The biggest SEO mistake I’ve ever made is the topic of this text. What do a national park, a war, and a casino have in common? Well, I’ll give you a hint: it involved my biggest SEO mistake. Leave a comment below letting me know what you think my biggest SEO mistake is. I gave you that hint, right? Now, before I break down my SEO mistake, I want to first tell you that you need to think long-term. See, I was shortsighted when I first got started in the role of entrepreneurship and marketing. When I was in my early twenties, and even before that, when I was 16, 17, 18, because I started SEO when I was around 16 years old, and to give you context, now I’m 37. I wanted to make money fast, so fast that I looked for shortcuts. And there was this one site called Battlefield Bypass, which was an expired domain with a lot of authoritative links. These links were naturally generated and not purchased because it was a national park site and was part of an award that happened on that land. So I bought it and converted it into an online casino site. Within months, I was ranking in the top three positions on Google for the term “online casino.” That keyword is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in affiliate revenue. Not thousands, hundreds of thousands, to give you perspective. That’s millions of dollars a year. That’s a lot of money, especially when you’re under 20 years old. But within months, Google whacked me! All of a sudden, that site lost all of its rankings. In essence, I was trying to cheat the system by getting traffic and rankings by cheating instead of providing value. See, the sites that rank at the top in the long run are the ones that users love the most. No one that cheats their way to the top lasts forever. Just think of it this way: you don’t really care if a site at the top has a lot of backlinks or better on-page code. You only care if that site solves your problem and ideally in a quick and affordable fashion.
“Now, I have learned a lot from this mistake, and I have made tons of others as well. However, I had a shortcut mentality when I was young and growing up. If I could go back in time, I would stop taking shortcuts, and I would be much further in my career, even as an entrepreneur. That’s my big SEO mistake. If you’re struggling with SEO and don’t want to make all the mistakes I’ve made, and you want to get your rankings by providing value to users and using ethical, clean tactics, check out my ad agency, NP digital. If you have any questions, leave a comment below. I’m here to help. If you enjoy the video, like it, share it, and tell other people about it.”
Transformation! 