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This SEO case study gives you the exact 10-step process I used at Aventon to outrank our bigger competitors and secure top spots for competitive and profitable keywords like “electric bikes,” “electric bike,” and “best electric bikes.”
As you might expect, we also reached record level search traffic:
Even better, what you’ll learn can apply to many businesses and industries, including home services, non-profits, software, B2B services and more. I also spent $0 on SEO for the first seven months aside from one inexpensive tool (which has a free alternative), so you can get a lot of traction without a budget.
Whether you’re new to SEO, an expert looking for an edge, or frustrated with traditional tactics, I wrote this post for you.
Here are the 10 steps I’ll be covering:
Buckle up boys and girls, it’s going to be a fun ride!
Pro tip: Most businesses lack an effective SEO strategy. Prioritizing the right tasks gives you a competitive edge.
Imagine SEO is like a treasure hunt, and what’s more important on a treasure hunt: buying a sun hat, or knowing where the treasure is and its value? Obviously, finding the treasure matters most. Similarly, your first SEO step is defining your goal and ideally, finding a treasure worth pursuing. And to be effective at reaching your goal, you need the right strategy.
First, let’s discuss choosing your SEO goal.
At Aventon, I was given two goals:
These goals were challenging–and some consultants told me they were nearly impossible–but they were achievable. While I couldn’t rank for “electric bike” immediately, this goal allowed me to better plan with the end goal in mind. More importantly, I had several levers to pull to drive success.
The key to my success was developing a focused SEO strategy. As business strategist Michael Porter put it, “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” A strong strategy accelerates results by clarifying priorities, and what to ignore.
In business, there are always trade-offs because resources are limited. The question then becomes this: “How do these trade-offs align with my goal?” For example, I deprioritized link building for nine months to focus on higher-impact tasks that helped Aventon rank faster for its main keyword. If I did it again, I might skip link building entirely (as you’ll see in step 9).
This strategic focus was key to our success. But in a world where AI is reshaping search and competition, is having the right strategy enough to stay ahead? Let’s explore whether a well-executed strategy can outperform AI-driven approaches.
Let’s face it. AI is changing the game in ways we never imagined.
From content creation to search algorithms, artificial intelligence is reshaping how businesses compete online, and SEO is no exception. But while AI is fast, data-driven, and scalable, it lacks the human intuition, creativity, and careful thinking that drive true competitive advantage.
This raises an important question: Can the right strategy still outperform AI? The short answer is yes, but only if it’s the right strategy.
AI excels at processing vast amounts of information, predicting trends, and even generating content. But it doesn’t know what information to process or create. And perhaps most importantly…
AI doesn’t exactly know what the right trade-offs are when executing a strategy that could potentially lead to phenomenal results.
That’s where true strategic thinking comes into play. It’s about understanding what the right actions are now, and which ones to save for another time. What were the actions I prioritized from the beginning?
Here’s a 10,000-foot overview of my strategy:
An effective SEO strategy becomes even more important and powerful when it aligns with your positioning, pricing, and go-to-market strategy. Consider this:
This is why I wrote Scaling Startups: to help you better understand and optimize your core positioning, pricing, and go-to-market strategy. Because in the hypercompetitive world of AI, strategy is what will enable you to beat your biggest competitors. The right strategy helped me beat billion dollar bike brands for “electric bikes.” And the right strategy will turn your effort into impact. Your journey to better thinking starts here.
The team I built and leveraged AI often, as you’ll see in Step 5b. But we never outsourced our thinking and most importantly, made key trade-offs that AI doesn’t do. This helped Aventon rank for our main keyword faster.
Now that you understand the importance of strategy in beating AI, let’s circle back on how to find your main revenue-driving keyword.
Pro tip: Not all keywords are equal. Some will make you money faster, even with less search volume.
Most businesses treat all keywords the same, which slows results. That’s why many believe SEO takes 6-12 months. But at Aventon, I not only increased SEO traffic in under three months while battling the lows of the off-season, I drove more revenue.
The secret? As a product marketer, I realized that not all traffic is equal. Instead, you should focus on keywords with high commercial intent with keywords that lead to sales.
