Back in the olden days of SEO, we never stood a chance at outranking major websites.
Imagine your awesome new website with a 23 Domain Authority trying to outrank some goliath with an 83 Domain Authority.
Forget it…you’re knocked out before even walking in the ring!
Google leaned on link profiles a lot more than it does today. It was a really simple way to quantify trust: X (links) at Y (value) equals Z (ranking potential).
In other words, established websites could rank for keywords…just because they were big websites!
And they could get away with thin content and obnoxious ads! (Looking at you, Forbes!)
And by having a first mover advantage, their gains kept generating more gains in a virtuous cycle. Because they ranked in positions 1-3 for everything, they generated more links based on their ranking position alone.
It was truly the 1% claiming 99% of the market.
Punching above your weight class
Most websites aren’t huge powerhouses, so I’m talking to most of you readers right now.
Things aren’t the way they used to be.
Google is now attempting to return the best pages based on the intent of the searcher. So that means a page can’t just win outright anymore because it’s part of a strong website.
That’s good for us. And it’s good for searchers.
What that means is that if larger websites don’t step their game up, we can play the part of David taking down Goliath.
An unlikely SERP
The keyword “best cities for digital nomads” is searched 250 times per month and has a matching traffic potential of 250.
Yet, the top ranking page for this query has a lowly Domain Authority and Page Authority of 18 and 26, respectively.
That’s fairly low for a top-ranking piece of content, but these metrics are meant to be observed relative to other websites.
So let’s take a look at the DA and PA of the first page of SERPs:
Position one is the proud owner of the lowest Domain Authority and almost the lowest Page Authority.
It sticks out like a sore thumb, and is definitely NOT helping.
On paper, they shouldn’t even be in the same ballpark as these other competitors.
Yet…they’re beating everyone.
How is this possible?
How to outrank larger websites
We are going to dig into a few factors that might be helping them level the playing field. First, let’s take a look at their content score.
1. Content depth evaluation
Using MarketMuse I can evaluate how well the results on page one covered the necessary topic cluster in order to present a “complete” article.
In English, this is going to tell me how in-depth the content is for each competitor.
MarketMuse suggested a score of 33. Here’s how it shook out:
They definitely did better than the average bear (25.6), but they didn’t really blow anyone out of the water. That said, they nearly hit their MarketMuse recommended score, and that’s what matters.
Verdict: It’s helping
2. Topical Authority
Having topical authority means your website is trusted within a certain field of expertise.
If my field of expertise is aerial monkey yoga, and I’ve written a lot of expert content on aerial monkey yoga stuff, my website would be considered to have topical authority in this space.
If I decided to write an article on football gambling for this website, it would never rank because I have no expertise in the area.
I looked at each of the ten results in SERPs to determine if they have topical authority in the subject of “digital nomads.”
They either fit into one of three categories:
Entire domain purpose: Their domain is dedicated to digital nomad topics.
Peripherally: They write about digital nomad topics but it’s not the purpose of the site.
No: They wrote about a digital domain topic, but their site has little-to-no expertise around it.
Here’s what I found:
Interesting.
So it appears that you need strong domain-level topical authority to crack the top of page one.
It’s worth noting that the bottom result had a low content score. Perhaps that’s what’s holding them back.
Verdict: Definitely helping
3. Page Speed
Page Speed is likely a direct and indirect ranking factor. So let’s see how each of the competitors stack up:
It’s really hard to make heads or tails of this one because every website loaded fairly quickly (zero over three seconds).
I would say that this definitely matters, but in this instance it’s a net neutral.
Verdict: It’s neutral
4. Title Tag Clickability
Lastly, we are going to look into aspects of the title tag that may be influencing clickability. One factor of RankBrain is “expected CTR”, in which Google measures your click-through rate compared to your peers.
If you are higher than expected, you may move up. And vice versa.
Let’s look at a few known factors that an influence a click:
Is it coincidence that position one had the only title that included both the year and a numbered list in the title? Maybe, maybe not.
It’s possible that they made better use of their real estate for a more clickable title tag.
Maybe.
Verdict: It’s maybe helping
So what do we now know about this enigma sitting at the top of SERPs?
They have a relatively high content score.
Their entire domain is about being a digital nomad (maybe bonus points for topical authority?)
They have an average page speed.
They have the only title updated for 2023 with a numbered list.
