These past couple of months…

I’ve slowly started to develop an interest in philosophical/mantra-type stuff.

So… 

Like any other person, I decided to download a couple of books on my Kindle.

I went through all the books that were related to philosophical stuff and downloaded them.

And one of the books that I enjoyed reading was…

Can’t Hurt Me — By David Goggins

You know the guy, who’s a super successful alter runner, Navy SEAL, world record for the most number of pull-ups, motivational speaker, and author.

And also tells you to…

STOP LISTENING TO YOUR INNER BITCH!

Anyways,

To be honest with you…

When I finished the book, it felt like I had just read 250+ pages of him patting himself on the back. 

It just felt really really braggy…

Now…

Don’t get me wrong here. He definitely has a pretty badass story and PLENTY to brag about.

And is quite literally one of the most impressive physical human specimens to ever walk the face of the earth.

But…

He did not just wake up one day and start winning ultra marathons.

Or break the pull-up world record. 

He put in tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of reps.

“What am I getting at right now?”

You see…

Your success in SEO is not the result of something you did that day or the night before.

It is the result of things that you have done over the past few months, years, and in some cases like Goggin’s, DECADES of your life.

The same applies to SEO.

In fact…

If you’re doing SEO for your company, brand, and local business, you can’t expect things to work out overnight.

If you were optimizing the pages on your website and optimized every single page on your site for the target keyword.

Do you think you’re going to rank #1 and start making $100,000 tomorrow?

If that was the case, you probably wouldn’t be reading this right now – you’d be lying on a beach in the tropics.

And the same goes for anyone trying to build an SEO business, whether that’s an in-house team, agency, freelancer, or even an SEO SaaS.

You’re going to have to put thousands of hours into your business before you even taste success.

You’ve heard the saying: “10,000 hours until perfection” – Malcom Gladwell.

It may not take you 10,000 hours to get to the #1 spot, but you’ll have to write dozens of blogs and build hundreds of links until you get it right. 

And it’s not one of those things that hits you at 3:00 AM in the morning and you suddenly figure everything out.

You learn over time. 

You have to put in a lot of hours and reps and trust me… it’s gonna suck for a long time.

A couple of years ago, when I was at my lowest, I thought of quitting SEO because I could never seem to put the pieces together all at once. 

I understood individual concepts, but couldn’t figure out how dozens of different parts of a tactic went together. 

And thought that SEO wasn’t my calling.

But I kept going – learning, testing, and iterating on every single thing I knew.

I was learning a bunch of individual tactics and as I started to connect the dots, I had this massive arsenal of tactics to attack the SERPs.

And FINALLY…

Everything started to make sense.

Again, like I said… 

If you optimize your pages today, you (likely) will not rank at the top of Google tomorrow.

SEO isn’t meant to be easy – but nothing good in life comes easy – you know that.

You have to do hundreds of little things right to rank #1 on Google: 

1. Build a simple site structure, implement robots.txt, set up canonicals & hreflang attributes (if international), stay on top of 404s & 301s, and so many other things along the way. 

2. Optimize all of your money/bottom of funnel pages.

3. Write high-quality blog content to build topical authority around each of those pages.

4. Build internal links to direct users & Google to other blogs and more importantly, your money pages, every single time you publish a new page. 

5. Build 5-10+ backlinks per month from other sites, running cold outbound campaigns or reaching out to journalists, only to pay a couple-hundred dollar fee just for a 3-word anchor with a link to your site.
   

And once you’ve done all of that….A huge new competitor comes in and wipes out all your positions.

Now you have to take them back. 

And if you add a new offer a few months later…you have to optimize that page AND build topical authority around it AND build backlinks for that cluster.

Do you see what I’m getting at here? 

NONE of these things can be done in a singular day or even a single month. 

You will have to do all of these things constantly for months on end just to turn a profit. 

We do this for every single brand that we work with on a daily basis: new content, new links, and new opportunities.

It’s an intensive operation at scale, even for one brand. We do it for 10+.

You need to understand that you’re not the only one competing for the #1 spot. 

There are trillions of pages out there and even in your industry, there are hundreds and thousands of competitors in some cases.

And when you finally get to the #1 spot and start making a shit ton of money in SEO… that will be the result of all the things you have been doing for the last 3, 6, and 12 months.

In conclusion:

If you give up SEO after six months, I’m telling you… you were so fucking close.

Seriously, you were really fucking close…

You were closer to success than you were to failure at the 6-month mark.

Everyone talks about the hockey stick curve where the graph is just flat…flat…flat and then takes off.

The flat part of the hockey stick is the part where nothing happens. Nobody likes the flat part.

But every day that you show up to write content, build links, and spy on competitors, you are inching closer to success.

And then one day, Google decides to reward you. 

That dreadfully flat line in Search Console starts to turn a bit more vertical.

David Goggins did not just wake up one day and instantly became the athlete he is today.

He put himself through physical and mental hell to become what he is today.

And only then he was the best. 

If you show up every day to build your brand, grow your agency, or whatever else it is that you’re working on, I guarantee you that it’s impossible to fail. 

If you want a detailed and simplified process of how you rank on your site at the top of Google without avoid making half of the mistakes that I made then this video is for you.

Until next time,

Kai Cromwell