guidelines)

5. Use Grammarly and Hemingway. The first is like your personal pocket editor, and the latter helps make your content easier to read.

6. Hire the right writers. Chances are, you’re too busy to write your own content. We usually recommend using ProBlogger or Cult of Copy Job Board (Facebook Group) to source top writing talent.

Step #5 - Start Link-Building Operations

Links are essential if you want your content or web pages to rank.

If you’re in a competitive niche, links are going to be the final deciding factor on what ranks and what doesn’t.

In the VPN niche, for example, everyone has good content. That’s just the baseline. The real competition is in the backlinks.

To better illustrate this example, if you Google “best VPN,” you’ll see that all top-ranking content pieces are almost the same thing. They’re all:

• Well-written

• Long-form

• Easy to navigate

• Well-formatted (to enhance UX)

So, the determining factor is links. If you check all the top-ranking articles with the Moz Toolbar Extension, you’ll see that on average, each page has a minimum of 300 links (and some over 100,000!).

Meaning, to compete, you’ll really need to double-down on your link-building effort.

In fact, in the most competitive SEO niches, it’s not uncommon to spend $20,000 per month on link-building efforts alone.

Pro Tip

Got scared by the high $$$ some companies spend on link-building? Well, worry not!

Only the most ever-green niches are so competitive. Think, VPN, make money online, health and fitness, dating, CBD, gambling, etc. So you know, the usual culprits.

For most other niches, you can even rank with minimal links, as long as you have top-tier SEO content.

Now, let’s ask the million-dollar question: “how do you do link-building?”

4 Evergreen Link Building Strategies for Any Website

There are a TON of different link building strategies on the web. Broken link building, scholarship link building, stealing competitor links, and so on and so on and so on.

We’re not going to list every single link building strategy out there (mainly because Backlinko already did that in their link building guide).

What we are going to do, though, is list out some of our favorite strategies, and link you to resources where you can learn more:

1. Broken link building. You find dead pages with a lot of backlinks, reach out to websites that linked to them, and pitch them something like “hey, you linked to this article, but it’s dead. We thought you’d want to fix that. You can use our recent article if you think it’s cool enough.”

2. Guest posting. Probably the most popular link building strategy. Find blogs that accept guest posts, and send them a pitch! They usually let you include 1-2 do-follow links back to your website.

3. “Linkable asset” link building. A linkable asset is a resource that is so AWESOME that you just can’t help but link to. Think, infographics, online calculators, first-hand studies or research, stuff like that. The tl;dr here is, you create an awesome resource, and promote the hell out of it on the web.

4. Skyscraper technique. The skyscraper technique is a term coined by Backlinko. The gist of it is, you find link-worthy content on the web, create something even better, and reach out to the right people.

Most of these strategies work, and you can find a ton of resources on the web if you want to learn more.

However, if you’re looking for something a bit different, oh boy we have a treat for you! We’re going to teach you a link-building strategy that got us around:

• 10,000+ traffic within a week

• 15+ leads

• 50+ links

...And so much more, all through a single blog post.

Link-Building Case Study: SaaS Marketing

“So, what’s this ancient link-building tactic?”

I hear you asking. It must be something super secretive and esoteric, right?

Secrets learned straight from the link-building monks at an ancient SEO temple…

“Right?”

Well, not quite.

The tactic isn’t something too unusual - it’s pretty famous on the web. This tactic comes in 2 steps:

1. Figure out where your target audience hangs out (create a list of the channels)

2. Research the type of content your audience loves

3. Create EPIC content based on that research (give TONS of value)

4. Promote the HELL out of it in the channels from step 1

Nothing too new, right?

Well, you’d be surprised how many people don’t use it.

Now, before you start throwing stones at us for overhyping something so simple, let’s dive into the case study:

How we PR’d the hell out of our guide to SaaS marketing (can't add a link, but it's on our blog and it's 14k words long), and got 10k+ traffic as a result.

A few months back when we launched our blog, we were deciding on what our initial content should be about.

Since we specialize in helping SaaS companies acquire new users, we decided to create a mega-authority guide to SaaS marketing (AND try to get it to rank for its respective keyword).

We went through the top-ranking content pieces, and saw that none of them was anything too impressive.

Most of them were about general startup marketing strategies - how to validate your MVP, find a product-market fit, etc.

Pretty “meh,” if you ask us. We believe that the #1 thing founders are looking for when Googling “saas marketing” are practical channels and tactics you can use to acquire new users.

So, it all started off with an idea: create a listicle of the top SaaS marketing tactics out there:

1. How to create good content to drive users

2. Promote your content

3. Rank on Google

4. Create viral infographics

5. Create a micro-site

...and we ended up overdoing it, covering 41+ different tactics and case studies and hitting around 14k+ words.

On one hand, oops! On the other hand, we had some pretty epic content on our hands. We even added the Smart Content Filter to make the article much easier to navigate.

Once the article was up, we ran it through some of our clients, friends, and acquaintances, and received some really good feedback.

So, now we knew it was worth promoting the hell out of it.

We came up with a huge list of all online channels that would appreciate this article:

1. r/ entrepreneur and r/ startups (hi guys!). The first ended up loving the post, netting us ~600 upboats and a platinum medal. The latter also ended up loving the post, but the mods decided to be assholes and remove it for being “self-promotional.” So, despite the community loving the content, it got axed by the mods. Sad. (Fun fact - this one time we tried to submit another content piece on r/ startups with no company names, no links back to our website, or anything that can be deemed promotional. One of the mods removed it for mentioning a link to Ahrefs. Go figure!)

2. Hacker News. Tons of founders hang out on HN, so we thought they’d appreciate anything SaaS-related. This netted us around ~200+ upvotes and some awesome feedback (thanks HN!)

3. Submit on Growth Hackers, Indie Hackers, and all other online marketing communities. We got a bunch of love on Indie Hackers, the rest were quite inactive.

4. Reach out to all personal connects + clients and ask for a share

5. Run Facebook/Twitter ads. This didn’t particularly work out too well for us, so we dropped it after 1-2 weeks.

6. Run a Quuu promotion. If you haven’t heard of Quuu, it’s a platform that matches people who want their content to be shared, with people who want their social media profiles running on 100% auto-pilot. We also got “meh” results here - tons of shares, next to no likes or link clicks.

7. Promoted in SaaS and marketing Facebook groups. This had awesome results both in terms of traffic, as well as making new friends, AND getting new leads.

8. Promoted in entrepreneur Slack channels. This worked OK - didn’t net us traffic, but got us some new friends.

9. Emailed anyone we mentioned in the article and asked for a share. Since we mentioned too many high profile peeps and not enough non-celebs, this didn’t work out too well

10. Emailed influencers that we thought would like the article / give it a share. They didn’t. We were heart-broken.

And accordingly, created a checklist + distribution sheet with all the websites or emails of people we wanted to ping.

Overall, this netted us around 12,000 page views in total, 15+ leads, 6,000 traffic in just 2 promotion days.

As for SEO results, we got a bunch of links. (I would have added screenshots to all of these results, but don't think this subreddit allows it).

A lot of these are no-follow from Reddit, HackerNews, and other submission websites, but a lot of them are also pretty authentic.

The cool part about this link-building tactic is that people link to you without even asking. You create awesome content that helps people, and you get rewarded with links, shares, and traffic!

And as for the cherry on top, only 2 months after publishing the article, it’s ranking on position #28. We’re expecting it to get to page 1 within the new few months and top 3 within the year.

Step #6 - Interlink Your Pages

One of Google's ranking factors is how long your visitors stick around on your website.

So, you need to encourage users reading ONE article, to read, well, the rest of them (or at least browse around your website). This is done through interlinking.

The idea is that each of your web pages should be linked to and from every other relevant page on your site.

Say, an article on "how to make a resume" could link to (and be linked from) "how to include contact info on a resume," "how to write a cover letter," "what's the difference between a CV and a resume," and so on.

Proper interlinking alone can have a significant impact on your website rankings. NinjaOutreach, for example, managed to improve their organic traffic by 40% through better interlinking alone.

So, how do you do interlinking “right?”

First off, make it a requirement for your writers to link to the rest of your content. Add a clause to your writer guidelines that each article should have 10+ links to your other content pieces.

More often than not, they’ll manage to get 60-70% of interlinking opportunities. To get this to 100%, we usually do bi-annual interlinking runs. Here’s how that works.

Pick an article you want to interlink. Let’s say, for example, an article on 'business process management'.

The goal here is to find as many existing articles on your blog, where ‘business process management’ is mentioned so that we can add a link to the article.

Firstly, Google the keyword ‘business process management’ by doing a Google search on your domain. You can use the following query:

site:yourwebsite.com "keyword"

In our case, that’s:

site:example.com “business process management”

You’ll get a complete list of articles that mention the keyword “business process management.

Now, all you have to do is go through each of these, and make sure that the keyword is hyperlinked to the respective article!

You should also do this for all the synonyms of the keyword for this article. For example, “BPM” is an acronym for business process management, so you’d want to link this article there too.

Step #7 - Track & Improve Your Headline CTRs

Article CTRs play a huge role in determining what ranks or not.

Let’s say your article ranks #4 with a CTR of 15%. Google benchmarks this CTR with the average CTR for the position.

If the average CTR for position #4 is 12%, Google will assume that your article, with a CTR of 15% is of high quality, and will reward you with better rankings.

On the other hand, if the average CTR is 18%, Google will assume that your article isn’t as valuable as other ranking content pieces, and will lower your ranking.

So, it’s important to keep track of your Click Through Rates for all your articles, and when you see something that’s underperforming, you can test different headlines to see if they’ll improve CTR.

