The 7 Levels of SEO From Trash to GOAT

The lion does not concern himself with algorithm updates and you're the king of the jungle, baby. Platform risk has no power over you. Your content is so valuable, your audience would continue to read it even if Google went away tomorrow. You start to be seen as an authority site in your industry, not to mention one of the first sites mentioned when you ask AI search about anything related to your niche. You've probably seen the seven layers of blank trend taking over social media lately. Well,

I'm a marketer, so naturally I felt the irresistible siren's call to do what all marketers do when they spot a trend, to jump on it and to make it thoroughly unapologetically lame. But hey, if we're going to beat this trend into the ground, we might as well learn something along the way. So, in this video, we'll climb through the seven layers of SEO quality, starting at trash and ending at an almost spiritual level of search enlightenment. Hopefully, you'll learn something. Maybe

you'll laugh. Maybe you'll cry. Maybe you'll realize that the the real ROI was all the friends that we made along the way. No, we're in SEO. We're trying to make money. Let's start with level one, trash SEO. This is the lowest of the low. SEO so bad that it's actually worse than doing nothing. At this trash tier, tactics are actively harmful to a website's visibility and reputation. You're actively engaged in negative SEO and black hat tactics like buying thousands of spammy backlinks or

stuffing pages with nonsensical keywords hoping to trick Google. Instead, you end up triggering manual penalties, which are really, really hard to recover from, by the way. Essentially, every move is an SEO blunder, cloaking content, hiding text, link schemes. Your unscrupulous ethics are surpassed only by your incompetence.  Stop it. Get some help. These strategies, if you want to call them that, backfire spectacularly. Tanking rankings and trust. You'll be lucky to get even high double-digit rankings like

position 60 or above, if you even rank at all. At this layer, you're your own worst enemy. And getting ranked in chat GPT, forget about it. That's not even on the table. Level two is bad SEO. In the bad SEO layer, there's at least no active sabotage, but there's still plenty of cringe practices. This is the realm of the woefully outdated or utterly clueless. Folks here have heard of SEO, but they misunderstand it completely. They still occasionally use SEO as a verb, like, "Hey, can you uh SEO this

blog post for me?"  No. No, they're stuck in 2009, obsessing over metad descriptions that Google usually rewrites anyway and keyword density while ignoring actual content quality. You'll see practices like keyword stuffing. They might also buy cheap link packages from sketchy vendors on Fiverr and end up with links from link farms or PBNs that do more harm than good. I mean, at best, these tactics have no effect, and at worst, they still incur penalties or send the site into a

ranking freefall. In short, this layer is characterized by doing well-intentioned SEO incorrectly, using outdated tricks that haven't worked for years. Oh, and zero AI search visibility. Even when you beg Chat GPT to share information about your brand, it still has no clue who you're talking about. Level three, mid SEO. Now, if you're not hip to the Gen Z slang, allow me to school you. Mid is something unremarkable, average, or thoroughly mediocre. Here, there's some effort to do things right, but it's half-hearted

or misinformed. The common scenario is that a marketer or business owner realizes SEO is important, so they take a few rudimentary steps. They might install an SEO plugin on their website and assume, "Hey, I'm done. That's a complete SEO strategy." They might fix obvious issues like writing unique title tags or enabling an XML sitemap and finally stop stuffing keywords. However, their content still isn't great. Often generic or god forbid oneshotted by chat GPT with zero human intervention. Guys,

are we still doing this? Please.  Come on now, dog. Come on, man. They just started following Rand Fishkin and might even poke around inside Google Search Console a bit, but SEO still doesn't make a whole lot of sense and feels extremely overwhelming. The outcome is aggressively mediocre results. The site might rank for its own brand name or very low competition keywords, but it's not making waves in search rankings. At this stage, SEO efforts are inconsistent and incomplete. enough to claim I did

some SEO, but not enough to significantly move the needle. Level four, okay SEO. Okay SEO is when mid SEO starts improving and trending in the right direction. You're moving beyond the absolute basics and developing an actual SEO strategy. It's still not great, but it's no longer clueless. Here we see the introduction of some actual keyword research and planning. You discover that you should invest in SEO tools to make your life a lot easier. Instead of guessing keywords, you target

