SEO is getting costly

The cheapest but most time-consuming way to increase SEO is by doing manual outreach and writing guest posts by yourself.
Costs = $0
Time invested = a lot
SEO factor = beneficial

magicjones said:

Ranking gets easier every year for me because my competitors article quality keeps going down. Even the big boys look like they're outsourcing a lot to the cheapest writers.

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If you're content is SEO optimized, it is SEO optimized. Nothing a lot more you can do with your content, and it doesn't matter then if a $300 hour copywriter wrote it or a guy in China for $5

SirLouen said:

Although big keywords are getting difficult, I'm constantly seeing new opportunities and new big players with way lower budgets that big players constantly comming in.
You just have to fly low in the beginning and grow from there.

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Best advice right there.

If you want to tackle a big key word you will need to start with very low volume keywords in that niche and rank them and keep expanding in low volume keywords. Once you rank for several dozen low volume keywords, move up in difficulty and repeat. Once Google is willing to rank you well for a few hundred less competitive keywords it will often give the ability to rank higher for the higher volume keywords in the same niche.

If you start off trying to rank for the high volume words you most likely will never get the rankings you need.

Learn a new language

prey24 said:

I was checking a keyword with super low kd 5 on ahrf and 11 on kw finder. 16k global searches on kw finder and 10k on ahrefs. The site that is ranking on the top have ,63 links from really really high quality websites

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This will make it almost impossible for freelancers working alone to create and grow a website on their own.

Zooha said:

If you're content is SEO optimized, it is SEO optimized. Nothing a lot more you can do with your content, and it doesn't matter then if a $300 hour copywriter wrote it or a guy in China for $5

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Yes there is much more. People actually read the articles... it's human conversions and you gotta connect. If your grammar is all over the place people don't feel as comfortable, won't share your urls, afraid to click links. higher bounce rate, etc.

Rj268 said:

Best advice right there.

If you want to tackle a big key word you will need to start with very low volume keywords in that niche and rank them and keep expanding in low volume keywords. Once you rank for several dozen low volume keywords, move up in difficulty and repeat. Once Google is willing to rank you well for a few hundred less competitive keywords it will often give the ability to rank higher for the higher volume keywords in the same niche.

If you start off trying to rank for the high volume words you most likely will never get the rankings you need.

Click to expand...

Completely changed the way I see IM, going to do this.

Here's what you can do as well.

First of all, Ahrefs KD sucks at the big time. You can check Difficulty using Moz.

What you can do is, try to find out really low competition keyword and check the Top 10 pages in Moz ranking for that.

If you think your site can fit into them (financially as well) by looking at the Number of RD pointing to that particular page & not the domain you can go for it. Even if big players are there.

Or

You can buy tight ass Non-Dropped domain in the niche and save your budget on links. You can start attacking low volume informational / guide type of keyword for first

few months and start with big volumes slowly....

Vamux said:

Focusing more on PPC has been good to me.

In general, when competition increases somewhere, it decreases somewhere else (not to say PPC is easier). Offline business is easier.

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Offline business isn't easier. It has never been, and never will be.
Offline is great when you have tons of cash and a lot of time. And even then may come some stupid virus, and after finally being profitable three years on in your offline venture (working 80+ hours a week on it), you find yourself on the brink of bankruptcy.
I have several people in my circles who find themselves in such a situation now.

Online has countless advantages to offline, and that's why we are all here

magicjones said:

Ranking gets easier every year for me because my competitors article quality keeps going down. Even the big boys look like they're outsourcing a lot to the cheapest writers.

Click to expand...

I also noticed that. Once a site grows quite big and earns great from Ads of affiliate income, they hire (or even employ) writers and pump out a lot of content to scale it up. In 95% of cases, the quality is nowhere near the original content which brought the site to the top in first place.

jefis said:

The cheapest but most time-consuming way to increase SEO is by doing manual outreach and writing guest posts by yourself.
Costs = $0
Time invested = a lot
SEO factor = beneficial

Click to expand...

Sure, but you can forget about getting any link for free, at least from any website of a decent quality.
You will save 15%-30%--the typical profit of some outreach guy/agency. But you will still pay for links, and it will take lot more time, and results are still questionable...


In my opinion, and I wrote this on several threads, it's tougher each year to achieve positive ROI with any link building campaign. Quality links are more expensive each year, you need more of them, and consistently, and it doesn't matter if you buy them or build your own network.

Therefor the most important step in IM in 2020 is research and planning. 90% of projects fail already at this stage. They are bound to fail before the first article will be written, the first link acquired/purchased....

