5 SEO Hacks That Work in 2022

I’m going to show you five seo hacks that are actually working right now and will continue to work in the future and make sure you read until the end because most people ignore seo hack number three and that’s a big mistake let’s dive in so

seo hack number one

seo hack number one is to do reverse keyword research now most people attempt to do keyword research with a traffic focused mindset and the reason is simple it’s for pure vanity huge traffic growth is pretty on charts but it doesn’t tell the full story here’s the truth traffic is relative so what do I mean by that take this example of two businesses business one sells funny cat pictures which gets 9 500 searches per month while business 2 offers personal injury services in st louis which only gets 200 searches per month now here’s a pop quiz for you which business will produce more revenue after ranking number one for the most important keyword well the answer is that the personal injury lawyer by a order of magnitude of a thousand now why am I showing you this example because I want to demonstrate that search volume is done what really matters is intent and all of your keyword decisions should be grounded on search intent and that’s when reverse keyword research comes into play reverse keyword research is an intent focused methodology not a search volume focused strategy now keep in mind you’re still going to use search volume but it’s only a small piece of the puzzle so with that said here’s how reverse keyword research works instead of prioritizing keywords with the highest volume you’re going to prioritize keywords with the highest transactional intent that means you’re going to start at the bottom of the funnel and work your way up for example if someone searches what is seo it makes sense to deliver an informational piece of content hosted on your blog this informational content should deliver pure value without any sales pitch because the searcher hasn’t shown any other intent other than to learn that said you do want to push the searcher further down the funnel and that’s why I always offer a relevant and free lead magnet whenever I publish informational content at the top of the funnel for example if you look at my blog post about on-page seo you’ll see that I have a free on-page seo checklist the goal is to push that relationship further down the funnel so instead of asking them to buy my seo training I’m just asking them for their email address in exchange for an awesome piece of free value that can really benefit them then once they’re on my email list I can deliver more value to them and nurture the relationship and as trust grows this subscriber may turn into a lead and eventually a client so what I just described is how you turn a cold website visitor into a client but of course it’s not always that straightforward because only three to five percent of searchers will turn into email subscribers and that’s why you must target keywords at each stage of the funnel for example after searching what is seo the next search might be learn seo and this is still informational in nature and at the top of the funnel so the content structure will be the same however after that they may search best seo courses or best seo training which is further down the funnel and is investigative in nature so at that point they’ll want to see other people’s experience with the program and this will lead to more transactional and comparison searches like gotch seo academy review or gotcha seo academy verse seo that works these searches are extremely high value because a searcher has become brand aware and is getting close to conversion and that’s why you must prioritize these keywords first and then work your way up the funnel the goal is to make money not to juice your traffic numbers so the next

number two

seo hack is number two prioritize existing keywords now this might seem really obvious but common sense isn’t common practice in seo the truth is that the best keywords to optimize for are the ones that you’re already performing decently for that means any keyword that’s ranking from position number two to number 15 is a golden opportunity to drive more organic traffic with little effort think about it Google is telling you that your page is a good fit for that keyword and the algorithm is giving it to you on a golden platter you just need to take advantage of it you should spend 80 percent of your time optimizing for existing keywords and the other 20 targeting new keywords so how do you find these keywords well first go to scm rush enter your domain go to organic research click on the positions filter and in the custom range enter 2 to 15. now you’ll see all of the potential low-hanging fruits to target so the question you probably have now is how do you optimize for these low-hanging fruits well anytime I want to improve the performance for any given page I just go through this seven-step process so number one is their keyword cannibalization keyword cannibalization is when two or more pages are targeting the same exact keyword phrase and eliminating this is a priority because it hurts performance you can use screaming frog to find instances of keyword cannibalization here’s how okay so all you need to do is open up screaming frog put the target website through here and then start the crawl and once it’s done the best way to find keyword cannibalization is to start searching based on url or by title so what I’ll do is I’ll just go right into here and I’ll just start searching things that I’m starting to see some similarities for so in this case this client wants to rank in st louis so let’s start looking for instances of keyword cannibalization for st louis right away the first thing I see is st louis divorce family law so then we’ll get a little more granular we’ll just type divorce and now we’re able to see is that they have a bunch of urls that all have st louis divorce family law attorneys in the actual subfolder so what we’re going to do is we need to actually fix this because we don’t want all of these pages to be optimized for this keyword phrase we only want this specific page to be optimized for this keyword phrase otherwise we’re going to run into keyword cannibalization issues and if we actually look at the title over here as well we’re going to see that if we look at divorce lawyer saint louis and then right below we also have divorce attorney st louis so these are actually the same exact keywords just slight variations but they have the same exact intent so these two pages are actually competing against each other so this is a very quick way to find instances of keyword cannibalization and you need to go through and clean this all up and in this case it’s just a matter of cleaning up the url structure and probably consolidating these pages into one primary page which would be this one number two does the content need to be upgraded so my criteria at this point is simple is the content unique and better than what exists on the site itself and when compared to the top 10 competitors so if you’re unable to be objective in this analysis then have someone else outside of your company review your content and compare it against the top 10. number three is the content optimized if your content passed the test then it’s time to perform on-page seo I’ll be explaining some actions in a second number four have you promoted the asset internally what this means is have you built internal links to the target page is the page easily accessible to crawlers and no more than three clicks deep number five have you created enough topical relevance more on this in a second number six does the page have enough backlinks so you need to narrow the backlink gap on both the page and the domain level if you want to be your competitors all right so now let’s move on to