We don’t have a perfect smoking gun here, but we certainly know enough to say with enough certainty that these factors (and maybe especially the topical authority) are helping David take down Goliath.
So how do you beat larger websites?
We can only make educated guesses (like this case study) at why Google favors one website ahead of another.
But there are some factors we do know are important, and we know that we have control over:
Write in-depth content using a tool like MarketMuse or Clearscope.
Have topical authority on the thing you’re writing about.
Having a fast page speed.
Having a clickable title tag.
It’s certainly not in the vein of “easy SEO wins”, but the result pays for the resources needed tenfold.
Using search volume metrics to forecast your traffic is wildly inaccurate.
There, I said it. Go ahead and throw your monitor out the window in a fit of rage. Curse my name and unfollow me.
Here’s the problem: Content doesn’t rank for just one keyword.
And, when you do keyword research you’re only forecasting based on one keyword.
Content can rank for thousands of keywords
But how?
The number of keywords your content ranks for depends on two factors:
The number of variant keywords that people are searching for your topic.
How in-depth you have written your piece of content.
Let’s unpack both of these so that they make sense.
There are some topics that people will search for in many different ways. They will use a very wide variety of keywords that ultimately have the same exact intention.
Take the keyword “Is eczema lifelong?” as an example. The top ranking URL is ranking for 4,307 keywords!
That means that you can search all 4,307 keywords and this page will show up somewhere in Google for each one of them.
Let’s take a look at some of the keywords this page ranks for:
That’s a TON of search volume, no?
And when you factor in each keyword’s ranking position, you’ll have be able to estimate the amount of traffic driven to that page via that keyword.
Via each of these 4,307 keywords, Ahrefs estimates that page drives over 55,000 sessions per month!
But how does this happen?
For starters, Google is making a guess about a searcher’s intent.
It understands that someone who searches “is eczema lifelong” probably wants to learn about causes, types, cures, etc. It’s assuming that these sub-topics will be of interest to that searcher.
Second, if you write a piece of content that is sufficiently thorough – meaning you do a great job of covering all the sub-topics someone would care about, like causes, types, and cures – you’ll rank for your target keyword along with these variant keywords.
But here’s a crazy kicker, the keyword “Is eczema lifelong” is only searched 50 times per month.
So if you were doing keyword research and landed on a keyword with a search volume of 50, you might immediately discard it!
But in reality, this topic has a potential of tens of thousands of visitors per month!
So how do I forecast traffic?
You should first thing of “keywords” more along the lines of “topics.”
“Keyword” implies something singular and finite. In reality you should be creating content that completely dives headfirst into a topic and fully supports it with as many sub-topics and detail as possible.
Then, when you use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs, enter a keyword and take a look at the estimated traffic for the first page of results and create an average.
Let’s go through an example together.
If we enter the keyword, “How to cure eczema”, I’ll see a monthly search volume of 900. Not bad.
But then if I scroll down to the top ranking pages for this keyword, I see a completely different story…
The top ranking pages for this keyword are driving tens of thousands of visitors per month.
The median value for page one content is 12,951, and the average value is 18,585.
So in reality…if I were to rank on page one for this keyword I wouldn’t be driving my share of 800 searches per month…I would probably be driving somewhere around 10-20k visitors per month.
Also keep in mind, sometimes the reverse is true! Sometimes search volume can over-inflate your expectations of how much interest there is in a topic.
Conclusion
I back-checked this strategy with the actual traffic we generated to landing pages when I worked at Brafton Inc. The result was 82% accuracy! When I threw out a couple outliers, it was over 90% accurate.
So, if you want an idea of how much traffic your keyword choices will drive, I can’t think of anything out there that’s more accurate.
Losing a keyword position that you’ve owned seemingly forever sucks…
And it’s usually the result of a competitor doing something better than you.
They either wrote a new piece of content that is now edging you out, or the re-optimized their existing content, and Google is giving them a shot at your old position.
Either way, you’re in trouble and you need to react quickly.
I’m going to explain how to first identify slipping content, then how to address it.
1. Use Search Console to see what’s slipping
Sometimes watching your keyword monitoring tool isn’t enough to understand what’s happening with your content performance.
Most content ranks for multiple keywords, and sometimes hundreds or even thousands! This particular page drives traffic via 293 keywords…
So tracking one individual keyword isn’t always the most effective way to really get a pulse for what’s happening with a single piece of content.
