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If I lost every Google ranking I had tomorrow and you gave me 48 hours to get a business back to the number one spot, I think I could do it. And I say that because I've spent the last seven years
Rob Hoffman walks through his 48-hour SEO playbook: picking winnable long-tail, high-intent keywords, checking domain ratings, using LinkedIn and YouTube for fast rankings, and building optimized page
Key Takeaways
- Winning fast requires targeting long-tail, buying-intent keywords where competitor domain ratings are low.
- Domain rating comparison is a better signal of winnability than keyword difficulty alone.
- LinkedIn and YouTube offer fast ranking opportunities for competitive terms when your own domain is weak.
- Optimized, genuinely better content plus a conversion path matters more than volume of pages.
What the video covers
- The creator claims he could regain a number-one Google ranking within 48 hours, drawing on seven years of SEO and AI search work for companies like Beehive, Kajabi, and Shopify.
- Step one is choosing a keyword you can realistically win: avoid broad head terms like 'best CRM' and target specific, buying-intent searches such as 'top rated CRM platforms for small business'.
- Keyword difficulty alone is misleading; check the domain ratings (DR) of the sites currently ranking in Ahrefs and compare them to your own site's DR.
- Use seed keywords plus modifiers (best, top, alternatives, versus, reviews) in a keyword tool to generate bottom-of-funnel search terms that convert.
- Track which pages and domains get cited in AI search (e.g., via Mentions) to understand what LLMs surface for a query.
- Decide where to publish: use your own site if its authority is sufficient; otherwise leverage high-authority platforms like LinkedIn Pulse articles and YouTube, which can rank very quickly.
- Create content that beats current results by being fresher, more detailed, and more useful, including tables, embedded video, and clear structure, since AI systems favor comparison tables.
- Ensure the page converts visitors with a clear next step, such as a lead magnet or demo call, not just rankings.
- Get the page indexed quickly through Google Search Console and monitor its performance.
- Focus on iteratively improving a few strong live pages rather than publishing many low-quality ones.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Ranking #1 in 48 Hours
- 01:18Step 1: Picking a Keyword You Can Win
- 02:44Checking Domain Ratings and Competitors
- 04:14Finding Bottom-of-Funnel Keywords
- 05:33Deciding Where to Rank: Your Site vs. LinkedIn and YouTube
- 08:12Building the Page and Conversion Path
- 10:59Getting Indexed and Tracking Results
- 13:20Improving Content and Closing
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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doing SEO and AI search for companies like Beehive, Kajjabi, and Shopify. And we've generated tens of millions of dollars of revenue for our clients through search. We also had pages hit number one in less than 48 hours, including a bottom ofunnel search we
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ranked for in under a day. So, in this video, I'm going to show you exactly how I'd approach those 48 hours from finding a search I think I can win to building the page and getting it in front of
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Google and LLMs like ChatGBT and Claude. The first thing I do is work out what keyword I could realistically rank for that quickly. Step number one, pick a search you can actually win. If I've only got 48 hours, I'm not going to go
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after a keyword like best CRM. There's already huge companies fighting for that ranking, and I'm not going to build years of authority in two days. So, instead of asking, "What's the biggest keyword I can rank for?" I'm looking for
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a search that is valuable enough to bring me customers, but specific enough that I have a chance of competing for it. So, I'm going to share my screen.
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I'm going to show you exactly how I do this. We're going to be looking for keywords that are closer to a buying decision, like alternatives, comparisons, reviews, and specific best searches. Okay. So, I'm going to start in a software like HFS. So, you're going
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to want to search for keywords that have high search volume but a low keyword difficulty score. And I'll be a little bit more specific in a moment. So, as an example, you can see here CRM software has a ton of search volume, but it is
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very difficult. And you can see that because the keyword difficulty is in red and it is a high number. Versus if you go to a search like top rated CRM platforms for small business, this has also a ton of search volume. So, 21,000
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people are searching this per month, but it has a zero keyword difficulty score. Now, here's one trick. You can't just rely on the keyword difficulty score.
