SEO Works, And You Don't Need A Thousand Posts To Do It Right

bynathaniell

101K followers

5 years ago

My most successful websites have always been due to (in my opinion), writing lots of content. Not only does it improve my writing skills over time, but it's also just a numbers thing.

The more times you try, the more times you win.

I wrote about 50 posts before my VPN website took off. I wrote about about 100 posts on my bootcamp site before I made it to Vegas. It took about 300 posts on a recent side project before I saw decent income.

Building an affiliate website has always taken lots and lots and lots of writing (or outsourcing) for me. Kyle talks about this in his post about brute force writing.

However, if you do things right from the beginning, you don't have to write that much. One great example is my beer website, which ranks surprisngly well for the amount of work I do on it.

I only published two articles in 2018, nothing in 2017, and everything else was in 2016 or before.

Right now, it's ranking #1 for Rare Beer Club Review, which earns about $100-$200 per month in commissions, and more during the holidays.

My beer site also ranks for keyowrds like "Libbey Craft Beer Glass Set Review", and "5000ml Erlenmeyer Flask", but neither of those keywords produce any income, despite being very product focused!

There's nothing complicated or difficult about how these rankings were achieved.

• Keyword in the title
• Keyword in the URL
• Keyword in the first paragraph
• Keyword in an h2 or h3 heading
• Keyword in your title image
• 1000-2000 words long

Plus, I follow other general content creation tactics Kyle and Jay cover in the trainings and webinars like internal linking, aiming for low competition keywords, and image SEO.

> SEO 2019 Checklist

What's Working In 2019?

The basics of creating high quality, FOCUSED content won't change from year to year. However, some things I've been doing that produce decent results are:

• Updating Old Content
• Using Cascading Headings (h2 > h3 > h4 instead of random placement for the looks)
• Using short URLs (website.com/focus-keyword instead of mywebsite.com/this-is-my-focus-keyword-2019)
• Using alt text the way it's supposed to be used
• Creating smaller paragraphs to optimize for mobile
• Larger fonts (18-20px)

It's hard to say which one(s) of these are actually producing results, or if it's a combination of all of them, or if it's just confirmation bias. Regardless, these things make sense from a readers perspective, so I think they are helping.

Final Thoughts

Although it definitely helps to write like a maniac and push out tons of content, it isn't the only way to achive success online. I like beer, and I have a lot to say about it, and Google is smart enough to see that!