I once heard Casey Neistat, the famous filmmaker and YouTuber, say this on a podcast.

And I think it fits so nicely with what separates those who are successful at SEO and those who find in to be a black box full of mystery and confusion.

Especially now. Like, it’s never been more relevant with the rise of AI-generated slop and the rise of AI search with ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Luckily, SEO is still alive and well. All the SEO examples in this article still work today. (There is one that is struggling, but I added it because there’s something we can learn from it.)

By the end of this, you’ll have a clear understanding of how to approach SEO for your website — whether you’re a media blog, ecommerce site, or SaaS website.

Okay, let’s dig in.

Types of SEO strategies businesses use

At its core, SEO is quite simple. All you’re doing is trying to understand how a search engine’s algorithm determines how to rank content in what order.

In my decade-long career in SEO, I’ve found that SEO can be thought about in a few different buckets:

• Technical SEO: This is how you build your website for search engines to understand. Things like Schema markup, sitemaps, HTML
• On-page SEO: This is the most important part of SEO — your content. This is how you structure the content on your actual web pages.
• Off-page SEO: This refers to backlinks. It’s all about how you get other websites and social media platforms on the web to link out to your website to help build your authority as a publisher with search engines.

Okay, assuming we are using modern website builders like Webflow, Squarespace, or Framer, which already take care of a lot of the technical side of SEO, let’s focus on the other two.

The other type of SEO, like on-page SEO, is how you target and optimize around a specific keyword. In fact, I made a full mini-course on YouTube on this topic you can watch:

In that video, I go over how to find a topic, how to write around a specific keyword, all the technical stuff you need to pay attention to when publishing your content to your CMS, and what you should do after you publish content.

When it comes to off-page SEO, this is just backlinks and mentions on other platforms. The best is to get a trusted website (that is relevant to your website) to link out to you. But even getting mentioned without a link is still important for getting shown in ChatGPT and other LLMs.

And even getting mentioned on social media platforms like LinkedIn or X (Twitter) can cause a lift in your rankings. I can’t directly prove this, but I’m speaking anecodaly. When someone talks about Marketer Milk on LinkedIn, I see a slight lift in my SEO traffic. It’s weird.

Okay, now let’s go over some SEO examples that I think are crushing it right now.

9 best SEO examples from real businesses in 2025

Here are my favorite SEO examples you can learn from:

1. Calm (SaaS blog)
2. Mad Rabbit (Ecommece Shopify SEO)
3. DMJ (Job Postings)
4. Zapier (Apps pages)
5. The Cut (Media blog)
6. Efficient App (Software reviews)
7. G2 (UGC programmatic SEO)
8. Angi (Local SEO marketplace)
9. JoinSecret (Affiliate coupon site)

Okie dokie, let’s go over each of these.

1. Calm

• Website built with: Squarespace
• Company type: Mobile app
• SEO strategy: Editorial blog content

First up on our list is a great B2C SaaS SEO strategy that I think is genius — yet easily replicable. If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ll know that Calm is a really popular meditation app.

One of the cool things about Calm is that they are both a mobile app and a web app. Having a web app version of their website allows them to leverage SEO as a channel to bring in organic growth. This is something I recommend many mobile apps try to do as well.

Calm’s SEO approach is mainly on its blog. At the time of writing this, according to Ahrefs (a popular SEO researching tool), Calm’s website gets 1.3M monthly visitors from SEO alone. And 1.2M of those visitors come straight from their blog.

It’s insane how fast they grew their traffic in 2023 and how it’s sustained itself over the past few years — even through all the Google Core Updates (and the rise of ChatGPT). This shows they’re doing something right.

If we dissect a bit further, we can see that they rank for a lot of pain points keywords.

They’ve done a great job of identifying what people might be searching for when they are feeling uncomfortable or distressed about something in their personal lives. And when people land on their articles, they become aware of Calm’s meditation app.

It’s a great strategy if you’re a consumer brand and looking to get into SEO. I made a video that mentions Calm’s strategy, you want to check it out here:

The video is mostly about SaaS companies and their different SEO tactics. But this blog post goes beyond just SaaS. Like the ecommerce website that’s next up on this list.