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You have to actually open this up and you scroll down over here to this section. These are the current rankings on Google. And if you look here in the column that says DR, that's domain rating. That means the authority that
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the websites have that are ranking for this keyword. And so, the higher the number, the more authority that website has. And that means that if you have like a 30 domain rating and all your competitors have like an 80 domain
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rating, it's not likely that you're going to be able to beat them. So you want to look here and see, okay, well, what are the domain ratings of the websites that are ranking? And we can see that this site has a 24 domain
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rating. This has a 37. This has a 13. So therefore, there are websites with a low domain rating that are ranking for this search. and you want to compare that to whatever your domain rating is. So if you come back to Hrefs and you can do
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that here in Hrefs, if you come to the site explorer section and you put in your website, it's going to tell you right up here at the top what is your domain rating. So as an example, my website here has a domain rating of 29.
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And since we see a couple other websites here that have a domain rating of 24 and 13, I think that I could actually successfully rank for this keyword with my website. Now, the other thing about this keyword is that it is very high
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buying intent. So, if we rank for this, I suspect that we're going to drive a ton of conversions. And the reason is because number one, it is a longtail keyword. So, rather than best CRM, it's top rated CRM platforms for small
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businesses. And typically, the more long and specific the search is, the more likely somebody is going to buy because they're looking for something very specific. They know what they want and they're just trying to find that thing and purchase it. Okay. Now, the second
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thing I'm going to do is I'm going to look here on a platform like mentions, which is an AI visibility tracker. And we're going to click into this keyword that we are tracking, and just see what are the websites and pages that are
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getting cited in AI search. And you're probably wondering, how do you do this keyword research in the first place? I actually have a really good claude skill for this. If you want access to the cloud skill, just let me know in the
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comments and I'll send it to you. But as an example, let's say that our website is ATO, which is an AI powered CRM. What we're going to do is we're going to first find the seed keywords, things like CRM, AI CRM, also listing some of
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their competitors like HubSpot. And then we're going to add modifiers. So this is like best top versus alternatives. And you can see what I've done here is I take the seed keywords and I put them into here in the keywords explorer. And
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then I come down to include any word. And this is where I put the modifiers.
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So, I'm going to copy and paste the modifiers into here, show results, and I'm going to go to matching terms here on the left. And that's how we get this nice big list here. Now, I will say this
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is just a quick way to get the keyword research process started. If I were actually working on a campaign for a client, I would do a much more in-depth keyword research process than this. But at least this gets you started and can
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start to get some ideas flowing. And look, we're finding a ton of really good keywords actually, like best CRM, contact management, small sales teams. I can't even say it. It's so long, but it has 4,000 searches a month, which is
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insane, and pretty low competition. And remember, because we don't just want to rank, we want to rank for a keyword that's going to make you money. You want to find keywords that have best in front of them. So, best CRM for alternatives.
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So like HubSpot alternatives, Salesforce alternatives also versus keywords are good, but this only works if your brand already is well-known. So this would work if you are HubSpot and you want to rank for HubSpot versus Atio. These are
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the most bottom offunnel search terms. And so if you can find keywords that fit these patterns, basically your rankings are going to result in a ton more conversions. And by the way, I'm going to show you a real live example of one
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of these keywords that we are ranking for. So this is our client frontal and they are ranking number one with their website and then also number two with a LinkedIn pulse article that we created for them. I'm going to talk about
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LinkedIn a little bit later because this is an overpowered strategy right now. It's a huge arbitrage. You're able to rank using LinkedIn pulse articles extremely quickly and for very competitive keywords. And this actually brings me to my next point which is you
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need to decide where you're going to actually rank. If my website already has some authority, I'm going to build the page there. I'm also going to be looking at places like LinkedIn and YouTube.
