Optimise your website and content to rank prominently in organic search results, capturing traffic without ongoing advertising spend.
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Search-engine optimisation SEO for short is the discipline of making your content the best answer to a user’s question and helping the search engine recognise that fact. In practice this means choosing the right topics (keywords), structuring pages so a crawler can understand them, earning signals of trust (backlinks, engagement) and removing technical friction (page speed, mobile layout, indexability). When all four elements align, your article, video or product shows up ahead of competitors in the results and collects free, compounding traffic.
Although most of us shorthand SEO to “ranking on Google”, the concept applies to every platform with a search box and an algorithm: Microsoft Bing, DuckDuckGo, YouTube, Amazon, the LinkedIn feed, the App Store and rapidly AI assistants such as ChatGPT or Gemini that cite web sources. Wherever potential buyers type, talk or tap a query, optimisation matters.
I started tweaking meta titles in 2010, months before launching my first paid-search campaigns. Fifteen years and hundreds of audits later, I still rely on the tandem: paid search for instant data and leads, organic search for compounding trust and lower long-term acquisition cost. In fact, this entire Solid Growth wiki is itself a growth hack an SEO backbone designed to rank for B2B terms my future clients Google every day and you are reading the results of that strategy in action. So it's working :)
SEO matters because it captures high-intent traffic people actively searching for solutions without ongoing advertising costs, creating compounding returns as your content library grows. One well-optimised article ranking for valuable keywords can generate hundreds of qualified visitors monthly for years with zero marginal cost, dramatically reducing blended customer acquisition costs over time. For B2B companies especially, SEO enables you to intercept prospects during early research phases, establishing thought leadership and earning consideration before they've even assembled their shortlist. The channel also produces higher-quality leads than interruption-based advertising: organic visitors actively chose your content because it appeared relevant to their query, arriving more informed and engaged than cold prospects. SEO's compounding nature makes it especially valuable for startups and scale-ups with limited budgets whilst paid channels require constant spending, SEO investments accumulate, with each new piece of content adding to your asset base. The authority SEO builds also has spillover effects: high rankings signal market leadership to prospects, and the backlinks and brand mentions you earn through content improve overall brand recognition. However, SEO requires patience and sustained commitment: meaningful organic traffic typically emerges 6-12 months after consistent effort, making it unsuitable for businesses needing immediate results. The channel also faces increasing competition as content marketing has become table stakes, requiring genuinely excellent content rather than keyword-stuffed mediocrity to rank. Algorithm updates can also disrupt rankings overnight, though sites with genuinely helpful content typically recover quickly. Organisations succeeding with SEO treat it as a long-term compound growth strategy rather than quick wins, committing to consistent content production, technical excellence, and earning authoritative backlinks through quality rather than shortcuts.
Create content that exactly satisfies the intent. A purchase-ready keyword wants pricing, demo videos and case studies, not a 3,000-word history essay.
Structure the HTML so search engines parse it quickly:
Make the site easy to access and fast to load:
Earn trust by collecting signals from the wider web:
Google’s Page Experience signals reward pages that render quickly and elegantly on mobile. Compress images, defer non-critical scripts, adopt lazy-loading and test in real devices. A one-second improvement can raise conversion rate by five per cent or more SEO impact aside.
Launch a Google Ads campaign on your target keywords. Highest-CTR ad text often becomes the organic meta description. Conversion data reveals which problems resonate; feed those into deeper organic guides. When organic pages reach page one, reduce the overlapping PPC budget and redeploy spend to new terms.
Backlinks are hyperlinks from one domain to another. Search algorithms treat them as votes of confidence: if reputable sites cite your guide on “B2B onboarding email templates,” they imply it is worthy of attention, lifting your authority score.
Newly registered domains in competitive B2B niches often need four to six months to see significant organic traffic. Established domains adding siloed content may see ranking movement in weeks. Speed depends on content quality, technical health, competition and backlink velocity.
