The Fastest Way to Get SEO Results: Slow Is Smooth, Smooth Is Fast

This is a very common mistake that I see in search engine optimization. And this common mistake can be summarized with a military mantra. Back in 2024, I read this incredible book series fiction called The Terminalist. Insane series about a rogue Navy SEAL who's amazing. Really, really good series. And when this Navy SEAL is doing his work, or ex-Navy SEAL, when he's doing his work, he's going slow and methodical. He's taking his time making sure he does a complete job. And he describes this with this mantra. He says, "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast." And this is actually a very common thing that I see with new websites, especially new websites, but larger sites, too, who have trouble with getting results with SEO. And they ignore slow is smooth, smooth is fast. What happens if you go too fast trying to do SEO? You might be thinking you get hit with Google skilled content abuse. That's only if you're going really, really fast generating hundreds or thousands of pages with AI without even thinking it through, not reviewing things. But more likely, what will happen is you will have all of these variables about why you're not getting results, and it will be hard to figure out what to do in order to get results. You just made things very complicated by going really, really fast, by rushing things. Let's say you have a new site, and right off the bat, you put up a ton of SEO pages, SEO blog posts, SEO landing pages. There are a few things that are happening here when you do this. Number one is you are diluting the page rank that comes into your pages. You're diluting the authority that comes into your pages. You need authority to rank. Often times a lot less authority than people think, but you still need authority to rank. But, by having more pages on your site, let's say all of your links, all of your backlinks are going to your homepage, that means the authority that is getting spread to your SEO pages is being diluted between all of the SEO pages. The more pages you have, if your authority isn't changing, and your pages are not ranking, you're going to have very little authority with which to use to continue to rank pages. If you have less pages, it's a lot easier to channel your authority into those pages. As I've talked about on the show before, if you rank, get clicks from search, and the searchers are not going back to the search results, this generates its own authority. Your pages actually generate their own authority, then you can channel that authority to new pages with internal links. But, if you're putting up a ton of pages at the start, and they are not ranking, and you have very little backlinks, now you have so many pages and your authority is getting spread too thin within these pages. But, that's just one possible variable, is that you don't have that one possible variable, you don't have enough backlinks. Maybe your pages are ranking, but it's bad because you were really sloppy with putting up the pages. You used AI to put up a ton of preliminary pages at the start without really thinking it through. These pages aren't very good, they result in pogo sticking, Google decreases the ranks of these pages. They're not getting clicks anymore. Google becomes less likely to trust your new site because you've put up a lot of content that searchers have said, "We don't like this." Now you need even more authority to start testing pages again. Of course, if you're putting content up too fast, it can seem unnatural, or maybe even you're putting up pages that people don't want to click on because you're not thinking through page titles. But, the crux of it is, the thing that trips up so many people with SEO, is putting up content too fast, throwing in all these variables together and it makes it really hard. Okay, what do I need to fix? Are the pages bad? Should I prioritize getting more backlinks? Do people want to click on these page titles? Is my information architecture solid? Am I routing my authority the right ways from the pages that get backlinks to the pages that need to rank? It's not just putting up content too fast though, because you can also be doing link building in a very sloppy way and burn yourself. Let's say that you're in a small niche. It's actually very common. You're in a small niche. There are only so many journalists who will cover you. You just spam these journalists with not thought out pitches, AI written, all the AI giveaways are in there, em dashes are in there, comes off as AI written. You're not even thinking about it. You send them all at once. You just have this list of emails. They report you as spam. Or somebody just tells you no. And anybody who's done outreach before or who who has done sales before, they know that it's a lot harder to get a yes when somebody previously told you no. Maybe you're on Reddit trying to do Reddit promotion and you're really sloppy and now you get your domain name banned from major subreddits in your niche. That happens too. Maybe you submit your site to all these different directories not thinking through the descriptions that you're using to describe your business and you describe your business in a way that isn't actually consistent with the keywords that you're trying to rank for. And now Google thinks that your new site is about something else and you