Stop Relying on AI SEO Tools — These 5 Secrets Will Help You Rank #1 on Google Search Many businesses use AI-powered SEO tools to boost their website rankings, but they often struggle to see results. The key isn't just in AI; it also involves strategic off-site tactics such as link building, using social media signals, partnering with influencers, and fixing toxic backlinks.

Every day, business owners feel more and more pressured about what to do with generative AI, mixed with confusion about where to start. Most marketers, whether full-time marketing professionals or those who practice marketing as a hobby to grow their brand or business, don't know where to start on growing their Search Engine Optimization.

Why? Because the options are overwhelming, all it takes is one Google Search of SEO AI tools for you to fall into the never-ending targeting from a million SEO companies that want to sell you a monthly solution or tool.

I recently came across a startup claiming to fix any website's ranking within days by installing their pixel on your website, which will save you so much time by automatically optimizing your meta titles and descriptions. This is indeed very helpful, but in no way will it help you grow your business within days. That concept is similar to someone telling you that they guarantee you'll get your dream job because their AI system will put together your resume in a fancy template — In other words, AI tools will only clean up how your content is presented and help it potentially get ranked better, emphasis on potentially.

As a professional who's dedicated my entire career to understanding Search Engine Optimization and optimizing paid advertising for the ultimate ROAs (Return on Ad Spend), I believe that a profitable tech stack for any business looking to grow its sales and reach through SEO must focus on combining on-site and off-site strategies.

On-site SEO covers everything on your website, including your pages, navigation menu, meta titles and descriptions, internal and external links on pages and blog posts. In contrast, off-site SEO includes everything done outside of your website that helps signal to search engines that they can trust your website.

That includes frequent link building, which means that you'll be able to get features on other sites that can link to pages on your website. A small example of this being true is how my marketing firm, X Network, gets hundreds of leads per month without any paid advertising or on-site SEO work. We are basically an invite-only firm at the moment, and we don't invest in growing our own website. Yet, we get a ton of organic traffic because of massive intentional and non-intentional off-site link building.

Related: 9 SEO Tips to Help You Rank No. 1 on Google in 2024

Why link building is your ultimate weapon

Here's the moment of truth that will shock most people: just one authoritative backlink can easily outperform about 500 average meta titles and description improvements, and one of these automated SEO tools will perform on your website. The biggest question is, how does one get backlinks? The truth is that the process includes a taxing amount of research, outreach and negotiation to get other reputable websites in your niches and other niches parallel to yours to publish content that links to your website pages.

My firm has built some long-term relationships with publishers and bloggers who usually own a series of blogs and websites, so it's sometimes a good idea to outsource your work to a specialized SEO marketing firm. They might be able to help you get plenty of backlinks quickly within a month or two instead of spending years reaching out and earning one link at a time. What I'm trying to say is that if you have all the right strategies and endless patience, you can do this off-site SEO on your own without the help of a professional or firm.

Some unique strategies can sometimes be a good second or third layer to your SEO, including getting yourself some backlinks by creating free directory listings for your services or practice and linking your website to your profile.

Related: How to Make Money with SEO in 2024

The untapped power of social media

A wonderful tactic for growing your traffic and brand awareness is social media, hence the reason why posting on your social media with links to your website and mentions of your brand can truly help you signal to search engines and their crawling bots that you are notable and deserve to be seen.

You can easily do this by announcing every blog post you publish on your Facebook, X and LinkedIn accounts with direct links to those new pages. According to detailed research by an independent company called Backlinko that examined 11.8 million Google search results, they found a direct correlation between off-site strategies and search engine rankings.

The research found that it's a site's overall link authority, measured by DA ratings, that strongly correlates with higher rankings inside of Google search results. Additionally, the study proves that the number of domains linking to your website, including any page on it, will play a key factor in determining your ranking in relevant keywords. The study showcased that websites that rank #1, for example, have an average of 3.8 times more backlinks than those that rank #2 through #10.

Related: These 3 Common Business Mistakes Could Cost You Customers

Influencer outreach

The true advantage of our time is that video influencers are in demand, whereas blog-oriented influencers are not. That allows you to curate and find new opportunities to work with bloggers passionate about writing reviews or opinion pieces about topics related to your product or service offering. Don't be shy to reach out to 10+ blogs per month and ask if they are willing to collaborate on writing a piece that includes your website.

A great strategy could be using generative AI to create outreach templates and using tools like Perplexity or Claude to customize them to the specific website or niche before sending them out. More AI tools can be used to scrape contact information, such as email, from websites that match your niche or, even better, websites that link to your competitors but not to your website.

Dissociate with toxic backlinks

The most important takeaway from this article should be this point: Always be on top of your toxic backlinks and disassociate from them by telling search engines that you would not like them to consider those backlinks. So many harmful sites can intentionally and sometimes, on random occasions, link to your website, which can truly harm how search engine algorithms view your reputation and trust your website.

Kaloud, a brand that I have been overseeing and leading the marketing of for almost 20 months, saw an improvement in Domain Authority at three different points in time that closely correlates with our finding the toxic backlinks and disassociating them from the brand's domain.

This process should never be done by yourself. A professional should always do it to avoid removing healthy backlinks from being linked to your website, which could potentially plummet your ranking. Once you understand that the search engine algorithms were built for your benefit as a consumer searching, you will begin enjoying SEO strategies and find opportunities inside your niche.

For example, you wouldn't want to waste a whole evening going through search results that are spammy and full of sales pitches, so make sure your website pages are helpful and unique, make sure that they offer content that isn't mass AI-generated, and has a human touch that makes it unique, including sales pitches and web forms, but keep them minimal.

Related: 6 SEO Tips to Help You Rank in the New Era of Quality Content

Local optimization can be your final puzzle piece

So many marketers mistakenly believe that they can optimize their websites for all countries. I cannot emphasize this enough: You can only optimize your website for one country at a time, and it is highly probable that you will gain ranking in other countries naturally as you make progress on your SEO strategy.

Start by defining if your website needs to be locally optimized. Are you an in-person and e-commerce brand? Then, optimize for both local and mainstream SEO. That means you will have to get your storefront(s) optimized in the local area to rank quite high on most map searches, and this includes getting listed on directories that offer data to frequently used map solutions like Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Bing Map search. Ultimately, this will feed databases that generative AI solutions feed on, so it's a win-win for all search fronts.

Optimizing your website to rank higher could truly feel like a never-ending chase to success, but truthfully, it is. You will never stop working on your search engine optimization; you will always need to create new blog content to cover more ground in your niche. As you publish more content, more keyword gaps will be found, and topic-focused concentration will decrease. A huge way to enjoy progressive growth is to track the positions of your website, such as how it ranks for your top keywords, and find new opportunities.