The Ultimate SEO Strategy for 2025
I’m going to show you how to develop an SEO strategy that will help you achieve results like this, and this will work even if you’re new to SEO or a seasoned SEO pro. I’m Nathan Gotch, an SEO professional with over a decade of experience leading hundreds of successful SEO campaigns. I’m also the founder of Gotch SEO Academy and Rankability. If you’re excited to finally crush your SEO competition, like this video right now, and let’s dive right in.
So, first, what is an SEO strategy? An effective SEO strategy should be unique to your specific situation. You’re fighting a war in Google against competitors, and every keyword you try to rank for is an independent battle that requires a unique approach. This brings me to step one in your SEO strategy: only pick battles you can win.
If you’re already ranking for some keywords, go to SEMrush, enter your domain, go to Organic Research, click on Positions, then use the dropdown and enter a custom range of 2 to 15. Filter by search volume to only show keywords with over 100 searches per month. Next, click on the KD filter and select “Very Easy.” Now, click Intend and select commercial and transactional keywords. At this point, you should have low-competition keywords with good search demand and a high probability of conversion.
Now, look at the keywords and pick one that closely matches your products or services. For example, I might choose “SEO Training Denver” because my business offers SEO training. Click on the keyword to open the overview and scroll down to the SERP analysis. Go to the Domain tab. SEMrush will show you the average domain authority score, which is crucial because the KD metric in SEMrush only considers backlinks on the page level, not the domain’s overall strength.
To qualify, look for domains ranking with lower authority scores than yours. In my example, four domains have a lower authority score than mine. Usually, this keyword would pass the test, but there’s a nuance to consider: domain-level relevance. For example, BoulderSEOMarketing.com is ranking #1 for “SEO Training Denver” because it’s highly relevant to the area. Domain relevance can be a big advantage, even if your domain has higher authority.
Once you’ve selected a keyword, move to step two: exploit your competitors’ weaknesses. Open your top competitors’ pages for the keyword and note their strengths and weaknesses. For example, when I wanted to rank for “Best SEO Books,” I saw most top-ranking pages were just basic lists of books found on Amazon. So I bought 26 top SEO books, read them, and created a unique content asset ranking them based on my experience. This page has consistently ranked in the top three for years.
Key takeaway: study your competitors to come up with a unique angle that hasn’t been done. You can use ChatGPT to brainstorm unique angles with prompts. Once you’ve found your angle, develop a relevant content asset. Go to Rankability, start your 7-day free trial, enter your keyword, and use the content optimizer to create an outline and build an SEO content brief.
Just to review, the SEO strategy so far includes: 1) Only pick battles you can win, 2) Find a unique angle for your keyword, and 3) Create content with NLP in mind for maximum relevance.
Now, step three is building an SEO moat, a concept popularized by Warren Buffett. In SEO, a moat is your competitive advantage that will protect your rankings. There are three pillars to building an SEO moat for a business: topic authority, brand building, and a strong backlink profile.
First, to build topic authority, go to SEMrush, enter a URL ranking for some keywords, go to Organic Research, and select positions 51 to 100. These keywords are what I call clustering opportunities. For example, my SEO books post ranks 65 for “Art of SEO Book,” but since it isn’t relevant enough to rank well, I’d create a dedicated page just for this term. Repeat this process for all relevant keywords. Every asset you build supports your primary asset through topic support and internal linking.
The second pillar is building an actual brand. To measure brand strength, look at branded searches in SEMrush. Ideally, you’ll see search volume for your brand. Build brand awareness by using an omnipresent strategy. Go where your audience lives—use social media, podcasts, newsletters, and PR tactics to build brand equity. Recently, Google updates have shown that real businesses with a broad presence perform better in SEO.
Finally, the third pillar is your backlink profile. Combine brand strength with overall domain authority to reduce SERP volatility and penalty risk. The question is, how do you build site authority? One scalable way to get backlinks is through linkable assets that attract passive links.
Here are three techniques to create linkable assets:
- Acquire free tools – Find niche tools with quality backlink profiles, negotiate to acquire them, and host them on your domain.
- Create free tools – ChatGPT can help you develop simple tools. For example, enter a prompt in ChatGPT, and it can create HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for a basic tool. Test it, refine it, and publish.
- Create data-driven content – Develop unique assets like case studies, which can earn you high-authority backlinks naturally.
That’s how you create an SEO strategy that will truly work. If you found this video helpful, please like and subscribe because I have more awesome videos coming soon. Thank you so much for watching!
