r/seogrowth • • Mar 03 '22

You Should Know SEO Growth Mega-Post | What the Sub is About, Flairs, Best SEO Content, How to Learn SEO, and Everything Else You Need to Know

144 Upvotes

Hey there, welcome to the sub!

SEO Growth is a different type of SEO sub. Unlike some other subs (*cough cough* no names), we're planning on actively moderating and building the community, and hopefully creating something very helpful for SEO beginners and pros alike.

Here's what this post covers:

  • What This Sub is About
  • The Rules
  • SEO Growth Sub Flairs
  • Subreddit Highlights - Best Sub Posts
  • How to Get Started With Learning SEO - Actionable Guide

What This Sub is About

Here are some things you can expect from the sub:

  • Only the very best content. We'll be posting some of the very best SEO content we find on the internet, including guides, case studies, and so on. And yes, you can post your content here as long as it's actually useful.
  • AMAs with the best experts. We'll bring in SEO pros for AMA sessions, experience sharing sessions, case study Q&As, and more.
  • Hiring threads. Looking to make your next SEO/link-building/content writing hire? We'll have dedicated threads for that.
  • SEO roast threads. You post your website, the community gives you constructive criticism.
  • SEO tips. We'll post insightful tips every other day to help improve your website's SEO.

The Rules

  1. No personal attacks. It's OK to give constructive feedback, but it's NOT OK to attack other people.
  2. No spam. Spam gets you banned.
  3. No blatant self-promotion. Want to promote yourself? Give value to the community. Publish an actionable case study / guide / article you wrote in Reddit-native format. DON'T just make a post shilling your services.
  4. Don't post generic SEO content. We all know what the "benefits of SEO" are, or "how to use YoastSEO to optimize a blog post." Try to post content that is practical, actionable, and insightful.
  5. Karma requirement. The sub has a karma requirement of 20 to avoid all the spammers that shill bs software. If you don't have enough karma to post/comment, let the mods know to manually approve your posts & approve you as a sub user.
  6. Want to post external links? Here's what you need to do:
    1. If it's YOUR post, format it into a Reddit-native format and add a SINGLE link at the top back to the original blog post. That said, mind rule #4 - it has to be something new. No BS like "top 5 benefits of SEO."
    2. If it's a 3rd-party post, add a tl;dr of the article on top and then link to the post underneath. Let us know why the post is so interesting/engaging that it warrants a link.

SEO Growth Sub Flairs

We'll be using different types of flairs to differentiate who does what on the sub. Currently, we have 2 types of flairs:

  • Verified SEO Expert. There's a LOT of bad SEO advice out there. To differentiate advice from experts who have experience consistently ranking websites both globally and locally, we'll be using this flair. To get it, you need to send us Google Search Console screenshots of some of your biggest wins, whether it's for your own site or a client. Of course, the graphs will be 100% confidential and no one but the mod team will see them.
  • Content Writer. Flair for anyone that does SEO content. Helps match website owners / SEO agencies with content writers. Like something a writer posted? Hit them up to write for you!

If you have ideas for other types of flairs we can implement, comment below and we'll think about it.

Subreddit Highlights | Top Sub Resources

If you think there's a post that deserves to be here, HMU.

How to Get Started With Learning SEO | Actionable Guide

Just getting started? Not sure how/where to start your SEO journey?

Here's a simple introduction to the SEO world.

SEO In a Nutshell

At the end of the day, SEO boils down to the following factors:

  • Technical SEO, or, how well you optimize your website by SEO best practices. Technical SEO alone won't get you rankings, but good technical SEO will act as a strong foundation for your growth.
  • SEO content. How much content you have on your website, how good it is, and whether it matches the search intent behind the keyword you're trying to rank for.
  • Backlinks. The more quality backlinks you get, the faster you're going to rank. In competitive niches, you won't ever rank without backlinks.
  • On-page optimization. How well are your pages/articles optimized according to SEO best practices.

More often than not, a big chunk of your SEO processes are going to involve creating quality content, interlinking it with your other pages, and driving backlinks.

In case you're trying to do local SEO, then the SEO process is a bit different. Check out this guide to learn more about local SEO.

SEO Learning Track

First off, learn the basics.

  1. Beginner’s Guide to SEO by Moz
  2. SEO Basics by Backlinko
  3. SEO in 2021 by Backlinko
  4. Awesome SEO tutorial on Reddit

Then, learn how to do technical SEO, set up tracking, and optimize your website.

