Why You Don’t Need SEO in 2023 (Do It Instead)

My new techniques get unreal results in no time.

They also work 100%.

After failing many times while using standard promotional methods, I discovered new ideas that I’ll be sharing below.

Let me tell my story.

I once got this weird skype message. Someone by the name of Alisa wrote to me that she needs my SEO consulting expertise, ASAP.

My first thought was SCAM – not only because of the message, but she also had a sexy avatar and my clients don’t have sexy avatars at all. They are professionals.

I usually make a point of not replying to scams. However, on that day, for some reason, I made an exception – I was curious about what type of scam they were trying to pull.

Anatolii. Hi, Alisa. How can I help you?

Alisa. This is a long story to write. May I call you?

It was really late and even though I was tired, I decided to make another exception because I was really curious about what type of fraud it was.

Anatolii. Yes, you may.

She called me by video call!

I was shocked. At first glance, however, the avatar did her no justice. She sat some distance away from the webcam so that I almost saw her whole body.

She wasn’t naked. She was wearing some clothes, not a lot! The clothes emphasized the shape of her surreal body.

Her shirt was very tight, pressed to her body, so as I could see that she had nothing on underneath. She also had on the tiniest pair of hotpants. They were her shorts, but they weren’t her size.

She looked really hot and I was speechless. She started the conversation.

Alisa. My name is Alisa. I have watched all your YouTube videos and also read all your articles. I like your style and your deep explanations. I hoped that you could help me?

Anatolii. Get down to the business, pleaaase.

I still don’t know how I was able to mumble that phrase. However, Alisa understood. I assumed it was not the first time when a man lost his speech with her.

Alisa. Ok, sure. Six months ago I opened an online lingerie shop. I was excited because I know a lot about lingerie – brands, prices, trends, preferences, etc. I invested all my money to fill my store with the latest goods. By having all the lingerie advertised, I could deliver them to any part of the US in a few days.

One of my friends is a photographer. He took high-quality photos and I posed, wearing my products because, with my experience, I could highlight them better than anybody else. I uploaded these photos to my website.

I borrowed $10K from my friends for providing on-page SEO. With this money, I hired Upwork writers with positive feedback and extensive experience. They wrote descriptions for my photos. I also hired web-developers to optimize my content. I think my content is much better than my competitors’. I also think it’s well-optimized for search preferences.

I only had problems with link building. I didn’t know exactly how it worked, so I decided to hire an SEO agency. They gave me a link building plan.

I had to take out a loan for the amount of $60K, just for the sake of links. I paid $10K every month for six months. I thought that I was going to get traffic, but nothing happened. Instead of traffic, I got Google manual actions.

Right now, I’m broke and I don’t know what to do. I need to pay my debts. My online shop has a Penguin filter and my goods are going out of fashion quickly. Please, help me. I can come to you. We can decide what to do. I will do anything…

Don’t get me wrong – this was an emergency situation. I usually get paid for my services, however, this young lady begged me to help her, for free.

So, I made another exception – yet again – and checked her website. She was completely right about some parts of her content. Her photos and pictures were top-tier and high-quality. The website’s structure was simple and well-optimized for UX.

I flipped to the meta tags quickly. Now, when I write meta tags I usually add some positive aspects, brackets, symbols, and numbers – simply for the sake of CTR. However, her meta tags were boring, had only a few keywords, without any special hacks.

Next, I checked the written texts on her product pages. The texts were written without any previous knowledge of the products, simply for the purpose of satisfying Google bots. However, I’m not a fashion specialist either, so I decided to skip this stage for now.

Finally, I checked her external backlinks. They were atrocious. I can’t remember the last time I saw anything as bad as these Black hat techniques, in one place: PBNs, directories, spam comments, automatic submissions and so on – they were all there.

All her spam backlinks linked to commercial pages with thin content. There was not a blog insight. So, I decided to continue our conversation.

Anatolii. Why did you hire that SEO agency?

Alisa. Because they quoted me the best price, for thousands of links.

The best price for thousands of links? Never calculate the quality of backlinks by quantity. Customers often enquire about the quantity of links. Explain to them how to provide White hat link building and content marketing.

I don’t actually want to criticize Alisa. Everybody makes mistakes, except those who don’t do anything.

I was in the same boat when I first started my website in 2008. I struggled for 2 years to get organic traffic. Three SEO agencies failed me, whereafter I started to learn SEO myself. In 2012 I established my Ukrainian and Russian SEO agency.

