The difference between trying to rank a new website or stagnant website that lacks topical depth, content, links or trust vs. flinging keywords effortlessly to page one within ten minutes (using a domain with age, trust and authority) is a game-changing metric.
Ranking in Ten Minutes instead of Ten Months
The only difference between a website that can get ranked in 10 minutes instead of 10 months for a competitive keyword is a website with domain authority. Authority is the objective of SEO, not dependency on backlinks from other websites or other metrics to augment rankings.
When approaching a market initially, it’s rather common to fall into the perspective of calculating how many pages, how many links and how long will it take to get ranked for keywords.
The usual exercise of (1) performing keyword research (2) building-out landing pages that correspond to those keywords and (3) launching self-sufficient websites with the keyword targets built into the site architecture; all that remains is scaling the amount of content needed to cross the tipping point and fuel those pages with backlinks.
Regarding the point (3) above, you can easily implement a CMS (content management system) in a sub folder or sub domain to build enough on page relevance to topple the barrier to entry and tip the scale of relevance in your favor.
For example, to rank for one keyword, you may have to build 30 supporting pages; the added benefit means that once the pages are indexed and feed each other through links or acquire inbound links, your website can rank for all the content on those pages, not just the initial key phrase you anticipated.
Taking this a step further (the premise of co-occurrence and creating relevance through semantic or approximate isolation) you can elevate your own website’s authority and “link to yourself” ring-fencing the internal links to catapult rankings for related terms.
If you initially set out with a very specific intention of ranking for an array of keywords, properly siloed those keywords (and their semantic synonyms and related phrases) into the site architecture (by using each node as a post or supporting page), then proceed to provide relevant internal and deep links to each page, an algorithmic metamorphosis occurs.
Due to the tightly woven semantic clusters present in the theme (topical continuity) your website emerges in search engines as an authority site. Another phenomenon you may notice is, even without backlinks, a page can appear in the top 10 results within minutes from publishing a page.
How long such a page stays buoyant depends on the depth of the related nested pages in the website as well as if the post is cyclical (and will roll off the page like a blog) or static.
The point to take away from this is; set your site up properly, give each primary keyword enough nested content to support it and give your website enough time to age (30-60 days), then measure the results.
This is where the organic side of SEO enters the equation, since you are essentially growing the site until it can fend for itself. After the gestation period, then either start building links to your most critical landing pages or use a robust analytics platform (such as pmetrics) to see which keywords are driving the most organic traffic.
Once you identify which keywords are responsible for the surge, if you are using WordPress, you can use tools like this one to split test your landing pages and fine-tune sales and conversions.
Simply rinse and repeat as often as needed or add additional lateral themes to the site (based on related search, synonyms or tangential markets) to capture a broader array of traffic to rank and split test. Over time, keywords that seemed competitive can be conquered with a few blog posts and the authority of your domain.
It’s merely a matter of scale, ranking credit (the buoyant nature of PageRank), trust and time that create this harmonic convergence. Once achieved, your website becomes its own self-perpetuating ranking juggernaut, capable of propelling pages into the top 10 SERPs (search engine result pages) within minutes from hitting publish.
do you think an age of 60 days for a site is really good enough to rank a webpage sitting on it? I would like to see an example if you could provide one.
Authority is one single factor that will raise your traffic profile beyond that struggle for short head keywords and content definitely is one of the most important part, but ranking it so fast would be something very challenging, if not impossible.
Royal Takeaway Clayton
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Spot on! I totally argee with you, this is one of my best technics when working with SEO myself.
I agree with Ashish. I’m not sure that a website can be ranked that fast. Kindly provide an example. If this can be really done, a lot will follow your methods and you will have lots of clients vying to get ranked.
Interesting post Jeffrey and right on track with what I’ve been thinking about recently! One thing I was wondering though is how to cross the tipping point with content when keyword research doesn’t identify too much traffic for keywords other than for the main term?
I’ve just created a site after coming across a well ranked site for a good search term with little content and not many links. However, other than the main keyword (which is a two word term) there isn’t much traffic for many other keywords. How would you recommend adding content in this scenario? I could add more pages but would it even be worth it if the posts aren’t targeting keywords and phrases according to my keyword research? I just can’t decide whether I would actually benefit from the added content or whether to just focus on building more links.
Any insights would be great. Thanks again for the great post.
Hey Justin:
I would suggest,that first you identify what the “SEO Ceiling” is, for example, I have seen our blog rank for keywords ranging from hundreds of thousand of competing pages to up to 4 million competing pages “in phrase match”. So, once you know what that is, try writing posts in category or finding what keywords have a high density of shingles in your site using site:yourdomain.com keyword
From there, if you have say for example 20 instances of a keyword in exact or broad match shingles appearing in the title, meta data or on the page, you are half way there.
For full expression, then create a new post using “exact match” only, with the 3-4 keywords in the title, then your done. Google should catapult this to page one if your website has enough “authority” i.e. algorithmic citation (since search engines parse your entire body of documents as a vector).
This new “expression” or landing page will rise to the top once you have exceeded the tipping point. We have built tools that allow us to see what this is and map it out on a page by page basis so we can create financial assumptions, conversion percentages, the amount of links and shingles (occurrences or pages required) based on the keyword.
If you want access, go here and sign up http://bit.ly/domainwebstudio
Otherwise, find a topical strong point in your site and test it out. If it hits page 2 and fails to breach page one, then you know your SEO ceiling is not strong enough to push it past competitors.
Hope this makes sense…
Thanks for that Jeffrey, that explains a lot. Just checked out the video for DWS which looks pretty cool. I think I’ll be trying that out soon.
Thanks again.