How I Would Become a Successful SEO Freelancer (If I Had to Start Over)

The Big Mistake That’s Stopping You From Growing Faster

I confess, becoming a successful SEO freelancer can be challenging. It certainly was for me, but exactly that is good news for you. After sixteen years of freelancing and five years of teaching SEO to thousands of people through my last project, I realized there's a much smarter, safer, and faster way to succeed. As I reflected on my journey and listened to feedback from the people I've taught, I realized how many mistakes could have been avoided and how much time could be saved with the right approach from the start. Landing your first well-paying clients, delivering fast and reliable SEO results, and earning more by doing less in just a few weeks is possible for you. But you have to be willing to work less, follow a step-by-step system, and invest two hours every day into your freelancing career.

So I'm going to show you the big mistake I can almost guarantee you're making that's stopping you from growing faster. I'm going to reveal how to find your first well-paying client and how to increase organic traffic for websites so they generate more sales from it in a way that will change your perception of how this should all work. You just need to be able to do an SEO audit following a step-by-step checklist, and that's it! Now, the reason I only focus on a certain SEO discipline can be made really clear in a minute when I show you the big mistake that you're probably making.

But first, who the heck am I to tell you how to build an SEO freelancing career? I'm Nedim. In the past 23 years, I've worked for over one hundred clients worldwide, from startups to enterprise companies as a freelancer and through my Ecommerce SEO agency. For the past five years, I've dedicated most of my time helping people learn SEO from scratch to the level of a Senior SEO specialist. I've helped people to go from zero to $5,000, $10,000 or even more income in just a few months. Nebojša, for example, nailed the game. So did Pavle.

I've helped hundreds of SEOs do cool things like this, this, and this. I personally started freelancing sixteen years ago at twenty four, when becoming an SEO freelancer was even harder. I scaled my SEO freelancing solo career from 0 to $300,000 yearly income, and I have made every flipping mistake you're currently making along the way, and therefore, I build a system to try to solve them. So let's start by looking at that big mistake, so you can save an insane amount of wasted time and lay the foundation of a successful freelancing career faster by avoiding it, which brings us back to why I recommend making a career as an Ecommerce SEO freelancer.

The Power of Niche Ecommerce

So imagine all you need to become an SEO freelancer and live a comfortable life is to learn to walk from here to here. I mean, that sounds really easy. Right? But the mistake everyone makes is thinking they need to hike over here, which makes the journey way, way longer and harder than it needs to be. Now the reason that happens is because having big famous clients sounds more appealing than working with niche online stores.

For most people, success means landing big, famous clients because that's how you earn the big money. Right? As a result, most people chase that goal, let it take over their life, and waste a horrific amount of time once they achieve that goal. And here's why. If you look at this graph, it shows the time distribution of an SEO working on big websites and an SEO working on niche online stores. Working for big clients means you will be spending a lot of time on management, reporting, meetings, and less on working on SEO. Big websites also usually implement SEO solutions much slower.

Well, you have to think of SEO freelancing as a business. If you get caught up in the insanely time consuming cycle of managing big websites - endless meetings, checking data multiple times a day, and waiting weeks for changes to go live - you're setting yourself up to fail because you'll spend so much time managing the client that there's little left for actually doing SEO and even less for scaling your business. That's why hiking over here ends up draining your time without giving you the financial payoff you expected. Yet, unfortunately, it's the exact game most SEOs are trying to play.

The good news, if you're doing the Ecommerce SEO for niche online stores as clients, it's actually easier to grow organic traffic and make money even by doing less. The key is designing your work in life so that only a part of your time goes to client communication, and the rest of writing developer tickets that directly increase traffic and sales. As a freelancer, you can only handle one or two big clients at a time, and that's if you're working full time, usually with overtime. Handling them as a side job is nearly impossible. But if you're working with niche online stores, you can easily manage two clients as a side job - or up to six if you're working full time without any overtime, and then you'll have a lot of free time.

In addition to that, the clients will never agree on a share deal where you get a percentage of the increased organic revenue, but niche online stores are likely to do so. Smaller businesses are interested in long-term partnerships, but big businesses can’t wait to get rid of you and take over your work with inhouse resources. And that is one of the reasons why big websites like this go bankrupt. Toys R Us had more than ten billion dollars in revenue and still went bankrupt. Up until 2017, Toys R Us was one of the top retailers in the United States until it suddenly wasn't.

The Path to Working Less and Earning More

There is much more money to be made with smaller businesses than with big ones, and it's safer and much more future-proof. You just need to know how to pick the right clients. That's exactly what you can learn inside SEOLAXY. The most successful SEOs succeeded because they understood they just needed to walk up here, which is a much shorter journey for success. And you can do that by following a step-by-step system, which builds trust and confidence. And in return, it makes you a lot of money faster from less. So the mistake you need to avoid at all costs is trying to play the same game as everyone else.

But how do you grow a career by doing less? Well, let me show you so you can understand why this should be your ultimate goal. So while back, my own freelancing exploded, and everyone was like, how the heck is he doing it? What they didn't know was that the way I was doing it. I was working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, getting only a few hours of sleep, and I was a complete mess. I mean, look at me in this picture. I shot that a few years ago. I look older than I do now.

I lived in fear that if I wouldn't perform, I would starve to death. I checked keyword rankings 3 or 4 times a day for every client. I was responding to every client email or message in less than an hour. I was trying to optimize every living second of my life. And then when it was time to actually make some real money from this, I had a problem. I still only had 24 hours in a day, so I had to find a way out. But anyway, I kept going. I wrote and sold plenty of SEO strategies and audits, and things were going well.

