Business Owners Guide to SEO in 2025

Raj: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. Today we have Jabez, a good friend of mine, and he's a serial entrepreneur, and he works on SEO, helps them understand how to actually move forward and build your business online.

He is the man who has connections all over the world. He just did a great SEO conference in Chiang Mai. He's going to do it in London, next, in June or July. Great to meet you, Jabez, especially during this world changing times, isn't it, for online businesses?

Jabez: Absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks for having me here, Raj. I appreciate that.

Raj: Thank you, Jabez, for joining and taking time to speak to business owners. We do not know how to go about SEO, right now, to be honest. I've been in this field for so long now, and SEO is a hard nut to crack, isn't it?

More and more, people are seeing their business sites are being pushed down because of the AI. You know, the bubble that we have at the top just gives AI answers.

So, what is the role of SEO now? How can we go about still being relevant in this age?

Jabez: I mean, with this advent of AI and the whole, especially last two years, the whole search engine scenario, the SERPs are the results that we see on Google. That's what SERPs are called. Everything is changing. With AI, things are changing, but I would say with AI tools, things are just getting more helpful to rank your business on various search engines.

You have more tools. Now, you have access to cheaper, but nicer tools that can guide you to create good strategies and rank your sites properly on ... via search engines.

Raj: Let's say a business owner is coming to promote their business. There is a rule that you need to follow by search engines. They have set a standard to build a website, right? So, you build a website accordingly, and you put it out there.

Other than that, what is the thing that a business owner needs to do? People talk about keywords, backlinks. What is relevant now?

Jabez: So, with SEO, my approach has always been to not overcomplicate things. Stick to basics and just keep putting in the effort. Don't let your website sit idle without any content. So, let's just start with- you already covered it- the basics. The first thing you do is establish in front of Google, or via search engines, that you are a real person running a real business.

Especially in the last two years, Google has been very strict with websites, especially affiliate websites, that were being run under a fake persona. So, Google released an update call that hammered sites that didn't have EAT (EEAT - Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).

Basically, calculates or measures various factors, [00:03:00] trust factors to make sure that you are a real person, you have authority, you have trust on that particular subject matter.

So, step one, establish it very clearly that you are a real person running a real business. So, have all your profiles, social profiles, all your Google map profiles, everything set up properly.

Then after that, make sure your website's tech setup is neat, easy to maintain, right? Don't overcomplicate and have a setup that you yourself cannot update on your own. So, as basic as- just use WordPress because WordPress is easy to maintain. Usually, it's fast as well. And so have a good hosting, have a good CMS, keep all the code light and clean so it's fast, and then, after that, work on content.

Even if you don't have a big budget, keep producing quality content that will help you get discovered. So, don't go too broad, stick to your niche, and stick to your business and figure out what are the kind of articles that my possible target audience will search for, and then, eventually, find you.

A good example I'll give you is- a lot of agencies, a lot of SEO agencies I've seen, they publish articles related to name ideas for a new company in XYZ sector. Name ideas for, let's say, plumbers or plumbing company, name ideas for a solar panel company. So, basically, they're really top of the funnel queries that new businesses will search for, and they will discover you in that way.

Okay, here's a SEO agency which I may need to find later, down the road. So, you think of creative ways of how you are going to come in front of your audience. So, those kinds of keywords you target; you create. Now, you have a lot of AI tools. Or you can hire a good consultant to help you create what we call the topical map.

Basically, topical map is, you can say, an advanced version of doing keyword research, but it maps out all the topics about which you need to write and publish on your website. So, to summarize, keep it clean, light, fast. For your website- do research for topics that you are going to write for your website.

Plan out for at least six months in advance or a year in advance. Plan out like these are the 50, 100, 200 articles that I'm going to publish, and then write good quality content. Don't copy-paste just straight up what ChatGPT is giving you. Research well and write content that will actually help your readers, and that's it.

So, [00:06:00] whether that content is produced via AI or written by an actual person, the end goal, is it going to help the reader? So, that's the 80-20 of the SEO strategy that to follow right now.