You need to be creative. Create great content that will keep the user more on the website. How?
1. The content itself
2. Infographics
3. Youtube videos

Kikerinka said:

Offline business isn't easier. It has never been, and never will be.
Offline is great when you have tons of cash and a lot of time. And even then may come some stupid virus, and after finally being profitable three years on in your offline venture (working 80+ hours a week on it), you find yourself on the brink of bankruptcy.
I have several people in my circles who find themselves in such a situation now.

Online has countless advantages to offline, and that's why we are all here

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That's because you live in Europe. Go to America and fix machinery or something. Easiest $100/hr you'll ever make. No cash required. Maybe $2k for tools.

And no, you're all here because many come from 3rd world countries, have social anxiety and can't deal with social interaction, or have done IM long enough that you find IM also easy.

Kikerinka said:

Offline business isn't easier. It has never been, and never will be.
Offline is great when you have tons of cash and a lot of time. And even then may come some stupid virus, and after finally being profitable three years on in your offline venture (working 80+ hours a week on it), you find yourself on the brink of bankruptcy.
I have several people in my circles who find themselves in such a situation now.

Online has countless advantages to offline, and that's why we are all here



I also noticed that. Once a site grows quite big and earns great from Ads of affiliate income, they hire (or even employ) writers and pump out a lot of content to scale it up. In 95% of cases, the quality is nowhere near the original content which brought the site to the top in first place.



Sure, but you can forget about getting any link for free, at least from any website of a decent quality.
You will save 15%-30%--the typical profit of some outreach guy/agency. But you will still pay for links, and it will take lot more time, and results are still questionable...


In my opinion, and I wrote this on several threads, it's tougher each year to achieve positive ROI with any link building campaign. Quality links are more expensive each year, you need more of them, and consistently, and it doesn't matter if you buy them or build your own network.

Therefor the most important step in IM in 2020 is research and planning. 90% of projects fail already at this stage. They are bound to fail before the first article will be written, the first link acquired/purchased....

Click to expand...

thats great

prey24 said:

Replies on this thread will surely help newbies

Ranking your website is getting much more difficult by each passing year because of the increasing competition.

People with huge budgets and getting all the fishes by buying links from huge sites.

What options/hacks/Blackhat methods are left for someone who is short on budget. What will be the right strategy in 2020 for someone who has limited budget?

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In my honest opinion:

1. Follow the keyword research/strategy mentioned already by others
2. Leverage the power of other platforms such as Youtube or anywhere else capable of sending traffic to your site
3. Build an email list, start capturing leads right away, so if your site gets hit or falls too much on SERPs you will still be able to sell directly to people already interested
4. Automation. Automate as much as you can... learn to code, hire or partner up with a developer to automate stuff

Good luck!

fasttrak said:

Absolutely. You need to checkout the KW research guides on BHW, but when I do KW research I firstly do NOT use Ahrefs KW difficulty rating. It is shockingly bad!, and I like Ahrefs, write guides about the tool, but this feature is utter rubbish.

I aim for KW groups with 150-300 individual KW searches per month, checkout the actual top 10 for each, then write an article covering them all in depth. I can easily rank that with no cost, just effort.

Someone (I forget who) said they target questions, like how to do x with y for example, no competition targeting the actual target phrase, so easy to rank.

You get the idea?

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Very useful tip.

Find better (easier) keywords.

Stackz said:

Find better (easier) keywords.

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Yes you have already taught me a lot about this thanks for that mate

I miss the good ol' days where SENuke= top 3, haha.

Build your site out using Keyword Golden Ratio (KGR), people including myself are getting pretty good results following the KGR keyword method.

I really think you should use good article quality to get your page rank boosted.
It's not really that hard these days as more and more low quality content is posted

rufus said:

Build your site out using Keyword Golden Ratio (KGR), people including myself are getting pretty good results following the KGR keyword method.

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Just googled what the KGR method is and it looks interesting! Am I correct in assuming you'd make the intitle keyword you found the exact title of your article? The only thing that isn't so clear on this method (and google didn't shed much light on it or me either), is that even though there may only be 250 results for intitle:KeywordPhrase, there could be 10,000 results for KeywordPhrase (without the intitle tag), with the first 1-30 being relatively strong ranking pages. Seeing as this is what people would actually search in google (i.e. their term without the intitle tag), isn't this an important factor that KGR method overlooks? I appreciate the KGR has been around for a while and made up by someone a lot smarter than me (and used successfully by ppl on here) so I don't doubt that it works, it's probably something I'm failing to understand so would appreciate some input