The SEOCover

The porta potty story is a lesson in unglamorous but defensible unit economics, not entrepreneurial magic. Chad Howard didn't crack some SEO code or find an algorithmic loophole—he picked a category with low competition, high margins, and sticky local customers, then executed operationally. That's the real takeaway for anyone chasing niches: the best ones aren't the ones that sound interesting at dinner parties, they're the ones where customers will pay reliably and your competitor is someone with a truck and a phone number, not a VC-backed platform. If you're still hunting for the "next big thing," you're probably looking past the actual opportunities.

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Backlinks still matter, but the framing that they're primarily about signaling "trust and authority to search engines" is getting stale. What actually moved the needle for years was whether Google thought a linking site was topically relevant and had existing authority—and that's still true. But if you're chasing links as a standalone tactic in 2024, you're probably working backward: the real signal is whether the link sits in content where your actual audience lives and whether it drives referral traffic that matters. Seven tactics for link building miss the point if they don't start with "who needs to know about this and where do they spend time"—because a link from nowhere doesn't move conversions, and Google knows it.

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