Glad you found it helpful Theo! To answer your questions:
#1 - It is generally accurate that SEO is a super-competitive, winner-take-all-game and there are only so many spots to rank. There are a few crucial caveats though:
-There are many niches that are hyper competitive and others that are fairly easy to make a dent in. For example, one client I worked with was focused on child speech therapy, and this was a pretty hard niche to crack. Another client I did research for was creating a migraine treatment center, and this niche has massive search volume but pretty low competition. Even if your niche itself is fairly crowded, there are usually at least some solid long-tail keywords that aren't overly competitive. I'd suggest signing up for AHRefs and looking for keywords with keyword difficulty (KD) under 30 and monthly search volume of 100+.
-I think a good analogy for SEO is building up your fitness. You might easily be in a friends circle where everyone works out consistently and you could easily assume everyone does it. In reality, the vast majority of Americans are overweight and have never seen the inside of a gym. Even amongst those who do go to the gym, many are not putting in any effort or are doing wacky stuff such as this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3II8qaLC9I&t=81s), which is the equivalent to the people falling for these SEO myths.
If you find a decent niche and keywords (e.g. a set of keywords that are sub-30 KD and in aggregate, 10k+ in monthly search volume), you follow the good process, and you commit to it consistently for an extended period of time (let's say for 1 year or more), it's almost a guarantee you'll rank highly.
#2 - To learn more about SEO, I'd check out Moz's free course - it's very good: https://moz.com/learn/seo. For more advanced SEO, I really like Matt Diggity's content, particularly his Affiliate Labs course: https://affiliatelab.im/. I bought his course during Black Friday/Cyber Monday for $500, so I'd wait until there's a promo or discount if you want to pull the trigger on it.
The biggest thing by far with SEO though is getting hands on experience and trying it out for yourself. The knowledge only takes you so far and you really need to get your hands dirty and get firsthand experience. This can either be with working with clients (e.g. maybe offer to help a friend for free so you can learn) or you can buy a website and apply Matt Diggity's blueprint to see if you can crack the SEO and boost its rankings significantly.
Hey James! Great article. I have a new client who wants me to help with SEO, and I'm a bit lost, so this was super helpful.
I loved the tip about looking at Google's "people also ask" questions. (I could probably also use this when doing market research for sales copy, haha.)
I have a couple questions:
1) I've always assumed that SEO is a super-competitive, winner-take-all game... a few people will rank and win big, most people will not rank and waste their investment.
How true is that? In your experience, how reliably can someone get results from SEO if they know what they're doing and they put in the work?
(I assume it depends on the niche you're going after... there might not be a perfect "general" answer to this question, haha.)
2) If I wanted to learn more about SEO, where would I start? Is there a course/influencer you'd recommend?
Glad you found it helpful Theo! To answer your questions:
#1 - It is generally accurate that SEO is a super-competitive, winner-take-all-game and there are only so many spots to rank. There are a few crucial caveats though:
-There are many niches that are hyper competitive and others that are fairly easy to make a dent in. For example, one client I worked with was focused on child speech therapy, and this was a pretty hard niche to crack. Another client I did research for was creating a migraine treatment center, and this niche has massive search volume but pretty low competition. Even if your niche itself is fairly crowded, there are usually at least some solid long-tail keywords that aren't overly competitive. I'd suggest signing up for AHRefs and looking for keywords with keyword difficulty (KD) under 30 and monthly search volume of 100+.
-I think a good analogy for SEO is building up your fitness. You might easily be in a friends circle where everyone works out consistently and you could easily assume everyone does it. In reality, the vast majority of Americans are overweight and have never seen the inside of a gym. Even amongst those who do go to the gym, many are not putting in any effort or are doing wacky stuff such as this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3II8qaLC9I&t=81s), which is the equivalent to the people falling for these SEO myths.
If you find a decent niche and keywords (e.g. a set of keywords that are sub-30 KD and in aggregate, 10k+ in monthly search volume), you follow the good process, and you commit to it consistently for an extended period of time (let's say for 1 year or more), it's almost a guarantee you'll rank highly.
#2 - To learn more about SEO, I'd check out Moz's free course - it's very good: https://moz.com/learn/seo. For more advanced SEO, I really like Matt Diggity's content, particularly his Affiliate Labs course: https://affiliatelab.im/. I bought his course during Black Friday/Cyber Monday for $500, so I'd wait until there's a promo or discount if you want to pull the trigger on it.
The biggest thing by far with SEO though is getting hands on experience and trying it out for yourself. The knowledge only takes you so far and you really need to get your hands dirty and get firsthand experience. This can either be with working with clients (e.g. maybe offer to help a friend for free so you can learn) or you can buy a website and apply Matt Diggity's blueprint to see if you can crack the SEO and boost its rankings significantly.
Hey James! Great article. I have a new client who wants me to help with SEO, and I'm a bit lost, so this was super helpful.
I loved the tip about looking at Google's "people also ask" questions. (I could probably also use this when doing market research for sales copy, haha.)
I have a couple questions:
1) I've always assumed that SEO is a super-competitive, winner-take-all game... a few people will rank and win big, most people will not rank and waste their investment.
How true is that? In your experience, how reliably can someone get results from SEO if they know what they're doing and they put in the work?
(I assume it depends on the niche you're going after... there might not be a perfect "general" answer to this question, haha.)
2) If I wanted to learn more about SEO, where would I start? Is there a course/influencer you'd recommend?