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SEO Masterclass Brief I: Real-World Ranking Strategies from Scratch

Written by Alex L, founder of Inseomnia.

I’m almost 7 years in my SEO journey and blessed to have cut through the SEO noise early on. It actually happened right at the beginning when I started working on my first website (https://www.apnosphere.com) and business venture.

I had a limited budget for online marketing and a dislike (still do) for influencers. They can’t sell you BS if you don’t have the money to buy it and aren’t fond of the ones selling it.

I quickly learned that a website can rank No.1 on Google without a single backlink. Mine did in less than a year. I also realized that paying for Google Ads had no impact on SEO. That Google doesn’t blindly flag duplicate content. And that Semrush’s data was often delayed, inaccurate, and their premium services were unnecessary. Up to today, I haven’t paid them a single dollar.

Recently, as someone (who was previously exposed to the 50 dollars SEO guru knowledge) enrolled in an SEO course with me, I thought it would be fun to share some of our developments and how our team at Inseomnia approaches SEO education differently.

Our SEO course is what I call a hands-on liveranking course, and I don’t think there are many (maybe just a handful) SEO experts who do it this way. We pick a slightly competitive industry and location, select targeted keywords with good traffic potential, build a website from scratch, and make it rank on the first page for at least one of the keywords within 6–12 months.

For this project, we chose scubadiving as the industry and 3 locations in East Africa: South Africa, Seychelles, and Zanzibar.

We ensured there were at least 10 existing scuba diving centres already indexed, otherwise it would be too easy. Our primary target keywords in each country include “diving”, “scuba diving”, “diving courses”, “diving centre”, “fun dives”, and “discover scuba diving”, among others.

Scuba Diving South Africa

Although domain names are mostly irrelevant for SEO these days, we used the domains scubadivingsouthafrica.com, scubadivingseychelles.com, and scubadivingzanzibar.com as they were already part of our portfolio.

Scuba Diving Seychelles

We built the website template over the past 3 days, with content written using ChatGPT. I mention this because many SEO gurus teach that AI content doesn’t rank well. We’ll put this to test even though we already know the answer. We used the same template and content for all 3 websites, only changing the country names.

Scuba Diving Zanzibar

As of yesterday 15th October 2024, all the websites are up, indexed, and starting to climb the rankings. Let the game begin!

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