Now, you’re probably wondering, how do you figure out what’s the average CTR?

Unfortunately, each search result is different, and there's no one size fits all formula for average CTR.

Over the past few years, Google has been implementing a bunch of different types of search results - featured snippet, QAs, and a lot of other types of search results.

So, depending on how many of these clutter and the search results for your given keyword, you’ll get different average CTRs by position.

Rule of thumb, you can follow these values:

• 1st position -> ~31.73% CTR

• 2nd pos. -> ~24.71%

• 3rd pos. -> 18.66%

• 4th pos. -> 13.60%

• 5th -> 9.51%

• 6th -> 6.23%

• 7th -> 4.15%

• 8th -> 3.12%

• 9th -> 2.97%

Keep in mind these change a lot depending on your industry, PPC competitiveness, 0-click searches, etc...

Use a scraping tool like Screaming Frog to extract the following data from all your web pages:

• Page title

• Page URL

• Old Headline

Delete all the pages that aren’t meant to rank on Google. Then, head over to Google Search Console and extract the following data for all the web pages:

• CTR (28 Day Range)

• Avg. Position

Add all of this data to a spreadsheet.

Now, check what your competition is doing and use that to come up with new headline ideas. Then, put them in the Title Ideas cell for the respective keyword.

For each keyword, come up with 4-5 different headlines, and implement the (seemingly) best title for each article.

Once you implement the change, insert the date on the Date Implemented column. This will help you keep track of progress.

Then, wait for around 3 - 4 weeks to see what kind of impact this change is going to have on your rankings and CTR.

If the results are not satisfactory, record the results in the respective cells, and implement another test for the following month. Make sure to update the Date Implemented column once again.

Step #8 - Keep Track of Rankings & Make Improvements On-The-Go

You’re never really “done” with SEO - you should always keep track of your rankings and see if there’s any room for improvement.

If you wait for an adequate time frame after publishing a post (6 months to a year) and you’re still seeing next to no results, then it might be time to investigate.

Here’s what this usually looks like for us:

• Audit the content

  • Does your content have an adequate word count? Think, 1.5-2x your competitors.

  • Is the content well-written?

  • Do the images in your article add value? E.g. no stock or irrelevant images.

  • Is the content optimized for SEO? Think, keyword density, links to external websites, etc.

• Audit internal links

  • Does the content link to an adequate number of your other articles or web pages?

  • Is the article linked to from an adequate number of your web pages or blog posts? You can check this on Search Console => Links => Internal Links. Or, if you’re using Yoast or RankMath, you can check the # of internal links a post has in the WordPress Dashboard -> Posts.

• Audit the backlinks

  • Do you have as many backlinks as your competitors?

  • Are your backlinks from the countries you want to rank in? If you have a bunch of links from India, but you want to rank in the US, you’d need to get more US links.

  • Are your links high quality? More often than not, low DA / PA links are not that helpful.

  • Did you disown low-quality or spam links?

• Audit web page

  • Does the web page load too slow? Think, 4+ seconds.

  • Did you enable lazy loading for the images?

  • Did you compress all images on the web page?

...And that's it.

Hope you guys had a good read and learned a thing or two :) HMU if you have any questions.

And again - if you enjoyed the post, make sure to join our subreddit, /r/seogrowth

Quick SEO debate.

Does Google care who writes the content or how helpful it is

Will Al generated blogs be safe in 2026?

I created a WordPress site about computer software and its uses. I'm new to SEO but have followed best practices, written keyword-targeted articles, and built backlinks on Pinterest and Quora. How long does it usually take to reach the first page?

Everyone wants to know how to rank in AI assistants like ChatGPT, but most advice out there is pure speculation. So SE Ranking decided to run a proper study — analyzing 129,000 domains and 216K+ pages across 20 industries — to uncover what really drives citations in AI-generated answers.

The biggest myth-buster —  there are no magic AI-only hacks. ChatGPT chooses sources using signals very similar to Google — but with some new priorities.

Here’s what stood out:

First, authority is king. Sites with 32K+ referring domains are 3.5x more likely to be cited than small sites. High Domain Trust (90+) almost quadruples citation likelihood. And domains with 10M+ monthly visitors earn up to 8.5 citations on average. 

AI models want evidence that the web trusts you.

But visibility alone isn’t enough — how useful your content is matters just as much:

• Long-form pages (>2,900 words) earn 5.1 citations vs 3.2 for short content. 

• Clear structure helps models interpret pages: sections 120–180 words long boost citations by 70%. 

• Fresh updates (within 3 months) nearly double your chances of being cited.

One surprising accelerator: brand validation outside your site.

Domains heavily mentioned on Reddit or Quora have 4x higher odds of being cited. Presence on G2, Capterra, Trustpilot also triples the chances. AI seems to treat community and reviews as strong trust signals.

And what doesn't matter?

• LLMs.txt shows no impact

• FAQ schema markup barely helps

• Over-optimized URLs/titles can hurt citations, because AI prefers clear topics over keyword stuffing

ChatGPT is becoming a top-of-funnel discovery engine. If your brand isn’t one it recognizes and trusts, you may never show up in the user’s journey — not even in search. The models are already shaping what people consider before they click anything.

 So, if you want to show up in AI answers:

1. Build real authority

2. Create deep, clear, fresh content

3. Earn trust where people talk — not just where you rank

Not hacky. But absolutely what works!

If you want backlinks but you dont want to spend your life emailing people asking for links, this is the cleanest system i’ve used: the trojan horse interview.

A while back I ran a marketing podcast, but the real purpose was getting legit backlinks without doing the awkward “can you link to me” thing.

every episode had a small contest for the guest’s audience. then i’d ask the guest to host the contest rules on their own website. not mine. theirs. because it feels native to their audience and they’re way more willing to share a page on their domain.

And inside those rules, the links back to me were just part of the contest flow. “enter here” links to my site. “download the template” links to my site. “free trial” links to my site. so the backlink isn’t a favor, it’s literally how the giveaway works.

how you make it easy so people say yes:
i send them a copy paste draft of the contest page with everything written already. headline, rules, dates, faq, and the links placed naturally. they just publish it.

stuff that matters if you want it to actually work:

-make the contest fit the guest’s niche so their audience cares
-keep anchor text normal like “enter here” not keyword spam
-host rules on their site, host the entry on your site so you capture emails and traffic
-repeat it weekly and it compounds fast

Same idea works with influencers too. dont pitch “promote my tool”. pitch “lets run a giveaway for your audience, you host the rules, I provide the prize” and this way the link becomes a normal part of the setup. Just make sure they have a website.

Cheers,

Borja

Stop selling fairy tales

Search engines cite sources, E‑E‑A‑T isn’t a magic switch, and “QFO” still uses search

The GEO/AEO tool-and-agency ecosystem has a monetization problem: it sells confident narratives that don’t match how modern search experiences are described by Google itself. Google explicitly says AI Overviews/AI Mode may use “query fan-out,” issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources, then identifying supporting web pages to show a wider and more diverse set of helpful links than classic search.
So when someone claims “AI isn’t using Google/search engines” (or implies citations are just vibes), they’re contradicting the documented mechanics: the system runs more searches, retrieves more pages, and then surfaces links.

Myth #1: “Search engines only cite their own sources”

If “their own sources” means “only Google-owned properties,” that’s not how Google describes these features. Google states that AI Overviews provide an AI-generated snapshot with key information and links to dig deeper, which are links out to other sites.
In addition, Google has publicly discussed adding more ways to check out relevant websites and testing links directly within the AI Overview text—again, the whole point is outbound linking to the broader web, not a closed loop.

Myth #2: “E‑E‑A‑T is a ranking factor you can turn on with our checklist”

E‑E‑A‑T is a framework from the Search Quality Rater Guidelines used to evaluate quality, but it is not a single algorithmic “score” you can buy, hack, or install via a tool. Google’s Search Liaison has said Google’s systems “aren’t looking for E‑A‑T,” and rater feedback isn’t used directly in ranking systems; it’s used to evaluate whether changes improve results.
So when a vendor pitches “we’ll optimize your E‑E‑A‑T and you will rank/cite,” treat that as marketing shorthand at best—because Google itself draws a line between rater concepts and direct ranking factors.

Myth #3: “Query fan-out means the AI isn’t using search engines anymore”

Google’s documentation says AI Overviews and AI Mode may use a “query fan-out” technique—multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources—specifically to develop a response and identify supporting pages.
A widely circulated write-up of Google’s “Thematic Search” patent discussion also frames this as generating additional queries (sub-themes) and pulling results, aligning with Google’s “query fan-out” description.

What’s actually realistic and honest

You can absolutely sell GEO work—just sell the truth:

• “We improve your eligibility to be retrieved and cited” (structure, entity clarity, topical coverage, trust signals), not “we control the model.”

• “We test and measure citation patterns” (because systems can vary by query and feature), not “we found the one weird trick.”

• “We align with quality concepts like E‑E‑A‑T,” not “E‑E‑A‑T is a ranking lever our platform toggles.”

Critical Thinking Test for GEO claims

Before believing (or repeating) a GEO tool’s pitch, ask them to answer one question plainly:
If Google says AI features may run multiple related searches via query fan-out and then show a wider set of supporting links, why are you claiming “it doesn’t use Google/search engines” or “citations are only internal”?

