Two founders built a B2B software comparison site starting in 2019. Pure organic traffic strategy.

Sold to private equity in 2024 for $20M after reaching $4M annual revenue.

Studied their entire 5-year playbook. Here's how they built a 8-figure exit through SEO: 🧵👇 1/ Site foundation and model:

The basics:

Niche: Marketing and sales software comparisons
Content: 850 comparison pages + 200 guides
Traffic: 1.2M sessions/month at exit
Monetization: Affiliate commissions + lead generation

Revenue model:

- Software trials: $50-200 per signup
- Demo requests: $100-300 per qualified lead
- Annual revenue at exit: $4M

Acquisition multiple: 5x revenue = $20M valuation

Every year brings 50+ "revolutionary" SEO tactics. I've tested 85 over 4 years.

Only 12 produced meaningful results (14% success rate). The rest wasted time and budget.

Here's the evaluation framework that separates legitimate innovations from expensive distractions: 🧵👇 1/ The innovation problem:

Why most tactics fail:

Pattern observed:

- New tactic hyped heavily (courses, conferences)
- Early adopters see results (first-mover advantage)
- Mass adoption begins (saturation)
- Results disappear (advantage gone in 6-12 months)

Need filter to avoid wasted effort.

Most local businesses create 10-20 blog posts and call it "content marketing."

Then wonder why they don't rank.

Here's how to build a local content hub that actually dominates search: 🧵👇 1/ What is a Local Content Hub?

A comprehensive, interconnected resource about your city/service area.

Think: Neighborhood-focused Wikipedia for your city.

Not random blog posts.

A strategic content architecture that positions you as THE local authority.

Infinite scroll is great for UX.
Users scroll. More content loads. No pagination.

But terrible for SEO.

Google only sees the first batch of content.
The rest? Invisible.

Client had 5,000 products.
Google saw 20.

Fixed it → indexed all 5,000 products: 🧵👇 1/ Why infinite scroll kills SEO

Traditional pagination:

- Page 1: Products 1-20
- Page 2: Products 21-40 (separate URL)
- Google can crawl all pages

Infinite scroll:

- Same URL
- Content loaded via JavaScript
- New products loaded dynamically
- Google stops crawling after initial load

Client example:

- 5,000 products total
- Infinite scroll loaded 20 at a time
- Google only indexed first 20
- 4,980 products invisible

I published 200 AI articles in 90 days.

Zero EEAT signals added.

127 got deindexed. 49 never ranked past page 5.

Google made it clear: AI content needs proof you know what you're talking about.

Here's how to fix it: 🧵👇 1/ What is EEAT?

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust.

Google's way of separating real experts from content farms.

AI can write about anything.
But it can't prove YOU know anything.

That's the problem.

Raw AI content sounds robotic and generic. Tested 200 AI articles before and after humanization.

Humanized versions ranked 40% faster and had 2.1x higher engagement metrics.

Here's the 15-point checklist that transforms AI content into authentic, ranking content: 🧵👇

Follow + Comment 'HUMANIZE' to get the full checklist template within 24h. 1/ Personal experience injection:

Before: "Companies should track metrics regularly."

After: "We track these 5 metrics every Monday morning in our 15-minute standup, anything that drops more than 15% from last week triggers an immediate investigation."

What to add:

- Specific examples from real experience
- Interview subjects with actual names
- Real timelines and scenarios
- Exact numbers and thresholds

The difference: Generic advice vs. actionable insight someone can actually replicate.

A food blogger started with 0 followers in 2021. No marketing budget. Just recipes and SEO strategy.

Hit $1M annual revenue in 2024 purely from organic traffic and display ads.

I analyzed her entire approach over 3 years. Here's the exact playbook she used: 🧵👇 1/ Blog profile and monetization:

The foundation:

Niche: Home cooking and meal prep
Content: 450 recipe posts
Traffic: 2.8M sessions/month
Team: Solo creator + 1 part-time VA

Revenue breakdown:

- Display ads (Mediavine): $65K/month
- Sponsored posts: $15K/month
- Affiliate (Amazon, cookware): $8K/month
Total: $88K/month average ($1.056M/year)

500+ keyword opportunities.
20 minutes of research.
$0 spent on tools.

