SEO Expert Shares His Best Tips for Any Business [Backed by 12+ Years of Experience]
In this guide, you’ll find answers to some of the most burning SEO questions you have. To help you understand how all this works, we’ve interviewed Daniil Denchik, the Head of SEO at Adsy.
Daniil has over 12 years of experience in search engine optimization, so it’s safe to say he knows exactly what a business needs to succeed, rank higher, and drive more traffic.
“I am the Head of SEO at Adsy, a guest posting platform with 125,000+ websites that helps businesses gain high-quality backlinks without the hassle or uncertainty of outreach.With over 12 years of experience in search engine optimization, I’ve tested just about every SEO tactic you can imagine. Now, I’m putting all that experience to work in my projects.“
Note: This is one of two guides in this series. In the other article, Adsy asked our colleague Robert Catoir (Social Media Manager at Metricool) all the same questions. So, if you want to get tons of insights on social media management, make sure to check the other interview here.
Top 11 SEO Tips Every Business Should Know
1. If You’re Starting SEO from Scratch With Limited Resources, What Should Be Your First Step?
The main rule here is not to spread yourself too thin.
Generally speaking, if you don’t have enough resources and you try to do everything, you’ll end up achieving nothing.
Instead, choose what you can actually handle. For this, you can follow this framework:
- Identify your main keywords and check how competitive they are. If the competition is too high, reduce the number of keywords or focus on less popular ones where you have a better chance of ranking. Then, optimize your homepage and product/service pages.
- If there are no viable keywords, try approaching the niche through blog content. Look for low-competition, thematically relevant queries. Here, the most important thing is to focus on both keyword optimization and the quality of content.
- If you can’t find any decent keywords that have low keyword difficulty (won’t happen for most niches), create micro-landing pages targeting from 2 to 10 low-volume keywords. But make sure your landing pages are actually good and create a lot of them — think 100, 500, 1000 pages. To simplify the process, go for one design template and focus on a unique copy.
2. What’s an “SEO Best Practice” That’s Actually Outdated or Overrated?
Blogs. Everyone knows about blogging for SEO, and (almost) everyone uses this tactic. But only a few realize how much effort it takes for a blog to actually drive traffic.
Nowadays, blogs are often filled with AI-generated articles. Yes, it is easier, but it still takes time. And, unfortunately, these pieces rarely bring in any meaningful traffic. It happens because this content is typically low-quality, and both search engines and readers know that.
Besides, having large volumes of random, AI-generated content can negatively affect your site’s overall SEO.
Note: Google doesn’t have any issues with AI as such. But what they do care about is unoriginal, spammy, and useless content, no matter how it is produced. That’s why even if a human writer is using some paraphrasing tools, it isn’t any better than AI-generated content.
Here is the quote directly from Google:
3. What’s the Most Underrated SEO Tactic Then?
One thing that is very often underrated is search intent.
While many businesses know what it is and how it works, when it comes to their content, they might simply ignore it.
A common mistake is promoting a page that doesn’t align with what users expect. Sometimes, it comes down to overconfidence or misjudging your site or product/service.
If some of your keywords aren’t holding their top rankings, look at who’s in the top 10 search results for that query. You might be trying to rank a commercial page for an informational keyword.
Let’s see how it works in practice.
Say you sell affiliate marketing software. Creating a landing page that’s optimized for “best affiliate marketing tool” doesn’t sound like a bad idea, right?
In theory, yes. But as soon as we google this search query, the only thing we see are listicles with different tools listed. And most likely, it isn’t a coincidence — it simply means that normally, people who search “best XYZ” are still considering their options.
In other words, they are in the middle of the funnel and aren’t ready to buy, just yet. So, your salesy landing page will be quite useless here, even if you manage to rank it somehow.
On the other hand, when we search for “affiliate software,” we see tons of commercial pages. So, optimizing a landing page for this query will make much more sense. Of course, it will be highly competitive, but that’s not the point here.
Another issue that often happens with a search intent is “unfair” competition. Imagine if you have some large marketplaces as your competitors for a particular keyword. In this case, they could have 1,000+ offers, while your online store only has 5–10 different product types.
Most users will naturally visit a website that has more choices. So, be honest with yourself and always check who else ranks for your target keywords.
4. How Do You Figure Out Which Tactics Will Bring the Fastest SEO Wins?
It will be different for every niche and business, so here comes universal advice: create a list of hypotheses that could potentially lead to quick wins. Next, check whether your competition did anything like that before.
Chances are, your competitors have already tried something similar. So, go through each potential tactic and see if it worked for them. If it didn’t, try to find out why this happened.
Next, you have three options:
- If the tactic worked for your competition, learn from them and do something similar.
- If a similar strategy wasn’t successful for other businesses in your niche, consider if you could somehow avoid making the same mistakes. If it’s possible, try to integrate the tactic.
- But if you don’t see anything you could tweak to succeed, maybe the hypothesis was simply wrong.
5. What Kind of Content Tends to Perform Best for SEO Right Now?
Expert content, hands down.
You see — there’s already a flood of educational content on social media and in blogs. Besides, AI can explain complex things in simple language really well — sometimes, even better than humans. But people still want insights and advice from real experts.
So, if you’re running a blog or publishing articles, make sure they’re written or reviewed by professionals in the field. And make it clear — to both your readers and Google — that your content is expert-led.
