If I Had to Restart SEO at 22, I’d Do This

Hi Edward, I'm Wasi Fali, 22 years old, studying in university, but also working a 9-to-6 job at an SEO agency. I've been doing SEO on my own for about 6 months before this. But now, I joined a digital marketing agency to clear my concepts, and honestly, it's helping, but I'm still confused because they are practicing old but workable methods, and very few of them know what advanced SEO is. Now, here's the real problem. Before I read the rest of this, I got this question yesterday from Mr. Wasif Ali. I got it over email. I sent him a response back and then I also said, you know, a lot of other people probably feel this way trying to learn SEO, confused about things. So, I think this would be a good topic for an episode. So, that's what I got for you. I'm going to read the rest of this and I'm going to give my answers having had many of the best SEOs in the world on this show and having made this show for 1,20 days in a row. I'm going to share my experience, my experience also with SEO and my answers. All right, so now here's the real problem. I watch your videos and sometimes one of you says one thing is right and the other says something different. I get it, SEO changes, but for a beginner like me, it feels like there's no single path. I end up searching YouTube every time I get stuck at work. That works in the moment, but it doesn't feel like real learning. I don't plan to stay at this agency more than 8 to 9 months. It's good for exposure to different niches, different projects, but I want to stabilize my life. I don't want to be a confused 22-year-old forever jumping from one video to another. My goal is serious. I want to become highlevel in this field, not just an SEO guy. I want the kind of knowledge you have. Strategic, deep, the kind where you're not guessing. So, here's my real question. I'm asking you like a younger brother would. If you were 22 years old again, working a 9 to6 agency job, tired, confused by too many YouTube videos, but serious about becoming top tier, what would your six-month plan be? Not a dream plan, a real tired person after work plan. And second, in this field, which career path would you choose for yourself if you had to start today? Something else like product SEO, growth or technical SEO? Not if you had money. Just as a normal human who wants stability and high income eventually. I'm not asking for motivation. I'm asking for a practical guide like a map. Because right now, I have too many videos and no structure. Thank you. Really respect your work. Signed, Wasif Ali22. tired but serious. Thank you so much for this message, Wasif. So, first let's just jump into this one line that your agency is practicing old but workable methods. And actually, a lot of the most This is something that a lot of newer people in SEO think. They think that tactics are are always changing. SEO is always changing. But a lot of the most effective SEO, if you are not trying to skirt the rules, hasn't changed. That's the truth. The best SEO is choosing the right keywords plus relevance plus authority plus reduced pogo sticking. Plus, if it seems clearly spammy, avoid it. So, find keywords that are going to actually bring conversions. That could be customers, that could be users, that could be warm leads. Make your pages relevant to these keywords. Put the keyword in the page title, the H1, the URL slug, the metad description if you choose to use a metad description, the beginning of the first sentence. The metad descriptions are optional. Build authority. Build authority in ways that pass real referral traffic. Don't try to get a backlink from a high DA site that isn't going to rank and get you clicks. Instead, try to get back links, relevant backlinks that are actually passing you referral traffic and that and and where your backlink is on a page that is indexed and ranking. That's the type of authority that you want. Also, when you rank more and you reduce pogo sticking, your pages generate their own authority. Your site generates its own authority because you are ranking in your niche and you're having satisfied clicks. And then if it seems clearly spammy, avoid it. The reason for that, that's an aspect of SEO that changes. Google is constantly getting better at catching spam tactics. Now, it's always a cat and mouse game. I don't like to play that cat-and- mouse game. I don't want to have to look over my shoulder constantly. I don't personally want to do churn and burn. Some people are cool with turn and burn. I think the value comes with compounding. So I try to build up SEO properties that are going to last forever. And so for me, if it seems clearly spammy, just avoid it. For example, just the other day, Google put out a statement that they are penalizing back button hijacking. Now, this is one that's it's better better late than never. It is late. People would literally make it so if you click the back button, they you you stay on their site. But that's something that's clearly spammy. And if you do that now, you're you're going to get hit by Google. If you if you put out tons of AI generated pages without checking them, I think that is clearly spammy. And lots of companies that do that, they get a short spike up and then they get hit. This is called mount AI. That's clearly spammy. So actually, I don't think the most effective SEO has really changed. People have become more efficient at it with better tools, but