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LinkedIn and YouTube are extremely easy to rank on right now, it is a huge opportunity. And so, if your website has low domain authority and you're not going to be able to rank there, I'd rather just leverage platforms that
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already have authority like LinkedIn and YouTube. And so, as a rule of thumb, if you look in hrefs and you can see that your search term that you're trying to rank for has a bunch of websites that have [music] crappy content and their
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domain rating is a lot lower than yours, that's a really good signal that you should try to build a page on your website. If it's a more competitive keyword, you're going to want to explore LinkedIn and YouTube. I'm going to walk
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you through it right now. But the other thing I will say is that ideally, you should try to rank for every keyword on your own website on LinkedIn and on YouTube. And here's a really good example. I'm going to show you how you
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can determine which one of these sites you should build your content on. If you look in Google and you see the AI overview is citing a LinkedIn article like it is right here, then you know there's a really good chance if you
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build a better LinkedIn page than what is currently being cited that you are going to be able to steal that ranking.
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And then also you can use tools like mentions which is an AI visibility tool and you can track keywords kind of like best tool for recording quick walkthrough videos for clients. Very longtail high buying intent keyword. And you can see that YouTube right over here
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is actually the most cited page for this keyword. And if we open up the YouTube video, is this a high quality YouTube video that actually matches the intent that somebody is searching for? In other words, for this prompt, best tool for
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recording quick walkthrough videos, is this video actually helping to answer that question? And when I look at this video, I do notice has pretty low views.
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It was also done 2 years ago, it's not an exact match title. So, I bet you if you created a YouTube video that had this exact title and it was a bit higher quality of a video, meaning that you
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have more fresh up-to-date information in the transcript. Also, this one is a faceless YouTube video, so it's like you don't even know who is the person behind it. So, there's very low authority. And also, maybe you optimize the description
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a little bit better. You're gonna have a pretty good chance at overtaking this ranking and being able to rank for this keyword in AI search with your YouTube video. And again, the best case scenario is to actually do all three. So, create
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a page on your website, create a YouTube video that you embed on the page, and then also create a corresponding LinkedIn article where you rewrite the article. It has to be rewritten. It cannot be a copy and paste. And you put
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that on LinkedIn. And so, as an example, for this page that we built for our client, you can see that not only is it a very high quality piece of content, but it also has a corresponding YouTube video here that's embedded in the page,
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as well as a very highquality corresponding LinkedIn pulse article here, which you publish to your company's LinkedIn page. So, you want AI to make the association between your company's name [music] and the keyword that you're trying to rank for. So
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publish it not on your page but on your company's page and then just repost it on your personal account. And again, LinkedIn is super overpowered right now in AI search particularly in getting into the AI overviews on Google or into
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LLM's like Chachi and Claude. We've seen LinkedIn articles rank in literally under an hour which is just crazy. So my overall recommendation is build your content on all three platforms. That is just going to broaden your surface area
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for ranking and you're going to have a much better shot of ranking in under 48 hours. Okay, so quick pause. If you're watching this because you want your company showing up when your customers are searching in Google, ChatGBT, and
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other places they're doing research, this is literally what my team does every day. We've generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue for our clients through search. And if you want us to look where your biggest opportunities are. You can book a call
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with us using the first link below in the description. Okay, let's get back to building the actual page. Step number three is you need to build something that is better than what is already ranking. For example, if somebody
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searches the exact keyword I'm targeting and they land on my page, I want to answer their question quickly. I need to give them a reason to trust me and my answer over the other pages they could have clicked on. And there's a few other
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strategies that I'm going to walk through right now. And actually, I have a full checklist of things that you can implement into your pages to make them perfectly optimized for SEO and AI search. So, I'm going to walk through
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some of these points and show you a live example. So, number one is key takeaways. You want to answer the reader's question as quickly as possible. You can do this with a key takeaways section where you have about
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five bullet points and you just answer their main questions without making them sift through an entire article. This is also really valuable for AI search because AI likes summaries. Number two is having a comparison table. Having a comparison table is really helpful to
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the reader because it just allows them to digest complex information in a very simple visual way. And also AI bots love comparison tables. Comparison tables are often used in AI search to power things like AI overviews on Google or the