Raj: That's great. Is there a tool a business owner can use right now to see if their website is doing well? Like, I know there are many tools that exist, but what is the best one right now for small business owners to use or medium sized business owners to use to see how they're doing.

Jabez: For SEO, the number one tool I would say is Ahrefs- a h r e f s- ahrefs.com. I would say, yeah, that's the all-in-one tool that you need for SEO. If there's only one tool you had to, I had to pick for SEO, hands-down, that would be Ahrefs. That will give you everything. That will show you what your competitor's doing. That will show you what you need to do.

That will show you how to plan for keywords, what kind of topics are working, what kind of topics or keywords have the potential to get a lot of traffic, everything. So, from planning to execution, to research, to competitor analysis, everything in one place. And that's Ahrefs.

Raj: What's link building? How does link building even work?

Jabez: Link building or backlinks- you can see it as the fuel for your engine. So, if your website is the engine, backlinks are the fuel for it. So, with search engine, like, with the amount of content out there on the internet, the more backlinks a website gets, it gives the content an upvote that this is of high quality or, it's almost like a voting system- the backlinks for search engines.

So, the more backlinks our website or our content gets, the higher its ranking goes up. But then, with backlinks, you have to now see the quality of backlinks. Earlier, things were different when you could just, I would say 10 years ago, you can publish any kind of backlinks on any site. For those who don't know what backlinks are- backlinks are, you can say, like citations, or it's, let's say, if Raj has a website and I have a website as well. When Raj publishes an article on his site, he mentions my website, as a resource that for more details you can check out Jabez's website using this link, and he adds my hyperlink.

That's a back link. So, that's a back link for me on Raj's best website. And then, in terms of the use for SEO, [00:09:00] as I mentioned, the more backlinks a website gets- the more quality backlinks a website gets- the higher it's ranking. It's ranking goes up.

Raj: So, it's almost like someone is talking about you to others. So, just like in a real world, my friends are just speaking about some topic and they're referring to some person. So, the same- backlink is doing the same. It's talking between two websites.

Jabez: Exactly. And you have to add my link there. Like when people are talking on various blogs, they need to add the link. Just adding the name is not enough. They have to add the link where you can click and then come to my website. That's how it's counted as a proper vote.

And just as you said, the more people talk about you, now it's also important that the more trustworthy people talk about me, and that's when my credibility goes even further up.

So, it used to be easier in terms of you can place backlinks on any site that doesn't get traffic, or any small random site, but now Google's algo (algorithm) has evolved and you need to make sure that your backlinks are placed in high quality websites.

Raj: So, if some, let's say for annoying reasons, someone want to bring down my ranking. If they talk about me in all the bad sites, will my ranking go down?

Jabez: Negative. It's called negative SEO, and it's a thing. Google keeps denying it, and will keep saying that we can ignore bad links, but as of now, till date, we do see negative SEO happening. We do see spam links being targeted towards your competitors.

Yeah, that's a thing. There are a bunch of competitive niches where people, that's how people try, try to come up by pushing the competitors down.

Raj: Is there a way to block those negative links coming towards your site?

Jabez: So, you can do that. There's something called 'disavow file'. So, basically, what you can do, first of all, you need to use a tool like Ahrefs, or you can even use Google Search Console to see all the spammy links that are coming to your site.

You copy all those links, put it on a txt file, and there's a format in which you need to save all those. You need to create that .txt file and then, within your Google search console, you upload that .txt file with a list of all the spammy domains that have come towards your site.

Basically, that tells Google that I'm not building these links. It's like spam that's being directed towards me, so I want Google to ignore these links.

Raj: So, if you're not able to track all the links coming towards you, and not use the tools [00:12:00] like Ahrefs, or some other tool, it's very hard to avoid it. And you have to keep track of all the incoming links. How do you even keep track of all these links for your clients?

Jabez: So, if you don't have any tools, as I said, you can use Google Search Console, but for Google Search Console, then your clients need to give you the access to Google Search Console. So, that's one way if you don't have, yeah, but if you have access to tools, like. Ahrefs or Semrush, then it makes your life much easier when you're doing SEO.

