
Ask HN: Does SEO still work in 2018? - jadeydi
If it works, which method are you using now?
======
codingdave
SEO works, and always will. However, trying to figure out the latest tricks is
a losing game. Even if you do figure out how to make something work today,
algorithms will change and you'll be punished for having gamed the system.

Instead, write 'honest' content. Write it well. Write it for humans. If you
find yourself adding content in hopes the search engine will pick it up, that
is a short-term gain for long-term pain. Do have your title match your
content. Do try to write unique phrases that are applicable to your content.
And try not to copy/paste content around your pages.

Do all that, with clean markup, and your SEO will be good enough to beat out
local competitors. (Even if agencies tell you differently.)

~~~
cookiecaper
I don't run a web agency and make 0 dollars from selling SEO.

This is not true. Google has been gamed for well over a decade.

On a past enterprise, I believed the lie "write good content and it will
magically rank" and paid a content writer for about 9 months. She posted
lengthy original content about 3 times per week, all highly relevant to the
search terms we cared about. I did the same about once a week.

A competitor with a private blog network and professional spam apparatus
started outranking us just with "link building", i.e., posting links on the
PBN they controlled, within 1 month of launching (we had about 15 months of
content at this point). They had no content on their site at all, just a
landing page that included a few of the keywords they were using in their link
building. There was no blog, there was no "well-written, honest content for
humans".

Google had no qualms ranking them based on the link text despite their lack of
supporting content. This competitor brutally beat us in organic search traffic
until both businesses were shut down due to legal threats from a F500 cowering
behind the CFAA.

Our blog is still online. There is no significant search traffic to speak of.
While the content may have aged some, it's still the best resource for a lot
of the things we posted about. It's buried pretty deep on Google's search.

Transparent spam and plagiarized content are easy for Google to detect, but
private blog networks are a major component of modern SEO, as are several
other non-organic schemes that Google has no simple algorithmic method to
detect (barring slip-ups that make it obvious, though even in those cases,
Google seems reluctant to punish domestic PBNs). I know of entire offices
staffed with "link builders" whose entire job is to figure out how to get
backlinks, and to be fair, "write really good original content" is somewhere
on their list, but it's not very close to the top.

Just a counterpoint. "SEO" is still a thing. Google is a high-value target and
it's worth a lot of money to game them. It is quite naive to believe that
they're impervious to it. You can rank OK with "honest, well-written content
for humans" as long as no professionals are competing with you.

~~~
IllIllIllIll
^^This.

Agreed. Google is certainly advanced, but it certainly isn't fair, despite
what their guidelines tell content writers and webmasters.

Google wants people to write high-quality, relevant content, so they altered
their guidelines to simply tell everyone to write high-quality, relevant
content. Yet, just as the YouTube lottery exists -- where two creators can
produce videos of similar quality and one sees enormous success and the other
doesn't -- there's probably a ranking lottery.

And at the end of the day, if a content moderator or employee at Google likes
your content, you'll have a better chance at ranking regardless of quality.

~~~
jackgolding
I'm not the best at SEO but I agree with this - it seems that writing good
content is only part of the story (but an important part.)

Similar to startups, I am curious as to how much of professional SEO success
is about outreach. i.e. if I am mates with a uni professor and I write
something about his topic, can I get a backlink from their valued .edu domain?
What about .gov? Does this outrank better content? To what extent are
forbes.com, entrepreneur.com, inc.com etc writers gaming this? (Or are they
just looking for the virality?)

------
orliesaurus
I've been doing SEO as a side gig for many smaller local websites. The amount
of traffic you can generate from locally ranking higher than your competitors
is astoundingly high. You can literally bring tens of thousands of dollars of
extra business to companies i.e. electricians, vet doctors, dentists,
gardeners... honestly it's worth every penny.

~~~
dx034
Any chance you could share some ideas? Is it just getting it linked on other
pages? That appears to be what a lot of "consultants" online suggest. Or
purely content optimisation?

~~~
orliesaurus
A comment wouldn't be enough, and ideas aren't worth a penny without a
detailed execution plan. Honestly if you are interested you have to put the
hours and do your own research, then test things yourself and see what you are
most comfortable doing/what works for your niche or business. If you're really
interested, lets exchange emails or telegram and chat, I would gladly offer
some time helping you out (for free ofc).

