You're thinking about your SEO Strategy WRONG! 🛑

A mental model stating that rank position is determined by three multiplicative factors: backlinks × on-page × domain factor, used to guide all SEO decision-making.

Links from external websites (sites you don't control) pointing to your site, serving as a trust signal that accounts for approximately 50% of rank position on Google.

The set of factors related to a page's content, structure, and user engagement signals that determine whether a URL makes Google searchers happy.

A client classification system distinguishing sites already receiving non-branded organic traffic (established) from those that are not, which determines the SEO strategy, timeline, and budget required.

The number of unique external domains linking to a site, considered more valuable than raw backlink count because multiple links from the same domain carry diminishing returns.

A measure of overall domain quality that impacts the ranking of individual URLs, reflecting whether the domain as a whole contains high-quality or spammy content.

Behavioral data Google collects—such as time on page and bounce-back rate—to determine whether a URL satisfies a searcher's query and adjust rankings accordingly.

Google's machine learning system that measures how users engage with and interact with a website, used as a signal in on-page ranking factors.

The practice of creating thorough, in-depth content covering relevant subtopics, word patterns, and media to satisfy Google's preference for content that fully answers user queries.

The age of a URL is a significant ranking factor; on average, pages ranking in position one are nearly three years old, making it difficult to unseat established content.

The primary guest and SEO expert featured in the video, founder of an AI SEO agency that developed the Core 30 local SEO methodology and scaled to 97 plumber clients using AI-driven content and local link-building strategies.

A metric from the SEO tool Ahrefs that measures exclusively the backlink strength of a given URL, used to demonstrate that backlinks account for roughly 50% of ranking factors.

Search traffic generated by users searching a company's own brand name, which is easy to rank for and therefore excluded when evaluating whether a site is 'established' in SEO terms.

The formula for rank position in SEO is: Rank Position = Backlinks × On-Page × Domain Factor. These are the three core elements that factor into where your content ranks on Google. Backlinks account for roughly 50% of the equation, while on-page factors and domain authority make up the other half.

Backlinks account for approximately 50% of your rank position on Google. This is supported by data from Ahrefs, an SEO tool that measured the correlation between their URL Rating (UR) — which is a pure measure of backlink strength — and Google rank position. That correlation came out to around 50%. This means that even if you do everything else perfectly (on-page and domain factors), ignoring backlinks leaves you only halfway to optimal ranking.

A backlink is any link from an external site to your site, while a referring domain is the unique domain providing those links. The distinction matters because six links from the same domain are far less valuable than six links from six different domains. Therefore, when building a link profile, you should focus on acquiring links from as many different unique domains as possible rather than accumulating multiple links from the same source.

On-page SEO refers to everything about your website's content and structure that affects ranking. Key factors include: content length and comprehensiveness, subtopics and word patterns used, presence of images (with alt text), embedded videos (ideally from YouTube), H-tags (H1 through H6), title tags, meta descriptions, page speed, URL age, and user engagement metrics. At its core, on-page SEO is about whether your content makes Google searchers happy and satisfies their search intent.

RankBrain is Google's system for measuring how people engage with and interact with your site. It's part of the on-page ranking factor and essentially tracks whether your content is keeping Google's searchers happy. For example, if a user visits your page, stays for only 15 seconds, hits back, and then spends 5 minutes on a competitor's page before closing their browser, RankBrain interprets that as a bad signal for your page and a good signal for the competitor's page. Over time, this kind of behavior can cause your ranking to drop while the competitor's improves.

Google provides search as a free service, but it makes almost all of its revenue by selling ads displayed to users of that free product. If people stop using Google Search because they're not getting good results, Google's ad revenue would dry up. This creates a strong financial incentive for Google to ensure its search results genuinely satisfy users — which is why content that keeps searchers happy tends to rank higher.

URL age is a fairly important ranking factor. On average, URLs ranking in position one on Google are almost three years old, and even URLs in position ten average around two years old. Only about 1% of URLs in the first position are less than a year old, and only 4% in the tenth position. This means that once a URL is established and ranking, it's very difficult to unseat — which is good news for those already ranked, but challenging for new content trying to break into competitive positions.

The domain factor is a measure of the overall quality of your entire domain. It assesses whether your domain is mostly filled with spam and low-quality content, or whether it's predominantly high-quality. This domain-level assessment directly impacts the ranking of individual URLs on your site. A strong, high-quality domain gives individual pages a better foundation for ranking, while a spammy domain can drag down even well-optimized individual pages.

Moving a page from position 150 to position 11 may look impressive in rank tracking software, but it drives virtually no additional traffic because nearly all of Google's traffic comes from the first page of results. As the video humorously points out, 'the best place to hide a dead body is the second page of Google search.' The real goal in SEO is getting onto the first page, where actual users will find and click your content.

An established site is one that already has enough content and backlinks to generate organic (non-branded) traffic and rank on the second, third, or fourth page of Google for relevant queries. A non-established site either has no organic traffic or only ranks for branded searches (e.g., its own company name). Branded traffic doesn't count as establishing a site because ranking for your own brand name is easy. The distinction matters because SEO strategy and timeline differ significantly between the two: established sites can see results in one to two months, while non-established sites require more time and investment.

For a client with an established website, the most effective strategy is to identify URLs already ranking on the second or third page for target queries and push them onto the first page. This is much easier than creating new URLs from scratch because: (1) Google already recognizes the URL as relevant to the query, so you don't need to establish relevancy; (2) the URL is typically older, giving it an age advantage; and (3) it requires less work than building from zero. Results in terms of increased traffic can often be demonstrated within one to two months.

The core SEO mindset is to do what Google wants — which means making Google's searchers happy. In practice, this means: type your target keyword into Google, study the top 10 results (since those URLs are already proven to satisfy searchers), understand what they're doing in terms of content depth, structure, and comprehensiveness, and then do it significantly better. The goal is to make Google's users even happier than the current top results do. SEO is not about gaming algorithms — it's about genuinely serving the user's search intent better than your competition.

Google's use of links as a trust signal was a groundbreaking innovation in search. By treating a link from one site to another as a vote of confidence or endorsement, Google was able to assess the credibility and relevance of web pages far more accurately than previous search engines that relied purely on on-page text. This approach produced dramatically better search results, which is why Google came to dominate the search engine market.

SEO for a non-established website is more difficult and expensive for several reasons: (1) You need to build relevancy from scratch, as Google doesn't yet associate the domain or URLs with your target queries; (2) new URLs lack the age advantage that established pages have; (3) you need to build backlinks and domain authority from the ground up; and (4) results take significantly longer to materialize. Compounding the challenge, clients with non-established sites often have lower budgets because they're not yet generating organic revenue — making it hard to invest the resources needed to compete.

Google evaluates on-page SEO quality through multiple content elements: (1) Content length and comprehensiveness compared to competitors; (2) subtopics covered and word patterns/usage; (3) presence of images with descriptive alt text; (4) embedded videos, ideally from YouTube; (5) proper use of heading tags (H1 through H6); (6) an optimized title tag; (7) a well-written meta description; (8) fast page speed; (9) URL age; and (10) user engagement signals such as time on page and bounce behavior. Comprehensive content that covers a topic thoroughly tends to perform better than thin content.