To find high converting keywords, let’s look at the five stages of the buyer journey, identified by copywriter Eugene Schwartz:
Customers move fluidly between these stages and sometimes will skip a stage, but you’ll often find these five stages, especially for high ticket purchases.
What’s the key to faster SEO success? Focus on keywords that solution, product, and most aware customers are looking up online.
To find the main keyword with high traffic that still drives revenue, focus on the highest volume solution-aware keyword. Here are some examples to help you find the highest volume, solution-aware keyword for your business model:
When in doubt, Google it! If search results show pricing, product pages, or buying options, you’ve likely found a revenue-driving keyword.
Pro tip: Once you’ve identified a keyword, use an SEO tool (like Google Ads, Ahrefs, or Mangools) to reverse-check what keywords top-ranking pages are targeting. I prefer Mangools Keyword Finder because you can do a few searches for free and it helps for Step 4 and Step 5b.
Now that you’ve identified your main keyword, your primary goal is to rank at the top. While other SEO activities may have indirect value and can help being a team player, the bulk of your efforts should focus on achieving that top ranking.
What’s holding you back from reaching the top? An SEO audit will help identify key obstacles.
Next, let’s dive into how to conduct one properly.
Pro Tip: Most SEOs focus on the wrong priorities during an audit because they focus on checking boxes rather than working towards an SEO goal.
If ranking at the top for your main keyword is the treasure you're after, an SEO audit is like Google Maps. Without a clear destination, Google Maps is useless. It can point out technical roadblocks, but it won’t help if the problems are taking you in the wrong direction. You need to know which way to go to find the gold.
For example, Aventon has strong rankings for competitive terms like “electric bikes.” Yet one tool rated our site health at 64% with over 1,200 errors and flagged a high number of “toxic links.” Yet we still rank in the top spots for "electric bikes" and related terms.
So instead of chasing arbitrary scores, here’s what I recommend you focus on in an SEO audit:
Let’s break each of these down.
Nothing flashy here, but without these basics, growth will be limited:
Search your main keyword (incognito if you prefer less biases) and analyze the SERP for key insights. Look for:
Let’s look at each of these items to help you rank higher in the SERPs:
What are the top 5 doing well?
Let’s look up “bookshelves” to find opportunities to rank higher in Google.
Here is what I notice what Wayfair, Target, Ikea, Amazon, and Kloter Farms listings are doing to rank higher for “bookshelves”:
You can further analyze competitor listings by checking on-page SEO, UX signals (like page speed via Google PageSpeed Insights), product filters visible in the SERPs, or time on page (comparing via SimilarWeb).
By studying these patterns and applying to the page you’re ranking, you can speed up your ranking process.
Outside of traditional organic SERP listings, what other opportunities are there to rank at the top?
Ranking for your main keyword can be tough, but sometimes it’s easier to rank in non-traditional SERP features. Plus, it gives you another opportunity to reach your goals.
For example, here are other SERP features you might find to rank for your main keyword:
Just like organic results, it's worth studying these features to identify patterns that can help you rank faster, as you’ll see in Step 5b.
Is Google showing any user experience patterns on the SERP that I should mimic on the page I'm trying to rank?
Looking at the bookshelves SERP, I see several filters used to refine results, such as width, color, height, number of shelves, features, price, sort by, and depth. If you're aiming to rank for a similar keyword, consider adding similar filters to your collection page.
What filters should you use? Start by including the filters that Google shows. Then if you know certain filters have search volume, include those too. For example, when optimizing for electric bikes, I saw people were searching for ebikes based on cargo capacity, so we added a filter for that and highlighted relevant specs.
While these filters are more common in ecommerce, this approach can work across other industries as well. For instance, if the “People Also Ask” section appears for your keyword, consider answering those questions directly on your page to improve your ranking.
Site searches help you understand what pages Google is indexing, allowing you to spot issues. The more irrelevant or broken pages Google finds, the less it’ll prioritize your main keywords.
To do a site search, type site:yourwebsite.com in Google. Here are a few useful searches I did for Aventon:
If you can make fixes yourself, do so. If you need the tech team, prioritize changes with the most impact and lowest effort. The more SEO wins you rack up, the more excited the tech team will be to continue helping you. Especially if you give them credit where credit is due.
