The Real Formula for SEO Success (It’s Simpler Than the Industry Makes It Sound)

People ask me what the “secret” to SEO is, like there’s a tactic nobody else knows. There isn’t.

After 14 years of doing SEO consultancy, I can put the whole thing into one simple formula, and everything else that gets talked about in this industry is detail sitting on top of it.

There’s a sequence — the actual user journey.

#1 Be seen in the SERPs. Your title tag, meta description, and snippet need to be compelling enough to actually earn the click. This is the part everyone thinks about. It’s step one, not the whole job.

#2 Confirm it at first glance. The moment someone lands, the above-the-fold section needs to immediately give them what they came for — or at least reassure them they’re in the right place. Lose someone here and nothing else you did matters.

#3 Deliver fully on intent. The rest of the page has to actually satisfy what the visitor came looking for. Not adjacent to it. Not almost. Fully.

And there are two foundations running underneath all three steps, non-negotiable, no matter what you’re optimizing for:

Technical health
Your site has to be crawlable and indexable. This isn’t glamorous work, and it’s not optional. Nothing above this matters if a search engine can’t properly access and understand your site in the first place.

Nowadays, especially for AI search this means ensuring accessibility for LLMs and agents, not just Googlebot.

Your site doesn’t have to be hitting 100% scores on Core Web Vitals but it must work properly!

External authority
Backlinks, digital PR, brand presence, citations. This is what makes the difference between competing and actually winning in any niche with real competition.

There’s a reason companies in highly competitive verticals like gambling and finance have insanely huge budgets for links. Links increases authority of your site. If nobody is linking to you, you have zero hope of ranking for anything but your brand name. (Yes there are a few exceptions, for example very low competition long tail keywords).

And yes – AI search means citations and brand mentions is more important than it used to be. But that’s still authority – being known and talked about and trusted outside of your own site.

That’s it. That’s the whole model. Get the click, confirm the click, satisfy the click — sitting on a technically sound, genuinely authoritative site.

Every site I’ve ever had success with traces back to this.

I don’t think SEO success is a long list of disconnected tactics you need to keep up with. It’s this chain, sitting on these two pillars.

Everything else — every new platform update, every “here’s what’s changed” LinkedIn post, every new tool — is detail underneath this framework, not a replacement for it.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Great content, great links, a brand reputation – these aren’t made overnight. But fundamentally the things I’ve talked about are at the core of any SEO success.

Want to learn more about how I can help? Let’s chat.