This Is Why You Don't Understand SEO

Here is a brief summary of the key points from the transcript: - The speaker emphasizes how difficult and time-consuming SEO is, using his website 2men.com as an example. It took over a year of foundational work before seeing significant organic traffic growth. - He outlines the important steps for SEO: creating different page types like products, categories, blogs etc., getting indexed on Google, starting to blog and interlink content, translating into other languages to expand reach. - Having lots of indexed pages on Google gives more opportunities to rank. 2men has over 40,000 indexed pages from translating content into 20 languages. - Most of the traffic is driven by the blogs, which are AI-generated. This disproves the claim that AI content doesn't rank. - Sustainable, quality content is key rather than spamming low-quality content. The process is methodical and builds over time. - Getting indexed on other search engines like Bing can further expand reach. - Overall the main points are that SEO takes a lot of time and effort, but following a systematic process of content creation and optimization can yield significant organic growth. Patience and persistence are important.

In today's video, I'm going to give you the brutally honest truth about SEO. SEO is really, really hard. It's very misunderstood. And I want to make it very, very clear to people that if you want quick and easy, then SEO is probably not for you. SEO is kind of like building a house. You need to put the foundational work in before you build the rest of the house. And you can't expect to have a good, sturdy house if you build bad foundations. So what I want to talk about in this video is how difficult it actually is to get a website going. Let's get into it. So I'm of course going to use two men as a reference .2 men is a website that I built completely from scratch myself. Pretty much every single word on this website was written by me using chat, GPT, of course. And I just want to give some context on what it actually takes to grow a website. Now, a lot of people say to me, oh, but you know, this website has authority, this website is really, really old and etc, etcetera. But like, if you think like that, then you're never going to get started because you need to get started to get to this point. You can't just not start and complain and say, oh, it takes too long. You need to put that one to two years of work in before you can have what you can see on my screen here, which is 11,000 keywords and 9.1 thousand traffic every single month on Ahrefs. Now, these numbers are actually higher if I go on search console, which I will. But for now, let's just look at Ahrefs. Now, you can see here that we started around November 2022. It was probably just before Black Friday 2022, and it was a very, very slow process of growing the organic traffic going down, going up, and then really starting to push around here is when I translated the entire website into 20 different languages. And also we started working with the agency that I now work with, Craft. And you can see the backlinks obviously had an effect, but also the translation also had a really, really big effect. If you look on the right here, you can see traffic, 1.2 thousand from the United States. And we have Mexico, Russia, Germany, Spain, and probably most of the countries in the world going all the way to the countries with 10,000 people in them. So this kind of hasn't been touched for a long time. Like, we're still blogging, but this is all just compounding, compounding, compounding SEO from the work that I personally put in at the very beginning of this. So let's talk about what we actually did. So probably the most important thing to think about is like page type. So what I mean by page type is like, what pages can you create that will bring traffic to your website? Okay, this is probably the most important question that you can ask yourselves at the beginning of any website. What pages can I add? So obviously the obvious ones are blogs. There's like number one on the list, products, collections, service pages, you know, guide pages, just normal pages. And you really, really need to think about what you can do. And also bonus points if you can do something different. Okay. If you're just going to sit and copy people, then yeah, you'll probably rank, but you'll only rank for what they're ranking. Imagine if you could think of something different and if you're really clever with things. There are many, many ways to bring traffic to a website other than just adding a page. Okay? There are other things you can do. For example, one of the most common ones are calculators or, you know, tools or something like that that can bring a lot of traffic to your website. Generally speaking, most people who are doing SEO, they're going to focus on page types. Now, I don't want you to just focus on blogs. People probably I'm partially to blame for this, have an obsession with blogs. They think that everything they should add to their website is a blog. That's not actually true. You can do many, many different things. And I'm going to show you a few examples of this on two Mendez in this video. So once you've got your page types, okay, and you can expand this, this is just six examples. What you need to do is think about how to create those pages and when to add those pages. So obviously with products, with an ecommerce store, with two men, these were just uploaded. Okay? And these are getting. Let's just actually see if I go to two men and I do slash product, then we can actually see how much each page type is getting. So you can see actually the product. SEO is not that strong and I'm really not surprised by this at all. I could have guessed that this was the case. Obviously, products are automatically uploaded. Normally in 90% of cases you might have to do some CSV work to add