The SEO Playbook Nobody Will Sell You

If you paid for SEO advice, you probably got scammed. Not because the advice was wrong, but because it was incomplete. The SEO industry survives by parceling out information slowly, wrapping basic concepts in proprietary frameworks, and convincing you that you need ongoing "expertise" to navigate the ever-changing landscape.

Here is everything I know about SEO after doing it for 20+ years. This is the playbook. Not a teaser. Not a lead magnet. The actual playbook.

The Brutal Truth About What Matters

SEO has three levers, only three, and everything else is noise designed to make you feel like you're doing something when you're really just rearranging deck chairs. The first lever is whether Google can find and understand your content, which is technical SEO, which is a prerequisite rather than a strategy, and if your site is broken then nothing else matters, but if your site works then technical SEO is done, and there is no ongoing "technical SEO work" for a functioning website despite what your agency might be billing you for monthly.

The second lever is whether your content deserves to rank, and this is the hard part that nobody wants to talk about honestly, because your content needs to be the best answer to the query, not good, not comprehensive, not well-researched, but the actual best, and if it is not the best it will not rank, full stop, and no amount of optimization will change this fundamental reality.

The third lever is whether Google trusts your site, which is authority, and this comes from other sites linking to you because your content is genuinely valuable, not because you paid for links or did "outreach" or exchanged favors, but because you made something worth referencing, something that people cite because they have to. Those are the three levers, and every SEO tactic either pulls one of these levers or it is theater, and most of what passes for SEO advice is theater.

The Technical Checklist (Do This Once)

Here is every technical SEO task that matters, and I want you to do these once, check them quarterly, and stop obsessing: go to Google Search Console and look at the Pages report and ask yourself whether your important pages are indexed, and if yes then you are done, and if no then figure out why, whether it's noindex tags or robots.txt blocks or canonical issues or server errors, and fix them and move on. Run PageSpeed Insights on your key pages, and if you score above 50 on mobile you are fine, truly, because Google has said Core Web Vitals are a tiebreaker rather than a primary ranking factor, and a fast site that says nothing will lose to a slow site with the best content, and bikeshedding over milliseconds while your content is mediocre is a special kind of self-sabotage, so optimize if you want but do not let speed theater delay your actual work.

Does your site work on a phone, can people read it and tap buttons and fill out forms? If yes then you're done with mobile usability. Is your site on HTTPS? If yes then you're done with security. Can Google reach all your important pages through internal links and is your sitemap submitted and accurate? If yes then you're done with crawlability. That is the entire technical checklist, and if someone is billing you monthly for "technical SEO," ask them what they are actually doing, because the answer is usually "monitoring," which means checking things that rarely change and sending you reports about it.

How to Create Content That Actually Ranks

Forget everything you have heard about keyword research and content calendars and posting frequency, because here is what actually matters. First, find queries where you can win by opening Google Search Console and going to Performance and looking at queries where you get impressions but rank positions 4-20, because these are queries where Google already thinks you are relevant but does not think you are the best answer, and this is your opportunity list, not keyword tools, not competitor analysis, but your actual data showing actual opportunities where you already have a foot in the door.

Second, study the winners, and I mean really study them rather than skimming: for each target query, search it on Google and open the top three results and ask yourself the following questions:

• What questions do they answer that I do not?
• What depth do they provide that I lack?
• What format do they use (lists, tables, step-by-step)?
• What unique information do they have?

The goal is not to copy them, because the goal is to understand why Google considers them the best answer and then make something better, which brings us to the third step: create the definitive answer, something that is so obviously the best resource on this topic that linking to anything else would be negligent. This means:

• Answering every reasonable question someone might have
• Including original data, insights, or perspectives
• Being more current than the competition
• Being more practical and actionable
• Being easier to understand and navigate

If you cannot make the best answer, do not make anything, because mediocre content actively hurts your site given that Google evaluates your site as a whole, and a thousand thin pages dilute your authority while ten exceptional pages concentrate it. Fourth and finally, refresh relentlessly, because content decays and entropy applies to search rankings, and what was comprehensive in 2023 is outdated in 2025, and your competitors are improving their content, which means you need to improve yours, so set a quarterly reminder for every important page and check the SERP and see who is winning and update your content to reclaim the lead, because this is not "content marketing" but rather maintenance of your competitive position.

The Link Building Reality

Here is what nobody will tell you about backlinks: you cannot scale them ethically, and unethical link building will eventually burn you, and the links that matter are earned rather than built, coming from journalists and bloggers and researchers and professionals who reference your content because it genuinely informed their work, and these links are rare, valuable precisely because they are rare.

The tactics that work are creating reference-worthy content like original research and unique data and comprehensive guides and useful tools, things that people cite because they have to; being the primary source, because if you have data nobody else has you become the citation, and you can commission surveys and analyze your own customer data anonymized and run experiments and publish results; building real relationships with the writers and editors in your space, not through automated outreach but through actually engaging with their work and providing value and being helpful so that when they need a source they think of you; and getting PR coverage, because legitimate press coverage generates legitimate links, so do newsworthy things and have opinions worth quoting and make announcements worth covering.