~~~
chrischen
Do you mostly do content generation, link building, or on-site html
optimization.

~~~
orliesaurus
all of the above + hyperlocal seo

~~~
chrischen
Between link building and content generation, which takes up more budget/time?
Asking as I'm trying to decide which one to focus more on.

~~~
orliesaurus
Great content takes time but it's impossible that you won't have an output.
Link building is hard and can lead to nowhere. If you were to get started and
only had a finite amount of time, I would focus on great interactive,
captivating and insightful content.

------
JeremyMorgan
Yes, definitely. But not in the traditional "hacks" sense.

I get a lot of search engine traffic to my blog, with the following strategy:

Stage 1: Technical - Clean up your act.

If you structure your site properly and make it accessible, search engines
will crawl and index it properly. Make your content accessible from a
technical standpoint.

Clean up your HTML

Make your URLs reflect your content, cleanly

Build and submit sitemaps

Make the navigation on your website simple and effective

Make your website load quickly

Stage 2: Content - Make great stuff.

If you build great content, people will share it. They will link to you.

Build great content

Make things that help people

Stay within a niche if you can

Create content that helps people, even if you're giving a little of your
service away. (For example, a roofing company featuring an article about how
to choose a roof, even if it sends them to your competitor, or some DIY stuff)

If you do these things, you'll do well in search engines. I'm oversimplifying
a bit, but this is way more effective than keyword stuffing, link purchasing,
etc.

Just keep it honest.

~~~
jwr
I could repeat everything that was written above. Exactly my experience. Just
do the right thing and SEO will happen by itself.

As a side note, I noticed that simple quick-loading pages seem to have more of
an advantage recently than people think.

~~~
JeremyMorgan
Yep, Google has been quite public about page loading speed being a factor in
rankings. It's not a "make or break" and it won't instantly put you on page 1
for everything, but it makes a difference.

------
brosirmandude
I'm a little biased because I currently work as an SEO Manager at an agency,
but I would say yes. It REALLY depends on the type of business, what stage the
business is at, their goals, and probably a few other things. SEO should
almost always be a part of a larger overall marketing strategy.

If you're an ecommerce shop optimizing product and category pages - SEO will
help.

If you're a plumber and ranking higher than your competition will bring in new
leads & jobs - SEO will help.

If you're an established SaaS company launching a new product - SEO will help.

If you're a brand new SaaS startup - SEO is probably not the best thing to
spend money on. That money is likely better spent on PR getting press
mentions, and on PPC ads promoting your brand.

The main problem I see many small businesses making is relying solely on SEO
to bring them leads while having no other marketing strategy. This may have
worked well for them back when you could spam websites to the top of SERPs,
but it's not the case today.

~~~
jachee
Give us some more counter-examples? Where will SEO definitely _not_ help?

~~~
nikanj
If you’re doing something completely new, there might not be too much organic
traffic. E.g when AirBnB was launching, the users were not googling for ”home
accommodation”, they were looking for hotels. Same for Twitter, nobody was
looking for ”sms blogging platform”

~~~
davemel37
Thats not an SEO argument thats a keyword choice argument. If demand is
minimal optimize for competitors brands or comparisons to related solutions to
what your audience needs when they are potentially in the market for what you
offer.

------
3pt14159
Yes it does, but a little goes a looooong way to Google.

I've also been starting to notice that having custom HTML / CSS is boosting
things more than before for smaller sites.

Also, even if using JS for SPAs doesn't matter to _Google_ there is a
reasonable long tail of other web crawlers that may or may not be helpful to
your ends and you'd be surprised at how many of them just use mechanize or
nokogiri instead of something more robust. Basically it comes down to cost,
last time I was in the custom crawler trade it was around 50x more expensive
to do things with a virtual dom than it was to either straight parse the HTML
or figure out the main API calls JS was making from the browser that actually
had the data I needed and just run those.

~~~
devin
Out of curiosity, what options beyond nokogiri, mechanize, etc. are you
referring to? Something open source, commercial, or custom?

~~~
3pt14159
Well I've done it a bunch of different ways, and granted this take is about
three or four years out of date, so take it with a grain of salt.

Selenium / headless Firefox with JS running in the browser waiting for things
to load / resolve. This is the worst case scenario.