If you’d like to hire a professional to do the heavy lifting, I do offer SEO audits. Once you've completed the SEO audit, the next step is to conduct further keyword research by creating keyword clusters. This will help you target related secondary keywords that support your main keyword, improving your rankings and driving more revenue.
By grouping your main and secondary keywords together, you can create focused content that captures a broader range of search queries, ultimately boosting your visibility and helping you rank higher for your primary keyword.
Pro Tip: Anyone can find a list of keywords. But to rank faster for your main keyword and make more money, you need to target high-converting secondary keywords.
One of the best ways to outrank your competitors is by creating keyword clusters and targeting secondary keywords with relevant content. Here's why this plan is so powerful...
Imagine you're shopping for running shoes. You’d likely want to find:
These are all secondary keywords related to "running shoes." To rank well for "running shoes," you'd create content targeting these secondary keywords, using a single page to target each keyword.
Then you would link these pages together in a seamless user experience.
You can find these secondary keywords manually by analyzing Google search results as mentioned in Step 3 above, but it's easier with a tool like Mangools Keyword Finder to help you identify relevant keywords faster. Here’s what Mangools shows when you look up “running shoes” in its tool:
You can also dig deeper into a secondary keyword to be your main keyword. If you double click on “best running shoes” to be the main keyword to rank for, you’ll discover secondary keywords related to this keyword like:
Again, Mangools Keyword Finder makes this super simple:
Not all secondary keywords are worth targeting, though. Some have similar search intent, known as semantic keywords. For instance, "best running shoes" and "good running shoes" may lead to the same search results, indicating they have the same intent.
To find out if two keywords are semantically related, do a Google search and compare the SERPs. If you find similar listings in the search results, they are semantic keywords and it’s worth targeting with a single page.
As you can see, these SERPs are similar enough to have the same search intent. Therefore finding the right keywords, analyzing commercial intent, and checking SERPs to identify semantic keywords requires time and expertise.
If you’d like me to do the heavy lifting for you, I have a few spots available for my keyword research services. No matter which path you choose, I can guarantee this process will help you rank faster for your main keyword.
Now that you have your list of revenue keywords to target, it’s time to create content that matches user intent.
Pro Tip: If your content doesn’t match what customers are searching for, it’ll be difficult to rank in Google.
Now that you’ve selected your main and secondary keywords, it’s time to make sure Google understands what your content is about. This means ensuring your content fits the keyword and placing those keywords in the right places on that page.
To identify keyword intent, simply search on Google and observe the content that ranks for your target keyword. For example, if you want to rank for "best running shoes," here's what you'll see:
And these are the content types I saw in the search results:
These are the content types you should consider creating if you want to rank for "best running shoes." Once you know the content type, you’ll want to ensure it’s optimized for on-page SEO.
Here’s a simple on-page SEO checklist to follow:
Those five are the bigger on-page SEO wins. Additionally, there are other best practices that can help improve on-page SEO:
As you build a solid content foundation, it’s worth exploring how best to leverage AI to accelerate and enhance your SEO growth.
AI plays a significant role in SEO, offering three major opportunities:
In my first year of SEO, my top priority was producing content to rank for relevant keywords, whether landing pages or blog articles. Once my content strategist, Francis, built a solid content bank using my SEO strategy, we shifted our focus more toward optimizing for Google’s AI SERP features, and the growth was almost immediate.
Google offers a variety of AI-powered SERP features, but success lies in prioritizing the ones that matter most to your business. By analyzing how Google’s AI surfaces content, you can tailor your strategy accordingly.
For instance, when studying Google’s AI Overview, we noticed from our tests (see Step 7) that Google prefers direct, complete sentence answers. If someone searches, “What is a step-through bike?” the top-ranking content typically starts with, “A step-through bike frame has…”.
Understanding these nuances allows you to optimize content effectively.
Optimizing to better rank for AI chat tools is still the Wild West, filled with golden opportunities when you play your cards right. Because the speed of change is happening faster than ever, and since this SEO test is in its infancy, I want to give you two items to keep in mind.
First, where is the AI tool sourcing its data? OpenAI is using websites, blogs, news articles, and forums like Reddit. My hypothesis is that the more often you appear in these sources of data, the more likely you are to become the AI’s recommended brand.