Even today, I can still think of a lot of excuses about why it was so difficult to get traffic. In general, it remains extremely difficult to get traffic to a new website. In 2019 I created a new English website about digital marketing. My Russian and Ukrainian websites don’t help to get traffic to my English website. English digital marketing websites are all over the place.

The main question remains: How do you outrank big websites with their high level of experience, authority, trust, and almost unlimited marketing resources?

Is it in fact possible?

Everything is possible.

If you read the whole article, you’ll learn about methods that work really well. I use these methods every day myself.

I want to share my hacks on a new website with you. I’ll explain to you how to promote your business, both with money and without.

SEO is a time-consuming game. Don’t expect quick results if you use standard methods. However, by using non-standard methods, it is possible to get traffic and sales faster, without ranking your website.

How? Carry on reading.

By the way, I’ll continue with Alisa’s story later in this article.

I created my new website – seotools.tv in June 2019. I spent five months creating the home page, the about me page, reviews of 265 SEO tools and I also created 8 of my own tools. I wrote 10 long articles about topics that had low-quality content online as well.

All my content is 100% unique. The next step I used was to promote my content by using the Skyscraper technique by Brian Dean. So far, I’ve received only 2 backlinks after sending out 134 well-written personalized emails – not even a 1,5% success rate, compared to numerous online studies where the results are between 5-10%.

I stopped and calculated. If I were to continue this way, I would not live long enough to see my website rank. I would be dead before then. Of course, during my promotion, I could improve and tweak some things in order to get an average ratio. However, it remains a long game.

For my Russian and Ukrainian agency, with 15-20 employees on average, I spent 3 years getting organic traffic in the digital marketing field. All my employees work full time. English is much more competitive.

For my English website, I only employ a content manager, a designer, and a web developer. They help me a few hours a week because my Russian and Ukrainian clients take up most of their time. The English website doesn’t pay the bills yet.

I came to the conclusion that I needed to find alternative methods for getting traffic and sales. I tested a plethora of methods and failed in many of them. I’m not going to waste your time by listing all of them. However, I made a list of techniques that worked really well.

It’s essential to build TRUST before trying to sell or get organic reach. It’s not only for SEO, but social media also have their own massive audience – over 3 billion people.

So, I decided to promote my social media accounts on Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, and Twitter. I spent almost all my time on social media where I got around 30-50 followers a day.

Once I made a mistake to give my Twitter account with over 4,000 followers for “a social media specialist” who sent spam messages and likes. I didn’t get any followers from this spam, even worse, Twitter blocked my account.

You can see, it’s not only Alisa who makes mistakes. I sent the request to Twitter support, but I haven’t got the response yet.

It’s more interesting that this mistake helps me more because I decided to pay all my attention to Linkedin. As a result, I have over 9,000 followers for my account that I registered in 2020.

I even stopped my Facebook and Instagram promotion because of Linkedin. I’m going to continue with other social media when I find true experts. However, if you provide everything yourself – I recommend you to only occupy one social media.

Many experts recommend converting your content to different formats for all social media. I did it. I took my time that is more valuable when I only create content for Linkedin.

Today I get over 200 followers a day on Linkedin. That’s much better than 30-50 followers a day when I was everywhere.

How do I get them? Continue reading because the best part is coming.

I post a lot on my account and comment on other influencers’ publications. I don’t insert links or commercial proposals – just support and help others. On Linkedin, I create a lot of valuable content. I provide the breaking news, help people to connect with each other, share my thoughts, etc.

Many Linkedin experts recommend publishing a few times a week. It doesn’t work for me. I usually post over ten times a day because I don’t know which post will bring me results.

Sometimes I expect a lot of views, however, the result is far away from this – around 500-1000 views per post. It’s not bad at all. However, some posts that I never expect to get a lot from them bring over 10,000 views and hundreds of comments.

That’s why it’s essential to test everything and post a lot.

I don’t try to sell on Linkedin, however, I get hundreds of messages on Linkedin and a few leads every day. There are only a few problems with a lot of spam. However, I learn to handle it as I do in my email.

One thing that I love on Linkedin! It’s possible to get a high level of engagement. On Facebook, according to numerous studies, the level of engagement for brands is around 3-5%. I see the same metrics for my Facebook account.

On Linkedin, I usually get around a 30-50% level of engagement, some of my posts get over 100% that proves Linkedin shares my posts for non-followers, as well.

