Search Engine Optimization Tricks Everybody Should Be Doing (Do These Now)

What is that SEO hack that works so well for you but few people know about? Somebody just sent this to me and said, "Hey, can you make an episode about this? It's a fun thread. SEO hacks from the SEO subreddit." Number one, get Google reviews from happy customers. Honestly, it works better than anything else. I'll add to that and I'll say just getting reviews in general, especially video reviews, because then you can take these reviews, you can put them on YouTube, you can put them on Instagram reels, on Tik Tok, on Facebook reels, on LinkedIn, and these are ranking. And when people are doing due diligence on your brand, they see all of these positive reviews. Here's something that a lot of people don't know. People in the due diligence stage, they don't want to look at the reviews that are on your website. and many of them won't even do it. So if you just take the reviews that you would put on your website and put them someplace else, people will then look at those reviews. So get great reviews and share them everywhere. And actually Lily Ray shared this. It's a graph from hrefs. It's YouTube citations in AI mode and it is an insane spike up. But that is happening all over the place with all LLMs is YouTube and video is getting cited a ton and referenced a ton. Get positive reviews. Share them everywhere. Use your brand plus the word review and then actually write the review that you got in the description for the video that you upload. If it's a video or just write it and quote it and all that stuff. Maybe you're sharing just a screenshot but still write it out. Oh, this next comment, this next comment was fire. So, this is somebody's SEO hack. I am a dev, not an SEO person, but with every project, I do quite a bit of on-site work. We can generally squeeze 20 to 30% uptick just from that. Taxonomies on large e-commerce sites. Finding tags for what people search for and creating landing pages for it gives quite a high boost. Let's say you have Levis's in your store. creating tags like Levis's jeans, Levis's jumper, etc. Also, other ones not brand related like white dresses, dresses, sale, etc. It's hard to get right and not be spammy, but it is driving a lot of traffic. I shared this a few days ago on the podcast, episode 133 of the show, the new SEO playbook, AI search, geo, and what actually drives conversions. this women's fashion clothing website, Pretty Little Things, they switched from traditional category pages like jeans to intentdriven category pages like airport outfits. And this led to an 841% uplift. Every single item featured on these intent driven category pages sold out of stock. Very similar. And if you want to see how to make these intent driven category pages, I have a section on them in compact keywords, my SEO course, that's the thing on my shirt. I have a template on what these pages should look like with multiple products. Next comment from this amazing thread. One overlooked SEO tip is something that most people think doesn't work, but has helped my sites rank very well for years. Oh my gosh, here it is. Take the keywords you want to rank for and repeat them over and over again in large text blocks. Then make sure that text is colored the same as its background. Doing this both bulks up your content and provides relevant contextual text. I can't believe how well this technique works for ranking web pages. Just note that this advice is completely designed to assist AI over reviews. So, I hope others will back me up on this fantastic SEO tip. So, for people uh who are new in SEO, this this comment from from this Redditor is a joke. Don't do that. But what you should do is take your target keyword and put it in your page title, your URL slug, your H1, the beginning of your first sentence, your metad description is optional, but those four places definitely put your target keyword there. The only hack that works better is aim to produce quality content that helps a person to solve a problem or find a solution. Prepare the content in a way that is easily digestible by humans and search engine bots. At the initial stages of blogging, take efforts to push your content. That's all. So, first of all, quality content means content where searchers are coming to your page and not pogo sticking, not going back to the search results to find something better because they are satisfied. They're not going back to the search results because they are satisfied with your content. So, actually, this is a new writing exercise that we're doing for this company that I'm funding. I'm funding a company where our biggest growth strategy is SEO and we've gone into a niche that has very poor SEO and we're going to dominate it. Wanted to we wanted to find a niche that we could just dominate with SEO really really easily that still had a lot of money in it and that's what we found. But something that I noticed is we could have the bottom ofunnel SEO landing pages be better. And so now before writing any bottom ofunnel SEO landing page or any SEO content for that matter, the exercise is just spend a couple minutes to think about your target keyword and who is searching it. Ask yourself who is searching for this target keyword. What is the searcher looking to achieve? What do they want? And actually just thinking about that and writing it down as a note for yourself and then going and writing the SEO content. It makes the SEO content so much better, so much more compelling, so much more able to satisfy the intent of the searchers. I really recommend doing that. And doing that will lead to this quote unquote quality content that doesn't result in a lot of pogo sticking. And actually, here's another comment about this. Somebody said, really understanding how your target audience searches. Someone with a high school education compared to someone with a master's degree will have very different search syntax when searching for the same thing leading to different results. For example, when searching about Puffy and his charges, someone with a high school education may search, "Is Puffy going to jail?" Someone with a master's degree may search, "Has Puffy been formally