Joe Davies’ Post

The best SEOs UNDERTHINK... They’re not worrying about weird keyword ratios, keyword clusters, densities, silos, hubs, technical stuff, eeat. They just do this 👇 They fill a google sheet with the questions their audience are asking about the main topic. They ask support staff, look at customer emails and brainstorm without any fancy tools. They may use keyword research tools to sanity check phrasing but mostly use manual research, browsing high traffic websites that cover the same topic, Wikipedia, table of contents in books. A serious SEOs goal is to comprehensively cover the main topic. Not to try find little obscure keywords so they can rank fast. They think bigger, think longterm. They group the questions into sensible sub topics and create the best possible articles or guides to answer them. They take whatever their competition is doing and aim to 10x it in quality. They aim to publish ASAP and start the ranking countdown timer. They don’t stagger publishing, unless it’s a cashflow or resource issue, there is zero benefit and results will just take longer. They don’t lose sleep about EEAT. They ensure the articles have an author with a small bio and credentials. If it’s health or finance they hire an expert to sign the articles off using Upwork or a job board. They understand the more questions they answer, the more traffic potential. And the comprehensive cover they have of the main topic, the more it reinforces their topical authority and overall rankings. So they front load as much publishing as possible. They supercharge their organic traffic by getting links to their content. They see who is linking to their competitors articles and see if they’ll link to theirs too. They also build a free tool or industry calculator to attract links. They don’t sleep on other channels while waiting for that organic traffic to grow. They share content on socials and start building an audience for the brand. Also traffic from social is possibly a signal that in turn helps organic. They understand SEO a 18-24 month sprint, even though the lesser competiton stuff will rank in a few months, full traffic velocity will be achieved 1 year+ after publishing. They understand having the high competition head topic stuff helps Google see them as an authority on the topic. They cover the topic comprehensively from the start, knowing full well the high competition articles will take a while to rank. They worry about site speed, technical stuff and all that other stuff after the site is getting significant traffic. This stuff doesn’t really move the needle much unless you have lots of traffic. They reap the rewards 18-24 months later, they set new goals and start a new SEO sprint. Are you an underthinker?

Love a snippet.

Link Gap Analysis is dangerous. "Our competitor has 167 DA40 links to their service page, we have 4. Let's build 163 DA40 links." This can sometimes encourage a reckless and impatient mission to 'close the gap' but may cause more trouble with things looking unnatural. Besides the link spike to a certain page, there may be lots of other factors such as supporting links to the homepage and other pages flowing authority with internal links. Not to mention age, social and on page content factors. It gets very complex, and not as simple as closing the gap in many cases. If you're going to go the link gap route, best to space things out over long periods of time, and be very balanced. Don't build 100+ links to a service page if your homepage has 30 links. Better still, my advice would be to just build a low amount of supplementary links in a natural way to pages that make sense. Homepage, blog posts, some to service pages, but not many. I say supplementary because you should be putting a big focus on real marketing, branding, social, content marketing and attracting links. This holistic approach is what makes your supplementary campaigns really work. Put less focus on # of links a competitor has, Google is far more complex than closing the gap of link numbers in a DA level. Instead of trying to “catch up” or win in the exact same way your competitors have, carve your own path, find new content opportunities, and think creatively outside the box. What do you think about this approach?

Oi oi

When starting an SEO agency, your only job should be: Get leads, close leads, set strategy. Outsource the deliverables from day 1 to a freelancer or vendor.

Agree or disagree?

Our SEO agency used to rely on referrals to get leads, but then they dried up. We were then forced to build self sustaining, consistent lead machines. Here's the 4 methods that worked: 1. Post case studies on Linkedin/X Not just "look what we did", but more "here's how we did it". Don't be afraid of giving out the sauce, it's the sauce that's going to get you leads. You'll need to have an active profile so make sure you're commenting and connecting while posting. This is a budget option but requires at least 1hr/day manual work. 2.Create 'system' lead magnet Package up your methodology into an ebook/course/video and target a specific audience. The methodology should solve a problem (SEO, paid, get more clients, increase conversion, improve operations etc). Run ads to this and create a funnel which leads them into a call and a DFY service. This takes a little more set up than other options, but once the funnel is optimised can be the most effective. 3. Run ads to discovery call This one works best when you run the ads for a specific market. Show case studies for that market, and lead the prospect into booking a free 'no strings attached' discovery call, where you walk them through your methodology - give away the sauce. Easy way to get up and running with ads > call. May get a lot of people who don't want to 'jump on a call' so potential for wasted ad spend. 4. Run ads to a productised offer If your offer is somewhat productised or 'packaged' you can clearly display them on a lander, and allow prospect to buy and onboard themselves. Works better for lower ticket, but can work for higher ticket too, no problem - people buy Teslas this way for $100k+. Google Ads can work well for this method as you can target people who are searching for what you're buying. This takes set up, but for the right offer, can be the cleanest simplest way to run an agency. Leads are essential to a business, without them, there's no need to optimise anything else. Nail the 4 above and you'll never run dry.