#302 – 5 Fresh Strategies to Dominate Google in 2023

Another year, another SEO strategy.

It’s no secret things move fast in the industry, and if you want to stay relevant, it’s time to shift gears as you move into 2023.

So in this show, Mark and Gael run through 5 of THE most important strategies to consider for the year ahead.

1. Push Quality Info Content

This has been a hot debate for many years. Does Google penalize sites pushing sites with too much commercial content?

Well, we’re still not convinced. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other reasons to push info content in 2023 heavily.

1. It helps to build topical authority.
2. It’s a great way to build an email list.
3. It’s an easy opportunity to build E-E-A-T.
4. It can easily be monetized using ad networks like Ezoic, Adthrive or Mediavine

Nope, that extra E in E-E-A-T isn’t a typo. In late 2022, Google added a new letter to everyone’s favorite acronym to form Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

In particular, Ads are likely to be hot in 2023. While January always sees a downturn in RPMs, Ad revenue has consistently increased over the past 5-10 years.

But then there’s the question of how. And in 2023, you can’t talk about Content Creation without talking about AI.

This is where things get spicy.

The latest soundbite doing the rounds in the industry is that Google is outright against AI-generated content. But here’s the thing. That’s not quite true…

As with all Content, ultimately, all that really matters is the quality.

And sure, Chat GTP isn’t going to be able to spit out hundreds of high-quality articles at the click of a button just yet.

However, it’s a powerful writing aid when used right.

Chat GPT can help with things like

• Writing your article outline
• Writing small sections like Intros and Outros
• Helping you research a topic

“Chat GTP is great at working with existing outlines. Don’t just give it a broad topic to write about. Feed it different sections of your research and break the content down into chunks. You’ll get a much better overall result this way.”

– Gael on Creating AI Content

You just have to learn how to harness its omnipotence.

Check out this guide to learn more about how it can aid in content creation.

2. Keyword Research: A different approach

Next up, Keyword Research.

Look. It’s no secret that keyword tools are wildly inaccurate at times. But in Gael’s recent study, we were shocked to find out just how much you can benefit from going with your gut.

In our test, we took a keyword with the following stats:

We got to work producing the article, and after a while, it started to rank.

And boy, we didn’t expect to see these results.

Now, the only downside is that it’s hard for us to sit here and explain how actually to replicate this type of success.

A lot of it just comes down to gut feeling.

• What do you think people in your niche would be searching for?
• Are there any upcoming trends, products, or topics in your market?
• What is the community saying?

“Focus on repeatable clusters of keywords. If you have a hub that’s performing well, that’s usually a good starting point. If a best [brand] keyword is getting you lots of traffic, it’s likely repeating multiple other brand keywords will yield similar results.”

– Gael on Creating AI Content

3. Commercial Content

Let’s face it. 90% of affiliate and commercial content on the web is “okay” at best.

But Google is waging war against okay content. That’s pretty clear in their recent updates.

But what sets okay content apart from excellent content.

Let’s look at someone we believe is doing things extremely well: Dronesgator. Let’s look at some of his key stats at a glance:

• The owner isn’t native English and still succeeds
• He doesn’t do anything that the average site builder couldn’t (i.e little to no dev resources or advanced programming)
• He doesn’t own every single product he reviews

“Dronesgator is an excellent example because it’s the ‘everyman’ of site-building. The content isn’t anything particularly complex or unachievable by most, yet it is far better than most commercial content you see on the web.”

– Mark on Commercial Content

The articles focus on how to help users, not how the owner can make money.

For example, he includes informative infographics that clearly present valuable information

He creates basic videos which exist purely to add value. And he adds important quantifiable metrics to each review

Small things like this, alongside his knowledgeable and realistic content, make him stand out from the crowd of average. And again, it’s things like this that every site owner can do.

4. Passive Link Building

Of course, we couldn’t talk about SEO without talking about everyone’s favorite topic: Link Building.

But this time, we’re not here to preach about actively building links through outreach-based link building, but instead, focus on the concept of passive links.

If you’ve been following us for a while, you may know that back in October, we released a huge survey figuring out how people build links.

But I’m going to let you in on a secret. We didn’t just do this out of the goodness of our hearts. Nope. We did it to build passive links.

And in doing that, we currently rank #1 for the term “link building survey.”

We then took that survey and created a second article on Link Building Statistics. And, you guessed it, we also now rank for the keyword “Link Building Statistics.“

And what this means is when people go to write about link building, they find our resource and inevitably end up linking to it as a source.

So what’s the catch? Well, the content has to be good. In fact, it has to be excellent. Something people actually care about and want to link to.

You’ll also need to have some authority in your industry to get started if you want to rank. That means you’ll need to be at least a mid-range DR.

“Brian Dean is a master of creating linkable organic content. Check out Baclinko’s top linked pages in ahrefs and you’ll see how he’s managed to amass hundreds of backlinks using linkable content.”

– Gael on Passive Link Building

5. Live, Breath, E-E-A-T

Yeah, we know. Everyone’s sick of hearing E-E-A-T. In fact, Gael wasn’t even that convinced it mattered.

That was until AI content came along and changed the game.

The thing is, AI is rearranging the bar of quality. Once upon a time, creating an average affiliate site with decent wasn’t all that easy. That meant, relatively speaking, few people bothered.

But now that AI is making “average” content more accessible, the market for average affiliate sites is about to get much more competitive.

So how do you stay one step ahead of the competition? As much as it pains us to say it, it’s probably through E-E-A-T.

The good news, however, is it doesn’t mean you have to go out and get a doctorate in Drones. In fact, displaying Authority is much easier than you probably think.

There are simple ways to build authenticity and convey experience, such as having an active social media presence where you talk knowledgeably about the topic, or perhaps you jump on a video once in a while to get hands-on with a product.

These are small things that AI is still a long way away from ever replicating.