King Kong—Sabri Suby’s digital marketing agency—is back at it again. Their latest ad promises to make you a God on Google, thanks to a brand new SEO G5 Method that’ll open the floodgates to free traffic. But has anything really changed all that much with search engine optimization over the years? Isn’t it still just having relevant content, a good user experience, and maybe a few backlinks? Or does Sabri actually have insider trade secrets, like his landing page claims? Let’s find out.
Of course, the free report is just a worm on a hook and you’re a beautiful bluegill who could use a snack. So you bite, Sabri reels you in and smacks you over the head with a video sales letter you didn’t ask for. There’s a big neon green button below the video instructing you to claim your free 30-minute strategy session. “But be quick! FREE spots are almost gone for September.” First Sabri tried to fillet you, now he’s telling you little white lies, but you ignore this because of his adorable accent.
You go and check your email, just in case—and sure enough, Sabri makes like Dumb & Dumber and totally redeems himself. ‘Cause there, at the top of your inbox, sits an email with a link to the Ultimate SEO Secrets Black Book. You pop it open, hoping it’s not just another outdated PDF document with four pages of Sabri’s story and another four telling you you need a mentor before linking you back to King Kong’s calendar where, if you play your cards right, Sabri could be that mentor.
What you get is a little better than that. It’s 40 pages, pretty graphics, no rags to riches story (that comes in the next autoresponder) but definitely a link back to King Kong’s calendar where your free 30-minute strategy session (worth $1,000 because Sabri said so) still awaits you. As for the SEO “secrets”? I mean, the info in the report wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. A far cry from that which was promised in the funnel leading up to it. Kinda just a hodgepodge of best practices if I’m being honest.
It starts out saying if you think you’re just gonna invest in great content and expect Google to reward you with page one rankings, think again. Sure, it’s important, but that’s just one piece of the SEO puzzle. Another piece is just prepping for success. You need to do a site audit, fix any technical errors you find, make sure your pages load lightning fast—things like that. There’s tips on coming up with a memorable 404 page, using proper alt tags on images, making sure your title’s not too long, yadda yadda yadda.
Then it encourages you to spy on your competitors: copy their keywords, their backlinks, whatever it is that they’re doing that’s working, right? What else? Be specific, be compelling, use an active voice, look for traffic and link opportunities in unexpected places: HARO, SlideShare (okay so maybe this is a little outdated), hop on some podcasts, upload some YouTube videos, create some infographics—nothing you didn’t read 10 years ago in a blog post titled, “SEO For Dummies: A Beginners Guide To Search Engine Optimization.”
Again, not bad, but if that was worthy of being called Ultimate SEO Secrets Black Book, then the pig of a vehicle I’m driving around in is a brand new Mercedes. I wish it didn’t go down like this. I want to like Sabri, I really do, but he’s just a much more polished version of every guru I see running YouTube ads that drives me batty. I’m not saying his paid programs aren’t good—I’m sure they are—but I don’t care for the hype or the misdirection he uses to get you into them.