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results that you see on LLM like chat GBT. So if you have a well organized comparison table on your page, it's more likely that you're going to rank and show up in AI search. Something else that's really important is having an
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author profile and linking to your socials. So, if you look on this article, the author, Kenny, you can actually click through to his LinkedIn page. It even has a nice headsh shot and says what his title is. And the purpose
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of this is to lend authority to the page because nobody wants to take advice from some faceless avatar. You need to demonstrate why you are actually an authority on the subject matter you are presenting. Another really key component
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of your page is to have a fact section. So, this is typically at the bottom of the page. And the purpose of this is to add additional keywords into the content that your reader is likely asking. And it's also just helpful for a human
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because your buyer likely has a ton of questions and objections. So, your goal should be to answer all of those things on the page itself using roughly five to eight frequently asked questions and then answering those questions in two to
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three sentences. Now, there's a lot of information here, and I'm not going to go through this entire list on this video because number one, I'm going to actually leave the link to [music] this in the description of the video. So, if
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you want to read this entire checklist, you can go download it right now in the description of the video. So, if you want to see a full breakdown of what makes a perfectly optimized article, you can go and watch a full video on that
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right here. But for now, the last thing I want to cover, which is so important, and this is probably the biggest thing that will help your page to get ranked, is having something called information gain. Okay, so information gain is
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unique information that you have that does not exist elsewhere on the internet. Examples of information gain include unique [music] studies, firstparty or proprietary data, or named expert interviews. And here I have a few more examples of what qualifies as
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information gain. But the reason this is important is because Google and LMS know that everybody these days are just using claw to spin up a ton of pages. And when you use AI to create pages, what you're doing is basically going out and
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scraping other pages that already exist and just rewarding and regurgitating them. So that does not make any sense for Google's business model or Anthropic or Open's business model. They need unique information to exist on the internet. And so you need to be the
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person to supply unique information that does not exist elsewhere on the internet. And then when AI crawlers go out and search the internet, they are going to be more likely to site your page. So ironically, if you are trying
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to rank a page in 48 hours, I would probably use a big chunk of these 48 hours just focusing on how can you add information gain to your content. Okay, so step number four is making sure that this ranking can actually turn into
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business because there's not much point in getting to number one on Google or an AI search if someone lands on the page and they have nowhere to go from there and you're not going to actually make a conversion. The point at the end of the
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day is you're trying to get people to use your product and to make money.
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You're not just trying to get vanity metrics like traffic. You want conversions. So before I publish this page, I want to make sure that the next step or CTA that is in the content makes sense for the person who searched. We
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call this CTA congruency. So as an example, if somebody is looking at alternatives or comparing products, so as an example, HubSpot alternatives, Salesforce [music] alternatives, they're probably much closer to making an actual decision than somebody reading a generalformational blog post. So
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therefore, you can have a CTA that is book a call or something that is a little bit more actionoriented. Whereas if somebody is searching a more informational keyword, kind of like this video, how to rank an AI search in 48
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hours, then you want to create a CTA that points them towards an educational resource. As an example, in this video, I created an educational resource that's going to help you get closer to your goal of ranking in AI search in 48
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hours. We call this a lead magnet. For example, if you are trying to rank a piece of content that is how to connect your CRM to Claude using an MCP, you probably want to create an educational resource, i.e. a lead magnet that people
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can download when they come to your page. So they land on your page and then you go, "Hey, if you want the exact steps that you can follow right now to actually connect [music] your CRM to Claude via MCP, I've created a
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blueprint. Go ahead and download it right here." So again, you have to think about what is the person who comes to your page trying to accomplish. And your goal is to always get them one step closer to accomplishing that goal.
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Whether that is a CTA to book a call with you where you're going to do an audit for them, or if it is a lead magnet, i.e. an educational resource that is going to give them a more detailed blueprint. And I normally
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recommend having about five CTAs in your content. You want to have one at the top, which is kind of like a floating CTA, that like book a call button that you see at the top of websites. Then you
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want to have a second floating CTA somewhere on the side, which means as people scroll down your page, that CTA remains static on the page. And then you [music] want to have three more CTAs.