them. But then collections or categories of what come next. And this is where the real big SEO comes from for an ecommerce store. So if I do collection here, we can see a couple of, it's about 800 more clicks and 26,000 more impressions. It's actually less than I was expecting, to be quite honest with you. I was expecting more than that. But you can see these are the main buyer intent keywords. Now these are something that you should do at the very beginning of your website. You should have your products and you should have your products organized into categories. Now if you're doing something like a service page or services, it's the same. Or if you're doing something like tiny home hub, like an informational website, it's the same thing. You need your guides in place in the header. I had pillar pages, okay? Only when you've done all other page types and they're on your website and you're getting indexed on Google and you have search console set up, that's when you start blogging. The reason is because you want to have internal links from your blogs to these pages, okay? So when you write a blog post, what you're always going to be doing is, well, or chadgpt is, or harbor, whatever you want to use is pushing the rest of your important pages from your blogs. So this is why it's so important to do this before you start blogging, okay? I didn't even know you could do that with this tool. What the hell, dude? You want to start buying internal links from your blogs, but if you don't have all of these pages already set up, you're going to have to go back. You're not going to have started growing some authority already from them. There's just a load of problems that just don't make any sense. Okay? Now I said to you, I was also going to show you some pages. So if you do page on here, you'll see that there are actually some quite interesting ones that I set up a very long time ago and they still get 1.2k clicks just for the pages. So we have international sizing charts in Portuguese and Spanish, which is pretty cool, which is a lot of clicks. And then we have a bit of a glossary, which again is something that you can add to your website. It just gets free impressions, free clicks, you may as well do it. And then I think somewhere there is a calculator. But I mean the calculator doesn't really work, but we'll just see if there is a calculator. Italian size suit calculator. Okay, well look at that amazing calculator that I made. But yeah, that's just an example of a few different things that you can do aside from blogs that will bring actual traffic to your website. Now once you've done all of this and you've started to blog and everything. That's when you can start thinking about translation, okay? Because let's say you then translate into four different languages, right? So now you have English, Spanish, German, Chinese, for example. You are four timesing or even more if you're doing certain languages and your niche is popular in certain countries, you are now four x ing your ability to appear on Google. And what this starts to do is if I go on search console again and click on pages, this is kind of the most important thing that you can do for your website. Indexed pages are all opportunities to rank on Google. So the more indexed pages you have, the more likely you are to appear on a Google search. Two men after two years has 42,300 index pages on Google. That is why we get such a good amount of impressions and clicks. I mean, in a month I'm not gonna like, I'm not gonna cry about 19,000 clicks, 766,000 impressions, okay? And all I did was the process I'm showing you right now. And then one last thing. If you want to really then start to scale up again, this is where you can start to think about other search engines. And also you can do this at the beginning of your website as well. You don't have to do it, you don't have to do this this far into this process, but you can start thinking about bing, Yandex, Naber, Yahoo and a few other, I don't know any others off the top of my head, but let's talk about these search engines. You just need to get indexed on them and then all of that content that you're making sustainably because it's a, there are only a lot of pages because they're translated. It's not because you're just spamming the Internet with ten to 100 blogs a day, which I would never recommend. Instead, what we're doing is it's a sustainable, understandable amount of content that you are adding to the website. Now just for some context, if I go on two men's sitemap and we go on blogs, for example, this is english blogs. You can see there are an absolute metric ton of them, okay? Because we are not messing around. This is what I stand behind. This is what I've always stood behind, is a blogging strategy to bring traffic to a website. If I do blog here, you'll see this is where the bulk of the impressions and clicks are actually coming from, is the blog. This is all AI generated content. So people that say AI generated content doesn't rank on Google. Yeah, I don't know what to tell you but just these 200 blogs is actually 4000 pages because every single blog is translated into 20 different languages so that is how you start to scale. Okay. You can see all of these different languages so we have products, collections, blogs and everything is tied together. And then one more tiny little thing is that it was actually confirmed by Google that having something in your header makes you much more likely to rank for it. Thank you so much for watching guys. If you enjoyed please let me know if you're watching all the way to the end. You're an absolute legend and I'll see you soon with some more content. Peace out. This video is super important because I talk about a few different problems with AI and LLMs and just generative AI and its ability to always agree with you and to not fully understand or read what you're trying to ask it to do.