Andrew
This

Bruno ✍️
Both would be nice 😉
Ammon Johns 🎓
Okay, then imagine 2 different people ask me this, and each chooses a different response.
The guy who wants encouragement I give "Hey, go for it. There is nothing you cannot achieve if you dedicate an open and determined mind to it"
The other guy gets my very serious, best intentioned advice: You made a critical mistake 7 years ago. The situation hasn't changed, so you need to ask yourself if you have. The way you worded it, I don't think you have. At least, not enough.
I've been doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) since 1995, and I've seen leading search engines rise to dominance, and die a swift death again. I've seen patents that AltaVista applied for granted, and by the time it was, all the names on the patent worked for Google. And in all those years, I've never, ever, had an algorithm change that seriously hurt me, or made me question my career.
That you have, tells you certain things that I'm not sure you are ready to accept, and change. SEO is not about ranking #1. There is way, way, way more to it than that. Many times the actual Optimal part of SEO may require that you drop a ranking or two, and certainly there will be many keywords that are worthless in value even though you get traffic for them.
The ultimate power keyword is the easiest one of all to get – your own brand or domain name. Where all the skill comes in is in making people use it. Making them, when researching their decision long before they are even thinking of buying, respect your brand and expertise enough that once they do make a decision, they come straight to you.
That's as true for the small company as it is for Amazon.
I think that rather than jump back into the same career you already jumped out of in frustration, you need to first master some related ones. They will teach you new perspectives so that, if you later do decide to get 'back' into SEO, you'll be a lot better at it, and a lot less frustrated.
I'd say start moving towards a better understanding of Marketing, or of Sales. The human aspects rather than code-tricks you hope will fool engines.
It's a tough bit of advice, I know, but it is honestly and earnestly mean to help you.
Otherwise, just pretend you only heard the shallow version of the other guy's reply – "You go, guy!"
John » Ammon Johns
100% right, especially about understanding fundamental marketing and sales before going into Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Christopher
"What, 7 years ago you thought people would stop using search engines? Because that's the only way it can die."
Even then, I think, it would survive, just with a different name and maybe a slightly different primary focus as SEO involves the visitors point of view and make him happy onsite 🙂 (at least for me it does!)

Bruno ✍️
Can you sum up in a few words what you did to double your numbers? No worries, I'm a Canadian living in Thailand, I won't steal your clients 😉
John
Bruno it was a communication agency 2.0 that used Virtual reality (VR) and Augmented reality (AR). But they wanted only big clients – and in France big companies don't like startups that much.
So I did a 3 things
1) Client acquisition
Ppc for 6 months + SEO. The budget was 70/30 (20% of the 30 dedicated to local because no one was in the horizontal search) at the beginning then went to 20 adwords /80 SEO
I used social media as well
2) Funnel and conversion rates
I created a funnel and implemented lead capture (opt in pages, ebooks blabla) on the website.
It's really important to hire a copywriter here! In the end I had a visitor to lead conversion rate of 7-10%
It's all good getting visitors but they need to become leads otherwise you did your SEO " for nothing. "
3) Authority
I work with a company that has access 12000 websites/blogs/digital press. It's links you guessed, but also high value articles. I made it white had by only going for 2 high quality relevant links that would bring in the right traffic – don't do it "just to get a link"
If I were to do it again the only thing that I would ad would be AB testing!!
Bruno ✍️
How long did this take, how much and how many people?
John » Bruno
that's asking for too much buddy I'd have to give you the entire communication and feedback file. I've got 5 people in my agency and we use partners for AB testing and opt-in forms, but SEO is so scalable that you can do it yourself 😉.
Bruno ✍️
Are you in Toulouse? I lived there for a year when I was young! Can I PM you John? Cheers!
John » Bruno
yeah for sure!!! Haha it's a fab city I moved here when my parents left England in 2006
Daniel
What kind of budget were you working with for those three things?
People starting out usually begin with a pretty low budget, so it's tough to make all these things work together at the same time. Sounds like you had a decent budget to work with, am I right?
John » Daniel
for the first 3 months not that much actually but as soon as he got his first client through Google then I got to work with quite a nice budget

Bruno ✍️
If it worked, yes, I made a lot of money from it in the days… got me in Thailand at 34, if I knew it still worked, I might get back into it, I could sure need the cashflow… but I'm a web designer, so it's insanely competitive…
Harvey
Of course it works, you wouldn't find one competing brand without an SEO team + consultants driving organic search. We even go as far as split testing SEO whereby we test SEO changes on a small category (say Audi used cars for sale), if that has a positive effect we'll roll it out to 5 more, then sitewide. I suppose it's more challenging for a small site as they need to get brand exposure as well as SEO so they need to get some marketing investment going. Google find popular sites outside of search and ranks them accordingly (signals). So in short, and this is my experience, SEO (excluding technical SEO) needs to go hand in hand with marketing. Get both right then you'll see positive results in organic.