Rick Kuwahara
When I started working with Paubox as the first marketing hire, it was just three of us meeting at a since-shut-down cafe in Chinatown. We were the very definition of bootstrapped with no money and barely a website.
So it should probably be no surprise that SEO was going to be a big driver of leads for us.
I was familiar with traditional marketing, paid digital advertising, but was somewhat new to SEO. I knew the basics, but never tried to have it be the center of our marketing strategy. So I had to buckle down and do some research.
In the end, these are the resources (along with keyword research that I’ll go into in another post) we used to get ranked as a Google definition. The result was thousands of dollars in MRR.
The SEO resources that drove results
I read a LOT of articles, watched tons of videos and went through a lot of whitepapers. But these articles below were some of the best I came across and I’ve had them saved in my Trello Marketing Scrapbook board since.
How to Combine SEO with Content Marketing to Maximize Traffic
This article by Neil Patel really got me thinking about the strategy behind SEO and that it’s not just a short term tactic. After the first couple of paragraphs it all just made sense how your SEO strategy should match up with your content strategy and that it’s a long term play.
Link Building Case Study: How I Increased My Search Traffic by 110% in 14 Days
The legendary Skyscraper technique to building content. This evergreen article by Brian Dean has been referred to by everyone for a reason. It’s one of the few step by step guides out there, one you can easily duplicate.
One subtle thing you’ll notice on this and other Brian Dean posts is that he constantly updates it to make sure no one out Skyscrapers him!
We Analyzed 1 Million Google Search Results. Here’s What We Learned About SEO
Another great article by Brian Dean, this robust study is both a great example and resource of how to build content that ranks. After you see all the things he mentions in the study, re-read the post and see how he applies it in the article itself. Very meta.
20 SEO Experts on Best Link Building Strategies that Don’t Require Content
This may seem like an odd article to reference since I did want to produce content. But great content without distribution is like a tree falling in a forest with no one around. Link building is one of the pillars to great SEO and you can easily take some of the approaches here and apply it to getting links to your content.
The advanced guide to link building
We did a few things to get our content distributed, but this guide by Neil Patel was a big reason why we climbed the rankings so fast. As soon as we focused on building .EDU and .GOV backlinks we started to go up in rankings.
What was the result?
The result is our page on HIPAA compliant email is in the second position on page one of Google. Even better, our definition shows up above all other organic results!
Now it’s your turn. Let me know how you applied these resources and your results in the comments below. Or even better – let me know what are some of your go-to SEO resources.