The tactics that do not work, or eventually backfire, include:

• Guest posting on sites that exist only for guest posts
• Buying links (any form, including "sponsored posts")
• Link exchanges
• Private blog networks
• Mass outreach for links

Google's spam detection has gotten remarkably good, and the links you buy today are the penalty you receive tomorrow, or worse they simply stop counting and you have wasted money on nothing.

The Keyword Strategy That Actually Works

Here is the counterintuitive truth: the best keyword strategy is not having one, because you should not chase keywords but rather answer questions, because every piece of content should solve a specific problem for a specific person, and if you do that well you will naturally rank for hundreds of keywords you never explicitly targeted. When I look at our best-performing pages, they rank for thousands of keyword variations that we did not target, because we wrote comprehensive answers to real questions and Google figured out all the ways people ask those questions.

The process is simple:

1. Talk to your customers. What are they confused about? What do they ask repeatedly?
2. Look at your Search Console data. What queries are people using to find you?
3. Study your competitors. What topics do they cover that you do not?
4. Create the best possible answer to each important question.

Keyword research tools are useful for one thing, which is estimating search volume, and they tell you if a topic is worth covering, but they do not tell you how to cover it, because the SERP tells you that.

The SEO Tasks Worth Doing Every Week

Most SEO work is wasted work, activity that makes you feel productive while accomplishing nothing meaningful, so here is the actual high-value checklist:

Weekly (30 minutes):

• Check Search Console for errors. Fix anything broken.
• Look at your top 10 pages by traffic. Any significant drops? Investigate.
• Check your position tracking for key terms. Any alarming changes?

Monthly (2 hours):

• Review your striking distance keywords (positions 4-20). Pick one or two to improve.
• Analyze one competitor. What are they doing well? What gaps can you exploit?
• Update one piece of content that has declined in traffic.

Quarterly (half day):

• Full technical audit. Check indexation, site speed, mobile usability.
• Content audit. Which pages drive traffic? Which are dead weight?
• Backlink profile review. Any toxic links? Any new opportunities?
• Strategic review. Are we ranking for the right things? What should we prioritize next?

That is it, and if you are spending more time than this on SEO you are either doing unnecessary work or you are at scale where these timeframes expand proportionally.

What to Do When Rankings Drop

Every site experiences ranking drops, and most people panic, but here is the rational response: first determine the scope by asking whether it is one page or a section or the whole site, and check Search Console, because the scope tells you the likely cause. If one page dropped, a competitor probably published something better or your content became outdated, so study the new SERP and update your content to reclaim the position. If a section dropped, Google may have re-evaluated your topical authority in that area, so look at what is ranking now and ask whether it is more authoritative sources or more specialized sites, which tells you whether to double down or pivot. If your whole site dropped, check for manual actions in Search Console first, and if none then check the timing against algorithm updates, and if it aligns with an update read about what that update targeted, which is usually content quality or link quality, and audit accordingly.

The recovery formula is always the same: better content, more authority, fewer problems, and there is no trick and there is no hack, because you improve or you decline and those are the only options.

The Hard Truth About SEO Results

SEO takes time, and real results take 6-12 months for new sites while improvements to existing sites show up in 2-6 months, and anyone promising faster results is either lying or using tactics that will eventually backfire. Here is what realistic progress looks like: in months 1-3 you fix technical issues and establish a content baseline and start creating or improving content, and rankings may not move at all during this phase; in months 4-6 you see early signs of improvement as some pages start ranking and traffic begins to grow, but slowly; in months 7-12 you start seeing compounding effects as content that ranked on page 2 moves to page 1 and new content starts ranking faster and traffic growth accelerates; and in year 2 and beyond authority compounds and new content ranks quickly and old content maintains positions with minimal updates and SEO becomes a defensive moat rather than an offensive struggle.

If you are not willing to commit to this timeline, do not do SEO, because you should spend your money on paid acquisition where results are immediate and stop the moment you stop paying.

The Questions You Should Be Asking

Before you hire anyone or buy any tool, ask yourself whether your technical foundation is solid, and if not fix it because this is a one-time project rather than an ongoing service; ask whether you have content worth ranking, and if not create it because no amount of optimization will make mediocre content rank; ask whether you are willing to be patient, and if not then SEO is not for you and you should do paid acquisition instead; and ask whether you have something genuinely valuable to offer, and if not then SEO will not save you because neither will anything else, so fix your product first.

The Only Sustainable SEO Strategy

Here it is, the entire strategy: make sure Google can find and understand your site, create content that is genuinely the best answer to important questions, build a reputation that earns natural references, and do this consistently for years. That is it, that is the whole strategy, and everything else is either tactics in service of these goals or distractions that waste your time.

The SEO industry wants you to believe it is complicated, but it is not complicated, it is just hard, hard to create great content and hard to earn real authority and hard to be patient, and if this resonates you might also appreciate the deeper version of this argument. The companies that win at SEO are not the ones with the best SEO tactics but rather the ones with the best content and the most authority and the longest time horizon, and the Lindy effect applies because the longer you've been ranking the longer you'll keep ranking, and they win because they deserve to win, and the best SEO is not needing SEO.

That is the playbook, so now go do the work.