Contained in this post are practical SEO Tips to step over complacent competitors by targeting the least common denominator with SEO. This, in turn, churns lackluster contenders off the page as a matter of relevance and precedence. There are three phases of keyword acquisition (1) research and evaluation (2) fluidity and buoyancy and (3) acquisition and defense.
SEO Tips to Step Over Your Competition
Depending on the keyword, the amount of additional themed pages you have to work with and the timeline and resources available to cultivate the ranking, each will rise according to the degree of intent you dedicate and collaborate through on page and off page metrics.
Rankings are a systematic reaction to proper SEO, for example, let’s assume a competitor has enough authority and enough contextual references within their website to hold down a top ranking position for a keyword you are targeting.
Do you go and try to snatch it from them with the tunnel vision approach and zero in on just that keyword, or do you survey the nodes of relevance from the theme or keyword cluster (the group of semantically related keywords and modifiers) that the keyword belongs to and then target the whole vs the parts?
The logical method is to acquire multiple miniature keyword victories until your website is ready to compete and rank for 50-70% of the broad match keywords left on the table from lack of an on page target.
Is there a rule that limits you from building a page specifically for a keyword? absolutely not… Is there any reason why you could not build 200 new pages over the next 6 months for your website, aside from lack or resource or know how? once again, absolutely not.
There is no rule book that says “creating specific targeted landing pages is bad”. So, instead of trying to make a one page catch all for multiple keywords (which is a great strategy for say a home page), then you can also blend that strategy with creating targeted landing pages that are internally linked strategically to acquire a specific ranking.
Then when you have enough of these specific rankings, your site will have matured enough to contend for the trophy keywords that simply were not possible 3-4 month prior.
After you determine your content threshold and on page trajectory, then map out thresholds and then intelligently acquire enough momentum to surpass them. For each keyword there is a tipping point. Finding out what that is and how many stemmed variations can be accomplished in a few hours of keyword research.
- Keyword A = 50 pages of content over 60 days and 25 deep links
- Keyword B = 4 pages of content, 1 new landing page and 15 internal links
- Keyword C= a link from your most trusted page, 2 deep links and a new landing page
Each keyword will have a unique formula that when calibrated yields a top 10, top 5 or top 3 result.
Creating a top ranking is a matter of 1) defining a landing page /destination or creating one specifically for that keyword 2) creating enough topical content on the site to improve relevance 3) strategically internally linking the content pages to the preferred landing pages with keyword-rich anchor text and 4) sprinkling enough deep links to those content and landing pages to make them ascend in the search engine result pages.
For example, Keyword A has 75,000 competing pages in a “phrase match” search engine Google, which means that in the top 1000 results of Google there are 75,000 instances of that key phrase fighting for supremacy.
Rarely is a page there from just having one page on the topic, so, you’ll need to discover the internal tipping point for the top 3 websites.
You can use a handy search operator in a Google search to find out, by adding the following.
site:website.com Keyword A
Obviously change the website to the competitor and Keyword A to the inspected term, then look for the number of occurrences within your competitors website.
Results 1-10 of 27 results, means they needed /used 27 pages of content with those keywords present in the title, body text or Meta data to cross that tipping point.
Try this same search operator again on a few other competitors rankings in the top 10 for that keyword and lastly for your own website. This should give you a fairly accurate idea of what it will take for you to get on the grid with that keyword. It is usually just a matter of content, strategy, links and time.
Armed with this technique, you can find competitors who are hanging on by a thread of relevance, which should be easy enough to brush aside once you inspect other on page factors such as allintext, allinanchor and allintitle relevance thresholds.
My favorite tool to collect this type of preliminary competitive intelligence is Niche Watch which provides a competitive overview of the top 20 results by just adding a keyword and hitting enter.
The suggestion here is (a) target multiple keywords within your reach starting with those with 50,000 or less competing pages (b) once those are top 10, target 100,00 competing pages, 200,000, 500,000 etc. until your site is capable or targeting keywords in the millions.
The site:website.com command reveals the barrier to entry, it’s just a matter of tactful implementation of on page content and deep links. The content steers what you rank for, the deep links determine the precedence and priority.
Very helpful article thank you for sharing it with the world. I love the suggestion of using googles site search with the keyphrase to determine how many pages you should aim for. That is a great guide…
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Noel for Nopun.com
a professional graphic design studio
Thank you for the useful guidelines you’ve mentioned.
Such a informative article and such a useful list thanks for sharing it.it really worthy for me.
Very Nice blog!!!Getting some idea about seo process.Thx for sharing valuable blog.