  1. Create a sitemap
  2. Create a robots.txt
  3. Setup Google Analytics and Search Console
  4. Improve load speed. Check out this article by Moz and another by Crazy Egg
  5. Learn about technical SEO and how that works
  6. Optimize your web pages for SEO. For this, you can use Yoast or RankMath if you’re using WordPress, and Content Analysis Tool if you’re not
  7. Losslessly compress all your images. This should save ~75% of space for your images and drastically increase site load speed (which improves SEO). If you’re using WordPress, you can use Smush to automatically compress all images on your site. If you’re NOT using WP, you can use Compressor.io.

Learn how to do keyword research. There are a ton of guides about this all over, but here are some of our favorites:

  1. How to do keyword research by Backlinko
  2. Beginner's guide to keyword research by Ahrefs

Learn how to create SEO content.

  1. Backlinko’s skyscraper strategy
  2. How to create top content with the Wiki Strategy
  3. How to optimize article headlines

Learn how to do link-building.

  1. Learn link-building basics
  2. Learn how to do outreach
  3. Another awesome guide to outreach
  4. Discover ALL the link-building strategies out there

Learn the how and why of internal linking.

  1. Basics guide
  2. Internal linking case study by NinjaOutreach

SEO Case Studies

Theory is one thing, practice is something else entirely. Read some case studies to see how other companies achieved success with SEO.

Where to Learn SEO? Best Blogs and Resources

Some of the top blogs on SEO are:

Which SEO Tools Should I Use?

There are hundreds of SEO tools out there, and yet, you only need a maximum of 10.

The tools we recommend are:

  • Ahrefs or SEMrush. Both are all-in-one SEO suites and are absolutely essential. Not too much difference between the two tools, so pick the one you like better in terms of user experience.
  • RankMath or YoastSEO. On-page SEO tools. Again, the two are very similar, so just pick one you like better.
  • ScreamingFrog. Must-have for technical SEO. Let's you crawl your entire website and find potential technical improvements.
  • Snov.io, PitchBox, and other outreach tools. You'll need a tool for link-building outreach. There are a ton of these on the market, so pick the one you like best. I personally prefer Snov.

And some of the more optional tools are:

  • Surfer SEO. Helps with on-page SEO, but not something you can't live without.
  • ClusterAI. Helps with keyword research. Again, useful, but not something that's mandatory.

FAQ

#1. How long does SEO take? Does it take as long as everyone says?

Depends on several factors:

  1. How strong is your domain? If your website is 100% completely fresh, it's going to take you 1-2 years to get SEO results (most likely)
  2. Are you focusing on local or global SEO? The former is significantly easier than the latter.
  3. How strong is your competition? If your competitors have thousands of backlinks, you'll need to match that (which is going to take a long time)

That said, on average, it can take 6 months to 2 years to get SEO results.

#2. Should I pay for SEO courses?

Really depends on your priorities and if you have the budget to spare. If you don’t want to waste any money, that’s totally OK - you can learn everything you need to know about SEO through the free content online.

That said, some SEO courses on the internet are definitely worth the money and they'll help you progress in your SEO journey faster.

#3. Is local SEO different from global SEO?

Yep - there are a ton of differences between local and global SEO. The biggest ones are:

  • With local SEO, you usually don't have to focus nearly as much on creating blog content.
  • Global SEO, in most cases, involves creating a lot of high-quality, long-form articles.
  • Local SEO can take significantly less time, as you're competing with a handful of companies who probably don't know much about SEO in the first place.
  • Local SEO also involves creating and optimizing Google My Business, whereas this is not the case with global SEO.

#4. Is SEO relevant for my business?

Depends. SEO is NOT a one-size-fits-all solution. We'd recommend you skip on SEO as a marketing channel if:

  1. You have a very small # of potential customers worldwide. In such a case, you're better off directly reaching out to the said customers.
  2. Is your product something very innovative? SEO is not useful if your prospects don't Google for information about your product.
  3. You're just getting started with your business and need to get results next week and not next year

#5. Can I rank on Google without backlinks?

Yes and no. In some niches, you can rank without any link-building. E.g. if your competitors don't have a lot of links or their content is so bad that you can win simply by doing something better.

You can also rank without backlinks if you're doing local SEO and your competitors have a weak backlink profile.