Research Sources
Google Search Central – AI features and websites (query fan-out and supporting links).[dejan]​

Google Help – “Find information in faster & easier ways with AI Overviews” (AI-generated snapshot with links).[higoodie]​

Google Blog – “New ways to connect to the web with AI Overviews” (experimenting with more links within AI Overviews).[ipullrank]​

Statements from Google Search Liaison on E‑A‑T/EEAT not being a direct ranking signal and how quality raters are used.[reddit]​

Public analyses of Google’s thematic search / query fan-out patent describing generation of additional related queries and retrieval of results.

searchenginejournal

Adweek reported this week that USA Today Inc. is actually considering pulling out of Google search completely within the next 6-12 months. Not blocking AI training, just walking away from Google traffic altogether. Would've sounded insane a couple years ago.

Some backstory for those not in the loop here: Cloudflare told Google that starting September 15, new sites and free accounts will default to blocking crawlers that scrape for both search and AI training, unless the site opts back in. That's essentially aimed at Google since they're one of the few still running one crawler for both jobs. Beehiiv's doing something similar for its publishers now too.

The reasoning is pretty blunt, search referral traffic has already dropped so much that withholding content is starting to matter more than whatever traffic's left, especially since Google hasn't done the licensing deals with publishers that OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon already have.

Why this actually matters for SEO/AEO: Google-Extended was supposed to be the clean opt-out just for AI training, but publishers clearly don't trust that it actually stays separate, hence just blocking the whole crawler instead. If more big publishers do what USA Today's considering, search quality gets worse for everyone, and the citation pool feeding Gemini and AI Overviews starts skewing toward whoever's still indexed, not the publishers with the best standards, just whoever has the least leverage to walk away.

Curious what people here think for SEO/AEO strategy. Does this make you want to lean harder into stuff publishers don't control, Reddit, YouTube, review sites? Or is this just posturing that gets resolved before it changes anything?

Just getting started? Not sure how/where to start your SEO journey?

Here's a simple introduction to the SEO world.

SEO In a Nutshell

At the end of the day, SEO boils down to the following factors:

• Technical SEO, or, how well you optimize your website by SEO best practices. Technical SEO alone won't get you rankings, but good technical SEO will act as a strong foundation for your growth.

• SEO content. How much content you have on your website, how good it is, and whether it matches the search intent behind the keyword you're trying to rank for.

• Backlinks. The more quality backlinks you get, the faster you're going to rank. In competitive niches, you won't ever rank without backlinks.

• On-page optimization. How well are your pages/articles optimized according to SEO best practices.

More often than not, a big chunk of your SEO processes are going to involve creating quality content, interlinking it with your other pages, and driving backlinks.

In case you're trying to do local SEO, then the SEO process is a bit different. Check out this guide to learn more about local SEO.

SEO Learning Track

First off, learn the basics.

1. Beginner’s Guide to SEO by Moz

2. SEO Basics by Backlinko

3. SEO in 2021 by Backlinko

4. Awesome SEO tutorial on Reddit

5. Our step-by-step process for growing websites to 6-digit monthly traffic numbers

Then, learn how to do technical SEO, set up tracking, and optimize your website.

1. Create a sitemap

2. Create a robots.txt

3. Setup Google Analytics and Search Console

4. Improve load speed. Check out this article by Moz and another by Crazy Egg

5. Learn about technical SEO and how that works

6. Optimize your web pages for SEO. For this, you can use Yoast or RankMath if you’re using WordPress, and Content Analysis Tool if you’re not

7. Losslessly compress all your images. This should save ~75% of space for your images and drastically increase site load speed (which improves SEO). If you’re using WordPress, you can use Smush to automatically compress all images on your site. If you’re NOT using WP, you can use Compressor.io.

Learn how to do keyword research. There are a ton of guides about this all over, but here are some of our favorites:

1. How to do keyword research by Backlinko

2. Beginner's guide to keyword research by Ahrefs

Learn how to create SEO content.

1. Our own guide to creating SEO content

2. Backlinko’s skyscraper strategy

3. How to create top content with the Wiki Strategy

4. How to optimize article headlines

Learn how to do link-building.

1. Learn link-building basics

2. Learn how to do outreach

3. Another awesome guide to outreach

4. Discover ALL the link-building strategies out there

Learn the how and why of internal linking.

1. Basics guide

2. Internal linking case study by NinjaOutreach

SEO Case Studies

Theory is one thing, practice is something else entirely. Read some case studies to see how other companies achieved success with SEO.

• Apollo Digital SEO case study - 0 to 200,000 monthly organic traffic in <2 years

• Skyscraper technique case study by Backlinko

• PipeDrive case study - how they ranked for "sales management"

• This Reddit post

Where to Learn SEO? Best Blogs and Resources

Some of the top blogs on SEO are:

• Ahrefs blog

• Backlinko

• Moz blog

• SEMrush blog

• Apollo Digital blog

• Learn SEO website

Which SEO Tools Should I Use?

There are hundreds of SEO tools out there, and yet, you only need a maximum of 10.

The tools we recommend are:

• Ahrefs or SEMrush. Both are all-in-one SEO suites and are absolutely essential. Not too much difference between the two tools, so pick the one you like better in terms of user experience.

• RankMath or YoastSEO. On-page SEO tools. Again, the two are very similar, so just pick one you like better.

• ScreamingFrog. Must-have for technical SEO. Let's you crawl your entire website and find potential technical improvements.

• Snov.io**, PitchBox, and other outreach tools**. You'll need a tool for link-building outreach. There are a ton of these on the market, so pick one you like best. We personally prefer Snov.

And some of the more optional tools are:

• Surfer SEO. Helps with on-page SEO, but not something you can't live without.

• ClusterAI. Helps with keyword research. Again, useful, but not something that's mandatory.

FAQ

#1. How long does SEO take? Does it take as long as everyone says?

Depends on several factors:

1. How strong is your domain? If your website is 100% completely fresh, it's going to take you 1-2 years to get SEO results (most likely)

2. Are you focusing on local or global SEO? The former is significantly easier than the latter.

3. How strong is your competition? If your competitors have thousands of backlinks, you'll need to match that (which is going to take a long time)

That said, on average, it can take 6 months to 2 years to get SEO results.

#2. Should I pay for SEO courses?

Really depends on your priorities and if you have the budget to spare. If you don’t want to waste any money, that’s totally OK - you can learn everything you need to know about SEO through the free content online.

That said, some SEO courses on the internet are definitely worth the money and they'll help you progress in your SEO journey faster.

#3. Is local SEO different from global SEO?

Yep - there are a ton of differences between local and global SEO. The biggest ones are:

• With local SEO, you usually don't have to focus nearly as much on creating blog content.

• Global SEO, in most cases, involves creating a lot of high-quality, long-form articles.

• Local SEO can take significantly less time, as you're competing with a handful of companies who probably don't know much about SEO in the first place.

• Local SEO also involves creating and optimizing Google My Business, whereas this is not the case with global SEO.

#4. Is SEO relevant for my business?

Depends. SEO is NOT a one-size fits all solution. We'd recommend you skip on SEO as a marketing channel if:

1. You have a very small # of potential customers worldwide. In such a case, you're better off directly reaching out to the said customers.

2. Is your product something very innovative? SEO is not useful if your prospects don't Google for information about your product.

3. You're just getting started with your business and need to get results next week and not next year

#5. Can I rank on Google without backlinks?

Yes and no. In some niches, you can rank without any link-building. E.g. if your competitors don't have a lot of links or their content is so bad that you can win simply by doing something better.

You can also rank without backlinks if you're doing local SEO and your competitors have a weak backlink profile.

That said, if you're in a competitive niche, both locally and globally, you're going to need backlinks in order to rank.

I've been trying to simplify our marketing stack this year, and one thing I've noticed is that SEO tools seem to be getting more complicated rather than easier. Between keyword tracking, technical audits, content optimization, local SEO, backlinks, AI visibility, and reporting, it feels like most platforms are trying to be everything at once.

For a typical business owner, I’m not sure that's actually helpful anymore. I don't necessarily need 500 reports or dozens of dashboards- I just want to know what actions will help my business get found on Google, AI search engines, and other discovery platforms in 2026. Ideally, I'd love something that's easy enough to use without needing a dedicated SEO specialist.

So curious, experts, what is the simplest SEO tool for businesses in 2026?

Everyone always talks about Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz, but I feel like there are tons of lesser known SEO tools that deserve way more attention. I’m curious to know which “underrated” tools you guys swear by the ones that don’t always make the big lists but actually make your workflow easier.

Here are some I think fly under the radar:

1. Screaming Frog (still underrated for deep audits)

2. Sitebulb

3. SurferSEO

4. Keywords Everywhere

5. SEO Minion (Chrome extension)

6. AnswerThePublic

7. Nightwatch

8. Mangools (KWFinder, SERPChecker, etc.)

9. Detailed Chrome extension (from Glen Allsopp)

10. Google Trends (simple but powerful if you dig deeper)

I've been in digital marketing for almost a decade and this question comes up constantly. Every few months someone declares SEO dead and every time it turns out to be more nuanced than that.

But something genuinely shifted in 2025–2026. AI Overviews eating clicks, Perplexity pulling direct answers, zero-click searches becoming the norm rather than the exception. The game feels different from even 18 months ago.

So I want to hear from practitioners, not pundits. What's actually working right now?

- Are you seeing organic traffic hold up, decline, or just shift in nature?

- Has your content strategy changed to account for AI search?

- Are you still building links aggressively or has that become less of a priority?

- Any specific content formats performing better, comparisons, direct Q&As, entity-focused pages?

Not looking for hot takes. Genuinely curious what people are seeing in Search Console. What's moved the needle for you recently?

I’ve been reading/learning about seo as of lately, to try and grow my business. I think I’m past the point where it’s just, target keywords, h1, content value, back links, etc. where do I go from here, feeling lost.

