Content Is Not King - Growing Zero Tax Jobs to 1000 Monthly Search Clicks in 2 Months

I'm Sam, and I run Zero Tax Jobs, a niche job board dedicated to tech jobs with zero income tax. I wanted to share how I grew my site to 1,000 unique clicks via Google Search Console in two months. I am just starting my journey, but already I've learned that despite what you read online about "content being king" for ranking on SEO... I am pretty sure it isn't. Read on to find out more.

🚀 Not a Genre
When I first launched Zero Tax Jobs, I quickly realized that the concept of "zero tax" or "income-tax free jobs" wasn't a well-defined job genre, and there was no real search volume to around this idea. However, I knew that of course people were interested in finding jobs in job markets which have no tax; Dubai & Abu Dhabi (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahamas, Cayman and Bermuda. This meant I'd need to try and target these keywords.

🔍 Keyword Research
My first step was to conduct thorough keyword research. I looked for relevant terms with low competition that I had some hope of ranking for.

The goal was to find those sweet spots where there was enough search volume but not too much competition.

Here are some of the keywords I came up with:

• dubai software engineer salary
• dubai software engineer jobs
• it & technical support jobs
• abu dhabi jobs
• expat jobs saudi arabia

✍️ Content Strategy - Pillar Pages and Long Form Content
I'd heard that creating quality content was really important if you wanted to rank in SEO and that it should be structured around a pillar page. A pillar page is basically a topic page for example "Software Engineering in Dubai", which has key information a searcher might be looking for.

Obviously in my case, people are searching for jobs so I decided to create pillar pages around specific job searches.

For example I created a Software Engineer Jobs in Dubai landing page, which listed all the latest jobs (updated daily), but also had text related to common questions people might have about working as a software engineer in Dubai, which I could link to long form articles. In the case of software engineering in Dubai, I wrote articles such as:

• Software Engineer Salaries in Dubai, UAE - An Ultimate Guide
• The Best Companies in Dubai to Work for as a Software Engineer
• How to Get a Visa as a Software Engineer in Dubai

These were all original articles, that I researched and wrote completely on my own. I also interlinked all the articles where relevant with contextual links which I heard was important for SEO.

📊 The Results
I am a very niche job board, so I am not expecting huge unique viewing figures.. however I've seen the unique clicks rise to just under 1000 clicks per month at time of writing.

Is this due to my SEO efforts? Yes and no.

Exploring the traffic, I get very few clicks through my targeted keywords, actually search volume tends to come from really specific searches and keywords that my site just happens to cater to - for example someone searching for a specific company or job.

When it comes to keywords I am targeting, only the salary keyword has seen reasonable results (I made the top 10 for one of the associated terms), but generally I float around 20 in the search enginer results pages (SERPs) for this.

For the other keywords... I am seeing hardly anything.

🫅 Content Isn't King
When I compare my pages with the top 20 around my keywords, it's clear that my content is far more readable, keyword related and ultra focused around this topic. In fact there are some pages which have close to zero relation to the topic yet they still outrank me... there are also pages with close to unreadable, AI generated content that are high in the results so what's going on?

I've come to realise that content really isn't king.. when it comes to SEO, it's all about backlinks. Without high quality backlinks google will never rank your page above other sites with a better backlink profile. You could have the best content in the world, but because Google doesn't really know about it, it has no reason to show it to people and so it will never understand that when people visit your page they are way more engaged with your content than higher ranking sites.

🏗️ Building Backlinks
This led me to my current mission: building backlinks. I've decided to pull back from content creation for a while and focus a bit more on improving my backlink profile. My aim is to seek out contextual links on high quality sites with decent domain authority to try and get better results in the SERPs.

Getting links is tough though, there are lost of ideas about mailing people and asking for links.. but honestly after sending 20 emails, I've received not even a whiff of a reply! As such, I am starting to think this is a really inefficient way to build links...

🛠️ Free Tools for Engagement
A better way in my opinion to build backlinks is to create free tools that my audience would find useful using AI and other technologies. People like linking to free useful tools that relate to their genre so the idea is that I can launch these mini products and pick up backlinks in a much more natural way.

I am still coming up with ideas but some I am thinking about are:

• Cost of Living Calculator: Helps job seekers understand how much it would cost to live in different countries.
• Salary Calculator: Estimate the person's actual salary by profession, level of experience etc

⏱️ Managing Time & Avoiding Burnout
Balancing this project with my full-time job has been challenging. To prevent burnout and keep the momentum, I've decided to set realistic work targets. Here's how I manage my time:

• 1 hour of job posting a day. I manually post jobs, that's because the whole concept of Zero Tax Jobs, is high quality jobs that are perfect for expats.. there are a lot of terrible jobs in these locations, and filtering through these is part of my USP.. AI just isn't very good at telling good jobs from bad jobs, so even though I have scripts to speed up the process the jobs need a manual review.
• 2 x 4 hours sessions per week. I try to do two sessions of four hours a week, they can be anything, but usually they are either about SEO/marketing or programming new features.

🎯 What's Next?
I plan to keep on pushing on slowly but surely, and measuring my results.

I am really excited to see how the backlink building affects my SERPs and report back on my results here.

Wish me luck!

If you want to communicate with me reach out to me on twitter here: @AwwSamu