Number Three

seo hack number three which is upgrade before you optimize so before you ever do on-page seo you first need to ask if the page itself is different and better than what’s currently ranking you need to go through this exercise with a completely objective mindset if your page is just another me too piece of content then optimizing it may produce short-term gains but it won’t last what produces long-term results in seo is creating pages that are truly unique and that means you need to find angles that haven’t been used before now keep in mind you’re still satisfying the intent but the content itself needs to be different than what’s ranking so look at your content through an objective lens and if it isn’t great then upgrade it and once that’s done and you’re satisfied then do on-page seo which brings me to seo hack number four which is do not violate minimum viable on-page seo laws check out the video below this one showing you my advanced guide to on-page seo so with that said the most non-negotiable on-page seo action is to place keywords in the right spot so your primary keyword should be in the url the title the h1 the first sentence the first h2 and you can use a keyword variation here and the last sentence these are absolutely non-negotiable spot so once you’ve placed your primary keyword in these critical spots you can then use a tool like surfer to optimize nlp which is natural language processing now it’s time for seo hack number five which is build topical relevance before link building now one of the biggest mistakes you can make is diving right into link building the truth is that if you build a strong on-site and content foundation you won’t need as many backlinks to rank and you also won’t need to be as aggressive with anchor text and the best method for improving rankings without needing as many backlinks is to build more topical relevance and authority now the question is how well like everything else there’s a wrong way and a right way to do it now some people think you should just answer every question in your vertical while this is the right approach in many scenarios it’s ineffective on the local level for example let’s say you’re trying to improve the rankings for a saint louis plumber does it make sense for a plumber to create content about when was indoor plumbing invented now this is a trick question but the answer is no now sure there is relevance on a niche level however it’s not relevant on the local level and it would be much better to create a linkable asset around a topic and location like the history of plumbing in st louis and if you do that now you’re building topical relevance in this context now the point here is that you need to be really granular go deep instead of wide when you’re trying to build topical relevance so with that said here’s how to find ideas to build topical relevance so one of my favorite ways to build topical authority and relevance is just simply go into Google enter your target keyword and we’re going to look for the people also ask section so we’ll scroll down and we’re immediately going to get access to all of these ideas that people are currently searching on Google and so we know for sure that people are searching these even if they don’t have volume when you run them through a tool because Google wouldn’t be showing these unless people were actually searching them so this is a terrific way to build topical relevance and authority because Google is telling us that these particular topics are relevant to this core topic that we just searched now if you want to streamline this process I recommend using also ask.com and I don’t have any affiliation with this tool but it’s just an amazing tool for making things way easier so all you need to do is just enter your keyword and then it’s going to do all that heavy lifting for you and you can export all these ideas and then you can of course run them through ahrefs to see if they have volume but ultimately you want to be able to create content assets around these ideas now keep in mind you should only create a new page if the intent is different so let’s take a look at a couple of these this one is what are the four types of coffee so that’s a very unique phrase compared to just coffee so this could have its own dedicated asset this one here is coffee good or bad for your health once again this could have its own asset because it has a different intent and then this one what is the benefit of coffee so this could be in regards to health this could be in regards to many different things so technically you probably want to create a separate asset for that as well and lastly is coffee a berry or a bean once again a very specific keyword with unique intent so it should have its own asset and as you go through these you’ll start to see the ones that would require their own dedicated piece of content and the key is that we want to satisfy the intent 100 so for example if we look at what is the weakest coffee we’d want to create a simple asset that explains exactly what the weakest coffee is and it shouldn’t be about anything else it just should be focused on answering that one question you should do it to the fullest extent and that is how you’ll be able to rank and build a ton of topical authority and relevance ultimately the big goal here is that we tackle all of these different ideas and then what we’re going to do is we’re going to internally link all these assets together which will then build topical authority and relevance for our core keyword which in this case is coffee so those are five powerful seo hacks to take advantage of right now thank you