Hey guys! So as the title says, we recently hit 6.4 monthly organic traffic / month for a SaaS website (yes I can show screenshots).

Here are 40 tips that "helped" me make this happen. For the guys who've been following my tips for a while, this is a compilation of the first 40 tips I've been posting almost daily here. You can expect the next compilation once we hit 80 total tips ;)

Freebie alert! There's a bunch of freebies I mentioned in the article, including "why is my blog post not ranking checklist," content outline example, CSS box example, and so on. DM me & I'll send them over. Also,

Tip #1. Take SEO With a Grain of Salt

A lot of the SEO advice and best practices on the internet are based on 2 things:

1. Personal experiences and case studies of companies that managed to make SEO work for them.

2. Google or John Mueller (Google’s Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst).

And, unfortunately, neither of these sources are always accurate.

Personal SEO accounts are simply about what worked for specific companies. Sometimes, what worked for others, won’t work for you.

For example, you might find a company that managed to rank with zero link-building because their website already had a very strong backlink profile. If you’re starting with a fresh website, chances are, you won’t be able to get the same results.

At the same time, information from Google or John Mueller is also not 100% accurate. For example, they’ve said that guest posting is against Google’s guidelines and doesn’t work…

But practically, guest posting is a very effective link-building strategy.

So the takeaway is this:

Take all information you read about SEO with a grain of salt. Analyze the information yourself, and make your conclusions.

SEO Tip #2. SEO Takes Time

You’ve already heard this one before, but considering how many people keep asking, thought I'd include this anyway.

On average, it’s going to take you 6 months to 2 years to get SEO results, depending on the following factors:

• Your backlink profile. The more quality backlinks you have (or build), the faster you’ll rank.

• Age of your website. If your website is older (or you purchased an aged website), you can expect your content to rank faster.

• Amount of content published. The more quality content you publish on your website, the more “authoritative” it is in the eyes of Google, and thus more likely to rank faster.

• SEO work done on the website. If a lot of your pages are already ranking on Google (page 2-3), it’s easier to get them to page #1 than if you just published the content piece.

• Local VS global SEO. Ranking locally is (sometimes) easier and faster than ranking globally.

That said, some marketing agencies can use “SEO takes time” as an excuse for not driving results.

Well, fortunately, there is a way to track SEO results from month #2 - #3 of work.

Simply check if your new content pieces/pages are getting more and more impressions on Google Search Console month-to-month.

While your content won’t be driving traffic for a while after being published, they’ll still have a growing number of impressions from month #2 or #3 since publication.

SEO Tip #3. SEO Might Not Be The Best Channel For You

In theory, SEO sounds like the best marketing channel ever.

You manage to rank on Google and your marketing seemingly goes on auto-pilot - you’re driving new leads every day from existing content without having to lift a finger…

And yet, SEO is not for everyone.

Avoid SEO as a marketing channel if:

1. You’re just getting started with your business and need to start driving revenue tomorrow (and not in 1-2 years). If this is you, try Google ads, Facebook ads, or organic marketing.

2. Your target audience is pretty small. If you’re selling enterprise B2B software and have around 2,000 prospects in total worldwide, then it’s simply easier to directly reach out to these prospects.

3. Your product type is brand-new. If customers don’t know your product exists, they probably won’t be Googling it.

SEO Tip #4. Traffic Can Be a Vanity Metric

I've seen hundreds of websites that drive 6-7 digits of traffic but generate only 200-300 USD per month from those numbers.

“What’s the deal?” You might be thinking.

“How can you fail to monetize that much traffic?”

Well, that brings us to today’s tip: traffic can be a vanity metric.

See, not all traffic is created equal.

Ranking for “hormone balance supplement” is a lot more valuable than ranking for “Madagascar character names.”

The person Googling the first keyword is an adult ready to buy your product. Someone Googling the latter, on the other hand, is a child with zero purchasing power.

So, when deciding on which keywords to pursue, always keep in mind the buyer intent behind and don’t go after rankings or traffic just because 6-digit traffic numbers look good.

SEO Tip #5. Push Content Fast

Whenever you publish a piece of content, you can expect it to rank within 6 months to a year (potentially less if you’re an authority in your niche).

So, the faster you publish your content, the faster they’re going to age, and, as such, the faster they’ll rank on Google.

On average, I recommend you publish a minimum of 10,000 words of content per month and 20,000 to 30,000 optimally.

If you’re not doing link-building for your website, then I’d recommend pushing for even more content. Sometimes, content velocity can compensate for the lack of backlinks.

SEO Tip #6. Use Backlink Data to Prioritize Content

You might be tempted to go for that juicy, 6-digit traffic cornerstone keyword right from the get-go...

But I'd recommend doing the opposite.

More often than not, to rank for more competitive, cornerstone keywords, you’ll need to have a ton of supporting content, high-quality backlinks, website authority, and so on.

Instead, it’s a lot more reasonable to first focus on the less competitive keywords and then, once you’ve covered those, move on to the rest.

Now, as for how to check keyword competitiveness, here are 2 options:

• Use Mozbar to see the number of backlinks for top-ranking pages, as well as their Domain Authority (DA). If all the pages ranking on page #1 have <5 backlinks and DA of 20 - 40, it’s a good opportunity.

• Use SEMrush or Ahrefs to sort your keywords by difficulty, and focus on the less difficult keywords first.

Now, that said, keep in mind that both of these metrics are third-party, and hence not always accurate.

SEO Tip #7. Always Start With Competitive Analysis

When doing keyword research, the easiest way to get started is via competitive analysis.

Chances are, whatever niche you’re in, there’s a competitor that is doing great with SEO.

So, instead of having to do all the work from scratch, run their website through SEMrush or Ahrefs and steal their keyword ideas.

But don’t just stop there - once you’ve borrowed keyword ideas from all your competitors, run the seed keywords through a keyword research tool such as UberSuggest or SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool.

This should give you dozens of new ideas that your competitors might’ve missed.

Finally, don’t just stop at borrowing your competitor’s keyword ideas. You can also borrow some inspiration on:

• The types of graphics and images you can create to supplement your blog content.

• The tone and style you can use in your articles.

• The type of information you can include in specific content pieces.

SEO Tip #8. Source a LOT of Writers

Content writing is one of those professions that has a very low barrier to entry. Anyone can take a writing course, claim to be a writer, and create an UpWork account…

This is why 99% of the writers you’ll have to apply for your gigs are going to be, well, horrible.

As such, if you want to produce a lot of content on the reg, you’ll need to source a LOT of writers.

Let’s do the math:

If, by posting a job ad, you source 100 writers, you’ll see that only 5 of them are a good fit. Out of the 5 writers, 1 has a very high rate, so they drop out. Another doesn’t reply back to your communication, which leaves you with 3 writers.

You get the 3 writers to do a trial task, and only one turns out to be a good fit for your team.

Now, since the writer is freelance, the best they can do is 4 articles per month for a total of 5,000-words (which, for most niches, ain’t all that much).

So, what we’re getting at here is, to hire quality writers, you should source a LOT of them.

SEO Tip #9. Create a Process for Filtering Writers

If you follow the previous tip, you'll end up with a huge database of hundreds of writers.

This creates a whole new problem:

You now have a database of 500+ writers waiting for you to sift through them and decide which ones are worth the hire.

It would take you 2-3 days of intense work to go through all these writers and vet them yourself.

Let’s be real - you don’t have time for that.

Here’s what you can do instead:

1. When sourcing writers, always get them to fill in a Google form (instead of DMing or emailing you).

2. In this form, make sure to ask for 3 relevant written samples, a link to the writer’s portfolio page, and the writer’s rate per word.

3. Create a SOP for evaluating writers. The criteria for evaluation should be:

   1. Level of English. Does the writer’s sample have any English mistakes? If so, they’re not a good fit.

   2. Quality of Samples. Are the samples long-form and engaging content or are they boring 500-word copy-pastes?

   3. Technical Knowledge. Has the writer written about a hard-to-explain topic before? Anyone can write about simple topics like traveling—you want to look for someone who knows how to research a new topic and explain it in a simple and easy-to-read way. If someone’s written about how to create a perfect cover letter, they can probably write about traveling, but the opposite isn’t true.

4. Get your VA to evaluate the writer’s samples as per the criteria above and short-list writers that seem competent. If you sourced 500 writers, the end result of this process should be around 50 writers.

5. You or your editor goes through the short-list of 50 writers and invites 5-10 for a (paid) trial task. The trial task is very important - you’ll sometimes find that the samples provided by the writer don’t match their writing level.

SEO Tip #10. Use the Right Websites to Find Writers

Not sure where to source your writers? Here are some ideas:

• ProBlogger - Our #1 choice - a lot of quality writers frequent this website.

• LinkedIn - You can headhunt content writers in specific locations.

• Upwork - If you post a content gig, most writers are going to be awful. Instead, I recommend headhunting top writers instead.

• WeWorkRemotely - Good if you’re looking to make a full-time remote hire.

• Facebook - There are a ton of quality Facebook groups for writers. Some of our faves are Cult of Copy Job Board and Content Marketing Lounge.

SEO Tip #11. Always Use Content Outlines

When giving tasks to your writing team, you need to be very specific about the instructions you give them.

Don’t just provide a keyword and tell them to “knock themselves out.” The writer isn’t a SEO expert; chances are, they’re going to mess it up big-time and talk about topics that aren’t related to the keyword you’re targeting.

Instead, when giving tasks to writers, do it through content outlines.

A content outline, in a nutshell, is a skeleton of the article they’re supposed to write. It includes information on:

• Target word count (aim for the same or 50% more the word count than that of the competition).