Second, you need a way to track and measure your results. In particular, you’re looking for an AI search grader. Mangools offers a free AI Search Grader. It runs multiple prompts and responses to estimate your average rank. Here’s how Apple ranks in the smartphone category:
On the content creation side, AI is only as good as the input it receives. Garbage in, garbage out. To get high-quality results, solid research is key. Francis would gather insights from product reviews and Reddit discussions about our ebikes, then input them into an AI tool to summarize key takeaways. After refining the output, he’d use AI to enhance or generate content based on the research.
If you’re looking to scale your SEO efforts with AI, I offer AI SEO audit services. More importantly, you need a strong strategy to guide AI effectively, hence why I wrote this post. Without the right research and planning, AI is just another tool producing mediocre results. But with a smart strategy, AI becomes a powerful force for growth.
Once your content is optimized, perhaps with AI accelerating the process, the next step is setting up the right metrics to track what’s working and refine your approach.
Pro Tip: Metrics offer invaluable insights into your SEO performance, helping you quickly identify what's working and what needs adjustment.
Congratulations—you’re over halfway through my 10-step process! Now, let’s set up a metrics dashboard to track your progress toward ranking for your main keyword.
Before we dive in, it’s crucial to decide what you’ll track. There’s an overwhelming amount of data, but the focus should be on tracking your ranking progress. Here are three key questions to answer:
Bonus: Consider also including search volume for your secondary keywords to prioritize them. If you’re selling products, you can also track revenue on this dashboard.
Now that you've identified your target keywords (main and secondary), you can start recording their positions. I recommend using Google Sheets, GSC, and Coefficient (another free tool) to pull in the data. Here's the setup:
Next, for each keyword, create a separate tab in Sheets. Connect Coefficient to GSC, and filter to pull data for the page you’re ranking for, the target keyword, and the position. To track progress over time, you can chart the keyword positions (Y-axis) against dates (X-axis). And remember, a lower position means more traffic!
With the right setup, you’ll be able to monitor your progress, adjust your strategy, and experiment with tactics to boost your rankings faster. You’ve established a solid foundation for SEO success, so let’s start creating SEO tests.
Pro Tip: The more tests you run, the faster you’ll learn. The faster you learn, the quicker you’ll understand how to scale growth. More tests leads to more growth.
As you progress in ranking for your keywords, you may notice untapped opportunities. Now is the time to start running experiments. When I joined Aventon, I identified several opportunities I held off on until this stage, including:
Some tests were a hit, others were difficult to measure, and some provided small, compounding growth.
The goal is to continuously find tests to run, launch them, and analyze the results—all aimed at ranking faster for your main keyword. Let me walk you through how I ran a title tag A/B test as an example, so you can create your own SEO experiments.
Start by asking “What do I think will improve results?”
For my title tag tests, I hypothesized:
I also draw inspiration from other experiments to generate fresh test ideas, like what was winning in PPC headlines.
To set up your experiment, there are two key components:
A baseline helps you compare your results using a control group and an experimental group. This way if you see growth or decay, you can get a better idea if this result was due to an outside factor.
To test title tags, I compared the results optimizing similar pages with old vs. new title tags. Your control group might be 20 pages with their original title tags, and your experimental group might be another 20 pages with updated title tags.
In some cases, like testing title tags on the homepage, you may only have one page. In such cases, compare the results against historical data.
The second step is deciding what data to track. When optimizing title tags, you’ll use search data from GSC. If you haven't set up GSC yet and you're planning to run title tag tests, now is a good time to do so.
You may also want to document your test setup to avoid forgetting important details. For example, in my title tag tests, I recorded which pages were in my control group and left unchanged, and which pages would receive the updated title tags.
Once you’ve established your baseline, identified which metrics to track, and noted all necessary details, you’re ready to launch your test.
Once you have your baseline and metrics in place, it’s time to run the experiment. The faster you launch, the more tests you can run and the more data you’ll gather.
With the test live, it’s time to evaluate the outcomes. It’s best to wait at least one week to assess results, as customer behavior may differ on weekdays vs. weekends. Sometimes, tests can show immediate wins before leveling out or dropping in traffic, so keep in mind you should wait at least seven days.
To evaluate significance, you might notice a massive spike in results. If you want a more precise method, you can use an A/B testing calculator.
