The Most Successful SEOs do THIS instead...

Key Takeaways

I was recently asked at an SEO conference what do the most successful SEO professionals do better than anyone else is it link building on-site SEO or something completely Nono related like negotiation networking or Cocaine by the way I gave what I believe is the best answer to this which I'll get to soon but I also wanted to crowdsource your opinions as well so I created a poll in my 30,000 member Facebook group to see what y'all had to say in this video I'm going to answer the question what do the top seos on the planet do best I'll go over the results that poll but also add my feedback while also giving you some action steps to get better at each of these skills today and make sure to stick around until the end because I'm going to highlight a special mention that was a complete blind spot to most people that took the poll which means that it goes over the head of the entire SEO industry but before I get started head on over to the link in the pin comment to sign up for my free SEO training Master Class it goes over all the strategies I'm using in 2024 to compete at the top of the game on Google Now first things first let's clarify what I mean by a successful SEO in my poll I asked for btim what do the most successful F SEO professionals do well for this will Define successful as high income at the end of the day SEO is a profession you might be the world's best expert at website speed optimization but does that actually make you rich that's the question we're answering here link building is the tactic that got the most votes with 36% funny enough I didn't even vote for link building but I do understand why many people would this is an AUST report of the top ranking Pages for the keyword bestvpn check out the domain rating column which is an indicator of the backlink authority of these sites dnes like Thanos level dr70 is iron man these are all hard to achieve personally I only have three sites in that range it's very clear that the sites with the most traffic on the internet have the most back links as is shown by this correlation study on backlinko the reason I didn't vote for it is because that I know that the highest earning seos don't actually link build themselves sure they might actually know how to build backlinks but more importantly they know how to get them done at scale either by Outsourcing them like crazy building huge Outreach teams or creating a Content marketing engine that attracts links on autopilot most likely It's a combination of all three of these but to get to this level you need to start to understand how to view backlinking efficiently scale is the key here the way I conceptualize link building is to break it down into two categories on one side you want high volume relevant links these would come from Outreach and ultimately Outsourcing once you build up the cash flow to afford outside help the volume of these links is going to supply page rank which is what's going to move you up the rankings the relevance of the sites you're getting links from is going to help Google understand what your is about and what keywords to rank you for typically these are going to come from sources like guest posts and Link insertions on the other side we have high Authority low relevance links I'm talking about links from sites like the Washington Post which Google has been specifically quoted to say is an example website that helps to establish eat sure the Washington Post has nothing to do with your kayak blog but are you telling me you don't want a link from there these links build the T trust in eat for your website link types here would be digital PR Outreach campaigns and Haro for digital PR I'm using F and his team over at search intelligence. co.uk the best of the best once you build up a mental framework of the types of links you need get practice building them then once you understand the process now you can start to build your own team or looking to Outsource once the cash starts pouring in the skill with the next highest vot count was hiring delegation with 177% of the total votes this was my number one pick and it was exactly what I was referring to when I tweeted your ability to make money with SEO is inversely proportional to how often you log into WordPress damn to grow an SEO business or any business for that matter you need to learn how to hire and delegate of course I agree that someone needs to balance anchor text ratios and fix Google search console errors but if you're doing that stuff all day long how the hell are you going to see the critical opportunities that are going to change the course of your business how are you going to have time to explore how AI can improve your processes how are you going to make the deals that give you 1,000% return on investment business Guru Michael Gerber who will get back to soon said you want to work on your business not in your business right now you think that the most important skill you're learning is SEO it's not the real skill you're learning is entrepreneurship you're learning how to solve problems and turn that into money the world is moving faster than ever new ways of making money are surfacing on The Daily it's the skilled entrepreneur that sees the gaps Bridges it with their solution and recruits and rallies a team of people to execute that Vision trust me at the highest levels all you should be doing is innovation hiring and management how do you get started with this read who the a method for hiring this is the best book on hiring I've ever read hands down read the eth by Michael Gerber I was lucky enough to read this book before I even started SEO and it's been a key part why I've been able to scale up to five concurrent seven figure businesses and today start delegating responsibilities instead of tasks what do I mean by this a task looks like this go to the spreadsheet highlight The Columns with a number lower than blah blah blah then delete rows that they exceed blah blah blah you know what someone feels like when you give them something like this my boss thinks I'm a freaking he thinks I have a cheesecake for a brain and I huff paint in my garage but if you say hey at the beginning of each week I need at least 500 websites to outreach to that fit our requirements I don't care how you do it that's completely up to you you own this