You can see, not only see sites that are coming towards you, or like, let's say backlinks that are coming towards your site, but you can see the parameters- what's the strength of that domain? What's the keyword that it's ranking for? How much traffic it gets.

What's the back-end filled with for these sites. So, sometimes there are sites that look really nice, but when you go and research, run them through these tools, these SEO tools, you'll see, okay, this site is filled with crap.

There's so much spam, junk on this site. So, yeah, having those tools, SEO tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, definitely makes your life easier to track and implement various strategies.

Raj: Wow. It's almost another job to do SEO, isn't it?

It's just a one-item line in building your online presence, and so much things involved within the SEO. To be honest, when I advise my clients, most of the time, I just do my basic things on SEO. Only when they have a very unique model and they could come up at top much faster than already existing competitors, then I would even advise to go into these things. But more and more I'm learning., If you don't invest in SEO, it is very, very hard to grow online.

Jabez: Absolutely.

Raj: It is a whole 'nother sector in our online presence, isn't it?

Jabez: It's like leaving money on the table. If you put effort in SEO and you start building organic traffic, the amount and also the quality of leads, business, that comes to you, that will be significantly higher than what you would otherwise get by paid ads, or by referrals, or just call outreach. So yeah, when you build organic traffic, you will get targeted leads.

You will get targeted, high quality leads easily, and consistently for your business,

Raj: Wow. I just recently came for an SEO conference, the one that you arranged. That's the first time I'm going to an SEO specific conference, and the amount of knowledge that they have for [00:15:00] different sectors of businesses, it was crazy. And I was wondering it's a whole 'nother agency, a whole 'nother team of people that you need to have, even to achieve those things for one client.

So, I'm wondering, how can even a small business survive in, in such a place? So, what will be the practical advice for people who are starting, and how can they slowly build up? Because when someone is starting, all their money, they can't put it in one basket, which is SEO, right? So, how can they practically think about investing in it?

Jabez: So, for new businesses, all that have limited budget to spend on the marketing or the SEO field, this is what I would do, for these businesses. I would straight-up not try to compete in all fields with my competitors. I will pick one particular topic. Write a ton of content around that one topic, gain what we call topical authority for that particular topic, and then move to the next one.

With SEO these days, there's something called 'topical authority'. Basically, in topical authority, in simple words, is for example, uh, protein powders, let's say protein powders, right? Protein powders have a huge range, variety, so if you straight-up try to compete for the keyword 'protein powders', it will be very difficult because there are so many big players there.

So, but if you can have sub-keywords, the smaller ones like 'vegan protein powders', then even another step further down, 'vegan protein powders for women' or 'vegan protein powders for men'- now, these are smaller keywords.

So, you will start from there, start writing content around, around that, and you cover all the topics around vegan protein powders for men or women, whichever one you're going for first. Like the source, the how it's made, different flavors, different companies doing it.

So, it establishes in front of Google that you are an expert when it comes to anything related to vegan protein powders for men. So, Google says, "Okay, this person has gained topical authority for this topic." And once you've established your authority on that one smaller keyword, or target, then you move to the next one. Then, you go higher up. Then, you go higher up.

It's almost like building different pillars- fully finish one section, then you move on to the next one, fill the whole section, and that's how you yourself become a big authority in that whole health niche, so that you, eventually, you can start targeting [00:18:00] protein powders as well. So, don't straight-up go for very competitive terms and keywords. Start with lesser competitive phrases, topics, and move on.

Raj: So, we talked about link building. We talked about building a content around a topic, be specialized in it to start with, and then, slowly build up. What else does a business owner need to think? Obviously, we are generating more and more AI content because as a small business owner, they wear many hats.

SEO is another item in their portfolio of things that they need to do, right? So, they would be using AI, unfortunately, and, or fortunately, then, what else they need to do?

Jabez: So, as I'd mentioned earlier, it doesn't matter if your content is written by a person or by AI.