the most effective SEO hasn't changed. Also have a strong page title where you have the keyword at the beginning of the page title, then the benefit or the searcher's goal after and then the brand name and these page titles get more clicks. But you could be doing that 15 years ago. All right, next part of this message. Sometimes one of you says one thing is right and the other says something different. I get it. SEO changes. But for a beginner like me, it feels like there is no single path. So it's not that people say different things because SEO keeps changing. It's actually just because some people are just wrong and others they can't let go of their previously held beliefs. I shared this quote from Weblinker, the moderator of the SEO subreddit. I shared this on yesterday's episode. Weblinker said, "Critical thinking and doing research is your friend. Finding a truism and locking yourself up is the enemy." I try to do a good job vetting guests for this show, but sometimes people come on who are wrong and they say things which I know not to be true. I can either argue with them and make them look bad or I can stay silent and make an episode about it later without calling them out. And I usually choose to do that because it's nicer. It makes my guests more comfortable. I get better guests because they know that if they say something that might be a little bit wrong, I'm not going to make an example out of them. Sometimes I will argue with someone if I feel like they are if they are saying something spammy and they are trying to take advantage of of this audience and I don't want that to happen. So then I will that's happened before where a guest will come on they will say something and I'll give push back. What do you mean by this? I will try to dig deeper or maybe I'll try to dig deeper if it's something that's really interesting. But if someone says something that I disagree with for example let's say someone I I'm I personally am a huge fan of targeting bottom offunnel keywords. keywords that have real high intent. But if somebody comes on and they're like, "I love targeting top offunnel keywords, the how-to keywords. These are my bread and butter." Maybe I'll be like, "Oh, have you tried bottom of funnel?" Or I might just not say anything and and try to keep asking them questions to get as much knowledge from them as possible for the audience because I don't want to make them look bad and maybe they know things that can be really useful. But my opinions on the best type of SEO, those are on the solo episodes. And what I try to do with this show is I try it's if if you listen to the show all the time, which was it sounds like you do and thank you. I try to arm you with understanding so you can make your own decisions. Again, the north star in SEO, it's just the best SEO is focused on choosing the right keywords plus relevance plus authority plus reduced pogo sticking plus if it seems clearly spammy, then avoid it. When you understand first principles in SEO, you know that if a guest some says something that isn't true, you can evaluate that from your own experience and from the first principles or that if it seems like it's not true. Next part you said, I don't want to be a confused video to another. All right. So, don't worry. You will be 23 soon and you'll be less confused. But and the reality is just with the more with more research you do, you learn more first principles like I was just saying and then you can judge things yourself. What you're going through is completely natural with learning. Everybody learns. Everybody starts somewhere. But try to learn the first principles so you can be more efficient at deciding what is true, what is false, what is best, what is worse. And you said, I want the kind of knowledge you have, strategic, deep, the kind where you're not guessing. One, like any great practitioner, I am constantly learning. And two, I don't guess a lot anymore. But that is because I spent so much time learning and and I constantly try to keep learning. Because I spent so much time learning first principles, I don't have to guess as much anymore. Because I have so much experience, I don't have to guess any anymore. You want to optimize for the right type of experience. So three, understand first principles so you don't have to guess. And then four, the right type of experience is trying to sell something with SEO. That for me is the best type of experience that you can get. And I'm going to get into that in a moment. You said, I am asking you like a younger brother would. If you were 22 again, working a 926 agency job, tired, confused by too many YouTube videos, but serious about becoming top tier, what would your six-month plan be? Not a dream plan, a real tired person after work plan. So, this is what my plan would be. If you were if you were my younger brother and I was giving you advice, I would tell you vibe code something ASAP. I have an episode on this. It's episode 9008 of this show. Vibe coding for SEO, building rankable apps, tools, and revenue in minutes. Vibe code a SAS that you can sell with SEO. You don't have to do a vibe coded SAS. You can do e-commerce. You can sell something on Shopify. A vibecoded SAS will be the easiest. You don't have inventory. You don't really have to worry about overhead. It's just the easiest to do. You can spin up a SAS and then start selling it with SEO and do this on the side. When I was working at I Prospect, which