#820 Top 5 SEO Tactics That Still Work in 2025 with Sean Markey
Tropical MBA: Entrepreneurship & Founder Lifestyle
Dan Andrews; Ian Schoen
4.9 • 527 Ratings
🗓️ 14 August 2025
⏱️ 36 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Organic traffic is getting weird… and kinda looks like an alligator’s mouth (you’ll have to listen to the episode to see what we mean).
SEO expert Sean Markey joins Dan to break down 5 strategies still working in 2025: from parasite SEO to aged domains and Reddit "hacks." If you’re trying to cut through the LLM noise, this episode is the ultimate SEO rabbit hole.
LINKS
Sean’s SEO newsletter for CEOs and founders that hate SEO newsletters
Sean’s SEO community
22 FREE business resources for location-independent entrepreneurs
Meet the world’s most generous global entrepreneurs inside Dynamite Circle
Connect with 7+ figure founders inside DC BLACK
Remote First Recruiting: Find your next best remote hire in 21 days
CHAPTERS
(00:00:00) Today’s Guest: Sean Markey
(00:02:53) The State of SEO in 2025
(00:03:49) What SEO Leaders Are Doing (Instead of Panicking)
(00:04:44) How to Own Page 1 Without Ranking
(00:07:25) Buy Your Way Into the SERPs
(00:09:23) The Reddit Mod Hack No One Talks About
(00:12:58) How Small Channels Are Printing 60K MRR
(00:14:46) Ranking in LLMs Without a Prompt Engineer
(00:17:26) The Aged Domain Shortcut That Still Works
(00:20:54) What Is Parasite SEO (And Why It Works)
(00:22:50) The AI Prompt Stack SEO Founders Are Gatekeeping
(00:25:25) Why Local SEO Still Wins in 2025
(00:26:45) Is SEO Even SEO Anymore?
(00:29:36) Why Community > Courses in 2025
(00:33:03) The 1-1-1 Model: Simple, Scalable, Profitable
CONNECT:
Dan@tropicalmba.com
Ian@tropicalmba.com
Past guests on TMBA include Cal Newport, David Heinemeier Hannson, Seth Godin, Ricardo Semler, Noah Kagan, Rob Walling, Jay Clouse, Einar Vollset, Sam Dogan, Gino Wickam, James Clear, Jodie Cook, Mark Webster, Steph Smith, Taylor Pearson, Justin Tan, Matt Gartland, Ayman Al-Abdullah, Lucy Bella.
PLAYLIST:
TMBA 588: Embracing Growth Through Setbacks w/ Sean Markey
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All right, everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Of course, this is the show where we help you grow a six, seven or eight figure location independent business. |
| 0:21.9 | One of the ways we need to do that is by top of funnel marketing. |
| 0:25.0 | In fact, probably for most of us, our biggest channel is SEO. |
| 0:29.2 | That's changing a lot. |
| 0:30.8 | We're going to discuss how we can leverage those changes to our advantage in today's episode. |
| 0:35.2 | So I've invited an expert on the show to discuss five |
| 0:38.2 | strategies for getting more organic leads via SEO in 2025. So how can we adjust and leverage |
| 0:44.6 | Google's changes to benefit our businesses? Along the way, we'll discuss some undervalued |
| 0:50.4 | ways to get more organic traffic for your brand and how our guest founded a popular |
| 0:55.1 | private community for SEO. So everybody's talking community. He's done it. He'll share some thoughts |
| 0:59.7 | on that. And also the thought process behind his highly profitable one channel, one offer, |
| 1:05.8 | business model. So to do all that, let me introduce you to Sean Markey. He is the founder of ranks.com. He writes one of my favorite must read newsletters. You can subscribe at ranks.com slash newsletter. And also he's the co-founder of the advise SEO community. So he's on the front lines of all these SEO changes happening in 2025. So without further ado, |
| 1:29.4 | let me introduce our guest, Sean Markey. Can you let us know what it is you do? How do you |
| 1:35.4 | make money on the internet? I've done SEO stuff since around 2011. I really went into my whole |
| 1:43.7 | story on the last episode I was on. So I won't go at that |
| 1:47.2 | link there. But these days, I have an SEO community. I co-own called Advise. And I do what I call |
| 1:57.0 | acquisition SEO, which is where I help other companies find and acquire websites that will |
| 2:04.2 | help them increase their traffic, increase the keywords there, potential audiences, or find |
| 2:11.5 | digital assets like subreddits, podcast newsletters that they could use to help grow their bottom line. |
| 2:18.2 | Now, we talk a lot off the podcast. You write a great newsletter, which I read every version. |
| 2:24.0 | The reason you're on the show today is because you are just always out there tinkering, |
| 2:29.9 | like playing around on the web, figuring out stuff that's working. Let's set the table a little bit. |
... |
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