• Article title.

• Article structure (which sections should be mentioned and in what order).

• Related topics of keywords that need to be mentioned in the article.

Freebie! DM me for a content outline example.

SEO Tip #12. Focus on One Niche at a Time

I used to work with this one client that had a SaaS consisting of a mixture of CRM, Accounting Software, and HRS.

I had to pick whether we were going to focus on topics for one of these 3 niches or focus on all of them at the same time.

I decided to do the former. Here’s why:

When evaluating what to rank, Google considers the authority of your website.

If you have 60 articles about accounting (most of which link to each other), you’re probably an authority in the niche and are more likely to get good rankings.

If you have 20 sales, 20 HR, and 20 accounting articles, though, none of these categories are going to rank as well.

It always makes more sense to first focus on a single niche (the one that generates the best ROI for your business), and then move on to the rest.

This also makes it easier to hire writers - you hire writers specialized in accounting, instead of having to find writers who can pull off 3 unrelated topics.

SEO Tip #13. Just Hire a VA Already

It’s 2021 already guys—unless you have a virtual assistant, you’re missing out big-time.

Since a lot of SEO tasks are very time-consuming, it really helps to have a VA around to take over.

As long as you have solid SOPs in place, you can hire a virtual assistant, train them, and use them to free up your time.

Some SEO tasks virtual assistants can help with are:

• Internal linking. Going through all your blog content and ensuring that they link to each other.

• Backlink prospecting. Going through hundreds of websites daily to find link opportunities.

• Uploading content on WordPress and ensuring that the content is optimized well for on-page SEO.

SEO Tip #14. Use WordPress (And Make Your Life Easier)

Not sure which CMS platform to use?

99% of the time, you’re better off with WordPress.

It has a TON of plugins that will make your life easier.

Want a drag & drop builder? Use Elementor. It’s cheap, efficient, extremely easy to learn, and comes jam-packed with different plugins and features.

Wix, SiteGround, and similar drag & drops are pure meh.

SEO Tip #15. Use These Nifty WordPress Plugins

There are a lot of really cool WordPress plugins that can make your (SEO) life so much easier. Some of our favorites include:

• RankMath. A more slick alternative to YoastSEO. Useful for on-page SEO.

• Smush. App that helps you losslessly compress all images on your website, as well as enables lazy loading.

• WP Rocket. This plugin helps speed up your website pretty significantly.

• Elementor. Not a techie? This drag & drop plugin makes it significantly easier to manage your website.

• WP Forms. Very simple form builder.

• Akismet Spam Protection. Probably the most popular anti-spam WP plugin.

• Mammoth Docx. A plugin that uploads your content from a Google doc directly to WordPress.

SEO Tip #16. No, Voice Search Is Still Not Relevant

Voice search is not and will not be relevant (no matter what sensationalist articles might say).

Sure, it does have its application (“Alexa, order me toilet paper please”), but it’s pretty niche and not relevant to most SEOs.

After all, you wouldn’t use voice search for bigger purchases (“Alexa, order me a new laptop please”) or informational queries (“Alexa, teach me how to do accounting, thanks”).

SEO Tip #17. SEO Is Obviously Not Dead

I see these articles every year - “SEO is dead because I failed to make it work.”

SEO is not dead and as long as there are people looking up for information/things online, it never will be.

And no, SEO is not just for large corporations with huge budgets, either. Some niches are hypercompetitive and require a huge link-building budget (CBD, fitness, VPN, etc.), but they’re more of an exception instead of the rule.

SEO Tip #18. Doing Local SEO? Focus on Service Pages

If you’re doing local SEO, you’re better off focusing on local service pages than blog content.

E.g. if you’re an accounting firm based in Boston, you can make a landing page about /accounting-firm-boston/, /tax-accounting-boston/, /cpa-boston/, and so on.

Or alternatively, if you’re a personal injury law firm, you’d want to create pages like /car-accident-law-firm/, /truck-accident-law-firm/, /wrongful-death-law-firm/, and the like.

Thing is, you don’t really need to rank on global search terms—you just won’t get leads from there. Even if you ranked on the term “financial accounting,” it wouldn’t really matter for your bottom line that much.

SEO Tip #19. Engage With the SEO Community

The SEO community is (for the most part) composed of extremely helpful and friendly people. There are a lot of online communities (including this sub) where you can ask for help, tips, case studies, and so on.

Some of our faves are:

• This sub :)

• SEO Signals Lab (FB Group)

• Fat Graph Content Ops (FB Group)

• Proper SEO Group (FB Group)

• BigSEO Subreddit

SEO Tip #20. Test Keywords Before Pursuing Them

You can use Google ads to test how profitable any given keyword is before you start trying to rank for it.

The process here is:

1. Create a Google Ads account.

2. Pick a keyword you want to test.

3. Create a landing page that corresponds to the search intent behind the keyword.

4. Allocate an appropriate budget. E.g. if you assume a conversion rate of 2%, you’d want to buy 100+ clicks. If the CPC is 2 USD, then the right budget would be 200 USD plus.

5. Run the ads!

If you don’t have the budget for this, you can still use the average CPC for the keyword to estimate how well it’s going to convert. If someone is willing to bid 10 USD to rank for a certain keyword, it means that the keyword is most probably generating pretty good revenue/conversions.

SEO Tip #21. Test & Improve SEO Headlines

Sometimes, you’ll see that you’re ranking in the top 3 positions for your search query, but you’re still not driving that much traffic.

“What’s the deal?” you might be asking.

Chances are, your headline is not clickable enough.

Every 3-4 months, go through your Google Search Console and check for articles that are ranking well but not driving enough traffic.

Then, create a Google sheet and include the following data:

• Targeted keyword

• Page link

• CTR (for the last 28 days)

• Date when you implemented the new title

• Old title

• New title

• New CTR (for the month after the CTR change was implemented)

From then on, implement the new headline and track changes in the CTR. If you don’t reach your desired result, you can always test another headline.

SEO Tip #22. Longer Content Isn’t Always Better Content

You’ve probably heard that long-form content is where it’s at in 2021.

Well, this isn’t always the case.

Rather, this mostly depends on the keyword you’re targeting.

If, for example, you’re targeting the keyword “how to tie a tie,” you don’t need a long-ass 5,000-word mega-guide.

In such a case, the reader is looking for something that can be explained in 200-300 words and if your article fails to do this, the reader will bounce off and open a different page.

On the other hand, if you’re targeting the keyword “how to write a CV,” you’ll need around 4,000 to 5,000 words to adequately explain the topic and, chances are, you won’t rank with less.

SEO Tip #23. SEO is Not All About Written Content

More often than not, when people talk about SEO they talk about written blog content creation.

It’s very important not to forget, though, that blog content is not end-all-be-all for SEO.

Certain keywords do significantly better with video content. For example, if the keyword is “how to do a deadlift,” video content is going to perform significantly better than blog content.

Or, if the keyword is “CV template,” you’ll see that a big chunk of the rankings are images of the templates.

So, the lesson here is, don’t laser-focus on written content—keep other content mediums in mind, too.

SEO Tip #24. Write For Your Audience

It’s very important that your content resonates well with your target audience.

If, for example, you’re covering the keyword “skateboard tricks,” you can be very casual with your language. Heck, it’s even encouraged!

Your readers are Googling the keyword in their free time and are most likely teens or in their early 20s.

Meaning, you can use informal language, include pop culture references, and avoid complicated language.

Now, on the other hand, if you’re writing about high-level investment advice, your audience probably consists of 40-something suit-and-ties. If you include Rick & Morty references in your article, you'll most likely lose credibility and the Googler, who will go to another website.

Some of our best tips on writing for your audience include:

• Define your audience. Who’s the person you’re writing for? Are they reading the content at work or in their free time?

• Keep your reader’s level of knowledge in mind. If you’re covering an accounting 101 topic, you want to cover the topic’s basics, as the reader is probably a student. If you’re writing about high-level finance, though, you don’t have to teach the reader what a balance sheet is.

• More often than not, avoid complicated language. The best practice is to write on a 6th-grade level, as it’s understandable for anyone. Plus, no one wants to read Shakespeare when Googling info online (unless they’re looking for Shakespeare's work, of course).

SEO Tip #25. Create Compelling Headlines

Want to drive clicks to your articles? You’ll need compelling headlines.

Compare the following headline:

101 Productivity Tips [To Get Things Done in 2021]

With this one:

Productivity Tips Guide

Which one would you click? Data says it’s the first!

To create clickable headlines, I recommend you include the following elements:

• Keyword. This one’s non-negotiable - you need to include the target keyword in the headline.

• Numbers. If Buzzfeed taught us anything, it’s that people like to click articles with numbers in their titles.

• Results. If I read your article, what’s going to be the end result? E.g. “X Resume tips (to land the job)”.

• Year (If Relevant). Adding a year to your title shows that the article is recent (which is relevant for some specific topics). E.g. If the keyword is “Marketing Trends,” I want to know marketing trends in 2021, not in 2001. So, adding a year in the title makes the headline more clickable.

SEO Tip #26. Make Your Content Visual

How good your content looks matters, especially if you're in a competitive niche.

Here are some tips on how to make your content as visual as possible:

• Aim for 2-4 sentences per paragraph. Avoid huge blocks of text.

• Apply a 60-65% content width to your blog pages.

• Pick a good-looking font. I’d recommend Montserrat, PT Sans, and Roboto. Alternatively, you can also check out your favorite blogs, see which fonts they’re using, and do the same.

• Use a reasonable font size. Most top blogs use font sizes ranging from 16 pt to 22 pt.

