[aniftythrifrty]

I am a small business owner who started their site and SEO and within three months I was beating multi-million dollar competition on the most important keyword google search terms for our market and industry. I did this with no budget, no adspend, just basic SEO and good keyword research. It's totally possible for mom and pop websites to get traction with google, even easy. You just have to be halfway decent at SEO.

[whatamidoingyo]

Same. Numerous 1st page top results, and even snippets. Honestly no idea how... I do know SEO basics, but didn't know I knew them well enough for this. Within a year I had the first result for a very, very popular search term. Granted it was a lot of hard work (18 hour days, sometimes).

[Solvency]

You spent 18 hours a day on SEO? Doing what??

[whatamidoingyo]

No, no. I spent 18 hour days posting on social media, writing articles, designing cover images, researching, etc. I honestly didn't do much work in regards to SEO, at least I don't think so. (There were a few times I knew something was going to be released soon, so I wrote about it before anyone else did.) But I do believe all of this contributes to SEO.

But yeah, this brought my site to having every article I write today to be listed on page 1 (top 5 results, at the very least) almost within a day, numerous snippets, etc.

[WarOnPrivacy]

>> You spent 18 hours a day on SEO? Doing what??

> No, no. I spent 18 hour days posting on social media, writing articles,

Yes, yes. Based on my 10-years-ago contact with SEO, you just described it.

[kjkjadksj]

I wonder how easy this will continue to be in the chatgpt era. What takes you 18 hours can probably be generated in 18 seconds with enough fidelity to get traction.

[15457345234]

Oh and doesn't that just define the problem so well

[aniftythrifrty]

The only thing I did was everything google recommended I do, literally. Run PageSpeed, do everything suggested. Log in to search console, do everything recommended. Super hard. And the keywords I dominate are for such things like, jewelry repair, jewelry repair near me, jewelry repair Seattle. Not niche. The reason I am beating such big spending rivals is because they usually have sites that break a lot of SEO rules funny enough. They try so hard and pay so much to "SEO Experts" but their site is templated spaghetti and no one can fix it, seemingly.

[carlosjobim]

Same here. I'm right up there competing with billion dollar companies with decades of presence and I don't know how many backlinks. While my small business has no backlinks from others and only relies on content for ranking, being entirely dependent on Google to be honest.

[dazc]

I would guess you're working in a niche that has not been targeted by the big media sites alluded to here? Being halfway decent at SEO will come to nothing when you have 20 or so competing sites that can rank overnight for anything.

[15457345234]

What's the site and what keywords are you targeting?

[dazc]

Parent poster is, I hope, wise enough to not answer.

[15457345234]

There's no reason not to answer that question. It's a commercial site, it's already public. (I just don't believe them.)

[dazc]

If they are unaffected by big media sites jumping into their niche then it makes sense to stay under the radar.

[throwaway2037]

> It's totally possible for mom and pop websites to get traction with google, even easy. You just have to be halfway decent at SEO.

If this is really true, then you should be running your own SEO consulting business. You would undoubtedly make much more money than your existing (presumably not SEO consulting), small business

Comments like this are similar to people (ahem, Internet randos) talking about their investment portfolio returns, where they wildly exceed the very best professionally managed hedge funds. I always say: "If you are so good, why don't you run your own hedge fund? It will easy to get funding." <<crickets>>

[aniftythrifrty]

Knowledge of my SEO prowess comes only recently. I have hung my shingle as a proven SEO expert so we will see. If anyone wants to hire me please let me know. I come with proven metrics.