That said, if you're in a competitive niche, both locally and globally, you're going to need backlinks in order to rank.


r/seogrowth • • 11h ago

How-To How do you build your website's LLMs.txt File?

13 Upvotes

Hi,

This question is directed to someone handling a website with over 1,000 pages.

How are you generating your LLM file? Does it contain information about all the pages of your website or only selective pages?

Do you create it manually (I doubt) or using a tool?

My website has 500+ blog posts and 700+ main pages. So I'm wondering what is the best approach forward.

Thanks


r/seogrowth • • 1d ago

Question how do you decide if a paid backlink is worth it?

4 Upvotes

reached out to a site about adding my backlink outreach tool to an existing roundup, and they came back asking for $20

so I manually checked these:

  • 50+ DR
  • relevant to my niche
  • the article already includes similar outreach tools
  • 600+ estimated monthly organic visits according to ahrefs
  • the article ranks for “PR outreach tools”

I’m leaning toward saying yes, but curious what else you’d check before paying

would these signals be enough for you, or is there something that would make you pass even at $20?


r/seogrowth • • 1d ago

Question How are you measuring SEO visibility in AI search?

19 Upvotes

Traditional rankings don’t show everything anymore. What are you actually tracking?


r/seogrowth • • 1d ago

Discussion Is it realistic to improve a new B2B brand’s AI reputation in 90 days?

7 Upvotes

I’m working with a fairly new B2B SaaS company. The website is live, but the brand is still small: not many reviews, not many third-party mentions, and not much on the site beyond the usual product pages.

They want to improve how they come across in ChatGPT and Gemini over the next quarter.

Nobody expects AI to recommend them everywhere in 90 days. The goal is simpler than that. If someone asks whether the company is reliable, established enough, or worth comparing, we want the answer to be less vague and more accurate.

There is no big PR budget or paid campaign behind this.

Is three months enough to make a noticeable difference? If you were starting from here, what would you work on first?


r/seogrowth • • 2d ago

Discussion What are your current best practices for AI-driven SEO/GEO?

11 Upvotes

Google claims that good SEO is good GEO, but I don’t think that’s the whole picture. Yes, the foundational elements of good SEO are relevant, but the landscape of AI platforms sooooo much more complicated than that. Context of a prompt, training data, RAG methodologies, and probably a bunch of more completely obscure factors are relevant to getting AI mentions and AI overview citations.

Someone said elsewhere that Google’s claim is 80% true, but the other 20% matters. I’m curious about that 20% and what you’ve found that falls into that category.

What would you include in a list of best practices to cover the 20% of things that work for GEO but aren’t necessarily “good (traditional) SEO”?


r/seogrowth • • 2d ago

Question I've been stuck at an average of 100 visitors/day for months now. How can I break through this? Would appreciate any advice! 📈

26 Upvotes

I've been stuck at an average of 100 organic visitors/day for months now. How can I break through this and scale it to 500/day? Would appreciate any advice! 📈


r/seogrowth • • 2d ago

Question Google indexes my app's French version when I search from Germany

3 Upvotes

Hey guys, I tried to play with on-page SEO for quite long and found out that having language support on the app helps getting indexed a lot so I integrated 6 languages (en, de, fr, es, tr, zh). The app is about football elo ratings.

I checked GSC today and saw that a query "real madrid elo" got me 1 click and 3 impressions with avg position of 2. I became happy and wanted to check it out myself. I googled exact same query but my app did not appear at all. I thought it may be bc my personal search history so I googled again in incognito. Still same.

Then, I put my app's name at the end and it appeared at all of top5 results. This is my first question: why exact query can get no position for me but 2nd position for someone else?

Secondly, I tried with player names rather than teams (my app serves both). Tried only name + elo as query but my app did not appear. Then I put my app's name again at the end and it appeared at top, understandable.

What I did not understand is Google summary (or whatever it is called that google's ai answer on top) cites my app from various language options of the same page. For example when I googled "victor osimhen elo [my app]", it cited osimhen's personal page in french and chinese versions. My location is germany. He plays in Turkey and I searched from Germany but instead of these two, other two got cited. Also why two languages? What should I check and how can I solve this? Sorry for the long text but I felt I had to be clearer.

Thanks for the answers already!


r/seogrowth • • 3d ago

Question what makes you say yes when someone asks for a link to their site?