2. Mad Rabbit

• Website built with: Shopify
• Company type: Ecommerce store
• SEO strategy: Product pages + blog content

Next up is Mad Rabbit, an ecommerce brand that sells tattoo aftercare products. I added Mad Rabbit to this list because it’s a great example of a Shopify store that solves a true problem. And because their products solve a real problem, it makes them a great candidate for SEO.

I mean, just look at their traffic. This is really impressive for an ecommerce brand:

And if we look at their top ranking pages, we can see that they not only use blog posts, like Calm, to rank for pain point keywords, but they also have their product pages ranking for some search terms as well.

For example, if you Google search “tattoo numbing cream” they come up right next to Amazon. And the page goes straight to a product page! Not a collection page, but a product page. Actually insane.

Whether or not Mad Rabbit decides to run ads to get sales, they are “default alive” from just SEO as a channel. Super powerful.

If you have your own ecommerce brand or are managing one, you need to check out Mad Rabbit as an example of how to do Shopify SEO right.

3. Digital Marketing Jobs

• Website built with: Webflow
• Company type: Online job board
• SEO strategy: Google for Jobs network

Next up is something I built a couple of years ago as an experiment. Digital Marketing Jobs is a job board for marketers. It curates jobs from around the web and categorizes them based on three things:

• Job location (think: remote, New York, San Francisco, etc.)
• Job type (think: SEO, growth, product marketing, etc.)
• Job industry (think: ecommerce, SaaS, agency, etc.)

This allows me to take a programmatic SEO approach and create dozens of combinations of different landing pages for job types.

Not only that, I also went after an exact match domain. And eventually, I did start ranking on the first page for “digital marketing jobs”.

Creating a job board also allowed me to experiment with Job Posting Schema. This allowed many of the jobs to be pulled into the Google for Jobs network — which actually resulted in the site getting over 100 clicks/day from SEO after just a couple days of launching it.

It’s a great example that shows a few things that still work in SEO:

• Exact-match domains still work (kinda, you need authority)
• Programmatic SEO is best when you have at least two combos to play with (location + job type)
• Adding Job Posting Schema helps get your jobs pulled in Google for Jobs

Anyways, it’s a cool little project. And I hope to keep growing it and documenting the process here, on my YouTube channel (Marketer Milk), and in my course.

4. Zapier

• Website built with: Vercel
• Company type: B2B SaaS
• SEO strategy: Programmatic app pages

Next up is a popular one that most people in marketing know about — Zapier. Zapier is an automation tool that allows you to connect multiple apps together to create automated workflows.

For example, if you submit a resource to this website to be featured on the homepage, it goes into a Google Sheet, and then from there, I manually approve or disapprove it. If approved, it automatically gets posted on my website. All of this is done with Zapier.

And if someone like me wanted this workflow, they might search for something like “Webflow Google Sheet integration” in Google. If you do that, you can see Zapier comes up:

This link then goes to a landing page that shows you how to start creating this workflow with Zapier. It’s a genius strategy that helped Zapier get its initial start.

Now think about all the tools out there — thousands. And think of all the combinations of tools that can fit together — even more thousands. These are all landing pages.

So Zapier’s app landing pages allow for a CGC (company-generated content) programmatic SEO play where they launch over 14,000 pages that rank in Google. And because they are leveraging the equity of other brand names, people naturally discover them for the first time when searching about other tools.

It’s a great example of a programmatic strategy that is so bottom of the funnel that while the traffic may not be that high, the conversion rates are.

5. The Cut

• Website built with: WordPress VIP
• Company type: Media company
• SEO strategy: Media blog

The Cut is a media company owned by Vox Media — the parent company of the New York magazine. Their site talks all about fashion, beauty, and luxury. It’s a great example of a media blog that generates millions in traffic a month in the consumer space.

What makes The Cut so interesting is that they’ve continued to stay relevant and have a consistent stream of SEO traffic through all the ups and downs of AI and swings from Google’s algorithm updates.

It’s a consistent 2-3M monthly visitors just from SEO. And on SimilarWeb, they’re showing over 7M monthly visitors in total.

