Comment by bell-cot
How long have you been on the web, and how crowded is your industry (from an SEO PoV)?
At $Job, we've got a couple long-time micro-clients in niche industries. They don't bother with SEO. Spend $0 on ads. Have decades-old site designs. And are in the top 3 Google results for most search strings that they care about.
I am not able to rank for my own brand name, it's not crowded. All the pages that are ranking from other websites (linkedin, facebook, x) are owned by me.
The website is 1 year old.