process then they'll be like oh snap boss Believes In Me I'm going to do a good job on this learn this and your business will seem like night and day from the preschool it was before by the way here's a quick word from the sponsor of this video search intelligence this campaign got us big links in websites such as Life Hacker Welles Online daily record and about 20 other news websites let me show you how we've done it we knew that people will be flying a lot this summer and we knew that journalists will be writing about this topic a lot so on behalf of our client we put together a nice guide about how to fall asleep on the plane then we use mrack to find journalists who write about travel then we put our advice in a nice email and send the tips to the journalists within just a few days the links started Landing securing our client natural placements in really big websites just like this this and this this is a great example about how you can leverage seasonal Trends to earn links to a website anticipate what journalists want to write about at all times and give them the stories that they need they will reward you with some great juicy links I hope this is helpful now back to the video next up we have on-site SEO with 133% of the total votes this is a huge category and can cover topics such as topical Authority which we all know slaps internal linking NLP and entity optimization but also includes trivial stuff like optimizing titles and descriptions and ALT tags simply because topical Authority is in this category I fully agree that on-site optimization is a key skill that the most successful seos have mastered the other stuff give it to your responsibility delegated team topical Authority works like this let's say you wanted to rank for something like best crypto exchange you can't just write a single article on crypto exchanges and expect it to actually rank in the top 10 even if your site had hundreds of thousands of links it just won't work instead you need to talk about every subtopic in the crypto space how to set up a wallet what is the blockchain Bitcoin versus ethereum all of it once Google starts to recognize you as a topical Authority expect to take a trip to bonerville like the site here this Healthline article crushes Google for the term best protein powder how many articles does Healthline have with the word protein in the title this simple command will tell you is 495 a lot which brings me back to hiring delegation because you're not going to be writing 495 articles by yourself now 90% of topical Authority involves creating a topical map of everything you need to write in your Niche after you fin finish year check out my video this chat GPT prompt just made Google SEO 10x easier it'll show you how to create a good enough topical map for free using chat GPT otherwise if you want me to generate the real deal for you head over to lepr dog topical dm- service and I'll get you sorted both links are in the description next up with 9% of the votes we have SEO testing setting up controlled experiments to reveal the Google algorithm this one I'm split on half of me knows that without SEO testing I'd be nowhere near where I am today when I was first learning SEO I got slammed by the Google penguin update that destroyed my entire website portfolio no site was left alive I was crushed but then I remembered hey Matt you were an electronal engineer before this SEO life why don't you set up some single variable tests and figure out exactly how Google works then everything took off I take the things I learned from SEO testing feed that to my affiliate business lead spring my agency the search initiative I teach it to people in the affiliate lab I talk about it when I was invited to conferences and then I started sharing it with you folks here on YouTube like I said it feels everything why am I lit on SEO testing being so important because it's not entirely necessary if you focus on the skill coming up next setting up SEO tests is difficult it takes a lot of time and it's demoralizing more often than not theories turn out to be Duds which is why I simply recommend getting SEO test results from people you trust if that happens to be me the affiliate lab is where I share all of it but I also sprinkle a lot of it here on YouTube so make sure to subscribe next up we have another non SEO soft skill in networking with 5% of the votes but man I got to SEO because I don't like dealing with people and I can do this all from home speaking as an introvert trust me I enjoy working from my nerd cave all by myself but remember how I told you not to worry too much about SEO testing it's because you can Network your way around it let's say you learned three amazing SEO tactics that work great for you why not find three more SEO friends in different niches each with three tactics themselves now your SEO toolkit has nine more badass skills because SEO testing is so slow I usually only complete one to two tests per month but I'm in a private group with Cory tugberk Robert nishel yashu gffu Kyle rof and Michael rorer combined this group is a fire hose of groundbreaking SEO strategy for networking honestly Facebook's are probably the best platform for it the affiliate lab members group has managed to attract nearly 4,000 of the best in the industry but there's also the free group affiliate SEO Mastermind where 30,000 smart people hang out even if you're not an affiliate these groups Crush at SEO now let's finish up things with a special mention Niche selection didn't get quite the love that I expected with only 3% of the votes you guys are killing me here niche selection is everything do you think that the laptop Niche is good they're expensive so commissions on these guys must be good right this Niche is absolute trash it's so competitive with major sites like znet and PC World you need a six to seven figure budget just to compete I've never seen a laptop Niche site make more than $7,000 per month with Niche selection you want to think about Roi how much can I expect to make from a site given how much it takes to build it and for that you want to look at Revenue per content article created as well as Revenue per backlink build where do you get this data from website marketplaces like Flippa to learn more about how I do this check out my video called how I start every SEO project up here at the top