How to spend 90% less time on SEO

Helloooo content connoisseurs.

It’s Perrin from Content Bites.

I’ve been doing SEO for 15 years, and today I want to tell you how to avoid basically all of it (but still grow). Then I want to show you a gas station, of all places, that’s amassing a pretty nutty social following by posting goofy content.

• Main course: How to spend 90% less time on SEO

• Snack: How a gas station grew to 1M+ followers

• Morsels: Links from CMI, Sprout Social, SME, and more…

Let’s dig in.

Main Course: How to spend 90% less time on SEO

SEO can be an unwieldy beast.

Nobody really likes spending time on it. But as content marketers, it’s often a big part of our job.

And that kind of sucks.

Because we’ve usually got, like, 17 different content channels to think about, and pouring our heart and soul into SEO at the expense of our other efforts can feel (and can even actually be) a waste of time.

But here’s the thing (and this is good news)…

People also drastically overcomplicate SEO.

We all know why: the talking heads want to sell us courses or services or whatever, so it’s in their best interest to make SEO feel like a complicated, time-consuming thing.

And if we wanted to go all in on SEO, it might truly take tons and tons of time. I’ve had clients for whom SEO drove nearly all of their business, and it made sense to min/max all things SEO.

But for us regular ol’ content marketers juggling several different channels?

There’s an easier way.

We can 80/20 SEO. And in doing so, we can spend like 90% less time futzing with it and more time doing what we’re best at: creating content people love.

I’ve been doing SEO for 15 years and ran an SEO agency. We had lots and lots of success for nearly every client we ever serviced by not doing most of the stuff people will tell you to do & focusing almost entirely on the important stuff.

So please let me spill this mf’ing beans.

First: understand that to do SEO you only need 3 things.

Here’s the first and most important thing to understand about SEO.

You really and truly only need three things to grow the channel:

• Some kind of domain authority (i.e., backlinks)

• A clean technical foundation

• A steady stream of content

And here’s the even better news, for most businesses, you really only need to worry about on of those things.

Let’s dive into these one by one.

1. You need some kind of domain authority (but you usually don’t need to worry about it).

In order to do SEO at all, you need some kind of domain authority.

By that, I mean backlinks.

Domain authority is measured lots of different ways, but it’s usually some combination of the amount and quality of backlinks you.

You also want your authority to be growing.

At the very least, you don’t want it to be declining.

You can check your domain authority with tools like Ahrefs or SEM Rush (I prefer Ahrefs).

Here’s the thing, though…

For the VAST majority of businesses – simply because of regular business activities – authority will grow naturally on its own.

I’m saying this from years of experience taking sales calls. Truly, I’ve looked at the SEO of thousands of different companies, and in my estimation, something like 80% of legitimate businesses that have been in business for more than a couple of years have flat or growing domain authority.

So, check to make sure your company’s is growing, too.

And then… don’t worry about it.

Seriously. Link building is probably the most difficult part of SEO. If you already have links coming in naturally AND you want to find the 80/20 version of SEO, you hereby have my formal permission not to worry about links at all.

If you do need links, I recommend Dofollow.io (not an affiliate link).

If you have absolutely no budget and no links, it’s usually better to focus on other kinds of content marketing until you do have a bit of authority.

2. You need a clean technical foundation (…but it only takes about a week).

You also need a squeaky clean website (don’t worry, you won’t have to do this yourself either).

Not from a design perspective. And not from a coding perspective. But from a technical SEO perspective.

It’s different.

And there can be a lot of nuance to technical SEO.

But there’s some more good news here, too.

Unless your entire business relies on SEO, you can get 90% of the way there in about a month, and you can hire someone to do it for you.

Here’s the 80/20 version of technical SEO.

1. Buy one month of Ahrefs

2. Run a technical audit to get your site health score

3. Hire an intermediate SEO on UpWork to get your site health score to 90+

When hiring SEOs on UpWork, make sure they have a really good job history and an actual track record of gigs doing technical SEO.

Explain clearly that the ONLY metric for success is the Ahrefs site health score.

This should cost you about $500-$1,000 depending on the size of your website (i.e., number of pages) and number of issues.

DO NOT let them sell you anything else (they will try). Ahrefs site health score only.

Will you get all the nuance?

No.

Will you have the absolutely most optimization technical SEO setup?

No.

But will you have enough of a technical foundation not to worry about technical SEO for at least 6 months? YES.

So pay someone like $700 to get your site health score above 90… and then don’t worry about it.

The ONLY important note about technical SEO is to make sure you’re leveraging internal links (links on your website that point to other places on your website). If you feel like a page is especially important, point more internal links a it to show Google it’s important.