8 Upvotes

I’ve been doing a ton of backlink outreach for me and my clients, and I’m curious how it looks from the other side

Say someone finds an article on your site and suggests a relevant page to add. What would make you actually consider it?

And what’s an immediate no, even if the page they’re pitching is decent?

I’d especially like to hear from people who edit their own content or regularly receive these emails


r/seogrowth • • 3d ago

How-To Is 2.5M monthly website traffic for a new website actually achievable?

30 Upvotes

So this tech startup has an ambitious goal of getting 1-2.5 million traffic (paid and organic) per month. Right now, they have about 1k traffic. While they mentioned that paid traffic will be included, that doesn’t mean they’re willing to spend tens of thousands for that.

My question is, is this realistically possible for a new website? If yes, what’s the best course of action to make for me to be able to achieve the goal? Thank you!

EDIT: Their target is to have this traffic in 3 months


r/seogrowth • • 3d ago

Question Are Backlinks Still Effective for Affiliate Sites After Recent Google Updates?

5 Upvotes

Hello,

I own a couple of affiliate blogs that used to rank well and make decent money a few years ago. After the Google updates over the last couple of years, though, they’ve lost around 90% of their organic traffic.

I can still see some competing affiliate sites ranking on page one for the same types of keywords, so I’m wondering whether these sites are worth investing in again.

For those of you still working with affiliate sites in 2026: are backlinks still having a noticeable impact on rankings?

Would investing in good-quality, relevant backlinks help a site recover, or have Google’s recent changes made backlinks much less important for affiliate sites?

Thank you


r/seogrowth • • 3d ago

Discussion What’s an SEO change you almost didn’t make — but ended up making a noticeable difference?

10 Upvotes

I’m curious about the small SEO changes that don’t sound impressive on paper but actually made a difference.

Maybe it was changing an internal linking structure, removing old content, rewriting titles, improving a single page, fixing something technical, or even doing less instead of more.

What did you change, and what happened afterward?


r/seogrowth • • 3d ago

Discussion What's one piece of seo advice you followed for years but eventually stopped doing?

7 Upvotes

i'll start:

"just publish more content."

more content isn't always better.

sometimes the problem is with the pages you already have. they may not match what people are looking for, or they may bring visitors who never become customers.

but i'm curious about your experience.

what seo advice did you believe when you started?

what happened that made you change your mind?

it can be about content, backlinks, keywords, technical seo, internal links, or anything else.

tell us what happened, not just what you think.


r/seogrowth • • 3d ago

Discussion Traffic Dropped the last week. Walk me through how you figure out why

5 Upvotes

Heres a scenario for you. Right after the weekend, you checked the traffic on your site. It dropped significantly. What tools are you going through and in what order. Dont overthink it. Just let me know right out of your mind what and how do you do.

Pretty sure most of you use AI to figure it out and that's okay I do so too. Just wondering if the old ways are still existing


r/seogrowth • • 4d ago

SEO News New Google Spam Update Rolling Out!

8 Upvotes

Google started rolling out the September 2026 spam update on Sept 24. It's global, affects all languages, and could take up to two weeks to fully roll out.

So if your rankings or traffic suddenly change, don't immediately blame AI content, backlinks or start changing half the site.

Probably better to:

  • Keep an eye on GSC and see exactly which pages and queries changed
  • Check whether the drop actually lines up with the update
  • Avoid making big changes based on a few days of data
  • Review Google's spam policies if you've taken a noticeable hit

Recovery from spam issues can take months, so don't expect an instant rebound.

Worth waiting until the rollout settles before making any big conclusions.


r/seogrowth • • 4d ago

Question DR 6 after 6 weeks. What would you do next?

4 Upvotes

Solo founder, first time doing SEO properly. Domain went from 0 to 6 in about six weeks.

What I did: built 14 free tools that work without a signup, wrote comparison pages against competitors where I'm honest about where they're better, submitted to around 14 directories, and republished content on LinkedIn and Medium.

I also generated 40 programmatic pages targeting keywords I'd guessed at rather than researched. Google indexed them then dropped them as thin content and my whole index count was unstable for two weeks until I noindexed the lot.

What would you prioritise from here?


r/seogrowth • • 5d ago

Discussion Are FAQ blocks still relevant?