What matters is, is that content helpful for the reader, and solving the reader's problem or query? So, if you write an AI generated content, it's really well structured, and the reader is coming, reading it properly- because you see, your AI generated content can have the answer, but is it properly structured?

Is it written in the proper way that a reader is able to skim through the whole article, and get the answer within a few seconds? Have to make sure that your article, whether AI generated or written by a human person, gets the answer correctly, and then also, you need to make sure your article is structured properly- with proper sections, proper headings.

Don't go for big chunks of paragraphs- break them in two or three sentences per paragraph, add more enriched data, like tables, images, videos, whatever you can to make your article look enriched, because this is one of the things that search engines are doing to avoid the AI junk.

Because of AI, there's, the internet is filled with AI generated junk, so one of the ways you can differentiate your website is by making your articles really well structured. So, the more features you add on your website besides adding the whole article and the more features, as I mentioned, images, tables, videos.

And if you have the resources to hire a dev team, create some tools within your articles like different calculators- like if you're in the health space, you must have seen calorie uh, calculators, calorie count in each different kind of fruit, those kinds of different, small free tools.

So, the more enriched your article is, the more trust it will win in front of, in the eyes of Google, and yeah, the more chances you [00:21:00] will create for your article to rank higher on various search engines.

Raj: Okay. What are the mistakes business owners can avoid as they build their content online? Obviously, writing content, it needs to solve a problem. What else can you advise them as they grow?

Jabez: Yeah. So, mistakes that they can avoid is- first of all, not publishing content, right? Leaving the site and thinking that it will start gaining traffic on its own. So, that's- let's start with the basic there. Then, when you start publishing content, just relying on AI tools only that- Okay, click!

Because AI tools are promoted in a very fancy way that some of them will say, "Okay, just one click, and you will start ranking, and one click, and you, your site will be SEO-optimized. It's not like that. All these AI tools. should be seen as a way to give you ideas, to give you tools. These AI tools to give you ideas, but don't rely on them to just keep publishing junk articles.

And as I said in my previous answer, as well- structure your articles, and yeah, make sure it's solving the problem. Make sure your answer is also unique, and don't sleep on your SEO strategy or your content. Keep publishing articles, and also at the same time, don't get overwhelmed or over-complicate things that I need this expert, that expert.

A lot of people, when they have budget to spend on, they'll just be overwhelmed, and they want to go for a tech SEO expert, or this expert, and that consultant. They'll hear all voices.

"Okay, this person said this, so I have to implement that, but then, now, this person is giving some other advice. And now, I don't... I'm confused, that I should listen to this person, or first, I need to learn this course, and then only I will, when I have the perfect strategy, then only I will implement this." That's a very big mistake of a lot of people- waiting for the perfect time.

There's no perfect time. The perfect time is right now. Just implement. Just publish your content, and if you learn something new, come and edit your article afterwards based on what you've learned. So, don't delay, as I said, and keep publishing your articles.

Raj: When you do everything, let's say, correctly 90% of the time, and then you have managed to do that for years now, but you don't see any results. How, how to go about it? What's the next step?

Jabez: Get someone else to review your site- someone with experience, someone with good case studies, someone with a track, good track record- get them to come and analyze your site. You will definitely find reasons why your site is not ranking or getting the traffic it needs.

Raj: Okay. Let's dive a little bit deep into a case study, or just one example. [00:24:00] Let's say it's a financial services site.

So I, let's say, I have a client who’s done a podcast. We have done blogging. We make sure that Google is able to read the site, and they have created enough content to be seen as an expert, but they're still not there yet- still not ranking on pages. Very rarely, people would search for that certain thing, and it will come up. So, how do you go about it? Obviously, an expert would see it.

Jabez: Right, so, there are various factors that will that are involved here. First of all, if you say your client is in the finance niche, it's one of the toughest niches. So, to rank in that niche is going to take a lot of effort, a lot of resources, a lot of content, a lot of backlinks. So, finance is a very tough niche, too.

