whale hello there

it has been a minute or 900,000 whoops

1. i have been busy with client work, which is cool
2. i got super duper stuck--SEO writer's block--for several months.

the client work has been great, 10/10, I love it (see the end of the email for more about that)

the stuckness... not so great. I decided to address this by doing the opposite of being stuck, and started a daily SEO newsletter.

each one covers one particular SEO news item or tip or whatever--it's like 500 words long and I've got a streak going of every weekday since February 27th.

this newsletter, Rank Theory, will still be weird and cover longform shit, what you've known and loved.

the daily newsletter will be a separate, different thing, and you can subscribe here if you want to hear me yell about an SEO news item every weekday: seo.beehiiv.com.

if you're new here, or if it's been a long, long time since you got one of these, here's a reminder that I always include a link to a freshly updated page of memes on my site (now at Ranks dot com) so you can a) click through and see some dope memes, and b) engage with the email in such a way that the email service provider doesn't think you're a deadbeat just cuz you use some email privacy (like me), and don't have to suffer through my reengagement campaign.

​click here for the memez.

What's Working In SEO in 2025, According to Sean

In my strong opinion there are three solid areas working in 2025 and I'm going to take you through them one at a time at (mostly) a high level.

1 - Acquisition SEO, Just Buy Your Way To Page One

This is specifically for brands with big ole budgets.

The idea is pretty simple:

• find sites that rank for the keywords that your target customers search for
  • ex. "ahrefs vs semrush"
• acquire those sites
• write "yes, semrush is overall the better SEO software" (if you're semrush)
• rinse/repeat.

This is actually something Semrush has been doing if you've been paying attention to their recent acquisitions.

You only need to look at the actual SERPs for "semrush vs ahrefs" to see it in action:

Semrush acquired Backlinko and Traffic Think Tank in the last few years.

Do you think Backlinko and Traffic Think Tank recommend Semrush over Ahrefs?

lol.

You can see the power of this when you look at SimilarWeb's list of referral traffic for Semrush:

Backlinko, ExplodingTopics, and SearchEngineLand were all acquired by Semrush.

10/10 execution.

As it relates to SEO, this is one of the best examples.

There are brands out there like Employer.com that just cannot stop acquiring brands in the jobs/HR space--and while it's really interesting to watch, they are not nailing the SEO/traffic part of it

(I've reached out to Jesse, CEO of Employer.com but I'm not cool enough to catch his attention in the inbox. Mad respect for Jesse, if anyone knows him please connect us, I could help them SO MUCH).

They own Employer.com, Recruiter.com, and Bench.co, which they just rescue-bought in late 2024.

Look at the traffic Bench is sending Employer.com:

Employer.com is not the largest site ever, so they don't have a ton of referral traffic

BUT STILL.

There's a million other examples.

Though it's not as strategically potent at what Semrush is doing, two of the top 10 traffic-referring domains for Healthline are Healthline-sibling-sites, owned by the same parent company:

Anyway, you get it.

Buy slices of pie and grow them to entire pies with strategic building and sharing of resources (you know, like how pie works in the real world...........)

I think this can be done a smaller scale (ask me about how I can help you find aged domains this way) if you don't have ginormo budgets, but obviously this plays super well for bigger companies.

You may also not be entirely shocked to know that this is the main service offering I've got going on, currently.

Soft pitch: go visit me @ Ranks.com if you wanna chat about whether this will work for your biz. Just book a call on the calendar.

I will FOR SURE be writing more about this particular tactic in the future, but for now let's move on to the second thing that's working in SEO in 2025:

2 - Have a Real Site That Offers A Real Service Or Product

This is the middle ground, the sexiest, curviest part of the bell curve.

If you have a site that isn't just trying to middle-man affiliates or shove ads down everyone's throat, but really offering a product you make or a service you've gone deep on, you'll probably do ok.

Or you'll get blasted to the shadow realm where a prehistoric beast covered in blood with the torn flesh of others hanging from its terrible jaws devours your heart FOR NO REASON.

