What People Think of SEO Is Wrong. Here's the Truth:

Did you know I own TrioSEO.com? We help fast growing B2B and SaaS companies get more SEO traffic and revenue. If you have a website that needs more content and backlinks, reply here and let’s chat!

Hey, savvy friends! 👋🏻

Did you ever think of SEO as “just content”? 

That’s one of the many misconceptions people have about SEO. 

People also think SEO is:

❌ Stuffing keywords

❌ Basic meta tags

❌ Backlinks = spam

❌ A one-time fix

One thing these misconceptions have in common? The idea that surface work = results. 

Which can’t be farther from the truth. 

What SEO Actually Is

🔥SEO is way more complex than most people realize. To see results, you’ve got to go DEEP.

Let me set things straight by unpacking what SEO is really about.

SEO is:

1. Quality Content + Freshness

Publish original, well-written, and in-depth content regularly to build authority. Update existing content to keep it fresh.

💡Pro Tip: Freshness is more about relevance than recency. Make sure your content is aligned with search intent to gain more meaningful engagement and better ranking.

Need help with that? My team at TrioSEO is on a mission to scale organic traffic and leads for 100s of businesses. Get a free SEO audit to get started.

2. Keyword Intent + Variations

Understand the intent behind search queries, target the right keywords, and use keyword variations for topical depth and context. 

Keyword research is a must for successful SEO!

3. Technical Optimization

Make sure Google can crawl and index your content by optimizing your site’s backend structure. 

This is where your technical SEO guys will build clean code, improve your website’s architecture, and ensure mobile-friendliness.

4. Authoritative Backlinks

Boost credibility by earning quality backlinks from reputable, contextually relevant domains. 

Easier said than done! I’m talking about publishing link baits, PR and outreach, guest posting and collaborations—the list goes on.

💡Remember: Backlinks are earned by offering value and building relationships.

5. UX Optimization

Enhance user experience by ensuring fast load speeds, intuitive navigation, and reducing (if not eliminating) friction.

6. Local + Reviews

Geo-specific keyword targeting combined with genuine reviews is key for driving local traffic and establishing credibility. 

7. Data-Driven Insights

Don’t build an SEO strategy blindly. 

Leverage SEO tools to monitor and analyze your performance. Use insights to guide your strategy and ensure optimizations produce your intended results.

8. Adapting to Algorithms

Resilience to Google’s changing algorithms doesn’t happen by accident. 

Monitor core updates and adapt to evolving ranking factors to hold your place at #1.

9. Voice Search Optimization

Capture voice queries by structuring content based on how people naturally speak, targeting question-based queries, and providing answers quickly.

10. Core Web Vitals

How users experience your web pages impacts your rankings. 

Meeting these top 3 metrics ensures speed, responsiveness, and ease of navigation:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

• First Input Delay (FID)

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

11. Internal Linking

Make it easier for users to discover key content, reinforce topical clusters (hub-and-spoke or hubbing strategy), and aid crawling and indexing by linking internal pages.

12. Mobile-First Priority

Google prioritizes the mobile version when indexing web content, so a mobile-first mentality for building websites is non-negotiable.

13. Semantic Relevance

Use LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords to target related terms, gain topical depth, and help search engines better interpret your content.

14. E-E-AT Compliance

Demonstrate:

• E (Experience through first-hand experience)

• E (Expertise through depth of knowledge)

• A (Authoritativeness by building a reputation as an industry expert)

• T (Trustworthiness by ensuring website security)

15. Video Optimization

Enhance the visibility of your videos across SERPs by optimizing video descriptions, titles, and transcripts.

See the Difference?

Doing surface-level SEO doesn’t get you the results you want. 

The key is going deep. 

That’s what my SEO course, The SEO System, is here for. Learn the exact SEO system I used to scale from zero to 12M in yearly revenue. Access my course today!

Exciting Stuff Coming Up!

Want more tips like this? I’m here to help you become SEO savvy with SEO tips and advice every week.

Watch out for an exciting surprise in next week’s newsletter!

See you there,

Connor

Whenever you’re ready, here’s 3 ways I can help you:

1. My SEO Course: “The SEO System” teaches the exact daily, weekly, and monthly SEO processes I’ve used to scale multiple companies to 6, 7, & 8 figures in sales. Available for pre-sale now!

2. TrioSEO: Hire me & my team to create SEO content for your business. We’ll create a comprehensive SEO plan, execute, & keep you updated so your business gains more traffic, leads, & sales. Get a Free SEO Audit.

3. Promote yourself to 100,000+ SEOs, marketers, & entrepreneurs by sponsoring this newsletter and my social channels. (Booked out 1 month). Email me for info.

Connor Gillivan has been building six, seven, and eight-figure businesses for the past 10 years with SEO. It’s my personal mission to create a community and services that help you grow your business by finding more people who would benefit from what you. When I started out, I wanted to make the community an inclusive, welcoming table where everyone can come to get help using high-end SEO strategies to take their businesses to the next level. After several years, and over 3000 combined followers across Facebook and LinkedIn, I will always aim to get better at what I do every single day. In addition, my primary focus is on my relationship with you. This way every time you interact with me, you end up getting ideas that take your project to the next level. I particularly appreciate when my following provides feedback via testimonials, reviews, and comments left on my site or social media accounts. Because with that feedback, I can use it to make your next experience even better than the last. Since I put so much effort into my relationship with you, I hope that any investment in me is exactly the way you hoped it would be. Because by choosing to utilize my services, it’s my promise that I will provide an experience that you will love over and over again. Now, as much as I care about making the world a better and more efficient place for businesses like yours, I also care about your privacy. I’m committed to the right to your privacy and strive to provide a safe and secure user experience. My Privacy Policy, to which you can find a link at the bottom of my website homepage, explains how I collect, store and use personal information, provided by you on my website. It also explains important information that ensures I won’t abuse the information that you provide to me in good faith. By accessing and using my website, you can trust that what you want to be kept private, will be kept private. If at any time you would like to read the Privacy Policy and get a better understanding of your rights and liabilities under the law, feel free to visit my site, find the privacy policy in the footer, and read it. If there is something you are concerned about or wish to get more clarity on, please let me know by replying to this email. The Privacy Policy also informs you of how to notify me to stop using your personal information. If you wish to view my official policies, please visit my official website.

When you visit my website you may provide me with two types of information: personal information you knowingly choose to disclose that is collected on an individual basis and website use information collected on an aggregate basis as you and others browse our website. For example, you may need to provide the following information: your name, website URL information, email address, and home and business phone number.

In addition to providing the foregoing information, if you choose to correspond further with me through email, I may retain the content of your email messages together with your email address and our responses. We provide the same protections for these electronic communications that we employ in the maintenance of information received by mail and telephone. It also explains important information that ensures we won’t abuse the information that you provide to us in good faith. By accessing and using my website, you can trust that what you want to be kept private, will be kept private. If at any time, if you would like, you can read my Privacy Policy and get a better understanding of your rights and liabilities under the law. Feel free to visit the site, find the Privacy Policy in the footer and read it. If there is something you are concerned about or wish to get more clarity on, please let me know by contacting me by replying to this email. The Privacy Policy also informs you of how to notify me to stop using your personal information. If you wish to view my official policies, please visit my website.