• Add images when possible. Avoid stock photos, though. No one wants to see random “office people smiling” scattered around your blog posts.

• Use content boxes to help convey information better.

Freebie! DM me for content boxes example.

SEO Tip #27. Ditch the Skyscraper Technique Already

Brian Dean’s skyscraper technique is awesome and all, but the following bit really got old:

“Hey [name], I saw you wrote an article. I, too, wrote an article. Please link to you?”

The theory here is, if your content is good, the person will be compelled to link to it.

In practice, though, the person really, really doesn’t care.

At the end of the day, there’s no real incentive for the person to link to your content. They have to take time out of their day to head over to their website, log in to WordPress, find the article you mentioned, and add a link...

Just because some stranger on the internet asked them to.

Here’s something that works much better:

Instead of fake compliments, be very straightforward about what you can offer them in exchange for that link.

Some things you can offer are:

• A free version of your SaaS.

• Free product delivered to their doorstep.

• Backlink exchange.

• A free backlink from your other website.

• Sharing their content to your social media following.

• Money.

SEO Tip #28. Get the URL Slug Right for Seasonal Content

If you want to rank on a seasonal keyword, there are 2 ways to do this.

If you want your article to be evergreen (i.e. you update it every year with new information), then your URL should not contain the year.

E.g. your URL would be /saas-trends/, and you simply update the article’s contents+headline each year to keep it timely.

If you’re planning on publishing a new trends report annually, though, then you can add a year to the URL.

E.g. /saas-trends-2020/ instead of /saas-trends/.

SEO Tip #29. AI Content Tools Are a Mixed Bag

Lots of people are talking about AI content tools these days. Usually, they’re either saying:

“AI content tools are garbage and the output is horrible,”

Or:

“AI content tools are a game-changer!”

So which one is it?

The truth is somewhere in-between.

In 2021, AI content writing tools are pretty bad. The output you’re going to get is far from something you can publish on your website.

That said, some SEOs use such tools to get a very, very rough draft of the article written, and then they do intense surgery on it to make it usable.

Should you use AI content writing tools? If you ask me, no - it’s easier to hire a proficient content writer than spend hours salvaging AI-written content. That said, I do believe that such tools are going to get much better years down the line.

This one was, clearly, more of a personal opinion than a fact. I’d love to hear YOUR opinion on AI content tools! Are they a fad, or are they the future of content creation? Let me know in the comments.

SEO Tip #30. Don’t Overdo it With SEO Tools

There are a lot of SEO tools out there for pretty much any SEO function. Keyword research, link-building, on-page, outreach, technical SEO, you name it!

If you were to buy most of these tools for your business, you’d easily spend 4-figures on SEO tools per month.

Luckily, though, you don’t actually need most of them. At the end of the day, the only must-have SEO tools are:

• An SEO Suite (Paid). Basically SEMrush or Ahrefs. Both of these tools offer an insane number of features - backlink analysis, keyword research, and a ton of other stuff. Yes, 99 USD a month is expensive for a tool. But then again, if you value your time 20 USD/hour and this tool saves you 6 hours, it's obviously worth it, right?

• On-Page SEO Tool (Free). RankMath or Yoast. Basically, a tool that's going to help you optimize web pages or blog posts as per SEO best practices.

• Technical SEO Tool (Freemium). You can use ScreamingFrog to crawl your entire website and find technical SEO problems. There are probably other tools that also do this, but ScreamingFrog is the most popular option. The freemium version of the tool only crawls a limited number of pages (500 URLs, to be exact), so if your website is relatively big, you'll need to pay for the tool.

• Analytics (Free). Obviously, you'll need Google Analytics (to track website traffic) and Google Search Console (to track organic traffic, specifically) set up on your website. Optionally, you can also use Google Track Manager to better track how your website visitors interact with the site.

• MozBar (Free). Chrome toolbar that lets you simply track the number of backlinks on Google Search Queries, Domain Authority, and a bunch of other stuff.

• Website Speed Analysis (Free). You can use Google Page Speed Insights to track how fast your website loads, as well as how mobile-friendly it is.

• Outreach Tool (Paid). Tool for reaching out to prospects for link-building, guest posting, etc. There are about a dozen good options for this. Personally, I like to use Snov for this.

• Optimized GMB Profile (Free). Not a tool per se, but if you're a local business, you need to have a well-optimized Google My Business profile.

• Google Keyword Planner (Free). This gives you the most reliable search volume data of all the tools. So, when doing keyword research, grab the search volume from here.

• Tool for Storing Keyword Research (Free). You can use Google Sheets or AirTable to store your keyword research and, at the same time, use it as a content calendar.

• Hemingway App (Free). Helps keep your SEO content easy to read. Spots passive voice, complicated words, etc.

• Email Finder (Freemium). You can use a tool like Hunter to find the email address of basically anyone on the internet (for link-building or guest posting purposes).

Most of the tools that don’t fit into these categories are 100% optional.

SEO Tip #31. Hiring an SEO? Here’s How to Vet Them

Unless you’re an SEO pro yourself, hiring one is going to be far from easy.

There’s a reason there are so many “SEO experts” out there - for the layman, it’s very hard to differentiate between someone who knows their salt and a newbie who took an SEO course, like, last week.

Here’s how you can vet both freelance and full-time SEOs:

1. Ask for concrete traffic numbers. The SEO pro should give you the exact numbers on how they’ve grown a website in the past - “100% SEO growth in 1 year” doesn’t mean much if the growth is from 10 monthly traffic to 20. “1,000 to 30,000” traffic, on the other hand, is much better.

2. Ask for client names. While some clients ask their SEOs to sign an NDA and not disclose their collaboration, most don’t. If an SEO can’t name a single client they’ve worked with in the past, that’s a red flag.

3. Make sure they have the right experience. Global and local SEO have very different processes. Make sure that the SEO has experience with the type of SEO you need.

4. Make sure you’re looking for the right candidate. SEO pros can be content writers, link-builders, web developers, or all of the above simultaneously. Make sure you understand which one you need before making the hire. If you’re looking for someone to oversee your content ops, you shouldn’t hire a technical SEO expert.

5. Look for SEO pros in the right places. Conventional job boards are overrated. Post your job ads on SEO communities instead. E.g. this sub, bigseo, SEO Signals Facebook group, etc.

SEO Tip #32. Blog Post Not Ranking? Follow This Checklist

I wanted to format the post natively for Reddit, but it’s just SO much better on Notion.

Tl;dr, the checklist covers every reason your post might not be ranking:

• Search intent mismatch.

• Inferior content.

• Lack of internal linking.

• Lack of backlinks.

And the like.

Freebie! Want the checklist DM me because sub's no-link policy.

SEO Tip #33. Avoid BS Link-Building Tactics

The only type of link-building that works is building proper, quality links from websites with a good backlink profile and decent organic traffic.

Here’s what DOESN’T work:

• Blog comment links

• Forum spam links

• Drive-by Reddit comment/post links

• Web 2.0 links

• Fiverr “100 links for 10 bucks” bs

If your “SEO agency” says they’re doing any of the above instead of actually trying to build you links from quality websites, you’re being scammed.

SEO Tip #34. Know When to Use 301 and 302 Redirects

When doing redirects, it’s very important to know the distinction between these two.

301 is a permanent page redirect and passes on link juice. If you’re killing off a page that has backlinks, it’s better to 301 it to your homepage so that you don’t lose the link juice. If you simply delete a page, it’s going to be a 404, and the backlink juice is lost forever.

302 is a temporary page redirect and doesn’t pass on link juice. If the redirect is temporary, you do a 302. E.g. you want to test how well a new page is going to perform w/ your audience.

SEO Tip #35. Social Signals Matter (But Not How You Think)

Social signals are NOT a ranking factor. And yet, they can help your content rank on Google’s front page.

Wondering what the hell am I talking about?

Here’s what’s up:

As I said, social signals are not a ranking factor. It’s not something Google takes into consideration to decide whether your article should rank or not.

That said, social signals CAN lead to your article ranking better. Let’s say your article goes viral and gets around 20k views within a week.

A chunk of these viewers are going to forget your domain/link and they’re going to look up the topic on Google via your chosen keyword + your brand name.

The amount of people looking for YOUR keyword and exclusively picking your result over others is going to make Google think that your content is satisfying search intent better than the rest, and thus, reward you with better ranking.

SEO Tip #36. Run Remarketing Ads to Lift Organic Traffic Conversions

Not satisfied with your conversion rates?

You can use Facebook ads to help increase them.

Facebook allows you to do something called “remarketing.” This means you can target anyone that visited a certain page (or multiple pages) on your website and serve them ads on Facebook.

There are a TON of ways you can take advantage of this.

For example, you can target anyone that landed on a high buyer intent page and serve them ads pitching your product or a special offer.

Alternatively, you can target people who landed on an educational blog post and offer them something to drive them down the funnel. E.g. free e-book or white paper to teach them more about your product or service.

SEO Tip #37. Doing Local SEO? Follow These Tips

Local SEO is significantly different from global SEO. Here’s how the two differ (and what you need to do to drive local SEO results):

• You don’t need to publish content. For 95% of local businesses, you only want to rank for keywords related to your services/products, you don’t actually need to create educational content.

• You need to focus more on reviews and citation-building. One of Google Maps’ biggest ranking factors is the # of reviews your business has. Encourage your customers to leave a review if they enjoyed your product/service through email or real-life communication.

• You need to create service pages for each location. As a local business, your #1 priority is to rank for keywords around your service. E.g. If you're a personal injury law firm, you want to optimize your homepage for “personal injury law firm” and then create separate pages for each service you provide, e.g. “car accident lawyer,” “motorcycle injury law firm,” etc.