So, that should be, you start from that point of view, first of all, and you need to know that it's a long game to rank in that niche. Then, you first look into the content that has been covered, the keywords or topics that you covered. Is there a demand? Is there a search volume for those topics?

You run those keywords, topics through various tools, and you will see is there a demand or not? All right? There are so many factors you need to check- whether the internal linking, the structure of all these articles- internal linking is when you write an article, and then, from within your own article, you give a link to another article.

So, it's linked together. So, you need to check the internal linking structure of your website, and after that, you check the back-end, this tech setup as well. So, how much load is there on, on the code? Is the code, is the back-end code very heavy? Is it clean? Is it light? Is the speed good?

So, first of all, tech audit- where you see the back-end is going on. Then you see the content audit, whether the content is targeting the right set of keywords. Also, is there what we call 'content cannibalization' where you covered some topic, and you wrote a very similar topic in another article as well?

So, now, Google is not able to figure out which article to rank, so it doesn't rank any of those keywords, or any of those articles. So, content cannibalization. Then, backlinks. Do you have quality backlinks to give the fuel? So, without backlinks, basically it's, your car can't go any further.

There are so many factors, but, and, um, you also need to see what the competitors, the sites that are ranking, how [00:27:00] much they've already published.

So, a good, easy way to find out is see the other sites, top 20 sites, see how many articles they have published. See how many backlinks they have published, and then compare to how many articles you have on your site, and how many backlinks are pointing towards your site.

Raj: Great. I think you've built a couple of businesses. You run an agency, you run a SaaS business. Tell me about the backlink SaaS business that you have. How does it help a business?

Jabez: Okay, so we have a- I'll give you a back story. So, we work with a lot of enterprise agencies. We do white label for them. Our SEO service is primarily focused all around building backlinks, right? So, once the backlinks are published, we also have to make sure that they don't fall off the index, or there are no issues afterwards on those backlinks.

So, we had a person who was doing these checks manually, and it would take a lot of time for that person to check. And then, that person was changing jobs. So, we decided that we can't be hiring and just keep doing this manually. It's time consuming and there's so much wastage of time. So, I reached out to my devs and asked them, "Hey, can you make this into an automated tool?"

Basically, all you have to do is scan the back-end code, and pick out these values, and tell us whether all these parameters are intact the way we wanted them to be. And then, yeah, they created an internal tool for us. And then afterwards, we shared this with some of our friends who also run SEO agencies, and they said that, "Why don't you turn this into a tool that we can use. Leave all our backlinks and it does a check of all the quality parameters."

So, basically, our tool link validator, what it does is- when you are building backlinks, whether in-house, or you're hiring an agency, it's a lot of money. Backlinks are not cheap, good quality backlinks are really expensive. You spend thousands of dollars on building backlinks, whether in-house or through agencies. You need to keep track, otherwise you're losing money and resources.

So you, all the backlinks you build, you dump it into a tool. A tool keeps a track of, of your backlinks ensuring that all the parameters- all the quality parameters- are intact, and if there are any changes that reduce the power of your backlinks, it will notify you.

Raj: What, what is the name of the website? Link?

Jabez: www.linkvalidator.io.

Raj: And also an agency that you run- www.theblueprints.co- theblueprints.co?

Jabez: Yeah.

Raj: Okay. What are the services you provide?

Jabez: All around link building. So, link building can be done through various strategies. We provide four kinds of link building. [00:30:00] One is called 'Link Insertions' or 'Niche Edits'. It's the same thing. The other one is called 'Guest Posting'. The third one is called 'Digital PR'. And the fourth one is 'Journalist Outreach'.

Raj: Wow! The last two are amazing. Is there a way, let's say, the person who started a business is an expert, and he's in the field. So, if he wants to write content and post on his website, it'll take years and years to even catch up. But if he's able to write content in a very established journal, he would come up really quickly. So, is there a case you have done that really helped the business that you can share with us, so that our business owners would know that they can reach out to you and take those services?

Jabez: Unfortunately, we cannot share any websites for website urls, but I'll give one example. We do a lot of link building for an SEO agency from the UK that sends us... and they are focused on real estate companies.