No fancy software. No expensive subscriptions. Just Google and a simple process.

Here’s how to uncover 500+ keywords fast 🧵👇 1/ Step 1: The Seed Keywords (2 minutes)

Start with your core services:

Example (plumber):

- Plumbing
- Plumber
- Drain cleaning
- Water heater
- Emergency plumbing

List 10-15 core terms.

These are your seeds.

Enterprise with 12,000 pages had 8 different teams publishing content. No coordination. No standards.

Result: 40% duplicate content, 2,000 thin pages, conflicting information across domains.

Implemented governance model that reduced issues 85% in 6 months. Here's the framework: 🧵👇 1/ The ungoverned problem:

8 teams publishing independently:

- 4,800 pages with duplicate content
- 2,000 pages under 300 words
- 17 different product feature lists
- Teams competing for same keywords

Nobody coordinating = chaos.

Client came to me: "Traffic dropped 35% in 2 months. No idea why."

Found 2,400 redirect chains.
Some were 5 hops deep.

A → B → C → D → E

Each hop:

- Loses link equity
- Adds 300-800ms latency
- Wastes crawl budget

Fixed them. Traffic recovered in 6 weeks.

Here's how redirect chains silently kill SEO: 🧵👇 1/ How redirect chains happen

Year 1: Product moved
example.com/old-product → example.com/new-product

Year 2: URL structure changed
example.com/new-product → example.com/products/new-p…

Year 3: HTTPS migration
example.com/products/new-p… → example.com/products/new-p…

Result: 3-hop chain
One URL now requires 3 redirects to reach destination.

Nobody audits old redirects.
Chains accumulate over years.

One content site in the personal finance niche generates $500K/month in revenue with just 380 published articles.

Not a SaaS. Not e-commerce. Pure display ads and affiliate commissions.

Tracked their strategy for 18 months. Here's how they built it: 🧵👇 1/ Site profile and model:

The basics:

Niche: Personal finance (credit cards, loans, investing)
Content: 380 articles total
Traffic: 4.2M sessions/month
Monetization: 70% display ads, 30% affiliate

Revenue breakdown:

- Display ads (Mediavine): $350K/month ($0.083 RPM)
- Credit card affiliates: $120K/month (avg $180 per approval)
- Other affiliates: $30K/month

Total: $500K/month

Team: 8 people (2 writers, 1 editor, 1 SEO, 4 affiliates/ops)

Local businesses don't need 500 backlinks. They need 30-50 highly relevant local links.

I helped a local HVAC company rank #1 in their city with just 42 local backlinks over 8 months.

Here's the local link building playbook that actually works: 🧵👇 1/ Why local link building is different:

Local vs national approach:

National SEO: Needs 200-500+ links
Local SEO: Needs 30-50 quality local links

What matters for local:

- Geographic relevance (same city/region)
- Business category relevance (related industries)
- Community presence (local recognition)

Quality over quantity at extreme level.

One link from city chamber of commerce beats 20 links from national directories.

I tested 47 new SEO tactics over 3 years. 8 produced meaningful results (17% success rate).

The successful ones followed a pattern. The failures ignored fundamental principles.

Here's the framework for evaluating SEO innovations without wasting time on fads: 🧵👇 1/ The innovation evaluation problem:

Why most tactics fail:

New tactic emerges:

- Promoted heavily (course sellers, agencies)
- Early adopters see results
- Everyone tries it
- Results diminish quickly
- Tactic becomes saturated

Example: Skyscraper technique 2014 (worked), 2024 (saturated).

Need framework to separate signal from noise.

47 neighborhood pages.

Each generates $100K+ per year.

Total: $5M in annual sales. All from targeted local pages.

Here’s the exact neighborhood page strategy that drives traffic, leads, and revenue 🧵👇 1/ The Setup:

Seattle realtor serving 47 neighborhoods.

Old approach:
One "Seattle Real Estate" page

New approach:
47 individual neighborhood pages

Result: 12x increase in organic leads.

Built 15 SEO business cases over 4 years. 12 got approved (80% success rate).

The 3 that failed taught me more than the 12 successes.