Sometimes you can use a layered approach, first do a normal mechanize request
then if the page doesn't 404 you can try to parse it there. If you detect that
its relying on infinite scroll try to run the JS command via Ruby Racer then
if that isn't [semi-]automatically possible put the URL in the "requires full
DOM queue" all of this on a bunch of code that lights up different servers to
evade log analysis. Some URLs are behind a CAPTCHA, and some people will then
add those urls to the "Use a human to do the work" queue, but I've never
really felt right about doing that. To me a CAPTCHA is basically someone
saying, "no seriously, bugger off" plus I don't want have some poor soul waste
their life copying and pasting text. It's easier to just convince a client
that last 0.01% of data isn't worth getting.

What's really funny is the meta game that stores have. There is no "price" any
more for many of these people. There is "the price you happen to see" and they
use a bunch of tricks to try to figure out if the traffic is real or not
because they know that other places are dynamically setting their price to
undercut them by some optimal amount.

It's just an arms race, but you know what arms races are really good for?

Arms manufacturers.

------
chuckgreenman
I worked for a company that does internet marketing, what I can say about SEO
is that there is only one strategy that will work.

If you want to be featured at the top of search results you need to have
content that is actually relevant to the search term. It has to be genuinely
relevant and of high quality and ideally, linked to by other respected sites.

You can spend all the time and money you want on the gimmicky stuff, google
will update the algorithm and wash away any progress you make.

~~~
eitland
Not a "SEO person" and can't say if it works or not in 2018 but I've helped
with a couple of web projects and it has surprised me how little work it took
to get ahead of local competition (basically write something meaningful) - and
how unenthusiastic business owners are to do this.

------
ilhicas
I believe the best methods to remain the same that it has always been, create
quality content by delivering value to your visitors and keep your webapp
running without maing your page hang on clients as well as presenting a clean
interface, that should be cross device.

~~~
amelius
That must explain why w3schools is always at the top of my search results.

/s

~~~
openIce
What's wrong with w3schools?

~~~
teddyh
W3fools used to have more detail:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20110117085131/http://w3fools.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20110117085131/http://w3fools.com/)

Even if w3schools have fixed all these instances since then, that all those
errors were ever produced is a bad sign, especially when there were better
alternatives even then.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
If you keep punishing someone for past mistakes there is no reason to improve.
On the other hand MDN is a mozilla resource and had good stuff from day 1 so
they deserve the traffic.

------
jimmy1
Absolutely -- for paid search. Organic SEO is a little tougher. You have to
really provide valuable, quality content for organic SEO. If you try to half-
ass it at all, it will be snuffed out and mixed in with the other garbage.
Provide incentive for users to browse your content and don't make it obvious
that you are just having a cheap marketing page with a couple of blurbs any
idiot can google to figure out the information you are providing. I think that
is why sites like Bankrate and NerdWallet are good at organic SEO -- they have
nice tools and good information.

~~~
Azkar
> You have to really provide valuable, quality content for organic SEO

This is the key. Google wants to make sure your readers are getting their
questions answered. SEO is constantly changing, but high quality and valuable
content will always be king.

------
nige123
Google is not a search engine.

It's an association engine.

We know what Google is trying to do - associate the best solutions to search
questions.

To game Google you need to help them achieve their objective - associate their
search queries with your solutions.

Broadly there are three types of search desire:

1\. navigational - the user wants to find a resource or place?

2\. informational - the user wants to learn something?

3\. transactional - the user wants to perform an action (pay a bill, book a
flight, hotel, restaurant etc)

If a page satisfies a user's search desire - they won't search for it again.

This missing search trail is a valuable signal to Google. It provides some
evidence that page A satisfies query B. The more these signals fire the
stronger the association.

SEO 2018?

Ideally make pages that solve your users' search problems without them needing
to go back to Google to search again.

~~~
dorgo
.... Or let bots do searches on google, clicking on your link and never search
again with same IP/browser/... combination. Or let bots do the opposite for
your competitors.

As long as google uses a metric to determine how good a page A satisfies query
B there always will be the possibilty to optimize for this metric instead of
actually to solve users search problems.

------
hashsalt
Depends on the market. Google's move to 'entities' over keywords means broad
search seo is beyond the abilities of "2 guys with some adwords experience"
type agencies that were popular circa 2011/12\. Quality well thought out sites
that (theoretically) align with intent fare better.