is one of the top performance marketing agencies, I was there doing SEO all day. I loved it. I was constantly learning, constantly asking questions to get to first principles. I found that a lot of people around me didn't actually know. So then I would be doing all the research just like you're doing. But after work, I would continue doing SEO for my own things, selling my own things with SEO. And then on weekends, I also started the New York City SEO meetup group. And so I would host SEO events on the weekend, learn by people around me, but also just I kept doing SEO. I would meet with web development friends and ask them questions because that would help me understand technical SEO. But I was trying to sell with SEO, trying to sell my own services, my own SEO services with SEO, which is really hard to do. It's really competitive. But I was doing this like you, working the 9 to6 agency job. I was getting into the office around 8. I'd wake up at 5:30. I'd go to the gym. I'd go for a walk along the East River. I'd get into the office around around 8:00 a.m. Work until 6 6:00 p.m. Come home, do a little bit more SEO. probably on my lunch breaks, I was writing SEO landing pages for my stuff. And you know what? I learned so fast. So my advice to you is to sell something. Learning to sell with SEO is very different from learning to just rank. With learning to sell, you care more about important things like topical authority, keyword targeting, keyword research, conversion rate optimization, tracking, doing marketing that gets real referral traffic, which gives you the best type of backlinks, you become effective a lot faster. So, if I was 22 again working the 9 to6 agency job, I would be selling with SEO on the side. That's my advice to you there. And then you said this is the last one. In this field, which career path would you choose for yourself if you had to start today? Something else like product SEO, growth or technical SEO? Well, you have to learn all of them, but growth is the best because it forces you to learn them all. When you are learning how to use SEO for growth, you have to learn about Google's rules for spam so you don't do things that are too spammy. You have to learn technical SEO because you want to make sure that all of your pages are being crawled and when you update a page, those updates are being seen. You need to learn having a strong website and good pages where people are not pogo sticking because if people are pogo sticking, you're going to have a bad quality score for your site and you're just going to lose rankings and eventually it's going to become a lot harder to rank because people keep pogo sticking. You have to learn how to write copy. You have to become a good marketer. And then the best part about learning how to grow with SEO is you can take that knowledge and apply it to other marketing channels. You can apply it to social media marketing. You can apply it to sending out newsletters. You can apply it to sales. You can apply it to so many different things. I'm a much better marketer from first understanding SEO. I can't even tell you how much better of a marketer I am from when you understand Google's algorithm because a lot of other algorithms in many different ways model themselves off of Google's algorithms. When you understand SEO, you understand so many more algorithms. You become just much nastier at marketing in general cuz you had to learn how to get referral traffic with backlinks. You had to learn what people would click on. You had to learn how to create good titles. You have to learn how to make copy where a searcher is going to come to your page and want to convert or move down into your funnel. So I would focus on growth. You will learn everything that way. Was fali. I hope you're not so tired after this. Keep learning. We all keep learning. The best of us keep learning. The worst of us stop learning. That's the truth. Thank you for this message. For anybody else who wants my method of SEO or to save just years learning SEO, that's why I made my SEO course, Compact Keywords. You can check that out at compactkeywords.com. This is a video testimonial I got literally yesterday. Compact Keywords uh from Edward Sturm is a great course. I just finished up with the videos not that long ago and was able to uh draft up an implementation plan sitewide for our site that we are just a few days in into implementing right now. And even just a few days deep, uh, with the skills that Edward taught, we're already seeing measurable increases in impressions, positions, and even clicks at this point, even just a few days in, which is very cool. And specifically speaking about the course, you can tell that Edward is just so passionate about the work that he does and is passionate about sharing it with the people and letting everybody know the the secrets, the hacks out there that that make SEO work for really any niche. And um if you're thinking about this course, if you're going back and forth about it, let this video be your your guide to to actually just go and and do it because I got so much out of it. It's it's helped my team incredibly and it's only going to go up from here. So, thanks Edward for contact keywords. I really do appreciate it. Thank you to Bob Quist for that. This is episode 1,020 of the Edward Show. 1,020 days in a row doing this podcast. If you watch this episode on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.