charged?" The first result leads me to a bunch of gossip like YouTube videos. And the second shows a thoughtful article from the independent. Same story essentially. Also, children and seniors search wildly different from the 25 to 54 demo as well. Reading up on and understanding the origins of how humans search from library science research as people search through card cataloges before computers really helped me early on. That was really interesting. But yeah, think about who your searcher is, please. Another commenter, SEO bros asking questions after backlink buying no longer works. Just hard work, man. Do the basics of technical SEO. Everything else is how good your content is. I really agree with that sentence. Do the basics of good your content is. I will add that it's also really important to find keywords where if you want a real hack, find keywords that people aren't targeting. That's a crazy hack and there's a million of them. What does not targeting mean? Find keywords where other websites are not putting those keywords in their page titles, their URL slugs, their H1s in the beginning of the first sentence. If you find those keywords and then you put the keyword in those places, you will rank for the keyword and you'll be like, "Wow, this is magic." And then the other trick is to find keywords like that that have purchase intent. That is almost entirely what my SEO course, Compact Keywords, is about. It's about finding these overlooked keywords that have very high intent. Grumpy SEO. Grumpy SEO said, "The secrets are get authority and have relevancy." 100% on this. Grumpy SEO is a legend. Somebody else, "The best SEO is well-written content. It will always beat AI no matter what kind of search quake disruption there is. People know who to trust." And I actually kind of agree with that. I still think that if you are deliberate about understanding search intent, you will do a better job satisfying it than a purely AI written piece of content. If you take those couple of minutes to think about who the searcher is, what they want, what they're looking for, you will do a better job making content than if you just give your keyword to Chat GPT or Claude and ask it to make a page. Somebody said, "Pay someone on Fiverr to generate 40,000 backlinks from Russia and India." This thread is full of jokes. Don't do that. I suggested my content writers write content targeting local intent. I gave him keywords, but NLP keywords were the most important ones. It worked perfectly and boosted my website traffic. After focusing on all the technical issues and fixing them, then I optimized the content by adding NLP. I saw the difference between past and recent. So this is an example. Let's say your primary keyword is best dentist in Hoboken. Search intent is local people looking for a nearby dentist. before without the natural language processing optimization. It's if you are looking for the best dentist in Hoboken, our clinic offers dental services. We provide teeth cleaning, whitening, and general dentistry. Contact us today for the best dentists in Hoboken. And then this is after with NLP plus local intent optimization. You have are you looking for a trusted dentist in Hoboken, New Jersey? Our clinic offers preventative care, cosmetic dentistry, and emergency dental services for patients of all ages. Conveniently located near downtown Hoboken, we specialize in teeth cleaning, Invisalign, dental implants, and sameday appointments. Our licensed dental team focuses on patient comfort, modern technology, and the personalized treatment plans to help you maintain long-term oral health. Book your visit today with a top rated Hoboken dental clinic. So, you're adding semantic keywords like dentist near me, dental clinic, teeth whitening. You're adding local signals like Hoboken, New Jersey, near downtown Hoboken. You're adding topical depth like services and and licensed team, preventative, cosmetic, emergency, natural language, human and AI friendly. The one thing is the introduction though needs to have the primary keyword in it. So the first sentence needs to actually have best dentist in Hoboken. Somebody else said customer generated content forums and knowledge communities. A lot of people like to have customers leave reviews for them on Reddit or other review platforms. But like I said, if you can get video reviews from customers and then use those and share those everywhere, that is huge. There's a lot more here. This is the last one that I'm going to share. Writing about my competitors in a comparison post. I get to rank for their keywords and snatch their traffic works like magic all the time. So you target keywords like your competitor's brand name plus the word alternative. Then in this post you have a comparison your brand versus their brand side byside comparison. You have that as an H2 and you literally have the sidebyside comparison with a table. And when you do that, you are taking your competitor's keywords because if your competitors are not putting up SEO content and you are putting up SEO content using your competitor's brand name plus some of their features or services that they might rank for, your alternative page will show. And this alternative page exists to convince people who are doing consideration for them or maybe looking to switch into going with your brand. This is working really well with AI right now, too. These alternatives pages, these comparisons are getting cited a lot. All right, this was such a good post. What is that SEO hack that works so well for you, but few people know about? If you want to save years learning how to do search engine optimization that gets paying customers, users, warm leads calling you up, check out my SEO course at compactkeywords.com. If you haven't checked it out already, you're going to love it. It is getting crazy reviews. I'm starting to share those reviews all over social media. I could be doing a better job. And so if you want to see those reviews, I have a ton of them on the landing page, compactkeywords.com. That's all for this episode. There's episode 1,36 of the Edward Show. 1 136 days in a row doing this podcast. If you watch us 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.