That said, if you're targeting a certain city, definitely still works. Most
local sites are poorly optimized.

~~~
siruncledrew
Yes, content should be much more closely paired with SEO. Googlebot's
algorithms change a lot[0], so there is always going to be a lagging trend
trying to keep up with it, which is why good SEO _should_ be an iterative
process. You get what you pay for (or for the effort you put in) with SEO.

[0]: [https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change](https://moz.com/google-
algorithm-change)

------
vidyesh
In my opinion, SEO will always work because Google will keep trying to be
build the perfect system (search engine) and it will never stop mainly because
Google has to keep evolving depending on the current human understanding. And
you cannot have a perfect system.

The changes Google will do to their algorithm will sooner or later be gamed,
SEO 'experts' will beat a small subset of the system, Google will penalize
them and adapt making it vulnerable to more exploitation.

The search engine is interacted with by humans so no matter what Google does,
at the end humans(SEOs) on the other end will try to present their content
first the way they see fit for humans.

------
at-fates-hands
I used to have about a dozen clients with the agency I ran with a friend a few
years ago.

I found out a number of things when I was working closely with my clients.
Most were doing ok in the SERPS and a few did really well because of the niche
industries they were in.

Some things I found out:

1 - SEO helps, but is never the determining factor in hiring any of the
companies I worked with. This means you can be #1, #1 in Google and still not
get any business because of it.

2 - Tracking contacts is critical. We mandated all of our clients use an
answering service. They would contact people within 24 hours of receiving a
contact form. The owner would then follow up to set up appointments,
consultations, etc. Once we did this, we saw a massive jump in sales
conversions which had nothing to do with SEO.

3 - If your design sucks and people can't find what they're looking for
quickly, they're going to leave your site no matter how high you're ranking.
We found this out with several of our clients who didn't want to redesign
their site for various reasons. They ranked high, but their traffic and
conversions sucked. We redesigned their site(s) for easier navigation, and
prioritized content and got rid of other content that clogged their site.
Conversions jumped by 43% over a 6 month period.

SEO does matter, but even if with massive amounts of traffic because you're
ranking well isn't a magic bullet for success. You also need a good design and
content people can find quickly and easily.

------
dazc
If you have industry knowledge (outside of tech) you can rank very well for
expert content because the stuff you need to beat is often written purely for
SEO benefit by someone who's done 30 minutes of research and then bluffed
their way through it.

From what I see, in the UK at least, small businesses aren't doing this.
Either they can't be bothered or are afraid of giving away knowledge they
think they could be charging for?

------
seanwilson
I believe it does. If you write quality content people want to read and share,
configure your pages so they can be easily understood by search bots and get
quality backlinks, you're going to rank well. You should follow what Google
actually suggest you do about SEO
([https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en))
but I don't think it's a good idea attempting to game Google by trying to
figure out what they're measuring behind-the-scenes because their algorithms
can changes.

Plugging my own project but based on the above principles I wrote a guide
containing on-page SEO rules that authoritative sources say are important
(e.g. Google) and created a Chrome extension that tests your site follows
these rules:

[https://www.checkbot.io](https://www.checkbot.io)

------
rokhayakebe
I do SEO for lawyers, mostly Family Law. I can tell you SEO works as in:
Proven Measured Positive ROI, to the point I wish I was allowed to own a law
firm. One thing I would say though is SEO should be one part of your marketing
strategy but not all of it. You should have a diversified approach.

Edit: Let me offer a different way to look at it.

Does having a well organized website help turn visitors into clients? Yes.
Well that's SEO, a well organized website.

Does having useful and well written information about the services and
products you offer, or you industry, help your business? Yes. Well that's SEO
too.

Can sharing your knowledge online across different relevant forums help you
grow your brand and business? Yes. Well that's SEO as well.

It is just that people who do not know SEO think it is things such as keywords
and metatags and url structure, but everything above and more is SEO. And all
these things work to your advantage, therefore SEO works.

~~~
SnowingXIV
I also do SEO work for lawyers, primarily PI and mass torts type stuff. It
does work - to an extent. There are certain technical things you need to get
right and that alone can rank you decently, especially locally. There is low
hanging fruit that can put you miles ahead of the competition and I've done
this time and time again.

The problem with SEO and why I have a grudge against the industry is past
success by gaming google with PBNs has led to hoisting up a few sites that can
dominate because of their past. Those sites used spam tactics, then ranked
high, that led to actual relevant backlinks, google got confused, and now
keeps them at the top for any new content. Others must also utilize these
dicey methods and pour serious money into it to do well. At least nationwide.
I'm praying for the day that house of cards comes tumbling down.