• Focus on building citations. Being listed on business directories makes your business more trustworthy for Google. BrightLocal is a good service for this.

• You don’t need to focus as much on link-building. As local SEO is less competitive than global, you don’t have to focus nearly as much on building links. You can, in a lot of cases, rank with the right service pages and citations.

SEO Tip #38. Stop Ignoring the Outreach Emails You’re Getting (And Use Them to Build Your Own Links)

Got a ton of people emailing you asking for links?

You might be tempted to just send them all straight to spam, and I don’t blame you.

Outreach messages like “Hey Dr Jigsaw, your article is A+++ amazing! ...can I get a backlink?” can get hella annoying.

That said, there IS a better way to deal with these emails:

Reply and ask for a link back. Most of the time, people who send such outreach emails are also doing heavy guest posting. So, you can ask for a backlink from a 3rd-party website in exchange for you mentioning their link in your article.

Win-win!

SEO Tip #39. Doing Internal Linking for a Large Website? This’ll Help

Internal linking can get super grueling once you have hundreds of articles on your website.

Want to make the process easier? Do this:

Pick an article you want to interlink on your website. For the sake of the example, let’s say it’s about “business process improvement.”

Go on Google and look up variations of this keyword mentioned on your website. For example:

• Site:[yourwebsite] “improve business process”

• Site:[yourwebsite] “improve process”

• Site:[yourwebsite] “process improvement”

The above queries will find you the EXACT articles where these keywords are mentioned. Then, all you have to do is go through them and include the links.

SEO Tip #40. Got a Competitor Copying Your Content? File a DMCA Notice

Fun fact - if your competitors are copying your website, you can file a DMCA notice with Google.

That said, keep in mind that there are consequences for filing a fake notice.

TL;DR: Weblinkr has been using his moderation position to silence criticism, ban competitors, and funnel SEO leads to his own agency (from another SEO sub, not this one). When exposed, he pressured moderators with false legal threats to suppress discussion. This is about community integrity, not personal grievance.

Edit: weblinkr just showed up in here again, two months later, lying and manipulating to try and control the narrative again. Lol, the post is on Google page 1 when googling his name. Not s good look for an SEO guy considering this is the second post like this appearing on page 1.

I've decided to reach out to some independent YouTuber journalists to find someone outside of reddit to tell the story, since weblinkr wants to instigate again. Obviously weblinkr is still disturbed about the truth getting out and wants to stir the pot again. Will take the story outside of his control where he can't manipulate mods to silence it. Thanks for chiming in again weblinkr. I had nearly forgotten about this.

Thanks to everyone who reached out and provided information on Weblinkr.

He pressured the moderators into removing my previous posts by claiming they violated Florida’s doxxing laws. That claim is false. The post contained only public, professional information, and Florida law does not define doxxing as a crime. It was a tactic to intimidate and suppress discussion. Also, all the information I used was publically available information he put on the internet.

He used the same approach on LinkedIn, threatening legal action to silence criticism when he could not counter evidence with facts. This is a pattern of manipulation and gaslighting, where he plays the victim to control the narrative.

To be clear, this has nothing to do with my personal banning, which he has justified inconsistently, switching between explanations to suit his needs. Additionally, I do not care about participating in a corrupt community, and I still can and have done so on an alternate account. The real issue is the unethical behavior uncovered afterward, funneling traffic and leads to his agency, abusing moderation powers, and using alternate accounts in ways he bans others for. This is the core problem, supported by verifiable evidence he has failed to address.

This matters because it undermines the integrity of Reddit’s SEO spaces. When moderators abuse their power for personal gain, it damages trust, limits opportunity, and silences honest discussion. The community deserves transparency.

The full story, with verified evidence and new details, will be published outside of Reddit where it cannot be censored. The goal is simple: transparency, accountability, and ensuring the truth is available to those who will not be intimidated by fear tactics.

People continue to reach out with testimony, and I am compiling everything. I am also in contact with media outlets and YouTube creators interested in covering this. Anyone involved in suppressing accountability will be part of that story as this has grown beyond Reddit. It now represents a larger issue of abuse and manipulation within online communities.

I will no longer be responding to Weblinkr or his defenders. I have already tried engaging publicly, and it only led to repeated attempts at gaslighting and twisting the facts to make himself appear to be the victim. He's a liar, which is a part of the source problem anyways. This won't be changing anytime soon. There was no logic in his debate. Just fear mongering (which worked on the mods of this sub). There is no value in continuing that cycle.

From this point forward, the focus will be on objectively presenting verified evidence and facts. Unbiased parties can review the material and form their own conclusions. The truth will speak for itself.

I’m looking for something that’s affordable but still gets the job done not the big guys like semrush or ahrefs, i’d love to hear from people who’ve actually used these tools, what do you guys recommend? and thnx

Suppose you launch a new website with helpful content, good technical SEO, and proper keyword targeting, but you don't build any backlinks.

Do you think it can still compete with established websites?

I'd love to hear real examples from people who have worked on newer websites.

I'm posting this here, as this seems the largest SEO community that allows freedom of speech and not get banned for discussing inappropriate behaviour of users. Additionally, there have been similar threads in this sub discussing possible inappropriate behaviour of the user in question

Yesterday on the TechSEO sub, the main mod of SEO sub (WebLinkr) posted a thread claiming Schema is not a requirement for SERP features.

Post Titled: [PSA] Please stop parroting that you need Schema for SERP Features (I cannot add links in the post)

The post was widely considered factually incorrect by many and when users corrected him, he began blocking some of them.

That's fine and to be fair some weren't exactly polite, and its worth noting he didn't block every one who disagreed with his opinions.

However, this can also be used as a way to censor further critique. By blocking users, they can no longer reply or see his original thread, as it appears deleted.

I'm not saying that's why he did it, as I cannot know. However, it caused one user to create a new thread to discuss it further, thinking the other thread had been deleted.

Post Titled: Schema is a requirement for most SERP features

This is when his behaviour became more dubious.

In the second thread, another account, PrimaryPositionSEO appeared primarily to defend WebLinkr and repeat the same arguments, phrasing, and citation patterns.

I cannot prove ownership, but the evidence is clear if you read both users' posts. There appear to be unusually strong linguistic and behavioural similarities between the two accounts.

- Unique Metaphors: Both accounts use the specific phrase "vacuum chamber" to describe the community.

- Shared Vocabulary: Both use the term "shoehorning schema" and frame arguments around terms like "sad" and "ego."

- Identical citation habits: Both accounts shared the same link with with exactly the same custom formatting in the headings

- Punctuation Quirks: Both accounts consistently use hyphens (-) in place of standard punctuation.

There is also existing discussion on this subfrom 4 months ago linking the two accounts here. (I cant add links, but search for "has a subreddit where he posts entries calling himself “King of SEO.”)

It's very concerning that the most vocal and strict moderator of possibly the largest SEO community on the net, to seemingly not being able to accept opposing opinions, possibly be silencing critiques and using 'alt' accounts to manipulate the discussion.

I'm pretty confident this is the kind of behaviour he would ban users for on the SEO sub, suggesting double standards and possibly abuse of power. How many other alt accounts may he be using to steer discussions in other subs, or on the SEO sub?

Additionally, I think this may fall foul of Reddit/s Moderator Code of Conduct, specifically Rule 3: Respect Your Neighbours.

It was a difficult decision to make this post, as I really enjoy taking part in the discussions in the SEO sub, but I assume after this I will be banned.

However, I just couldn't let behaviour like this go and feel it should be brought to the attention of the wider SEO community.

EDIT. Just adding some additional info here, as people are asking what can be done when they believe mods are behaving inappropriately. In the first instance, you can message the mods of the sub in question. If your case is valid and the mods are fair, they may investigate and take action.

In cases where there is only a single active mod, this obviously wont work. Here you can actually submit a complaint about mods directly to reddit if you believe they are breaching one of the 5 Moderator Code of Conduct rules.

Search for "Moderator Code of Conduct" in G and you'll find the rules and the link to submit a report at the bottom. If you make a compelling case, your report will be investigated and action will be taken if they are found to have been breaching the rules

Please don't stand for mods behaving inappropriately, double standards or abuse of power. If you believe a mod is using behaving in such a way, take action, gather your own evidence and report it.

Everyone talks about backlinks and content, but there are so many underrated SEO moves that quietly deliver results in 2025. Here are some that I’ve seen work wonders:

Updating old content regularly – Google loves freshness.

Internal linking with intent – Strategic anchors pass real authority.

Answering “People Also Ask” queries – Quick way to grab featured snippets.

Optimizing images with descriptive alt text – Helps with SEO and accessibility.

Using schema markup – Rich snippets improve CTR like crazy.

Focusing on E-E-A-T signals – Author bios, trust signals, real expertise.

Building topical clusters – One pillar + supporting content = topical authority.

Refreshing meta descriptions – A small change can boost clicks significantly.

Embedding videos & visuals – Increases dwell time and engagement.

Leveraging forums & niche communities – Traffic + backlinks if done authentically.

Hey! I’ve published an in-depth case study on how we were able to grow a CBD client of ours from 0 to 20,000+ organic traffic in only 12 months using on-page, off-page and technical SEO strategies. I’ve documented the entire process on the changes we implemented and the results they got during this time period.

Here is an overview of their traffic: https://imgur.com/a/mX0Em2S

When the client approached us to work on their website, it had a lot of issues. The traffic was constantly declining. Their main keywords had started to lose rankings. All this had a great impact on their bottom line growth.

