How to Make Money With SEO: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners

In today’s fast-paced digital age, capturing and holding someone’s attention has become an uphill battle, with an ever-growing flood of content, which means that attention is worth more money.

There are many various methods you can generate money if you have outstanding SEO skills and know how to draw traffic from Google (and other search engines).

Although most people know you can sell SEO services, this isn’t your only option for making money online.

In this article, we will explore various methods of making money with SEO. We’ll examine the pros and cons of each monetization strategy.

Best Ways to make money with SEO:

Sell SEO Consulting and Freelance Services

Numerous companies are eager to hire SEO experts to assist them in ranking for keywords that their target audience uses.

Ranking for keywords that potential consumers look for on Google (such as “best flower delivery in Pakistan” or “best data management solutions”) is highly beneficial for all types of businesses, whether they sell flowers locally or are in the IT industry and sell data management software.

You have two options: either create an agency and employ staff members to carry out your SEO strategy as a lone SEO consultant or freelancer.

You might provide services like;

• Technical SEO optimizations
• Link building
• Content marketing
• SEO audits.

If you are just starting your SEO career, choose one service and then add others as your confidence grows. As businesses frequently pay extra for a specialist, it’s a good idea to specialize in a specific area (SaaS, small enterprises, e-commerce, etc.).

You can also use SEO for podcasts, YouTube, and Amazon since those search engines’ top rankings are also quite useful.

Pros:

• Quick cash flow and inexpensive startup costs.
• High margins of profit.
• Learn from the websites of others.

Cons:

• Customers may leave at any time (this occurs since SEO takes time to produce results).
• Client management is not enjoyable for everyone.
• Limited scalability since agencies need more employees to scale while lone consultants can merely raise their prices to do so.

Sell Productized SEO

You can productize your SEO services if you want to deal with clients but don’t like the thought of long-term commitments.

Offering an SEO strategy package, for instance, may include a technical audit, keyword research, content marketing plans, and link-building plans. After that, the client receives this information, and they are in charge of carrying it out.

These engagements, in contrast to SEO services, can take you a week or two to finish, after which you part ways with the client.

Pros:

• Management of clients is less than offering services.
• No startup costs and immediate cash flow.
• Any decline in ranks or other issues with the website is not your fault.
• Frequently, profit margins of 100%.

Cons:

• You must constantly sell since you generate no recurrent income.
• Many larger businesses only want to hire people who can execute for them since they have bigger funds.

Create An Affiliate Website

You can work with other companies to offer their products and services to your audience if you have a website with visitors.

These companies provide you with a link, and whenever a visitor to your website clicks on it and makes a purchase, you get paid a commission.

Affiliate marketing is a simple way for you to earn money by offering products and services to your audience without taking care of customer satisfaction or fulfillment. In a sense, it is similar to influencer marketing, except that all of your income is derived from commissions and you are not need to have a personal brand to operate the website.

Pros:

• You can earn passive revenue without having to interact with any of the clients.
• An affiliate website can be scaled indefinitely and developed into a strong brand.
• You don’t always need to hire staff if you run a solo business.

Cons:

• You may not experience quick income flow because developing an engaged audience can take some time.
• Your revenue may radically change at any time if Google’s algorithm changes.
• Google is tightening down on affiliate websites as AI content overtakes human-generated content and EEAT gains importance.

Offer Sponsored Content

By allowing other brands to produce and publish sponsored posts on their websites, many branded and personal bloggers monetize their audiences.

If you let them include a link to their website, many brands will also be eager to pay for guest posts because backlinks are important for boosting domain authority.

Pros:

• There are no difficulties with managing clients for you.
• As your website grows, you can raise your fees and scale your income.
• There is relatively little work involved in publishing sponsored posts that have been produced by others.

Cons:

• You constantly seek out new sponsors because there is no recurrent income.
• Individual passion blogs are getting decreasing traffic as consumers turn to social media more frequently for information.
• Maintain a balanced ratio of helpful to sponsored content (likely 4:1) to maintain audience trust, which can constrain scale.