Until then, having a better site, with better copy (done by a professional
writer not farmed out), and using Adwords typically is the go-to.

~~~
rokhayakebe
I decided to stop pitching SEO and instead pitch "growing your business." SEO
alone is not going to cut it and it is dangerous for any business to rely on
one source of leads. Also thinking about Growing a business allows me to keep
looking for sources of revenue and improving conversion rates. Haven't had
success with Adwords (Family Law), you should email me so that I have your
contact (email in profile).

~~~
SnowingXIV
Definitely agree. I tell most clients the same thing, you shouldn't rely on
one source of leads forever, especially not SEO. I'm open to any medium.
Radio, newspaper, tv (I wish I had the budget for tv commercials or could
convince some to try it), whatever yields the best cost per acquisition.

I haven't touched Family Law but it might be similar to PI. PI on Adwords is
brutally expensive and that's why hyperlocal SEO works well in that regard.

------
ezoe
Yes, at least for Japanese.

Currently, most Japanese Google search results are garbages. It's all
boilarplate texts(but produced by very cheap human labor writers so you can't
easily filter it out) with keywords in it.

SEO won, Google lost.

------
dmtroyer
Can someone post or link to strategies for optimizing for local google seo?

~~~
discussedbefore
The basic option for local lead gen is encouraging happy customers to leave
glowing Google reviews.

After that comes paying for AdWords to get those reviews in front of more
eyeballs.

------
chx
The tricks people used to call SEO stopped working amost 15 years ago with the
Florida update. The next big one was also long ago, Panda in 2011. Writing
relevant content (especially if there is new content frequently) works.
Nothing else works and nothing else have had for a very long time. Most SEO
services are selling snake oil. In a sense Google won and if you want to be
featured at a high place in the result list you need to be relevant to what's
being searched. No tricks.

------
kristianc
It's probably less relevant than it was, due to Google's aggressive internal
linking. Google now surfaces more and more information (sports scores,
directions etc) without you having to leave Google. If you run a service
competing with Google in one of these areas - good luck.

Similarly, AMP has kind of changed the game in terms of publisher traffic.
Users seem to be assuming that results that do not appear in those carousels
are more outdated / less relevant.

------
spamwatch
I thought I'd try my usual check to see what the state of the art is. Googled
"rivonia plumber" (where I live) and got pages like this:

[http://plumber-plumbers.co.za/index-rivonia-plumbers.html](http://plumber-
plumbers.co.za/index-rivonia-plumbers.html)

[http://www.plumbersgauteng.co.za/gauteng-plumbers-
areas/plum...](http://www.plumbersgauteng.co.za/gauteng-plumbers-
areas/plumbers-plumbing-rivonia/)

That is so gamed. Keyword stuffing, repeated exact pages. I assume it's better
in the US but surely the algos are run over the whole dataset? Is this a
worldwide problem?

When I first did that search I found nests of sites using exactly the same
content and styles, with different areas. Same phone number across many sites,
cross-linked out the wazoo. I don't have the interest to check now but it
doesn't seem much better.

~~~
LoSboccacc
Google can’t rank properly repost farm that reformat stackoverflow content,
giving them more rank than stackoverflow itself!

If something of that profile can’t get ahead of pages gaming pagerank,
independent blogs focusing on content have zero chance without at least doing
some legwork on backlinking and keyword optimization.

------
jasonlotito
Yes. SEO works. The mistake is believing that SEO is just about Google. SEO is
also important for places like Etsy, where carefully crafting your listings is
important. And despite the belief that SEO is slimy, it's really all about
ensuring that your product gets in front of the person that wants your
product. So for Etsy, it's not just about the number of people seeing your
product, but the number of seeing your product that want to see it, and are
willing to buy it.

------
jeffnappi
Yes it does! However, now that the algorithms are all grown up it's about FAST
sites with high quality content. There are no more games to be played. It is
important to do your keyword research to understand the market you are
attempting to reach, but that should only inform your content production and
outreach plans.

High quality content isn't cheap and you have to be in it for the long game.

