Scaling SEO is hard. It’s easier to think why an SEO campaign would fail than succeed.
Most of the startup growth leaders in my network know that Google algorithm has changed a lot. Specially since the advent of AI search.
Some tasks have become easier and cheaper. But it has generally become harder to stand out amongst the sea of AI generated generic content.
So since 2024, I started collating the core principles of how Google algo ranks pages as AI search advances.
What is REALLY important, and what isn’t?
I call it “Product led SEO Success Formula: the 8-step framework to prevent your campaigns from failing.”
It relies on the following 8 pillars:
- Irresistible Offer
- Clear conversion tracking
- Defined goals and KPIs
- Effective site structure
- Precise keyword strategy
- Compelling content
- Authentic link building
- Tech execution velocity
Nail them all, and you’ll scale.
Miss one, and you’ll fail:
8 Ways How SEO Campaigns Fail:
- No great offer = “Useless”
- No clear tracking = “Blind”
- No goals & KPIs = “Aimless”
- Bad site structure = “Fragmented”
- Bad choice of keywords = “Inaccurate”
- Bad copywriting = “Unremarkable”
- No focus on link building = “Inefficient”
- No focus on tech execution = “Leak”
If your SEO strategy isn’t delivering the outcomes you expected, it’s usually because 1 of the 8 steps is missing or suboptimal.
Want that as a visual checklist you can put in a slide deck or copy/paste into a tweet? (I know I always like those — they reduce friction) Here you go:
Pillar 1: Irresistible Offer
This is the first pillar because without this, you won’t generate a good ROI. No matter how hard to work on the other pillars.
If you don’t have Product-Market Fit, OR you haven’t validated your offer from any other growth channel…
You’ll be better off not investing in SEO.
In fact, when I work with clients, I explicitly understand why their customers buy. It needs to be painfully obvious that their offer is better than anything else customers have in their consideration set.
I judge an offer’s irresistibility by this value equation –
Pillar 2: Clear Conversion Tracking
Clear conversion tracking and data apart from Google search console lay foundations for success. Experienced marketers would call ‘clear conversion tracking’ a myth. I agree partly. But that’s exactly why we need to work hard to drive clarity – driving clarity becomes a moat.
While Google algo collects a lot of data to determine what page should rank and what shouldn’t, it doesn’t share enough.
Google’s ranking algo leaked in 2024 and shared 14,000 ranking factors. But nobody still knows which exact combination of factors leads to the best optimisation. That’s why it’s important for you to build 1st party data.
While Google may not have access to your internal revenue data, generally the people who interact a lot with a landing page are more likely to convert.
If a page receives a lot of engagement and conversions from any visitors that come from Google search, it’s a leading indicator to you that you need to invest further in that page and get a higher ROI.
You can start by setting up Google Analytics events with Google Tag Manager.
Simple thumb rule:
✅ Good data = good results.
❌ Bad data = bad results.
Pillar 3: Defined Goals & KPIs
A clear set of Goals and KPIs provides focus. It helps determine how much effort you should spend improving on any of the pillars.
It helps identify leaks. For example, a client had set a goal of hitting 100k additional organic visitors in the next 6 months.
4 months in, we ranked #1 on a query that alone started delivering 40k visitors a month.
So we updated our KPIs to reduce concentration risk. This means that we didn’t want all our traffic to come from a very few articles. In case we lost rank on those top articles delivering maximum traffic, our traffic would significantly drop.
So we set “# of blogs with > 100 daily visitors” as a guardrail metric to be tracked every month.
This pushed the team to reduce concentration risk.
Without the right goals & KPIs you are aimless and your SEO strategy will fail.
Pillar 4: Effective Site Structure
This pillar is important enough to warrant its own post.
But in short, an effective site structure has a huge impact on:
- How you influence the algorithm.
- Your keyword strategies.
- Your link building strategy.
- Your tech execution velocity.
With an ideal structure, you make it easy for the algorithm and users to navigate your site. Plus it’s easy to not leave pages on your site as orphans.
If the site structure isn’t fixed right in the beginning, you’ll end up with costly mistakes that compound. Often leads to a mess of internal links that takes forever to clean up.
Time that you won’t have as you solve more immediate problems of the business.
Pillar 5: Precise Keyword Strategy
You must deeply understand that ‘search intent’ defines the keyword strategy. In order to target the right people, you must understand:
- How do keyword intent types work (especially informational vs transactional)?
- What’s the difference between search terms and search intent?
- Why does a landing page rank for highly specific keyword, but it completely bombs when you try to get the same page ranked for a broad keyword?
- How does keyword targeting work in multi-feature SERP (search enginer results page) and how does this impact CTR?
- How should keyword cannibalization be managed across multiple pages on the same website?
- How would trends like AI-generated content, AI Overviews and zero-click searches influence your keyword targeting strategies?
Without the right keyword targeting, your strategy is inaccurate and will fail.
Pillar 6: Compelling Content
If your content doesn’t resonate with your audience, nobody’s gonna be interested in your products and services (which you can recognize by low engagement time).
Make sure there’s a message-to-market match (which you establish by speaking to your ideal customer’s pain points and desires).
In this decade, attention is the currency of the web. Content becomes a moat if you focus on value gain per second for your consumers.
Without resonating communication, SEO campaigns are unremarkable and will fail.
Pillar 7: Authentic Link Building
10 years ago, you could probably get away with building lots of low quality backlinks. It was easy to get ranked on queries your site had nothing to do with.
Each day it gets much harder to evade Google’s spam detection. And it’s harder to build and authentic link profile, when the industry is mostly pay-to-play.
Brand mentions are now a moat. Brands see higher than average conversions because people trust brands more. So authentic links towards a brand are expected to not only drive traffic, but also high engagement time and conversions.
It’s too hard for spammy sites and bots to fake a link navigation journey with the right user agents, geographies and user behaviour.
Pillar 8: Tech Execution Velocity
Most experienced startup founders agree that ideas are dime a dozen. The only difference with winners is that they execute and iterate faster than the competition.
Having the right Tech stack and execution strategy allows you to improve your Product led SEO tools and content faster.
Launching new landing pages has never been easier. So it’s easy for disrupters to build faster than incumbents.
Conclusion
Last but not least, get AI assistance on each step. You can automate a lot of the work, if you’re creative with your prompts.
Use this model to find where your SEO strategy is lacking.
Nail all 8 pillars: you will succeed with SEO in 2025!
This framework is inspired from Miles McNair’s Google Ads success formula.
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