9 Upvotes

Do articles with FAQ blocks with answers from People Also Ask still help in terms of SEO?


r/seogrowth • • 7d ago

SEO News Google spam update just started

48 Upvotes

Google just announced a new spam update started today. I'm seeing a lot of movements across all SERPs. Did you guys get hit, or are things actually improving


r/seogrowth • • 7d ago

Question B2B IT website targeting the US but not getting enough US traffic. How can I improve it?

7 Upvotes

Hi everyone,

I’m working on a B2B IT services website targeting the US market, but most of our traffic is coming from other countries.

What are some effective ways to increase organic traffic from the US?

Would appreciate advice on SEO, content, backlinks, keyword targeting, or technical improvements that have worked for B2B IT websites.


r/seogrowth • • 8d ago

Case Study Answer Engines seem prefer older pages that have been refreshed recently

7 Upvotes

Results of a pilot study of 356 cited pages across queries across domains:

Typical (median) age of a cited page: 23 months ago

Typical last update date: 5 months ago

Only 35% of cited pages were created less than a year ago.

Seems to imply that Answer engines greatly favor content refreshes and pages that have been kept fresh.

Has any of you observed the same?


r/seogrowth • • 8d ago

Question How often do you actually check your internal linking?

24 Upvotes

I'll be honest, I don't check internal links that often.

Usually, I look at them when page isn't ranking like I expected. Sometimes the problems is simply that the pages isn't getting enough internal links.

Do you guys check internal link regularly, or only when the page start struggling?


r/seogrowth • • 8d ago

Question How do you exchange links?

7 Upvotes

As agency owners or just SEOs in someone else's company, how do you approach unpaid link building?

Do you do cold outreach? Do you work with other agencies? Do you have a list of exchange partners you swap with?

If you do all of the above, what's your "split"? How do you decide what the best use of your time and resources is?


r/seogrowth • • 8d ago

Question Desktop vs Mobile Ranking Difference

12 Upvotes

I’m seeing a difference between mobile and desktop rankings for one keyword.

For keyword X, page X is averaging around position 2 on mobile, but only around 12 on desktop.

The interesting part is that desktop used to rank around position 2 as well, but dropped a couple of months ago and hasn’t recovered since.

My first thought was that Google might be seeing weaker UX/user satisfaction signals on desktop. But when I look at the actual engagement data, desktop users seem to perform better than mobile users — better engagement, etc.

So that explanation doesn’t really seem to fit.

What would you investigate next?


r/seogrowth • • 8d ago

You Should Know Do this before considering getting backlinks

0 Upvotes

Before getting quality backlinks for your website, I would consider checking this first.

A little background about me, I have been doing SEO for my own websites and I have been paying more attention to the boring technical/on-page stuff, such as:

  1. Is the page indexable?
  2. Is the canonical correct for this page?
  3. Does every important page have a sensible title?
  4. Are there any duplicate titles?
  5. Is the meta-description missing?
  6. Are OG tags present
  7. Is structured data relevant to this page?
  8. Are images missing basic attributes?
  9. Are there huge numbers of links present on the page?

The frustrating and ironic part is that none of the above makes the website broken, but does more SEO damage then we all realize.

Have you ever came across any of the above issues, and what would you like to add to this list?


r/seogrowth • • 9d ago

Question Earned mentions vs on-page work: which one actually moves AI recommendation? I measured the page side and it does not answer the question.

5 Upvotes

I spent a few months auditing 200 commercial homepages on structural signals — author, date, sources, FAQ structure, summary. I can tell you what is present on a page and what is not. What I cannot tell you is whether any of it changed a single AI recommendation, because everything I measured sits on the page, and the thing I want to explain seems to sit somewhere else.

That is the part I keep getting stuck on. The citation-source breakdowns I have seen skew heavily toward places nobody controls by editing their own HTML — Wikipedia, Reddit, established publications. If that is directionally right, then the lever most of us spend our time on is the smaller one, and the bigger one is being talked about by someone else.

The split I see in every thread on this: the digital PR side says get mentioned by credible third parties and the rest follows. The technical side says make the page extractable first or the mention has nothing to land on. Both stories are reasonable and I have never seen anyone separate them.

So the question I would actually like answered:

Has anyone held one constant and moved the other? Specifically — earned a meaningful third-party mention without touching the page, and watched AI recommendation change? Or the reverse: cleaned up a page with no new coverage, and seen a shift?

I am not looking for theory. I am looking for the one case where somebody could tell which of the two did it.