The two things are extremely closely related in my mind. Growth Hacking (which also includes SEO for me) and “Hacking” in an IT/Computer sense (like a Penetration Tester or Ethical Hacker”) have the same mindset, or at least, they should have the same mindset.
The best SEO experts I have ever met are programmers.
SEO is, really, manipulating (preferably in a “white hat sense”) the search engines to rank your content higher than your competitors.
Google rewards content that gets more engagement than your competition and that is the “true and only metric” that counts in my opinion.
I’m not going to cover every aspect of SEO as I see it, but rather I want to share some tools and processes that I believe show the similarity between the two disciplines because I have experience in both.
Incidentally, I have a post relating to the broader connection between growth hacking and hacking here.
I am a Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) and CompTIA Security+ certified so I feel that at least I can demonstrate that I understand the subject matter that I’m writing!
I’ve also worked with dozens of these professionals and I’ve even interviewed dozens of Kali Linux Developers that have created the hacking tools that we all love and use so again, I just want to emphasize that I think I know what I’m talking about in the post.
Tools In Kali That Can Be Used For SEO
Tools that can be used for SEO (white and black hat) are, I believe, as follows:
| Name Of Kali Tool | Reason Why That Tool Is Useful For SEO |
|---|---|
| Emai Harvester | Kinda obvious, but this scrapes email addresses |
| Maltego | This helps discover who is best to contact for backlinking, etc. |
| Sn1per | To help establish domain ownership and other points of interest when orchestrating outreach |
| Metasploit | Discover vulnerabilities in the targets site to offer to patch and then pitch your services but remember that this would be illegal to scan and find vulnerabilities |
| ProxyChains | Savvy SEO marketers that wear both hats live inside multiple proxies. If you need to ask why then you’re several steps behind where your marketing could be. |
These are the tools that I can think of right now that are the most useful.
Think about it though, these tools are basically the same as things like ZennoPoster and Scrapebox, i.e working with proxies and being able to detect undetected to perform hundreds if not thousands of tasks at the same time.
When more tools become obvious to me I’ll add them to this resource.
If you can think of any please add them!
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