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One about 15 to 20% down the page in the copy. Another one that's about like 30 to 50% down the page. And then one more CTA at the very bottom of the page in the copy itself. And then additionally,
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you're going to also want to have social proof. So, testimonials, case studies, and you basically want to have as much relevant customer proof on the page as possible because this is what makes people trust you. You need to
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demonstrate that you can actually get the result that you are telling people you can get for them. You basically just need to prove to the audience that you are worth listening to and you can [music] actually help them to get the
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result that they are looking for. So, again, frontal does an amazing job of doing this in their content. If you look here, they have a CTA up at the top right corner. They also have another one right here. These are the floating CTAs
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that remain static as you scroll down the page. Funny enough, they actually have another one right here. Then if you keep scrolling, they have yet another CTA that looks really nice and clean on the page over here. And at the very
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bottom of the page, they also have this CTA that just says, "Want us to run this for you?" And then you go ahead and book a call. And the social proof, if you look down here, Frontal's actually given
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a lot of case studies where they've worked with companies like AirOps, Airall, Design Pickle, who they have gotten results for, and they're very specific about the results that they've gotten for these clients. And actually, if you go to the bottom of the page,
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they have even more proof and case study resources right here where you can click through and go to a much more detailed dedicated case study page. So, these are all conversion rate optimization tips because again, you don't just want
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people to land on your page and to get traffic. You want people to actually buy your product. And once that's live, I'm going to use the rest of my time in these 48 hours just to track whether or
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not this page is actually ranking. So, you need to actually get your page indexed, which you [music] can see in Google Search Console. And now you can track how this page is actually ranking.
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And honestly, the first thing I would do is I would just start searching this keyword myself every day and just seeing am I showing up in Google's AI overviews as well as going into Google Search Console and filtering down for the
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keyword or the query is what it's called in Google Search Console that you're trying to rank for. And Google Search Console will tell you what your ranking is for that keyword. Now, heads up that Google Search Console has a bit of a
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data delay. So, this is why honestly I'll just open up a VPN, set my location to New York or Los Angeles. Sometimes I open an incognito window and search my keyword and just see what comes up and you'll see especially in the AI
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overviews which it's very easy to rank quickly in these AI overviews with again a LinkedIn article or a YouTube video and you can go and monitor that every day and just see hey is my content actually ranking and honestly that's
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where I'd stop thinking about the 48 hour challenge because getting something to number one quickly is great but you don't want to spend all your time refreshing a page. The bigger opportunity is taking what worked and doing it again and again for the next
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search that can bring you customers. So what I would do from day three is number one, if your first article is not ranking, I would do a little bit of an audit and see what does my page not have
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that the existing content that is ranking do have. As an example, maybe they have a more detailed fact section or maybe they have a YouTube video embedded in their content and my content does not yet. And you can add these
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elements into your content. But I would also just focus on repeating what we talked about in this video and getting more shots on net because what you want to do is yes, you want to perfectly optimize your content, but you also want
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to get reps in because maybe if you create five pieces of content, three are going to rank and two may not, but the three that you did get ranking are hopefully going to get you results and bring you customers. So, it's all about
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repetition and getting more shots on net because the point of giving myself 48 hours isn't that I think every page you publish should be number one 2 days later. Okay, that's not realistic. Most searches are not going to work like
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that. The time limit just forces me to focus on what I can control. So, you're basically saying, I'm going to create the best, most optimized content that I possibly can in 48 hours. Okay? You don't want to be a perfectionist and get
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perfectionist paralysis where you're taking two weeks to create a single piece of content. The time limit just forces me to focus on what I can control, which search I go after, where I publish, how useful the page is, and
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whether I've put something on it that deserves to rank above what's already out there. Then I can keep improving it instead of publishing another 50 pages and hoping something sticks. And the other benefit of this is that now I can
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actually keep updating this live page and improving it rather than just spray and praying 50 crappy pages. Now, if you want my team to do this with you, there is a link below in the description where you can book a call right now and we
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will look at where your company could be showing up across Google and AI search.
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Otherwise, please subscribe if you like this video because that is a signal to me that I should continue to make content like this. and I will see you in the next
Topics:SEOkeyword researchAhrefsdomain ratinglong-tail keywordsLinkedIn PulseYouTube SEOAI searchLLM visibilitycontent optimization