phrases your audience is actually searching for. Light bulbs are starting to go off and you're finally internalizing the golden rule of SEO that it's all about satisfying user search intent. You feel yourself building momentum. It's exciting. You begin studying the competition and the SERs and strategizing on how to produce an even better page for a given keyword. Content at this stage improves in focus. Each page is mapped to a specific topic or query. Who knows, you might even uh mess around and organize content into

basic silos or clusters and begin internally linking in a more purposeful way so users and Google's crawlers can better navigate your site. Nice job, team.  You're also making a concerted effort to learn solid onpage optimization best practices. You use Surfer to analyze top ranking competitors and ensure your content hits all the semantic keywords and topics that search engines and large language models expect to see. The content editor guides you through optimizing each piece with datadriven

suggestions for keyword usage, content structure, and comprehensiveness, taking the guesswork out of onpage SEO, and helping you create content that's both user focused and algorithmically sound. Algorithmically. Algorithmic. Algorithmically. I am see mom. I am smart. I can say algorithmically. The result? Your efforts actually start yielding traffic beyond just brand terms. The site gains some rankings for midtail keywords and maybe even snags a few featured snippets or longtail queries along the way.

 Nice. You've even started looking into AI SEO more intentionally, studying how Chad GBT retrieves data and sites sources. But while those big spikes in Google Search Console make for some pretty charts to show the seauite, SEO still feels kind of scattered and peacemeal and there's little to no link between organic traffic and actual revenue. But you're hopeful the website has direction and results are modest but real. Level five, good SEO. Okay, the Padawan is becoming a Jedi and we are

SEO Maxin big time. While your friends were out drinking and partying, you've been studying the blade and it shows. You now view every website through the lens of SEO, constantly looking for how brands position themselves and drive conversions through organic traffic. You not only see the high-level impact of brands, but also in the granular details of how they convert users and create engaging experiences for their organic visitors. You begin following more thought leaders on LinkedIn and X. Not

fake gurus, mind you, but actual SEOs in the trenches doing great work and sharing their insights. You're feeling your focus shift strongly to quality, both in content and user experience. This is solid homegrown gradea white hat SEO through and through. You can't beat it. You're starting to explore how AI can help you do deep research and you've fully invested in SEO tools like Screaming Frog and Surfer so you can start doing technical audits and producing quality content at scale.

You're committed not just to rank for terms, but to actually create content that you can be proud of. Suddenly, almost without warning, clusters of content start to form around particular themes, and you're more clearly tying conversions to SEO. You've graduated from ChatGBT oneshot wall of text content to AI assisted content creation with expert quotes and EAT signals, citing credible sources, showcasing author credentials, and keeping content fresh, which you know now is especially

important for AI search visibility. You use tools like Surfer to optimize every piece of content with complete topical coverage, aiming for a top content score, but knowing that these metrics are only a compass guiding toward the ultimate north star of great user experiences. At this point, you're seeing strong performance gains. The website's rankings and traffic see a significant uplift. Highquality content starts earning back links naturally. Maybe a few bloggers or even news sites find your content worth linking to.

Users spend more time on the site because it actually answers their questions, resulting in lower bounce rates and higher dwell time. The brand begins to build topical authority in its niche thanks to consistently useful content. And the company leadership, they're taking notice. You've graduated from checking a bunch of disperate SEO boxes to executing a proper inbound marketing campaign and attracting users by being genuinely helpful. Level six, great SEO. Great SEO is good SEO dialed up to 11. Everything is

coming together in a holistic strategy. You've got full executive buyin and budget. Now SEO isn't a oneperson initiative. It's not a set of isolated tasks. It's an operationalized datadriven welloiled machine. At this layer, SEO is integrated deeply into the overall marketing plan. You're now a maestro conducting an orchestra of content creators. All content is planned and executed at scale without sacrificing quality, often using workflows, AI agents, templates, and collaboration tools to streamline the

research, writing, and optimization processes. You've not only created amazing standard operating procedures for your team, but you have other marketing leads DMing you like, "Hey, can you send me your strategy doc? You guys are killing it." Internal linking is on point across the site. Every new piece is systematically linked into relevant hub pages and vice versa. So, the site architecture boosts all important pages. Technical SEO is locked in, dude. The site is well ststructured,