The more tests you run, the more you’ll learn. Keep experimenting, adjusting your approach based on what works, and scaling successful strategies.
As you see more growth, you can accelerate progress by bringing in additional expertise, helping you scale even faster.
Pro Tip: When funds are available, hiring the right professionals can accelerate growth significantly. Some professionals I hired helped take tasks off my plate, freeing up my time. Others provided SEO insights I didn’t have at the time.
As I mentioned before, I spent $0 on SEO for the first seven months aside from Mangools. Once you have the right plan in place, hiring the right people is like adding more fuel to the fire.
There are many professionals you can work with, but I categorize them into two groups:
With coworkers, you don’t always get to choose who the company hires, but you do have the power to decide who to work with.
For example, my tech supervisor, Dan James, had a strong grasp of ecommerce strategy and surprisingly deep knowledge of SEO for a programmer. With his support, the tech team contributed to multiple projects aimed at improving our ranking for electric bikes. These included building scalable landing pages on Shopify, implementing product filters, and balancing SEO with UX and technical requests.
Another key teammate was Francis Lechiara, a copywriter I trained to become our content strategist. He played a crucial role in transforming Aventon’s blog from a low six-figure revenue stream to five times that amount. He accomplished this by optimizing content around revenue-generating keywords, targeting AI SERP features (see Step5b), and partnering with an external agency to publish three articles per week.
One of the most impactful decisions I made was hiring an external SEO consultant. The best consultants can spot growth patterns across multiple industries. After achieving some wins, I hired Dan Shure to be my second set of eyes. He conducted his own SEO audit and uncovered opportunities I hadn’t considered. For example, he showed how Google was prioritizing Wikipedia to rank for “electric bike,” even though it didn’t appear in common SERP features.
While you can achieve significant success with a $0 budget as I did in my first seven months, having professionals in your corner speeds up your success. I spent around $20,000 in initial tests before hiring the right team members to help improve our ranking for the main keyword. This eventually ramped up to an investment of $14,000/month. The investment was worth it, though I wish I had known the right professionals to hire from the start.
Now, let’s dive into a controversial topic: Do you need to build links?
Pro Tip: Link building used to be a big factor in ranking for keywords. However, today Google has significantly reduced the value of links.
Are links worth building to scale SEO faster?
When Google first started, its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin hypothesized that web content could be ranked based on the number of links pointing to it. Just as research papers require citations, web content is "cited" using links. The more links a page receives, the more likely it is authoritative on a topic.
However, over time, people began manipulating the link-building system. This led to Google showing pages that were less relevant or provided a poor user experience. A bad user experience causes users to turn to competing search engines, so in time Google considered more opportunities than just links to improve the user experience.
Experts today have different opinions on the value of links. The problem is, it’s often difficult to track the value of a single link, or even the return on investment of link building.
The difficulty in tracking ROI comes from several factors:
I’ve had links on sites like Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur, Salesforce, and dozens of other sites. While these links are great for social proof, I can’t say if these links led to meaningful search traffic.
When should you consider building links? Here’s my take:
With some wins in the bag, it’s time to look at how you can double down on your success.
Pro Tip: Most marketers get distracted by shiny new marketing tactics. If you find something that works, focus on scaling it.
To double down on your SEO success, you should concentrate on amplifying what’s already delivering results. One way to do this is by identifying your top 10 performing pages in GSC. Then optimize them further by enhancing the user experience, updating content to better target keywords, and improving calls-to-action.
Next, turn your attention to your bottom 10 underperforming pages. While some losses in traffic might be beyond your control, other pages have opportunities to reverse traffic declines.
Finally, you can double down on your success by going through this 10-step process again. It may take time, but you’ll likely find new opportunities you had not considered before. Additionally as Google’s algorithm changes, you may find you need to adjust your SEO plan.
Scaling SEO success is all about consistency, testing, and focusing on what truly drives growth. By refining your tactics, leveraging data, and doubling down on what’s working, you can create sustainable, compounding growth.
Remember, SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. As you fine-tune your strategy, stay agile, keep learning, and always prioritize providing value to your customers. With the right approach, you’ll be able to scale your efforts, rank higher, and achieve your business goals.
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