3. You need a steady stream of content.

So now, in almost all cases…

…we won’t have to worry about building links, AND we won’t have to worry about technical SEO.

Which means… we can focus on what we do best: creating content.

I know, I know.

Easier said than done.

And there’s no real way to shortcut great content (and no, I don’t recommend anything with AI currently, aside from, perhaps, research).

So there’s no way around having to do the actual creation, but conceptually, it’s pretty easy.

Here’s the very, very distilled version of my SEO content system:

• Target keywords that are relatively low difficulty

• Target keywords with high intent

• Target keywords with low volume to start

• Ramp up to higher publishing frequency, difficulty, and search volume as you get traction

I literally ran a whole SEO agency on this framework.

I use Ahrefs for keyword research.

Then, use the metrics from that bullet list to create a content calendar.

Of course, content creation takes time and effort, but we’re probably creating content every day anyway.

For SEO, we just need to make sure the content we publish on the website targets some good keywords.

If you want to grow SEO faster, publish more content targeting more keywords, and as you grow, target more and more difficult keywords.

Again, this is NOT the most optimal way to do this, but it is absolutely a good way to approach SEO if it’s just one part of your overall strategy, and you mostly want to make sure all channels are growing consistently.

How to use this TODAY.

1. Verify your company’s getting backlinks (it probably is); if it is, literally don’t worry about it

2. Pay someone on UpWork $500-$1,000 to get your Ahrefs site health score to 90+; do this 1-2 times a year but otherwise don’t worry about it

3. Focus all the rest of your time on publishing content targeting smart keywords

4. Measure and repeat

Snack: How a KwikTrip gas station grew to 1M+ followers by being goofballs

Most companies suck at social.

They don’t understand what people actually want to see. They don’t understand how people actually behave on social media.

They feel like an overcooked turkey: dry and stuffy.

But every once in a while… every once in a blue moon…

You come across a company who absolutely slays it.

KwikTrip is one of those brands.

It messes up deliverability if I put too many images in these emails, so I can’t just dump a bunch of screenshots in here, which is what I’d really like to do. So do me a favor, and just browse a few of KwikTrip’s social media accounts:

• Their Facebook

• Their TikTok

• Their Instagram

• Their Twitter

If you add up those accounts, they have 1,075,000+ followers on social media.

It’s not Kim Kardashian.

But guys, they’re a f*cking gas station.

Like with all social media, it can be tough to really reverse engineer, but I put together a list of what I think is making it work.

First, they abandoned any sense of corporate-ness.

They don’t care. They’re not selling anything. They’re just being a bunch of goofballs interacting with social media the way those platforms were designed to be used.

I do not think this would work with every brand. But why does it work here?

Because BRAND is the most important thing to them.

You can’t sell gas online.

You’re not going to give out discount codes to get people in your store to purchase stuff.

There’s no e-commerce play.

It’s a gas station. So the best possible scenario for you is that people recognize your brand on a road sign next to a bunch of your competitors.

The one thing KwikTrip is really great at is getting an ROI on fun.

Second, they hired a young social media team.

I’m not sure if everyone on this team is young, but it’s certainly true that the folks who appear in the videos are young.

And if you’re primarily going for exposure, brand, and fun – hiring people who are native to social media is almost always better hiring a stuffy 40-something with a billion years of experience.

KwikTrip seems to have hired young nerds and just let them do their thing.

Lastly, they mix memes and high-production-value content.

• Example of a meme-post that got 21k reactions

• Example of a high-production video

They post videos like that every once in a while, and they fill the negative space with memes that feel very inside-baseball to their customers.

It’s a brilliant mix of quality and quantity, and it contradicts the conventional wisdom that you need content continuity to be successful on social.

These guys just post whatever feels fun.

What to steal from KiwkTrip

• If you have any kind of ROI on brand, invest in reach & fun instead of raw ROI

• Hire people who are most native to the platforms that work for you

• Mix “pillar” social content with easy-to-produce memes

• Measure and repeat

Morsels: Content marketing links to help you grow

• Research Says These Two Choices Determine Your Content’s Shelf Life (link)

• 17 Top Programmatic Advertising Platforms to Use in 2023 (link)

• Getting Started With GA4: A Practical Approach (link)

• The Future of Email Marketing: Insights From 23 Content Marketing Experts (link)

• How SEOs and UX Designers Can Work Better Together (link)

• Consumer Buying Behavior and Marketing: What Does Our Data Say?

  (link)

• How to Batch Instagram Reels Content Efficiently (link)

That’s the issue.

If you missed last week’s issue, you can read it here: How I Grew a Dog Food Blog to 1.8M visits/year.

Go forth & conquer.

—Perrin