------
arnon
SEO works but actual focused content is better.

~~~
mkirklions
Thats what I thought was SEO.

Everything Calories Per Dollar bring in hundreds of people to my website a
day. As a result, I studied more restaurants Calories Per Dollar, studied
Calcium Per Dollar, and other things like Caffeine Per Dollar.

All relevant to my website, all quality content IMO. Google is easily my best
source of traffic.

------
rajacombinator
If you can SEO yourself to top rankings for tons of keywords, probably. But
you probably can’t do that through pure SEO without strong existing organic
ranking. Also highly product dependent if SEO is a viable channel. Probably
best to cover the basics, optimize page load, and forget the rest.

-t. my impression from dabbling briefly with it.

------
michaelbuckbee
Others are saying: "SEO Works" but Google is steadily moving towards a pay for
placement model.

------
myth_buster
At it's core SEO boils down to a protocol for helping search engines make
sense of your website/content. If you look at it that way, then yes SEO still
works in 2018.

But more often than not, SEO is an umbrella term which encapsulates both the
good and the bad practices. Given the work Google and others have done on
weeding out the latter using ML/AI as well as human intervention [0] I would
say you can't be sure whether those would work. It's contingent on Search
Engines being aware of the practice and penalizing that behavior. So it may
work today but not guaranteed to work tomorrow.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956658](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956658)

------
austincheney
SEO is more interesting now that search engines are seeking greater engagement
and insight on user preferences. I maintain a small application at
[http://prettydiff.com/](http://prettydiff.com/) and both Google and
DuckDuckGo have widgets or features available that come up in the search
results depending upon the search terms.

This saves the user time because they may get what they need directly from the
intelligent search engine result data so that they don't have to enter my
site. On the other hand Google makes deep links into the site immediately
available as "sub-results" so that a user can enter the site more directly
without wasting time on an entry point.

------
uberend23
SEO is sometimes seen as a dark art to get your stuff to the top. I'ts not.

Really, SEO means labelling your content so google understands what it is.

After that, it's all about links.

------
blairanderson
Valuable Content on the internet is a fairly good approach. Outreach to
related media companies to cross promote is a good approach.

------
taveras
I firmly believe that one cannot be a webmaster and ignore how search engines
work.

------
davemel37
I think the Biggest mistake people make is asking, "does it work" about any
marketing strategy!

The question itself begs for an anecdotal answer that is completely irrelevant
to your circumstances...

More importantly, the amount of people who have given up on strategies too
soon or because it wasnt done in a way to provide empirical evidence, is
staggering... and the amount of misinformation that flows out into the wild
built on those flawed premises is really problematic for those without the
context of your situation and the relative context of the situation where
those opinions were formed.

The second problem is that opportunity cost is rarely measured by marketers.
The third problem is that your resource allocation relative to your objectives
is arguably more important than any other factor or opinion about a strategy.

Marketing decisions should be made in the context of your resources, goals,
and your broader marketing mix.

The idea that you can evaluate a specific strategy and measure its return in a
Silo without considering the opportunity costs and other available strategies
relative to your specific resource limitations is very dangerous and needs to
be killed off!

The ideal scenario is to optimize to cashflow relative to lifetime value and
time value of money...or get as close as possible to this...and choose
strategies within the context of this calculation.

You want an SEO strategy? First, figure out if your audience is there and the
cost to reach them with paid search and how long it takes to turn into
cashflow and the lifetime value of that customer...than evaluate the costs to
optimize to rank for that keyword, and how long it will take, than look at
your other resources and strategies relative to the likely costs and returns
and time to get cash returned relative to those strategies and decide if its
worth investing in ranking there...

Once you identify a proven keyword and have context for the cost and value and
time and oppirtunity costs, than figure out how to rank for that keyword...
maybe you buy a site that is already ranking. Maybe you advertise on sites
already ranking. Maybe you think about the user and find a way to create a
resource that Google will want to rank because of its utility... and than
create empirical tests to measure progress and than you invest !!!

\------ The shortcut SEO strategy i like is to ask yourself, what resource can
I create for my industry that is not online but would offer so much utility
that google has no choice but to optimize their algorithms to rank my
resource... like wayne gretzky, go where the puck will be in the future...

When is SEO is done right, its Google trying to optimize its algorithms to
rank your content, not vice versa!

Just my two cents.

------
deadcoder0904
Yes. For SEO related content, I always check Backlinko -
[https://backlinko.com](https://backlinko.com)

The guy Brian Dean has many years of experience about SEO

~~~
orliesaurus
Funnily enough reading studf from this site's (i.e. rank brain 2018 guide) on
mobile makes my phone lag hard (octa core from last summer). I think the 5000+
heavy images content needs some mobile optimizing... Here's a little audit
with Chrome's own tools:
[https://i.snag.gy/eX7IB1.jpg](https://i.snag.gy/eX7IB1.jpg)

~~~
deadcoder0904
Jesus Christ didn't knew that. Someone told me few months ago that's the SEO
guy & the way he talks & all is solid content. Didn't knew it has so bad
LightHouse perf.

------
gscott
The new SEO is really branding just over a long period of time. Expect SEO to
take 6 months to 2 years.