Isn’t this why you’re reading this blog post as well? 🙂
6. What Are Your Go-To Tools or Platforms for Doing Your Job Well?
Many SEO professionals use custom tools for several tasks — that’s what we do at Adsy, too.
Plus, we use more technical software (when needed). A great example of this is Lumar, but this tool won’t be useful unless you actually know your thing.
As for more user-friendly tools that even beginners could try for their day-to-day SEO, here are my favorites:
- Ahrefs & Semrush — all-in-one SEO solutions that you probably know about by now.
- Screaming Frog — perfect for everything related to your site health, crawlability, broken links, redirects, and other technical SEO stuff.
- Google Search Console — a free, Google-native tool that gives you lots of basic information about your domain.
- Winston.ai & Copyleaks — important software nowadays that helps detect AI-generated content.
7. What’s One Trend or Shift You’re Paying Close Attention to?
I’d say there are three main trends I’m currently keeping an eye on.
Trend 1: SearchGPT
SearchGPT (unofficial name) is part of Search Generative Experience (SGE) by Google. Put simply, these are AI-generated answers to your queries right in search results.
You’ve definitely seen an AI Overview like the one below. This is part of SGE.
Trend 2: Bing Copilot
Bing Copilot is similar to what Google does with its SGE. This feature is all about giving quick AI summaries and answers, either in Bing search or Microsoft 365.
Trend 3: Google’s expanded structured blocks
Expanded structured blogs (or snippets) are basically AI-based features that give you extra information about your search request. The idea of these is similar to Featured snippets, People also ask, etc.
Maybe you’ve seen sections like Things to know when googling. That’s what it is.
Why are these important for SEO?
First of all, all of these features/tools impact CTR and traffic volume for certain types of queries. As a result, you can get less or more visibility (depending on whether your website becomes a source of information).
Basically, all those AI summaries can potentially “steal” your clicks.
After all, why would anyone need to click on a search result if they’ve already got an answer to their question? Exactly! For now, traffic from Google hasn’t dropped significantly, meaning that most people still use search engines the “old-school” way. But this could change in the future.
Plus, when it comes to Google’s expanded structured blocks, there are opportunities to get more traffic to your website.
8. What Should a Business Do If It Hits a Plateau (i.e., Stops Growing) in SEO?
First, figure out why you’ve plateaued. Obvious, but it’s crucial if you want to fix it. Once you know the reason, the next steps will vary.
Let’s go through a couple of the most common options:
- Rankings don’t grow:
If your rankings have stopped growing, run a full SEO audit — there may be underlying issues blocking growth.
- Traffic doesn’t grow:
This is another common scenario. Your rankings might be improving, but traffic isn’t. Then, check which keywords are rising — maybe your topic (or part of it) has lost popularity, and you’re relying on outdated data.
- You’re already at the top (best-case scenario):
This is the case where all your keywords are already in the top positions. If that’s your situation — first of all, congrats — but what’s next? Consider informational queries or explore related niches. If you’ve done that too, it might be time to launch a second or third site to expand your reach.
9. How Important is Posting Frequency? Is it Better to Post More Often, Even if You Sacrifice Quality to Some Degree, or Stick to Fewer, Highly Polished Posts?
Overall, if instant indexing isn’t your goal, it’s better to publish less often but with higher quality. It works great not only for SEO but also for your brand image in general.
Even one well-written, in-depth guide, research, case study, or review every six months has a strong chance of ranking high and attracting backlinks. It isn’t a strategy for everyone, but it can definitely work if your content is worthy.
That said, it’s much better not to put all your eggs in one basket. Try publishing 10 (or so) solid articles a month. Track which ones start gaining traction, and once they do, go back and polish them even more. Then, you can also start building backlinks to them (if you do link building).
10. Should Businesses Sse AI in SEO? What Are The Best Use Cases You’ve Seen in Your Experience?
AI is a great tool — but it’s just a tool.
If you can build your own AI-powered software, you can automate or enhance many processes. If not, even ChatGPT can help with routine SEO-related tasks like:
- Building anchor plans,
- Writing article titles,
- Crafting meta descriptions, etc.
But when you see blog posts that tell you that “SEO is dead because of AI,” it’s quite far from the truth — at least for now. Still, again, as I’ve mentioned in the question on trends, things might change, so it’s important to keep an eye on what’s going on in the market.
11. What’s The Most Effective Way to Analyze Your Competition?
First, you have to know exactly what you want to analyze: keywords, link-building strategy, or technical optimization.
Next, you can stick to the following approaches:
- For keyword analysis: Gather a list of competitors using various queries. This way, you can easily find 20–30 competing sites. Then, use Ahrefs/Semrush to check their top organic traffic pages.
- For link-building: Again, use Ahrefs or another tool you prefer to look at new backlinks your competitors have. If you take your time to analyze those, you can understand their strategies and what’s working for them.
- For technical audits: Here, the best solution would be to use tools like Screaming Frog. The beauty of this software is that whatever you check for your site, you can also see for your competitors’ pages.
Bottom Line
We hope these insights were helpful. If you have any other questions you’d like to hear Daniil’s take on, share them in the comments, and I’ll do my best to answer all of them.
And, of course, don’t forget that this was just one part of the guide. In the other one, our Robert Catoir (Social Media Manager at Metricool) answered the same set of questions from the social media perspective.