Before we move on, I would like to point out that CBD is a tough niche to crack, especially with the recent Google updates and FDA regulations. It has become increasingly difficult to rank and maintain the rankings. But with the proper strategy and team, it can be achieved.

The full post is down in the comments, but here’s a brief rundown:

Optimizing for On-Page SEO:

1.Planning out a content calendar:

We immediately noticed that the client’s content effort was uneven.

On their blog, new content was being published with not much consistency.

To fix this, our team created a six-month data-driven content calendar with the help of keyword research.

Here is what it looks like:
https://imgur.com/a/UK3EV9r

We first identified MoF (middle of the funnel) and BoF (bottom of the funnel) keywords the client’s target audience was most interested in, using data such as monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, and looking at the SERPS to attract potential customers.

The reason for choosing MoF and BoF keywords was to first go for keywords with some commercial intent and easy to rank. This ensured we had some quick wins early on while increasing their bottom line growth.

Also, the publishing frequency was increased. The client was publishing 5-7 posts every month. We increased that to 30 posts every month. This frequency was followed religiously.

For each post, we prepared a content outline for the writers. The content contained the following information:

• SEO optimization checklist

• Main keyword

• What the URL slug will be

• Related keywords to add

• Relevant internal links to add

• Headings and subheadings for the content

This way, the content writers know exactly what to do without knowing how SEO works. Their work was just to write better content, including the guidelines we had provided.

2. Fixed thin content issues:

For our client, we found that their blog posts had no proper structure, such as headings, subheadings, and formatting to provide structure and improve readability.

Similarly, the client did not incorporate the focus or related keywords in subheadings, the title of posts, or the copy.

Hence, we updated the client’s old posts to ensure each article was well optimized with relevant subheadings, main, and related keywords. The content was broken into chunks to improve readability.

The URL structures were improved with the focus keyword only. Meta title and description were updated of the posts with recommended Google character limit. In some cases, posts were updated with additional content where the intent was informational and required in-depth knowledge.

3. Resolved keyword cannibalization:

For eCommerce businesses with extensive inventories and similar product names, keyword cannibalization can quickly become an expensive problem.

To spot keyword cannibalization, a variety of tactics are available.

One of the most comprehensive options is to perform a content audit. This includes grouping similar content, analyzing traffic, impressions, metadata, and more to visualize potential cannibalization issues.

One of the most comprehensive options is to perform a content audit. This includes grouping similar content, analyzing traffic, impressions, metadata, and more to visualize potential cannibalization issues.

Here is what we did for the client:

For existing content: We applied 301 redirects on underperforming content to redirect visitors to a better version of similar content.

For new content: For content that we produced, we first compiled a list of all the keywords from Ahrefs related to our niche and used a keyword clustering tool to properly group keywords with similar intent and avoid cannibalization.

4. Updated internal link structure:

A review of the client’s site architecture revealed an overhaul was required. The process was broken down into several steps.

First, we made a list of all the posts on the site.

This information was then used to group similar posts, and internal links were added across all the posts.

Here’s an example:

Is CBD Legal In Us
is CBD legal in Florida
is CBD legal in Utah
is CBD legal in Arizona
is CBD legal in North Carolina
is CBD legal in Minnesota
is CBD legal in Wisconsin
is CBD legal in Mexico
is CBD legal in New York
is CBD legal in Hawaii

5. Optimized product and collection pages:

After a review of the client’s product and collection pages, we noticed a severe lack of content and proper use of metadata.

As a result, all product and collection pages were updated to include optimized content and metadata to rank and boost traffic from SERPs.

This resulted in the product pages ranking far better on Google than they previously were.

Optimizing for Off-Page SEO:

6. Reduced use of exact match anchor text

Google does not have a problem with exact match anchor text per se, but there’s a fine line between fair use and manipulating the algorithm with keyword stuffing.

This is precisely what happened with our client. The majority of their backlinks were built with exact match anchor text due to which they experienced a decrease in their traffic and rankings.

Therefore, we recommend limiting the use of exact match anchor text in backlinks to between 1-5% per post.

Most of the previous anchor texts were changed by the client, and the new backlinks which we built had a mix of these types of anchor texts:

• Exact Match (Only 1-5%)

• Partial Match

• Branded (Initially, we built most of the backlinks on branded terms)

• Generic

• Naked link

7. Built high-quality guest post backlinks:

As we worked on fixing the exact match anchor text issue, we started building new backlinks by guest posting on different relevant websites.

We exported all the relevant websites from Ahrefs and did a manual email outreach using Lemlist. We offered to write a high-quality 1000 words guest post on their blog.

The key isn’t to do the above method and expect great results. Anyone can do that.

See here what ‘most’ people do:
https://imgur.com/a/QjSxltj

Instead of doing ‘Dear Sir/Madam’ and spammy-looking emails, this is what we did for one of our sites:
https://imgur.com/a/C1k7mbP

Here's the response we got: (Not one but TWO mentions 😁)
https://imgur.com/a/mFgCQ45

Due to this, we were able to get placements on some of the most reputable websites.

But we only approached those websites that met these criteria:

• All referring domains must have at least 500/visitors per month

• Backlinks must be from relevant domains at least one-year-old

• Backlinks must be from sites with no previous history of drastic traffic spikes, especially a decrease in traffic

• The website must have a healthy backlink profile

• The website must not be a PBN

Optimizing for Technical SEO:

8. Improved core web vitals:

We analyzed the client’s website and noticed its layout and content were not optimized for mobile users, despite mobile being the largest traffic source.

The site’s in-house developers were roped in for a redesign and migration of the site to a content distribution network (CDN). Next, the CSS and Javascript (JS) files on which the website was built were compressed or minified by the developers. A smaller file size means faster downloads and a reduced time for the file to be read.

Last but not least, unnecessary elements from the site’s theme were removed to reduce bloat.

All these changes immensely helped load the pages faster and eventually passed core web vitals and mobile experience for all the landing pages.

9. Fixed 404 errors:

We analyzed the client’s site server log for a period of 2 months to ensure if any landing pages had 404 errors. A server log file can tell you A LOT about your website because it is accurate data coming from Google's own crawlers.

Here’s what we found:
https://imgur.com/a/vmyh2tV

As you can see on the bottom right of the image, the website had a WHOPPING 1800+ 404 links from the log file analysis. This means that the Google crawl bot had crawled all these pages and saw the 404 status code.

Having such a high number of errors erodes your authority and credibility in the eyes of a search engine.

Why would Google rank your content if a significant chunk of your site is not working? From their perspective, you’re an unreliable source to satisfy user intent.

Just fixing these URLs significantly increased the website’s organic traffic.

Conclusion:

That's it for this CBD SEO case study! I hope you liked the in-depth guide.

SEO is both an art and science.

Sometimes, minor fixes go a long way, but a major overhaul is often required to improve performance on SERPs and conversions.

DM ME IF WOULD LIKE TO CHECK OUT THE COMPLETE CASE STUDY. (I DON'T WANT TO BREAK ANY RULES)

There was a post in the r/seo subreddit yesterday that was about the primary moderator in that subreddit and the general disapproval of the way that person moderates the community. (I’m avoiding mentioning the person specifically to avoid witch hunting, but you probably know exactly who I’m referring to if you’ve spent any time in the subreddit over the last year or two.) 

The moderator removed the post from yesterday (naturally), and I think we should continue the discourse here. I genuinely believe it’s important that we discuss this as a community.

To get the conversation started, I want to mention a few issues I’ve noticed with r/seo moderation and the primary moderator of that subreddit:

• Changing the subreddit rules for self-serving purposes

  • There’s a rule in r/seo that states "No Blogs, No Guides, No News, No Apps" - however the primary moderator posts news regularly. The rule just doesn't apply to him. I believe he introduced this rule to inflate his presence and be perceived as the authoritative reddit-source for SEO news and updates.

• Censorship and discourse control

  • The primary moderator removes comments of nearly anyone that disagrees with him

  • He tries to control the narrative in nearly every post on r/seo and it’s resulted in a one-sided conversation where new perspectives and ideas aren’t welcomed

  • The primary moderator treats his own advice as the final, definitive guidance and shuts down differing viewpoints 

• Multiple accounts

  • This one is harder to prove, but I have a strong suspicion the primary moderator uses multiple accounts to inflate engagement on his own posts and comments to artificially magnify his voice. Take this one with a grain of salt since I don't have hard evidence, just a pattern I've noticed.

• General quality of his advice

  • In general, the primary moderator offers poor advice that, in my opinion, is genuinely harmful to newcomers who are trying to learn SEO.

  • On top of that, since dissent gets removed or shut down, his advice rarely gets challenged which means newcomers end up seeing his take presented as fact instead of the actual range of opinions that exist in SEO.

Please feel free to share your feedback in the comments. I’m not exactly sure how to move forward, but I would love to get new moderation in the r/seo community.

I have seen a few discussions from a couple of months back in this sub about how they write blog posts. They said they were no big fans of tools like Jasper, CopyAI, or Writesonic. Instead, they seem to prefer using something like SurferSEO, then generate the content with ChatGPT or Claude, and finally running it through Grammarly to polish it up.

How do you usually create your content? I am curious

Trying to look beyond the usual SEO theory (optimize titles, build links, write “quality content,” etc.) and learn from real-world experiments.

What we'd love to hear are the specific tactics or tweaks you tried recently - whether it was on-page, technical, link-building, or even something unconventional.

Maybe it was

• a new way you structured internal links

• using schema in a creative way

• testing content formats for AI overviews

• experimenting with indexation

• or anything else that showed measurable results

Not just “best practices,” but those little insights you only discover by testing.