I know someone who makes $12MM/year from high-ranking websites in extremely competitive keywords... and it's all about peddling links, really. The first page of results rarely has any correlation with quality (of information/product) and more than likely the correlation is actually negative. You will find content written by non-experts who mostly just summarize Wikipedia articles, but littered with unimportant info to hit keywords. Searching for a product? First page will be dominated by whoever has more $$.
I grew up with Google and it really feels like it was a different time back then. I Googled "how to make a website" as a teenager, found out about PHP and started studying PHP documentation. From there I expanded into other languages and eventually built a career. Today you Google "how to make a website" and you will be guided through a WordPress installation on a hosting website with a $5 monthly subscription. That's literally a website by the guy I mentioned making $12MM/year - he takes a cut from each referral.
Programming queries are a completely different thing. I'm talking about queries like "plumber in X", "build website", "which laptop to use" etc - queries where there's a very direct path from search to money being spent. Those queries are completely littered, you can just skip 10 pages and maybe you will find some actual professionals or enthusiasts with actual information.
I am curious what you mean by "peddling links"?
> The first page of results rarely has any correlation with quality (of information/product) and more than likely the correlation is actually negative.
Isn't the first page of results supposed to be more about relevance than quality?
And also vice versa where you reach out to others to sell keywords in your content to them to improve their SEO.
> Isn't the first page of results supposed to be more about relevance than quality?
According to whom? What google tells you? If google made more money sending you to a web page with regurgitated content on it surrounded by adwords that would actually send you back to google to click on an ad making them more money, why would they send you to a high quality original source that was written in 1999 by someone who cared about the topic and got them zero revenue?
Does your friend have any other channels working profitably?
How are these sites monetized?
The business very starkly displays a core truth: if you really know how to do SEO, you will run your own websites instead of selling "SEO services".
https://medium.com/startup-grind/seo-is-not-hard-a-step-by-s...
So what's the point ?
Probably less than 30% of the article would be considered "effective" (e.g. the advice is specific to, and likely to materially increase SEO performance) and the rest is either unsubstantiated (semantic tags and image compression leading to SEO ranking improvements) or unrelated to actual SEO (404 pages and other "engagement" advice).
There are much better articles that break down the basics, ignore the "SEO" parroting and that are substantiated by real data (based on test and trial).
You too can be a success on the internet! Just follow these 10 tried and true techniques. For just a simple investment of $999, my system will show you what to do.
Do you want to be a millionaire too!?
It always makes me sad that the sad state of the web is imposed by an artificial decision.
Good article, very different from past years where repeating a keyword was useful.
"Rule #7: There is no secret. Craft amazingly good content."
So... Craft amazingly good content by hiring a freelancer on fiverr to write boring top ten blog posts that aren't intended to be read by anybody but Google?
On the one hand, I appreciate the author sharing strategies and ideas. On the other hand, this feels a lot like polluting cyberspace. By ranking your blogspam to drive sales on your dropshipping platform, or whatever, you're pushing actual good content off the first page of search results and into ignominy. It helps explain a general feeling I've had lately about the web getting worse and more generic.
Or rather, as much information about the users as possible. Add Google Fonts to the mix, also the hosted JS frameworks. Anything hosted by Google that is requested via your web site is information about the visitor for Google. This is evil in its purest form, but if you are to play the game then play it in full.
:(
SEO is a good thing. But it's not always the best investment.
> all with a 95% SEO acquisition strategy
That's so wrong. Free organic traffic is great. But if you rely fully on organic traffic, it rather shows that your LTV is not bigger than your CAC and if Google or competition kills your search traffic, your business is done and/or you can't scale when your mighty SEO doesn't work anymore.
My version of the thought process is that, all else equal, SEO has three key disadvantages:
1. Attribution is often harder than some other channels, and your experimental design has to account for that.
2. There is a less direct, unitary through-line from dollars invested to dollars earned. Say you spend X dollars on various SEO improvements this month, and you get Y units of growth (conversions, revenue, etc.) that you can attribute to that SEO work. It is less reliable to assume (relative to other channels) that spending 10X on SEO improvements next month will reward you with 10Y units of growth.
3. If SEO is your dominant channel at 95%, and you ever hit the maturity in the channel, the effect of the above is can be fatal to a growth-oriented startup. However you measure your SEO-based CAC, it is probably going to be lower than the CAC of whatever your backup/next channel ends up being, and lower by a large amount. If you have to add in a lot of SEM with your SEO, CAC goes way up, and if your LTV was too precariously close to your CAC already, you are very likely to go negative on your unit economics.
#2 and #3 are what I assumed whsheet was intending as I read their post.
Don't trash the already bad SERPs with more junk (eg regurgitated articles written for £3, surrounded by ads and popups). That's just being a c__t
I've never heard this before and in fact have only heard the opposite.
as i am leaving SEO for good, im selling my SEO book for 1€/$ (Kindle Version, i can't set it to 0)
ZERO of those users will ever care or even notice your URL. Dont waste time on that
ZERO of those users will ever type in a search string on Google to find you
MANY of those users can order from you with their phone’s native payment system, or will pull out their credit card and type it in using the crude mobile interface.
It also works really well.
Really should consider ditching a lot of last decade’s logic. And by last decade I mean that the 2020s is starting in 3 months. What even are your goals? Identifying that there are SEO optimizations doesnt mean they arent irrelevant optimizations to earning revenue. Are we still trying to drive traffic to ad supported food blogs so that 0.2% of “people” accidentally click them? Come on. You want recurring revenue from your SaaS service or reselling crap from Alibaba to hipsters at a 1,000% mark up.