Looking at their top pages, we can see that they rank for really high ToF (top of funnel) keywords around horoscopes, answers to interpersonal questions, and celebrities.

While their domain rating is quite high, 88, it’s still a good sign that topics like this are still here to stay. While the rise of ChatGPT has taken a lot of informational queries, Google is still king when it comes to most searches on the web.

So, hopefully, this gives you some inspiration to not be discouraged. Now is the best time to build an SEO-first media company because most don’t think it's possible, so they’re not even trying.

But note that I said media company. I’m not talking about a tiny niche blog. The Cut has built a real brand that spreads beyond just search engines. They have a newsletter, partner with other brands in the space, and have social media accounts with 1M+ followers.

It’s this omnipresent approach to media that allows them to build authority with Google and maintain such strong rankings. They also have great human writers. Not AI slop. I even ran some of their top-ranking articles through Originality AI to detect if they used any LLMs to generate the content.

Yup, 100% human. So that’s probably another reason why they’re doing so well.

6. Efficient App

• Website built with: Webflow
• Company type: Software review site
• SEO strategy: Software curation

Next up is Efficient App. They are a software review site founded by husband and wife duo, Alex and Andra. Talk about couple goals.

They’ve been able to create a really cool SEO media business in a highly competitive (but also profitable) niche — software reviews. Looking at their traffic, we can see that they’ve grown fairly quickly, with a fair share of algorithm update swings (but still healthy):

It’s inspiring to see. And they also follow a similar play to The Cut in that they don’t just focus on SEO. They also have a YouTube channel where they upload software reviews that complement their existing blog posts. This way, they can embed the videos into their blogs. A very similar approach that I, and many others, use as well.

Looking at their top ranking pages, we can see that they rank for keywords like:

• Best planner app free (700 searches/month)
• Productivity software (2,700 searches/month)
• Browsers (20,000 searches/month)

And so many more…

I’m definitely rooting for them. It’s so cool to see because it validates so much of what I also do. It shows that regardless of what you read on Reddit or X about Google killing publishers, Google still cares if you care.

Of course, it takes more than just writing good content. You have to know the technical stuff and create an omnipresent media brand. But it's so, so, so possible.

7. G2

• Website built with: Ruby on Rails
• Company type: Software review site
• SEO strategy: Programmatic UGC

Next up is G2, one of the most popular review sites for software. Unlike Efficient App, where reviews are written in blog posts by the actual company, G2’s reviews come straight from user-generated content. It’s people who actually use a service that then go and review it on G2.

And G2 has done a great job of organizing all of these reviews and creating a container for them. This way, they can spin up thousands of landing pages and rank in search without having to create the content themselves — people leaving reviews are making the content.

This creates an incredible growth loop. People leave reviews → G2 landing pages are populated with more content → Google ranks the G2 pages → Page gets traffic → More people see it → More people leave reviews → Repeat.

This has allowed G2 to create such a profitable media business through their own software product and ads/partnership network that they hit $100M+ in revenue back in 2024.

There’s only one caveat to G2 being on this list. And I added them to this list on purpose.

They’ve been hit really hard by algorithm updates in the past year. From a peak of around 5M monthly visitors to now around 630K monthly visitors (at the time of writing this).

This shows a shift that Google is experiencing right now. They’re prioritizing editorial content over programmatic content. As G2 declines, companies like Efficient App are replacing them in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

No SEO person, not even me, can predict if and when this will change. Google may decide to give G2 its traffic back. Who knows? We can only speculate on what is happening right now. I have one conclusion that may not be accurate, but it’s that over the years, software companies have found ways to game their reviews on G2 — potentially making the reviews seem less trustworthy and authentic.

There’s nothing wrong on G2’s part. It’s the players on the platform. But this is just a guess, and I’m not claiming anything here.

But a deeper look into the current top ranking pages for G2 shows that their Learn subdomain, aka their blog, is where many of the highest trafficked keywords are going to. So it does validate the thinking around Google loving editorial more than programmatic these days. Again, that should make you excited!

8. Angi

• Website built with: Custom React code
• Company type: Service marketplace
• SEO strategy: Programmatic local SEO

Angi, formerly Angie’s List, is an online directory website that helps users find local experts to help them with their home services. Need a plumber? Angi can help you find it. Need someone to repair your fence? Angi’s got you.