Think in topics clusters of related queries so one pillar page answers multiple intent variations and sub-articles dive deeper. Google’s semantic understanding groups synonyms; topic authority outlasts single-keyword chasing.
Google says it uses no single “domain authority” score, but independent tools approximate it by backlink quantity and quality. Treat DA/DR as relative signals in competitive analysis, not an absolute KPI.
SEO is the long-game partner to the instant traffic of paid search. It demands an empathy for the searcher’s job-to-be-done, disciplined on-site structure, bulletproof technical foundations, and a proactive approach to off-site trust-building. Apply those four layers across Google and secondary engines YouTube, Amazon, emerging AI search and your content becomes an evergreen growth asset. For the complementary quick wins of bidding on those same keywords, see the paid-search primer at [/what-is/paid-search].
Build your channel strategy and optimise each channel, so you grow traffic strategically without burning budget.
Create an outreach strategy that defines who to target. Configure domains and infrastructure properly. Build targeted lead lists. Write emails that sound human. Design multi-touch sequences.
Develop LinkedIn ads strategy that targets decision-makers. Set up campaigns with proper tracking. Learn Google Ads strategy for high-intent keywords. Master creative principles that drive conversions.
Define your organic growth strategy with traffic goals. Build a content production workflow. Create content that educates and converts. Optimise for search engines and AI. Repurpose across channels.
Optimise your profile so it converts visitors to leads. Warm up your network before posting. Build a content calendar that keeps you ahead. Write posts that drive action. Time publishing to maximise reach.
Gabriel Weinberg
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A method to discover your best channel. Prioritise, test and focus resources where traction is most likely.
Russel Brunson
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A broad look at audience building. Useful ideas for content, partnerships and email that compound over time.
Set a traffic goal, group keywords by intent, and build a strategic content pillar map that scales with clear launch plans ready to execute.
Turn your organic-growth strategy into a production system. Track ideas, score by impact, move through workflow, and publish on time consistently.
Optimise your website and content to rank prominently in organic search results, capturing traffic without ongoing advertising spend.
Measure what percentage of cold emails get responses to evaluate message quality and list targeting rather than sending more emails to poor prospects.
Protect long uninterrupted blocks for deep work that requires concentration by clustering meetings and separating them from creative and analytical time.
Create focused standalone pages for paid campaigns that remove distractions and guide visitors toward one specific action to improve conversion rates.
Track emails that fail delivery to maintain sender reputation and avoid being marked as spam by continuing to email invalid addresses that hurt deliverability.
Ensure emails reach inboxes rather than spam folders by maintaining sender reputation, authenticating properly, and following anti-spam best practices consistently.
Measure likes, comments, and shares to evaluate content resonance and algorithmic distribution on social platforms that reward interactions with reach.
Gradually increase sending volume from new domains to build reputation with inbox providers and avoid being marked as spam when scaling outreach quickly.
Build relationships and demonstrate expertise on social platforms to generate inbound interest rather than interrupting buyers with cold outreach.
Measure the percentage of visits where users actively engage, filtering out passive bounces to assess true content quality.
Identify search terms your customers use to create content that ranks organically and bid on paid terms that drive qualified traffic at profitable costs.
Master the economics of customer acquisition by tracking what you pay for each meaningful action across channels.
Optimise individual pages for target keywords by improving titles, headings, content, and internal links to help search engines understand topic relevance.
Build cumulative site-wide ranking power through quality backlinks and strong content so new pages rank faster than competitors starting from scratch.
Create comprehensive hub pages on core topics that link to related subtopic content to establish topical authority and improve rankings across topic clusters.
Measure engagement quality by tracking the percentage of people who click after seeing your content or advertisement.
Calculate what you pay each time someone clicks your ad to evaluate channel efficiency and determine if paid traffic costs justify the leads generated.
Process email to empty daily by deciding whether to act, defer, delegate, or delete each message rather than leaving unread items as false to-do lists.
Schedule focused work sessions in your calendar to protect concentration and ensure important tasks don't get crowded out by meetings and interruptions.