Then my doctor said something I'll never forget - you're going to crash and create an unrepairable damage if you don't slow down. Anyone over 30 will know this. And if you have a family, or a job, or a business, taking this approach to spending every second of your time trying to be a freelancer, it literally can't work. It's impossible, and it actually stops you from making money and having a life. So I came up with an emergency plan, which totally transformed the way I looked at SEO forever, and enabled me to build a system that got me into a position where I've worked less, but still grew my business and made significantly more money in less time. My plan didn't just work for me. It worked for Stefan too. You might remember him from one of my videos. He blew up his freelancing career from 0 to 5K in, like, ten weeks, but that's only half of the story. He then switched to the next phase of it. Now he's having even more clients, and his business is doing great by being less time a manager, more time making money. But his income still grows, and that could be your ultimate goal.

The SEOLAXY System: The Smart Walk to Success

Okay. So now you know the big problem this solves and the kind of result it can get you. Let me show you how to do it and introduce you a new way to think about Ecommerce SEO, so you can play the right game without burning out. And to do that, I want to bring back the walk. But this time, just imagine walking much faster. What the heck is this? What does it have to do with SEO? Well, when I was trying to come up with a plan to fix the massive time issue I had, I've wrote down every task I was doing and realized that some tasks are more like walking with a fully packed heavy backpack when you do them.

Trying to optimize everything at once was slowing me down and didn't really have that much impact on growing my freelancing career nor the client's organic traffic. Instead of a backpack full of random SEO issues, what I really needed was just one checklist - all those SEO issues sorted by the potential SEO impact they might have - and to strictly follow it. The second issue I had was the wrong type of clients. Aside from the big clients we already talked about, the worst ones are actually the smallest clients. They're often the most demanding, nearly impossible to satisfy, and question every penny before paying. Like in many areas of life, the middle ground is often the best place to build your foundation.

I call the clients who fit that sweet spot - dream clients. They're mid sized online stores generating between $50,000 and $100,000 dollars in monthly organic revenue. They don't have an inhouse SEO team, but they appreciate it incredibly when you help boost the organic revenue by 50% or more, and they tend to stick with you. In addition to that, you actually know all people responsible for development of that online store. You can approach the CEO, resolve some issues directly with the management, and you can get the newest plans directly from them, so you can adjust your SEO strategy on time. That all makes it easier to deliver great results fast and therefore feels better.

The additional magic ingredient which makes you almost unreplaceable for such clients is if you know a bit more about their niche than outsiders. The clients appreciate it a lot if you understand the business they're in, and that also leads to faster and better results. So with this approach, you don't scale your business by acquiring more clients from the same country - you scale by landing an online store from the same niche in another country. But now the SEO results which you have delivered to your first client are a reference which makes you stand out and makes the decision for a new client way easier.

Don't underestimate the time it takes to really understand the ins and outs of a specific niche. Once you figured out what works well in one country, the core patterns almost always apply across others too. The same goes for the SEO strategy - once you've discovered what delivers the strong results for one client in that niche, you can confidently apply that approach to the next one. But which niche to choose? With which country to start? These are all topics we cover in deep detail in the SEOLAXY masterclass and would be too much for this video. If you master these three things, your freelancing career will look after itself.

The Niche Advantage and Future-Proofing Your Career

So all you need to do is focus on Ecommerce SEO, pick a niche, build a reference, land your first dream client, deliver faster results by following the SEOLAXY Checklist, and the client will happily sign a long-term contract. Now, landing the next client is much easier. Those clients will be happy to pay you at least $5000 monthly if you continue to grow their organic sales - which you're going to. And if you get stuck, you can always ask me inside SEOLAXY and get a reliable advice fast. The next level is to get shared deals on top of your monthly fee for the next client if you wish to get more clients.

At the beginning, you'll need around two hours per day per client. After you get more experience with the first two dream clients, that will start to shrink. In the end, you'll work less and earn more than before, especially if you're still employed at that point. You can choose to keep freelancing as a side gig or quit your job entirely. If you do quit, you'll have room for even more clients. At one point in my career, I was managing six clients while working only three hours a day. I have an average IQ and no special powers, so if I could do it, anyone can.

You don't even need to be super disciplined, I wasn't for sure, but you do need to be reliable and deliver results consistently. That's where most SEOs fall short. Getting clients is way easier than keeping them for years. With the structured approach inside SEOLAXY, you'll be able to cherry-pick your dream clients and consistently overdeliver - which means they'll never want to end the contract. But here's the thing, after about three years, you should be the one to move on. At least from the clients you don't have a revenue share deal with. Otherwise, you'll probably get bored. That might sound like a first-world problem, but once you get there, you’ll probably understand exactly what I mean.

Getting a share deal is also easier than you might think, if you know how to do it. That's what the final Masterclass lesson will cover. Right now, I'm creating all the outreach email templates and contracts you need to nail in order to have the possibility to get a share deal at the end. You'll also learn the soft skills needed to control the outcome of sales and onboarding calls, and how to work smoothly with project managers and developers. Not everything is about delivering SEO results - you need to be aligned with every department, not just the CEO. That's what SEOLAXY is all about.

If you want to start your SEO freelancing career the smart way, join SEOLAXY now. I can't guarantee the doors will stay open forever because I really care about the success of each member, and I simply can’t help everyone. So if you're serious about starting or growing your SEO freelancing career, now's the time to join SEOLAXY. And if you ask yourself why I care, it's simple - I've achieved almost all of my life goals, and I can't just sit around doing nothing. I want to give something back to the world, and helping others achieve their goals makes me feel fulfilled. Reading your messages after you achieved the first big wins or seeing what you were able to do or afford thanks to the growth and success you achieved by following my advice makes all the effort worth it.

See you inside SEOLAXY, where SEO freelancers walk the smart path to work less and earn more, and never hike the hard path with a heavy backpack again.