So what we want to do is use Search Console to compare one time frame to another to evaluate which content is losing overall clicks.
I’ll use a month-over-month comparison to compare clicks to content:
Then I’ll click into the “pages” tab, and sort by the content that lost the most clicks in the most recent month.
Check out the page below, it lost 830 clicks from one month to the next! BRUTAL.
I’ll click on that page to isolate it, then tab over to “queries” to see which keywords lost the most traffic.
Most keywords lost clicks, but they were all centered around a specific theme. This one is simple, so I’m going to click on the keyword that lost the most clicks to isolate it.
I need to find out:
Did the keyword lose positioning? Or…
Was there a natural seasonality to the keyword? Or…
Did the CTR slip for other reasons?
I’ll start by evaluating impressions. I want to see if the search volume for this keyword was stable.
It doesn’t look like seasonality caused it. Must be something different. Now I’ll click on “average position” to see if a drop caused a decrease in click-through rate.
Well that seems to be the problem! I’ll now look at the last 16 months of data so that I can get an idea if this ranking fluctuation is a normal thing, or just a recent thing.
Nope! We definitely got bumped out of position one and are now hovering around position 2-3. It’s time for damage control!
2. See if your content is still competitive
As I mentioned before, a lot of the time you lose rankings because competitors have created better content than you. They may have more appealing title tags, more in-depth content, faster page speed, or simply a better on-page experience.
An easy place to start is by using a content tool to see if your content is still up-to-snuff.
Uh oh, according to MarketMuse, we are 13 points below target. Let’s see what our competitors’ scores are….
Yeah, we are no longer competitive.
3. Optimize your content
Re-optimizing your content can involve A LOT of things. In this instance, the clearest issue is that our content depth is too low.
We are going to use a content writing tool like Clearscope or MarketMuse to write a more thorough article, then republish it.
It’s important that you only modify the content! Do not create a new piece of content, and do not rewrite the URL.
Very bad things will happen.
After rewriting and republishing the new, improved content, here is what happened to our average ranking position…
And here is the traffic that rebounded as a result of the ranking improvement…
Conclusion
Losing just one or two positions for a critical keyword can have an insane impact on your traffic. In the example above, we lost about 2/3 of our traffic via our target keyword.
By using Search Console we were able to identify all the pages losing traffic, diagnose the causes, and quickly react.
Again, simply reacting to keyword monitoring tools is not enough! You need a full picture of what’s happening to your content, not just a few keywords.
Does SEO ever feel like the Wild Wild West? It can feel like things are changing DAILY, and the things we were told to do six months ago can be obsolete today.
It’s freaking madness!
But, the one concept that has endured through the past five years is this: You need to create awesome content for searchers. Period.
And most of the traffic you drive to the site is going to come from creating great content. It’s not going to be your tech-heavy SEO stuff from the days of old.
And that tends to break peoples’ brains because they assume SEO is super technical and black box-ey.
But here’s the thing: It’s still pretty technical and sophisticated, but those technical elements have been redirected into the right brain side of things: language and communication.
That said, “technical stuff” can cross the bridge into seemingly subjective stuff like “content quality” and “depth of topic coverage” fairly easily now.
So let’s explain how Google is turning something subjective, like “content quality” into a technical/mechanical thing.
Step 1: Choosing a keyword to create content for
The easiest way to waste all the hard work you put into keyword research is to use a “keyword target” approach in which you use a keyword you want to rank for throughout the site.
Or, to try to get a piece of content to rank for more than one keyword.
So what we’re going to do instead is choose a keyword and create one AWESOME piece of content for that keyword.
After all, Google ranks pages for keywords, not websites!
Open up this keyword research template and add your keywords and data. Choose a keyword that has a solid combination of low keyword difficulty and a substantial amount of monthly searches.
Next, we are going to need to figure out WHY people are searching for that particular keyword, then decide what kind of content to create.
Step 2: Audit the SERP for intent
Arguably, the most important and oft-overlooked aspect of creating content is understanding why someone is searching for your keyword target and how to satisfy that intent.
Remembering that we are going to create an entire page for each keyword we select, we will first need to determine which type of content to create. We will do this by investigating SERPs for the keyword we choose.
