Reflecting on my SEO journey, I’ve realized one of my biggest mistakes was listening too much to online gurus and courses. Rather than taking action, I hesitated, swayed by pitches promising exclusive methods and fear of using the wrong methods. You don’t want to use the wrong method!!😡

My BIGGEST Mistake in SEO

Therefore, for fear of potentially getting the wrong methods, I simply held back on some key fundamentals. In this case, I want to share with you an example of link building, where for a long time I was listening to first of all, this sort of white hat crowd saying:

• You must listen to Google
• You shouldn’t build links
• Links will get you penalized

When it all came down to it, and I started testing some link-building strategies, it worked really well. It was surprising because having had all this propaganda, from free online resources, I was basically under the impression that if I tried to do link-building, it wasn’t going to work because I couldn’t get the true powerful links that they were talking about. In reality, it all comes down to some simple fundamentals. But they’re not going to tell you that because they’re trying to pitch their service.

Challenges of SEO Discourse: Propaganda and Action

So much of the SEO discourse, and publicly available knowledge, all comes from people selling something, whether it’s a course service, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But of course, he got to try and stand out in the market. Therefore, for all the links, sellers will always tell you that their links are best you shouldn’t do this method shouldn’t do that method. Now, of course, some of that is true. And there are things out there, you don’t want to build and that will damage your website.

But in the grand scheme of things, the price of inaction is much greater than the cost of action. If I did build the wrong links, then there are always solutions to that like disavowing, even if it did come down to it. But in reality, the chances of that happening were much lower than I thought, I had a massively heightened risk and profile because I listened to so much propaganda. But when I stopped listening to them and was at the point where I was going out meeting more high-level SEOs, then I was getting more of the inside story, that actually, there’s a lot more freedom there.

Real-Life Example

So let me give you a real-life example of this. This is a website I sold early in 2022. It was a standard affiliate content site. Now I did a basic level of link building. So I did a very cheap dodgy press release. And I found a good expired domain from a very similar website and redirected that website to mine in order to inherit those links. So it’s got a DRF seven, I think at the time as its peak as of the hour about 12. So really very small.

Optimization and Success

Through on-page content, quality, and topical relevance, I was dominating some really good searches. So I’ve actually only had 100 or so articles, most of which I wrote myself. But they’re all optimized with Surfer, they were all really deep, and informative. They had the products at the top, and then the buying guide underneath, and lots of internal linking, and a really good template actually for conversion rate optimization. So it was doing really well. At its peak, it was doing about $1,500 per month.

• Negotiation and Reflection: So when I came to sell it, I was able to they were already pitching me around a 40x multiplier, thanks to Empire Flippers. However, they said that was basically the maximum they were going to take and they could always take a lower offer. And I was able to negotiate that up to 43x. So that meant I was going to get really decent payout for the site.
• Regrets and Insights: But when I look back now, knowing what I do know what I do now, because once I sold that website, I actually reinvested that income in upskilling my knowledge, so I immediately started traveling, getting out to the biggest conferences out there to meet some of the biggest people in the industry and get talking to them. I don’t just mean their talks. I mean, actually, hang out with them at the bar and get genuine insights into the stuff they didn’t talk about. Online.
• Missed Opportunities: So this really was one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in SEO, what do you think I got a 43x multiplier, that traffic, I reckon I could have easily doubled or tripled that traffic, in which case, if you think about that graph, in terms of the valuation of when I sold it, versus had I built some links, drone that traffic grew that revenue, and then massively scaled that traffic.
• Reevaluation and Lessons: Most of my clients, will often see 10 20x returns in traffic from doing this link-building process, then that site could have been extremely valuable. So I sold it for about 40 $50,000, something like that. I reckon I could have got a good mid-six figure for that site.

Final Thoughts about My Biggest Mistake in SEO

Had I not listened to the standard advice, which is links are bad, you shouldn’t build them. Or if you do build them, make sure you use this guy who said this guru will overcomplicate these things in order to establish their own authority in Rassie 90% of SEO is just content and links. And if you do those fundamentals, you’re going to succeed.

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Learn how to avoid the biggest mistake in SEO

However, creating the content is just one step. We need to ensure Google indexes and crawls the new pages effectively. Emphasizing the importance of the pages will encourage Google to take notice and make them discoverable in search results.

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