Feels almost like a coin flip, not a great place to be. Google in 2025 will just murder a site that was 100% legit, unless it is a super huge authority, then it just keeps on ranking them even if they do the Bad Things.

But for the most part, if you're doing all the right things... writing good content (even if AI), building backlinks from sites Google loves, offering a service or product, things are probably going well.

One area where I keep seeing this idea reinforced is when I'm looking for sites to acquire in the cannabis space (for my acquisition SEO client in the canna industry they are so smart and cool), I consistently come across some random-ass dispensary in St. Louis or some outskirt of Boston that's ranking for like 33,000 keywords.

Why?

Because they're a real business selling real products, a real brand that real people really love.

Why tf is this regional dispensary ranking for these massive terms???

It's always because it's got that ecom vibe that Google's algo likes.

So if you've got a site in this area, you probably should:

• keep sending quality signals that you're really real
• pray to Poseidon who watches over the seas and the underwater internet cables that you're not an innocent bystander in a Google update (like the one rolling out today lol)
• keep building links to sites that Google likes (like, they're ranking for a lot of keywords and receive lots of traffic from those keywords, I feel very strongly about this--shout out to Grindstone for the framing)

Good luck, Hunger Games sign off for this section.

3 - Sink Into The Filth At The Bottom Of The World And Live Like The Fat Rat King Of Garbage Island

So this is like, the opposite of the other two.

I fully acknowledge there will be some white knights reading this that get their potatoes a little salty about the suggestion that doing some aggressive, less-than-white hat SEO is a perfectly legitimate (and effective) way to deal with ranking on Google in 2025.

But still. When life Google gives you lemons a completely nearly arbitrary system of ranking and destroying websites and people's livelihoods at their whim or the whim of an AI they use to rank things that even THEY don't really understand anymore, make lemonade embrace the darkness (but do no harm).

Which is to say:

• start projects you expect to lose in a few months
• take advantage of parasite SEO opportunities
• test things and multiply what works
• create lots of local projects where competition is small
• be aggressive in the short term.

This is actually the kind of stuff we talk about in the Advise Slack group that I co-own with Jacky Chou.

It's interesting to see all the shit people get up to, and all the tests and results Jacky gets.

Ex. he built a directory with Cursor and is emailing restaurants around his city with a "best of" badge and getting hella backlinks.

Still early days on Ahrefs but these are all very niche relevant links from real sites:

Not saying you should do this, but it is inspiring to see someone taking a lot of action and finding something that works and sharing it (then thinking about how you can apply this to your longer-term projects).

Anyway, yes this is a low-key pitch to get you to check out/join the Advise community, because there's a lot of cool, exciting shit going on if you're moving toward the "fuck it, YOLO" vibe of SEO, which, NGL... it's hard NOT to do after you see how people digging and digging and doing their thing gets fucked over, mostly randomly (not saying NO ONE deserves it, but I've been there, and it's devastating, and I only a little bit deserved it).

This is the "life is fleeting, everything is fleeting, get in and make your money (unless you're being a shitbird to other people--don't do anything that fucks over anyone else)" mindset.

I think there's a lot of opportunity here, obviously, why else would I have a community where this features prominently?

It's not just ALL like that in Advise, there's a lot of discussing legit SEO shit, but there's a lot of talk of local SEO, gaming Reddit, how to get out of the sandbox, sharing vetted service providers, etc.

It's a good place and I'll shut up about it for now.

So that's my take on the three areas of search that are working 10/10 right now in search.

Work With Me (If You Want To)

Couple of ways to work with me if you need some SEO help:

• Let me help you with Acquisition SEO (go here, book a call)
• Hit reply if you could use some consulting, I do that too
• ​Join advise​

~

Okay, that's it for my first email back.

There's a lot of shit I want to talk about--even outside of my daily newsletter, so hopefully I am properly unstuck and you'll hear from me again in a week or two. :)

As always, I'd love to hear from you NOW.

What did you think?

What are you seeing work super well in 2025 so far?

Hit reply and LMK!

until next time... (and hopefully a little sooner than last time)

sean

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