3 ways to insult Google

The fastest and easiest way to get better at SEO is to:

1. Stop listening to white hats.

2. Break SEO rules

Yes, white hats and Google absolutely hate it when you play against the “rules.”

But, to be honest, that’s probably the only way you’ll be able to get better at SEO.

Case in point, I’ve been breaking SEO rules for the last 4 years, and I’ve never had any of my websites penalized.

In fact, we’ve delivered pretty insane results for all the brands that we work with. We’ve added tens (even hundreds) of thousands in organic monthly revenue by consistently breaking (more like bending) the rules. 

 So… if you want to get better at SEO, here are 3 SEO rules that you should break:

1. Buy more links

Buying backlinks directly violates Google’s spam guidelines – I don’t care. If you want to build links at scale, the best way to do so is to shell out some money for them. 

This is how we build 80% of the links for our brands, you’ve seen the results and I’ve never had a site penalized by doing so. The other 20% are PR & UGC (Reddit & Quora) links, which are technically free, outside of the cost of labor. 

There are hundreds of millions of websites on the internet – I guarantee that Google doesn’t care if you pay for 5-7 backlinks each month.

2. Use AI to write content

You want to do more in 2024? Time to leverage AI. 

No, I don’t mean mass publishing hundreds of articles at once without reviewing them, unless you’re cool with burning your site to the ground in <100 days. 

But climb down off that anti-AI pedestal you’re on and start using it. Rather than write from scratch, use AI to generate a 2000+ word blog post, then use your knowledge & expertise to edit/trim down from there. 

Change the style of voice, add in relevant statistics & personal experiences, internal links, and whatever else you need to make it a winning piece of content. 

This will be so much faster than writing from scratch, enabling you to produce more over time. 

3. Spend more on paid ads

I’m a huge advocate for SEO, obviously. But I’m an even bigger advocate for you making more money. 

SEO isn’t your eCom brand’s golden ticket to millions of extra dollars, at least not on its own. 

It can succeed on its own, but the results will be amplified if more people are familiar with (and search for) your brand online. 

They’ll see your ads on TikTok & Meta and then head to Google to search for your brand name – that is an incredibly strong ranking signal.

Notice I said signal, not factor. 

Over time, this indirect relationship will correlate with a stronger SEO presence.  

Speaking of a stronger SEO presence:

Breaking SEO rules and everything is good, but if you want to outrank your competitors and dominate the SERPs, then breaking these 3 rules isn’t going to be enough.

You’ll need a well-structured and proven SEO strategy that will take you to the top of the SERPs.

In my opinion, most eCommerce brands fail primarily because their SEO strategy is shit.

It’s too templated, they go after far too competitive keywords, or they use SEO strategies that don’t apply to eCommerce – I literally spoke to a founder who had all of these exact issues yesterday. 

I recorded a detailed step-by-step video showing how you can rank your Shopify store with a custom strategy. We use the exact same framework to build bespoke strategies for brands at our agency and have delivered some really good results for our clients.

You can watch the complete video here:

Until next time,

Kai Cromwell