Rank and Rent Pages

While some business owners invest in SEO services to improve their websites, others only need leads right away. As a result, businesses will frequently merely pay you to rent a website that ranks for a phrase they want to rank for in order to generate leads.

For instance, a dentist in Pakistan might pay to rank your website if you currently rank first for “best dentist in Pakistan.”

Pros:

• High margins of profit.
• Hardly any client management.
• The SEO plan is entirely in your control.

Cons:

• If your website isn’t doing well in search results, you’ll lose customers.
• Investing a lot of money upfront is necessary to rank websites.
• Customers are free to churn at any moment.

Grow and Flip Websites

Many businesses choose to buy pre-existing websites with good content, backlinks, and a respectable quantity of traffic for their target keywords because SEO is a lengthy process and it might take years for a website to rank for its desired keywords.

In order to enhance your website’s visibility and authority, many of these purchasers will either develop and sell their own products on these websites or reroute your website to one of their already-existing websites.

Building a strong foundation with the capacity for additional development and monetization is the key to expanding and flipping a website. Here are some guidelines to make sure your website can be flipped:

• Use a domain name with a brand.
• Choose a niche with room for growth.
• To demonstrate consistent growth, use predominantly white hat growth techniques.

Pros:

• You may produce a 20–30x return on net income profits, it’s one of the more lucrative SEO approaches.
• There is no management of clients necessary.
• While you are growing it, it can make passive revenue, and when you sell it, you will receive a large sum of money.

Cons:

• To get the first wave of website visitors, a significant initial expenditure is needed.
• The acquisition procedure can be laborious, stressful, and complicated.
• No one will necessarily buy your website, though.

Sell Your Own Digital Products

While generating and selling digital products is another well-liked strategy, dropshipping is one approach to earn money from your website by reselling a manufacturer’s physical products.

The advantage of selling digital products is that you can produce them once and sell them endlessly. A digital product could be an app, a course, or a community. As a result, it provides for a fantastic, scaleable passive income business.

You must rank for your desired keywords and make sure the material establishes trust with your audience if you want to offer courses or instructional content. You can also want to create a personal brand around your website because people prefer to learn from experts.

Pros:

• Because you can create a digital product once and sell it endlessly, they scale effectively.
• Additionally, consumer assistance for digital products is negligible (unless you have a community).
• To raise the lifetime value of your customers, you can provide upsells, down sells, and subscriptions.
• The majority of digital products may be produced with little initial outlay.

Cons:

• People want to buy from experts, thus you normally need to build a higher level of trust before you can offer an educationally-oriented product. As a result, in addition to ranking highly, your content must also establish credibility, which may result in higher content production expenditures.
• Building deep trust with your audience requires time and resources, and you might need to nurture them through email and free training before they’ll think about buying your digital items.

Get a Job As An SEO Specialist

The majority of well-known businesses employ full-time SEO experts to assist their brands rank for important keywords. Additionally, the arrival of AI is likely to alter the SEO environment, making those who are knowledgeable about using AI to automate different SEO procedures increasingly desirable to businesses.

Additionally, there are many in-person and remote positions available at different businesses, allowing you to work as an SEO specialist while earning a steady income and seeing the world.

You can also pick up skills on the job and later create your own websites to provide more sources of revenue.

Pros:

• You get an average salary that is independent of Google’s algorithm.
• By establishing your own websites, you can build extra income streams after learning SEO on someone else’s pay.
• By being invited to speak at events and other gatherings, you can use the authority of another company to strengthen your own personal brand in SEO.

Cons:

• You don’t have as much freedom as other SEO monetization tactics because you are still working for someone else.
• Due to the need to respect the company’s other objectives, your options for experimentation are limited.
• Its income potential is modest.

Conclusion:

SEO practice is the best technique for getting better at it. The best piece of advice I can give you is to create your own WordPress website and begin creating content to rank for various keywords.

Even while you might not start making money right away, it’s the quickest approach to developing your SEO abilities. You’ll have additional chances to monetize your SEO expertise as you advance in the field, from selling clients’ services to creating affiliate sites that provide passive income.