Here's the exact framework that convinces executives to invest in SEO: 🧵👇 1/ Why most SEO business cases fail:

Common mistakes I made:

Failed business case 1 ($200K request):

- Led with rankings and traffic
- Vague ROI ("long-term value")
- No competitive context
- 12-month timeline unclear

Failed because: CFO couldn't justify to board.

Failed business case 2 ($150K request):

- Compared SEO to paid ads
- Showed lower CAC
- Ignored implementation complexity

Failed because: Engineering said "we don't have capacity."

Failed business case 3 ($180K request):

- Perfect financial model
- Forgot to socialize early
- Blindsided stakeholders in meeting

Failed because: Politics matter.

Ever seen Page 2, 3, or 4 of a category suddenly outrank your primary category page?

It’s one of the most confusing ecommerce SEO issues

And it happens more often than you think.

Here’s the cause and the fix: 🧵👇 1/ The Pagination Problem:

Ecommerce site with 500 products per category.

Pagination:

- /category (Page 1)
- /category?page=2
- /category?page=3
- etc.

Google started ranking page 2 for main keyword.

Page 1 disappeared.

Most site migrations lose 20-40% of organic traffic.

One B2B SaaS company did the opposite: they doubled traffic in 6 months. All during the migration.

The secret? They didn’t just move pages.

They migrated smarter: improving content, URL structure, technical SEO, and internal linking while maintaining traffic.

Here’s the step-by-step approach that turned a risky migration into a 200% traffic gain 🧵👇 1/ Pre-migration baseline:

Starting position before migration:

Old site metrics:

- 85,000 monthly organic sessions
- 1,200 ranking keywords
- Built on outdated CMS (2015)
- Page speed: 4.2 seconds average
- Mobile experience: Poor
- URL structure: Inconsistent

Migration goal: Modern platform without traffic loss.

Actual result: 170,000 sessions within 6 months.

Managing SEO for 50K+ page enterprise sites is impossible without AI automation.

We built an AI tool stack that reduced manual work by 70% while improving output quality.

Here's the complete enterprise AI SEO stack that actually works: 🧵👇 1/ Why enterprise SEO needs AI:

Scale challenges:

Manual approaches break at scale:

- 50K pages = can't manually optimize each
- 10K keywords = can't track individually
- 500 competitors = can't analyze manually
- Daily changes = can't review everything

Traditional tools help but still require massive human input.

AI automates pattern detection, anomaly finding, and content optimization at scale.

Client's e-commerce site got completely deindexed from Google in March 2024. Zero rankings. Zero traffic overnight.

We recovered it to 150K monthly sessions in 9 months, surpassing pre-penalty levels.

Here's the complete penalty recovery process that worked: 🧵👇 1/ The penalty discovery:

How it happened:

March 15, 2024: Traffic dropped 100%

- 120K sessions/month → 0 overnight
- All pages disappeared from Google
- Search Console showed manual action notice

The penalty: "Unnatural links to your site"

Cause investigation:

- Previous agency bought 3,000+ PBN links (2022-2023)
- Client unaware (outsourced to cheap vendor)
- Link pattern obvious (same anchor text, same DR range 15-25)
- Google detected after 18 months

Revenue impact: $400K/month → $0 from organic.

Enabled Google Business Profile messaging. Generated $400K in revenue in 6 months.

All from Google Maps messages.

Most businesses leave this money on the table.

Here’s exactly how to turn GMB messages into customers: 🧵👇 1/ The Missed Opportunity:

Most businesses disable GMB messaging or ignore it.

Why?
"We don't want to monitor another channel"

Reality:

- 67% of mobile searchers prefer messaging
- Messages appear prominently in GMB
- Direct line to high-intent customers

Built SEO forecasts for 23 clients over 3 years. Tracked actual results against predictions.

Average forecast accuracy: 78% at 12 months.

Here's the model that works, avoiding the common forecasting traps that kill credibility: 🧵👇 1/ Why most SEO forecasts fail:

Common mistakes:

Over-optimistic assumptions:

- "We'll rank #1 for all target keywords"
- Linear growth projections
- Ignoring competition
- No risk factors

Under-documented methodology:

- Black box calculations
- Can't explain variances
- No historical data
- Gut feeling disguised as math

Result: 12-month forecast off by 200-300%.