I continue growing on Linkedin because it works perfectly fine. However, I also pay attention to YouTube.

Why YouTube? Let’s dive in.

How do you create better videos? For YouTube, the first 24 hours is the most important. During that time your video is ranked on how it catches and holds a viewers’ attention. This means that if your new video shows better results than existing videos, YouTube will rank your video higher.

I use my experience from my Russian YouTube channel where I have over 17,000 subscribers that I use to promote my English YouTube channel.

I recorded a bunch of videos and they failed to rank. For my first two videos I spent a few days writing transcripts. Not good. I didn’t have enough time to write unique transcripts for every video. Then I had one of my brilliant ideas. Unique content is only important for Google, not for YouTube.

I started to record videos about digital marketing topics using other content. I usually find the best online articles with similar keywords and paraphrase the content on my videos. I always refer to them in my videos and link to the original content in my description. I never violate any copyright laws. Even more, the original authors get additional traffic from my videos.

I also decided to read a lot of guides and studies about YouTube promotion. These guides inform you that for YouTube, it’s important to record longer videos from 10 to 20 minutes because the average length on the YouTube TOP is around 15 minutes.

It was the same with blog post’s lengths. However, each year bloggers spend more time writing longer blog posts. Then, I decided to test with longer videos, because for YouTube it’s more important to keep their users on their platform for longer.

YouTube users usually spend 40 minutes during one session, on average. I decided by starting to record videos of around 40 minutes in length. I figured, let YouTubers watch one of my videos in full and then they can leave the platform. It might sound foolish, but it works.

You need to consider that there are 1,7B websites online and only 23M YouTube channels. The difference is 73 times less! Businesses today are still too lazy to record videos despite the fact that video traffic is growing.

Link building is the most difficult part of SEO. However, you don’t need to provide link building for ranking on YouTube.

What I like more about YouTube is that there is no cannibalization at all. For website promotion, it’s important not to have similar content. You sometimes need to spend a few months learning user behavior for your website and think of various ways of rewriting one piece of content.

On YouTube, you can record unlimited videos with similar keywords and rank all of them. If some videos fail to rank you have a better chance of ranking others.

For Google SEO you need to spend a lot of time creating unique content, optimizing with load speed, providing link building. Even after this, you don’t know whether you’ll get results or not.

For YouTube SEO and suggested videos, you need to spend an hour to record a video, 8-16 hours for editing. YouTube cost per click is more than 10 times cheaper than the Google cost per click.

PPC doesn’t help to rank your website, but it does help to rank YouTube videos. You can also set up Facebook ads, however, it’s unjustifiably expensive for YouTube promotion.

You also need to find additional relevant traffic in the first 24 hours for your YouTube videos. I found this traffic on social media, but it’s not paid traffic, merely organic. I have a lot of ranking keywords on my Russian YouTube channel.

Right now I’m focusing on my English YouTube channel where I started from scratch and my Russian accent is far from English. As a rule, this is considered the worst way to start. Everybody told me so. Luckily, I never listen.

Despite these difficulties, I’ve got over 1,400 subscribers. I continue to test my approaches because that something works for my Russian YouTube channel – doesn’t work for English.

I use two quite different approaches to get subscribers: commenting the last videos of popular accounts and asking social media users to subscribe to my channel.

So, what next?

I’m going to use guest posting. For my Russian websites, I wrote over 350 guest posts for almost all authoritative digital marketing resources. So, I’m going to create a lot of valuable English content for others. And yes, I’m going to provide SEO for my website because it gives around 56% of all online traffic. I can’t ignore this channel. I just provide more preparations.

The second channel is to create linkable content on my website. I can provide valuable content, but if it’s not linkable – I can’t get results. So, my team is developing a new unique multi-functional tool that I hope to earn a lot of links.

When I feel ready to use Skyscraper technique – I’ll be back with this technique, as well.

Oh, I almost forgot about Alisa. I helped her to show the correct direction. She started her social media journey from Instagram where her audience is. Sorry, I can’t share her account because she wouldn’t be happy, but she is fine.

Also, read the following articles:

• 7 Simple SEO Tips for Beginners (SEO Is Not What You Think)
• What Does a Marketing Consultant Actually Do?
• Marketing Agency VS Marketing Firm (What Do They Actually Do?)
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): Marketing Definition
• PR vs Marketing: What’s the Difference (Infographic)