Similar to G2, Angi has a programmatic SEO play. However, Angi has the benefit of competing in a less competitive market. Local SEO is a lot easier than general SEO. With general software topics, you’re competing with hundreds of other websites that know all the SEO best practices.

When it comes to local search, you’re competing with small business owners and mom-and-pop shops that may have paid someone 20 years ago to build a website that’s just sitting there and doing nothing. Okay a bit harsh, but you get the point.

Angi, however, is not one of those old sites. They know exactly what they’re doing when it comes to SEO:

With over 3.6M monthly visitors from just SEO (8.4M/month total according to SimilarWeb), Angi has mastered the “near me” service types of keywords.

What you’ll notice with local SEO terms is that when you’re searching something, the Google autocomplete always adds on “near me” to the search query. That’s a big sign that you’re in the local SEO space.

For example, if I start searching “roofing companies…” near me comes up. And if I search for it, we can see all the options that are local to me (New York City). Right under Yelp, we can see Angi.

Now, imagine all the cities in the places they serve. Let’s say the US. There are just over 19,500 incorporated cities in the US. Now, think of all the different home services — at least a dozen. Now multiply these to create different combos, and each combo is its own programmatic landing page!

At the time of writing this, according to Ahrefs, Angi has over 436,452 landing pages. Absolutely insane, and it’s no wonder they have so much organic traffic.

Now, think about the opportunities you have here with other services. Jobs in cities, buying things in cities, etc. There are so many directory website ideas ready to be made.

9. JoinSecret

• Website built with: Ruby on Rails
• Company type: Coupon code site
• SEO strategy: Programmatic promo codes

Last but not least, we have a really cool SEO play for an affiliate website. JoinSecret, aka Secret, is a marketplace where founders and startups can find deals on software.

It’s a modern approach to the typical coupon website. What makes Secret so cool is how great the web design is, that they have a premium membership program, and that they are able to compete with similar keywords to that of G2.

The site has fairly stable SEO traffic, and is sitting around 20-30K monthly visitors just from SEO. But that traffic is very valuable because it’s all super bottom-of-funnel traffic to software products.

Looking at their top keyword, we can see that they rank on the first page for many popular software products (with the addition of promo or coupon keywords attached to the brand name).

And because most affiliate programs work on last-touch attribution, I’m sure they’re making a solid amount of affiliate commissions from this type of traffic.

It’s just a cool website that puts a modern twist on the coupon website. And I’m definitely rooting for them!

It’s like they took a little bit of what Efficient App is doing, a little bit of what G2 is doing, and a little bit of the traditional coupon website. It’s such a genius move, and I’m actually surprised that they don’t have even more traffic than they currently do. Definitely a ceiling that is not even close to being reached yet for them.

So, if you’re looking for inspiration for an affiliate website, this is one to check out. Maybe it’s a different niche outside of just software. But there are lots of opportunities here.

Learn the skills of the top 1% SEOs

As you can see, SEO is still very much alive. And with the rise of ChatGPT and AI, it’s only going to grow and become even more important. In fact, I would go as far as saying it’s the best time to get into SEO.

It’s not that all the past knowledge of SEO is irrelevant — far from it. But it’s that right now, there are a lot of people trying to game it with AI-slop writing. And if you can create a real human-first media brand, with the knowledge of how to do keyword research, create an SEO optimized website, and give search engines what they want, you will win.

I guess this is the part where I pitch some of my stuff. Forgive me for “selling out” here. If you want to learn some stuff for free, check out these resources:

• My free marketing newsletter. I talk a lot about SEO in there and share a lot of SEO content from creators I admire.
• A blog post (and YouTube video) on how to write SEO blog posts.
• A bunch of SEO content I’ve curated from other creators.

And if you’re looking for an A-Z course on how to do editorial SEO (for SaaS and media companies), you can check out my Content Marketing Course. If my course isn’t relevant to you, I also have a list of some other SEO courses you can check out as well.

Alright, that’s it! If you have any questions, the best way to get a response is to comment on one of my YouTube videos. I try to respond to all of them. Happy SEOing!