didn't keep track of the directories. And yeah, you can fix this, but it's harder to fix. And at the same time you put up a ton of new pages on your site that could be sloppy or you just don't have enough authority to put into the pages or maybe you're going after keywords that are too competitive cuz you're not thinking about it. And there are so many variables to take into account, so many different little things to try to fix and it just makes doing SEO so much more difficult. It's not impossible. You could have a viral linkable asset. Now you're getting a ton of links and you're routing those links correctly to your sloppy pages and you are ranking it's because you you get so much authority with a viral linkable asset. But the reality is slow is smooth and smooth is fast and it would be much faster if instead of putting up a ton of content right away, you put up three SEO pages, waited for your pages to rank as you were building links. Then once your pages are ranking, now you're figuring out what's working and you can put up more pages. Maybe six more pages and then you see what happens. Maybe you need more links. But now there's a lot less variables because you're going slow and because you're going slow, you're actually getting progress faster. Also, take breaks. You will make way better content if you take breaks and give yourself time to think about the content that you're making, to think about the search intent and satisfying what searchers want. You'll send off way better SEO signals, higher click-through rates, lower pogo sticking. Taking breaks so that you get better results is the definition of slow is smooth, smooth is fast. I had this conversation recently on the podcast about how a lot of marketers, not even SEOs, marketers try to automate things that they don't know how to do in the first place. I love automation. I use automation all the time, but I am automating things that I already know how to do. And as a result, the automations give me a good output. But if you don't know how to do things, there's a good chance that you're going to get a really sloppy output and if you do this with a lot of different things, especially in SEO, now you just have all of these variables that makes it really hard to get progress. So the alternative is you go slow, you're seeing what's working, you're seeing what's getting results, you're finding workflows that you can automate, and by taking the long cut, you're actually taking the shortcut. Some clear takeaways from this episode. If you are a new site and you have put up tons of pages without even thinking much about the pages, I want you to cut a bunch of those pages. Cut as many pages as you can, especially if you just generated them with AI without really thinking about it. Focus on a handful of pages. Start just trying to rank three pages for keywords that aren't too competitive. By competitive, I mean you want to go after keywords where you don't see a lot of websites taking those keywords and putting them in their page titles, URL slugs, H1s, and beginning of the first sentences. These are easy keywords because they're not being targeted by other websites. And start with just three pages targeting easy keywords. You're a new site, you don't have a lot of authority with which to target competitive keywords. Don't have too many pages on your site at once as a new site because now you're you're diluting your authority between all of these pages. Once you have these three pages up, build links. I just put up a video yesterday about how to build links to a new website. Episode 1048 of this show, how to get backlinks for a brand new website even with zero authority. Build links. Now, if you're not ranking, it's a lot easier to figure out why you might not be ranking. You have way less variables. By going slow at the beginning, things are a lot smoother, and it is actually way faster to get a far above average outcome. By the way, the same thing can happen if you are an older site and you've gotten sloppy. And by getting sloppy and going too fast without maintaining the methods that might have worked in the first place, now you have all these variables to deal with, and so you want to scale back, figure out what's working, what's it's working, then scale up the right processes. I see this all the time. I I have this these conversations constantly. And hopefully by making this episode, I have less of these conversations because less people are making this mistake. Like I said, SEO becomes a lot easier when you know what to do and what not to do. And if you want to save years learning that, I have a 13 and 1/2 hour SEO course, compactkeywords.com, about how to use SEO to get customers, users, and warm leads calling you up. You're using conversion-based SEO landing pages, not informational blog posts. And I share the best practices that I have learned that work really well and the things to avoid. SEO becomes so much easier when you know what to do. And if you want to save time learning what to do, that is at compactkeywords.com. That's everything that I got for you on this episode of the show. This episode 1,049 of The AdWords Show. This is my daily search engine optimization podcast, 1,049 days in a row doing the show. If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcast, thank you so much for listening. And I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.