blazing fast, and totally free of crawl errors. You've built a killer series of dashboards that monitor performance metrics religiously. Google Search Console, analytics dashboards, rank trackers, not obsessing over vanity metrics, but using data to refine your strategy. You're constantly AB testing titles or content improvements. As far as off- page content goes, you're not interested in one-off link swaps. You're investing in off-site communities on Reddit and Quora. You're building

relationships with adjacent brands. You're running fullcale digital PR campaigns to earn quality mentions. The lion does not concern himself with algorithm updates and you're the king of the jungle, baby. Platform risk has no power over you. Your content is so valuable, your audience would continue to read it even if Google went away tomorrow. You start to be seen as an authority site in your industry, not to mention one of the first sites mentioned when you ask AI search about anything

related to your niche. You check Surfer's topical map to make sure you're thoroughly covering your niche and it's just an ocean of purple because of how thorough your content is.  Oh, that's hot. That's hot.  As far as your day-to-day content system, it's absolutely humming. New content rolls out regularly and performs well. Older content gets refreshed to stay current and nothing is left to rot. And not only that, but the business feels the impact. SEO is now the number

one most profitable lead generation channel in your entire business and you can confidently report ROI on all your SEO initiatives. However, there's still one more level above the almost mythical pinnacle of SEO mastery. And that's where we're headed next. Level seven, goat tier SEO. This is the peak of SEO enlightenment. the greatest of all time level where SEO transcends being a marketing tactic and becomes almost a way of life. Few ever reach this layer and those who do are basically the

galaxy SEO gurus that everyone else looks up to. At this stage, your third eye is wide open, baby. You anticipate search trends before they even exist. You're covering topics so thoroughly that you create content around emerging questions before anyone even knows to search for them. You run SEO experiments. You're asked to speak at conferences. You're a thought leader in the least cringe way possible. Your CEO is terrified to lose you, and he should be. You're a hot commodity. You're

tightly partnered with all other marketing channels, and you're producing regular video content for YouTube. Now, that supplements your blog content. You're taking a page from sites like Zapier and building highquality programmatic pages for every imaginable search query. You're the investipedia of your industry with an encyclopedic knowledge of everything your audience needs. All the fundamentals from earlier levels are second nature. Your site's technical health flawless and your

interlinking is masterful. No orphan pages. Every piece of content supports each other and your revenue driving pages. In fact, your topical authority is so expansive that you even target zero search volume queries without fear knowing they'll still bring value. Ironically, this strategy works. Those novolume topics end up attracting niche traffic and reinforcing your authority. A known secret of SEO experts. But I digress. Not only that, you're deeply tuned into user signals. You scour

community sites to spot pain points and questions and then immediately create the best resource on the internet to answer those. You might even run a niche community, say a subreddit or a Slack channel or yes, even a Discord. my lady. If there's a new search generative experience or AI answer engine, it consistently pulls your content as the authoritative answer. And the beauty is you're not gaming the system. You're simply the best answer everywhere. You've built up real community karma as

a respected voice on Reddit and have built a following on LinkedIn. Your brand is so trusted that you've even earned the crown jewel of off-page AI SEO, your own Wikipedia page. At this level, you have a multi-channel domination mindset. SEO isn't just about Google web results, but about presence across all platforms. You are Neo in his final form, fully awake to the matrix. You've realized the ultimate truth. SEO has always been about providing delightful, engaging, informative experiences to users. It's not about

chasing any single algorithm update or obsessing over a secret hack. At this level, you don't even stress over metrics like keyword difficulty or even competition. You are the competition. You are the danger. You are the one who knocks. You create content and web experiences so good that algorithms adjust to you, not the other way around. You've become search engine agnostic, building your strategy upon the solid rock of good user experience, so that even if tomorrow a new search engine

platform arose, you would change nothing. Your competitors fear you. Your investors love you. You're constantly used as a case study for how SEO ought to be done. This is the layer where SEO becomes almost effortless. The proverbial flow state. You set the direction and success naturally follows. Achieving goat tier SEO means your marketing is truly hitting that sweet spot where users are happy, search engines are happy, and your business is profitable beyond your wildest dreams. Well, that was fun. If you want to learn

more about how Surfer can help you achieve that SEO nirvana and make onpage optimization and content production way more efficient, be sure to check out the link in the description. If you want to learn more about increasing your brand visibility, YouTube thinks you'll like this video next. Thanks for watching and happy ranking.