~~~
TheRealPomax
If it takes you 6 months to 2 years to become prominent in local searches,
something has gone very wrong. The answer to the original question is really
one of "over how big a part of the internet?" first. Global SEO is a slow
process, local SEO should be a matter of months at most, if the site you're
optimizing for isn't "yet another one" in a saturated local market.

~~~
gscott
Local SEO can be very competitive depending upon what you are doing. Having a
physical address is good and so signing up for a cheaper local listing manager
(cheapest I have found is from Vistaprint [https://www.vistaprint.com/digital-
marketing/local-listings?...](https://www.vistaprint.com/digital-
marketing/local-
listings?couponAutoload=1&GP=04%2f17%2f2018+12%3a04%3a38&GPS=4974675686&GNF=0))
will get someone's website on 20-30 sites with authority immediately. Then
having long articles and having keywords that focus on the local market. But
depending upon what you are doing that might not be enough... for example
local insurance agencies there is a lot of competition sometimes with up to
100 insurance agencies in a tight geographical radius. Time helps to rise
above when there is a lot of local competition.

~~~
LoSboccacc
Could one do that landing users on a facebook page instead of a real site? I
got some question from a friend owning a local business but it’s quite outside
my competency and was just looking around for info when this hn popped up

~~~
gscott
Instead of Facebook I would suggest focusing on getting a lot of positive
reviews on Yelp. If your friend can get 20 or 30 reviews on Yelp he will
totally dominate the whole local market with a number 1 listing organically on
Google without hardly any effort.

------
gcuofano
Disclaimer: I work for WordLift.io, which focuses on Semantic SEO and on-page
SEO automation. Thus my opinion might be biased.

The answer is SEO matters a lot. Yet SEO today means something entirely
different from what it meant a few years back.

Back in 2015 when I started my blog, I was writing what would be defined
quality content. It was very in-depth, researched (at times it would take me
weeks to write a piece of over three thousand words). However, when I hit the
publish button I wasn't getting any traffic (at the time a few dozens visits
per month!). True, quality content is the baseline, but if you don't have an
idea of how search engines work, you might gain traction over a few years
time, but the process is quite long and not guaranteed to succeed!

However, what SEO means today is different from what it meant a few years
back. In the past keywords and backlinks were all that mattered. They still
count. However, it will come a day when they will stop working. Why?

Since 2012, Google has been building a giant knowledge graph, which main aim
is to gather information on the web, structure it in the form of nodes and
edges to construct this massive graph. Thus, getting featured within Google's
so-called knowledge vault becomes critical for an effective SEO strategy.

Thus, if in the past you might be targeting keywords to be positioned on the
SERP. Today you might want to be more focused on long-tail keywords that can
bring you in featured snippets or inside a knowledge panel. In fact, those are
also the avenues to get into the Google assistant, thus voice search.

In short, while in the past it made sense to use backlinks and keywords
because Google lacked the power to use more sophisticated methods to index and
rank the web pages. Now you have to switch from a keyword centered content
model. To an entity-based content model.

This kind of approach is more holistic and targets not only the SERP, but it
allows you to get ready for voice search. What are some practical examples of
having this approach?

\- an internal glossary that targets specific questions your readers/potential
customers might have \- structured data in the form of Schema injected as
JSON-LD (in this way you're giving better data that does not affect the
performance of the page) \- use a better internal linking strategy, that
connects articles to topical pages (like the glossary pages) and back

There are more strategies to adopt, but those are the ones that come to mind
right now.

------
jackdaw
It is still works like how past time its been working. Some algorithms are
changed but technique of the seo is the same.

[https://www.overnightgraphics.com/](https://www.overnightgraphics.com/)

------
always_good
As long as there is search, there are ways to appear towards the top of it.

