Forget the theory for a second. Here's the actual checklist, in order, so you can go check your own site right now instead of just nodding along. 1) Open your top money page. Can you find the author's full name without scrolling? If it's "Admin" or missing, stop — nothing else matters until this is fixed. 2) Click the author's name. Does it go anywhere? A bio, a credentials page, a LinkedIn? If it's a dead link or no link, that's gap #2. 3) Ctrl+F the page for a source, study, or citation. Zero hits on a YMYL page is a red flag to both Google and a human reader. 4) Look for a last-updated date. If your "2024 guide" still says 2024 and nothing's changed, that's stale trust. 5) Check your About page. Does it explain who's actually behind the site, or is it generic filler about "passion for helping people"? 6) Search your own site for the word "disclosure" or "disclaimer." If it's not there and you're making money-adjacent claims, add it. Run through your top 3 pages against this list and count how many boxes you're missing. Most people are surprised it's not zero, it's usually 2 or 3. Post your score below (no URL needed) — which one is your weakest?

Here's what actually moved. I took on a client on May 1st. They sell in one of Google's most restricted niches. The kind where Google is actively suspicious of every page you publish. No ads allowed. No easy links. Competitors getting deleted from the index every core update. If the system works there, it works anywhere. That was the bet. Here's the 9-week scorecard, straight from Search Console: - 20 pages up - 2,650 extra clicks vs the period before - Best product page: +2,933% - Another product page: +1,960% (that's 392 extra clicks on one URL) - One article: +2,300% - Even the news page: +7,400% But here's the part most people miss. Around 1,900 of those 2,650 clicks landed on PRODUCT pages. Not the blog. Most agencies would've spent those 9 weeks pumping out blog posts. Top of funnel stuff that AI summaries are eating alive anyway. We did the opposite. Money pages first. I can't share the keywords or the niche. Client confidentiality. But I can share what the work actually was, because it's not magic: 1. Fixed the trust signals Google checks before it will rank a restricted-niche page at all. Who's behind the site, who vouches for it, whether a machine can verify any of it. 2. Made every money page readable by machines. Clear structure, sane internal links, schema that tells Google exactly what each page is. 3. Stopped feeding the blog and started feeding the pages that take payment. No new content sprints. No link buying. No tricks that die in the next update. Boring, fundamental trust work. Repeated weekly. Turns out Google doesn't hate restricted niches. It hates restricted-niche sites it can't trust. If you're sitting on a site where the products don't rank but the blog sort of does, you've got the same problem this client had. Happy to answer questions about the approach in the comments. Keywords stay private, everything else is fair game.

I use Claude, Chatgpt (Codex) and GLM 5.2. To save on tokens and because the results are night and day. Happy to share my system with members. Real results, a page ranked 51 I applied my system straight to number 1.

A few resources to go deeper once you've worked through the YMYL SEO Starter: Greenlight Keywords course and free tool: propeloseo.com Greenlight link-building program (LLB): propeloseo.com Done-for-you SEO and site audit inquiries: propeloseo.com/contact Which of these are you closest to needing right now?

Display ads are fine, but they leave most of the value of YMYL traffic on the table. The real money in hard niches is on the back end, where it recurs. Three models that work: a subscription or membership tied to the problem you rank for, recurring affiliate offers (SaaS and ongoing services), and your own productized service sold to the exact visitors you already attract. What does your back-end revenue look like today, and where's the gap?