So, we are doing the back-end, or the link building, for a bunch of real estate companies from the UK and they are, right now, I think, right now a total, there are eight to nine companies, real estate agencies, that are sent via one company to us. So, it's very simple and like, easy, straightforward strategy that we are following. The agency that is sending us these clients, they are handling all the content.

We are publishing the backlinks, and both are, like, content and backlinks need to go together. If you are just building backlinks and not publishing content, it's unnatural. And same, the other way as well. If you're only publishing the content and not publishing backlinks, then again, you won't have the power to drive.

Right now, there are these eight, eight or nine companies that are ranking really well in the local commute areas- simple SEO strategy, good back-end, which is- speed is already optimized. Now, they're just publishing- a decent amount of articles per month, and also, not crazy link building as well, just a decent amount of link building for each of these sites, and they are consistently climbing up the search results.

Raj: That'd be great. Yeah, we will definitely reach out to you because more and more clients, when they have, they have established businesses, but to climb up the ladder in Google ranking, and to be known by other people is the hardest thing because there's so many voices out there, and businesses are struggling to clearly communicate what they're trying to solve, right?

So, as a business, they're trying to solve a problem for a client, and [00:33:00] they just can't reach out to people that they're trying to reach because of millions of millions of sites and voices there.

And yeah, and then, we are relying on only a couple of sources like Google or Instagram or some new sites. So, it's important to know where your clients are, and how to actually target them through various means.

Jabez: SEO takes time. That's, I think, the biggest hurdle. People want to see instant results, and that's why they spend, rather, on ads. But you see, another factor to rank- another edge that ranking organically gives you is the trust factor. When you see your sites on the first page and compared to ads, you yourself, when we ourselves, when we are searching for something on the Internet, we try to skip the ads and we know which ones are real sites.

We first click on them, because we know, okay, ads are, just, you can pay and come in front. So, we try to avoid them. Build instant trust for when you are ranking for various topics around your niche. And apart from, I would say, it's just one of the most powerful ways to build your business, to build trust, and eventually grow the multiples of your revenue.

Raj: Yeah, if you're not even saying things in the public forums, if you're not even voicing out what you want to say to others, how can you even be considered as an expert, right?

And so, that's why business owners need to be there online speaking about what they're trying to solve. Either it's a product or a service. You have to advocate for it and build your presence around it, and hopefully, do it right according to the standards of search engines so that they would take them as an authority figure, and build their content.

Also talk about your competitors. Talk about people who are already doing what to some extent, similarly what you're doing, and promote the sector that you are in, and talk about the challenges there, you know?

So, that's why, that's how you build trust. It's not just by only promoting yourself in a small circle. It needs to be out there. Yeah, so SEO is the tool to make that happen. But one, biggest challenge I'm facing is the AI taking over the SEO part, the search engine part. We are not going to search engines and searching for answers anymore.

We are going to AI, and ask ChatGPT the questions, or I'm, more and more, using Perplexity because it gives the resources of where it is getting those information from. So, how do you go about helping your clients?

Jabez: Right now, if you talk about a ranking on these various LLMs, [00:36:00] there's still no fixed research or case study that has come out.

At least, I haven't come across anyone that can verify- follow this strategy and you will be able to rank on LLMs. One thing I do, I have seen, especially on Perplexity, the resources that you do get, they are established big sites, so, very big sites that have a huge amount of content.

They've been there for years, and they have a huge amount of backlinks as well. So, like right now, it looks like you need to create a really big site. You need to publish if you want to start ranking on those LLMs, you need to make sure you have a lot of content and you have a lot of backlinks.

So, that's my take right now. I wouldn't tell that I've come across a fixed strategy, or a fixed solution for this because I haven't come across any such case study, yet.

Raj: Thank you, Jabez. Thank you for listening to us today. I will come up with more content to help small business owners to have a great strategy online so that they can come up and sell their product and services to people they are trying to reach. We will put more descriptions. about job-based business below, and make sure to click and check it out. Thank you so much guys.