Maricielo Solis, founder of BLENDtw, studied the inner workings of how SEO works to elevate her platform for college students. BLENDtw is the leading community for Gen Z, covering college life, wellness and culture. She used key SEO metrics to grow a seven-figure platform.
Appearing on page one of Google search rankings doesn’t happen overnight. Strategy and consistency are vital to the beginning stages of increased awareness. Additionally, patience is required to achieve long-term goals in marketing and sales. Google currently holds 92.58% of the total search engine market share, and 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine.
“I had spent all my savings and spent about $10,000 in hiring all these writers and making the publication prettier,” she explains. “I didn’t know why we weren’t getting the traction that we got four months ago with one particular story. I started realizing that I was doing something wrong. I was doing everything wrong because I didn’t know how the publishing world worked… I then understood that I was completely missing SEO. So for you to create content that ranks on Google, there are specific guidelines that you have to follow… I applied all that framework to my website. And it took off. We went from having 10,000 readers per month to having 10,000 readers per day. We started consistently making $10,000 in ad network every month to $100,000 in affiliate marketing. Once we knew how to use it, the website took off.”
Google values websites that demonstrate expertise, authority and trustworthiness (EAT) because its priority is to provide accurate information and answer the concerns of users searching for a specific query. Google always rewards EAT content with higher rankings on the algorithm. This type of content includes having clear expertise in the topic you are writing about, primary research such as data, polls, graphs and case studies, and unique images and videos that add value to the reader.
New publishers’ number one mistake is that they overuse keywords in their articles. Doing this frequently can hurt your rankings on Google, making it seem like you are spamming people. Instead of using the same keyword in an article multiple times, focus on using variations of that keyword.
Additionally, do not rely on AI tools to write content. The quality of the content is low and will hurt your rankings. AI tools are good at telling someone how to do something but can’t show someone how to do something. Focus on quality content with real-life examples. Experts will become more critical in the next year.
The Core Web Vitals metrics are more critical than ever with the latest Google updates since they are a fundamental part of the user experience. For example, suppose you are trying to leverage SEO to bring organic traffic to your website. In that case, monitoring the Google search console regularly to identify issues affecting pages on your website is essential. A url with good Core Web Vitals will give you an advantage over your competitors.