When I Google “golf rival tips”, I see the following results:
Three videos dominate the first scroll. As we move down the page we see the following:
All told, we have 3 video results, 5 blogs and a link to a social page. If we were to summarize what people are looking for when they search this keyword, it would most certainly be: An informative blog/guide and possibly video content that explains how to play the game “Golf Rivals.”
So I’m going to plan on creating a guide-style blog post for this keyword.
The next thing we need to figure out is the type of media (video, graphics, imagery, tools) people are expecting to find when they search this keyword.
The easiest way to do this is by briefly clicking through all the results on page one and observing the types of media people are using.
The results were the following:
30% video content
20% use screenshots of the game
50% are text only
So we could technically get away with writing a text-only blog, but we would likely get a bonus by creating a video and/or adding some screenshots.
I want to create something better than any of my competitors, so I’m going to do both.
The last thing we need to figure out is what to title the content. This is SUPER important because it will dramatically influence your click-through rate, and indirectly, your rankings via RankBrain data.
I’ll do this by auditing the titles we find on page one. Here’s what we’ve got:
Here’s a summary of what I’m seeing:
“Golf rival” is generally used at the beginning of the title tag.
I should probably either use “tips” or “guide” somewhere in the title tag.
It seem that people want to “become a pro”, so I’ll include that somewhere.
I’m going to use the title tag: “Golf rival tips to become a pro player.”
This incorporates everything people seem to be clicking on the most.
Finally, we are ready to write content.
Step 3: Write the content
This is the part of SEO where Google is mashing your left brain and right brain things together.
While “content quality” might seem like a subjective concept, Google actually has a mechanical method for determining this.
For starters, it’s evaluating your EAT (Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness). In other words, it’s evaluating whether or not you’re an authority in the space, and whether or not you’ve written authoritative content on the topic.
This is why you should specialize in specific topic clusters on your website. If most of your content is about how to use medicinal herbs, you’re not going to have much “EAT” in the area of golf video games.
Google is also looking at how well you cover the topic you are writing about for your blog.
In other words, it’s trying to answer the question, “Does this piece of content do a good job of discussing all the topics someone would be wondering about when searching for this keyword?”
To figure out which sub-topics to talk about in your blog, you could theoretically read through every blog in the top ten results and make a note of every sub-topic that’s discussed.
If I were to try to rank for “baseball”, the results could look something like this:
With this information, I now have a blueprint for everything I could possibly talk about, and how to prioritize the topics.
Fortunately, there are tools out there like Clearscope, MarketMuse, and Surfer who will do this for you automatically.
Here’s what the output for “golf rival tips” looks like when I put it into MarketMuse:
On the upper left you can see the “content score” I need to hit in order to be competitive. My content score is determined by how well I cover all the sub-topics you see on the right.
The more sub-topics I cover, the more “thorough” it will be seen in the eyes of Google. I want to be as thorough as possible.
After writing my content I will add the text into the tool and see how well I’ve covered all my recommended sub-topics.
This is exactly how Google has turned something seemingly subjective into something quantitative and mechanical. It knows how well you have covered your topic cluster relative to your competitors, and it will seed your content in search results accordingly.
Step 4: Keep an eye on performance and re-optimize often
So be patient! And if your content isn’t performing after about five months, you’ll probably need to reevaluate what went wrong in steps 1-3.
Conclusion
Everything we just talked about is the “hack” to generating SEO results. Only nowadays “hack” isn’t the right word. Rather we should think of it as “creating the best content on the planet that gives searchers zero reason to click on a competitor’s link.”
Using just these four steps resulted in Brafton 20x’ing its organic traffic.
Sure, it’s a lot of work, and can feel tedious, but the payoff is incredible.
I’m going to make an argument against companies investing their resources in building links before investing in content and title tag optimization in 2023.
Alternatively, I’m going to make an argument for building content that fully satisfies user signals via RankBrain.
Now, SEO people, don’t throw a temper tantrum and eject your computer out the window just yet.
Just bear with me as I make a case.
In order to make this case, we need to discuss a little more about what link building is, the time investment, and the results you might expect.
What is link building?
Link building involves a number of techniques to convince other websites to link to your website. We are not talking about natural “wait and pray” techniques.
The overall objective is to send links to your critical pages that need keyword ranking improvements.
External website links to you → rankings go up → more traffic to the page → more revenue.
If you look up link building techniques, you will find the encyclopedia of techniques. Some of them include:
Broken link replacement.
Guest blogging.
HARO outreach.
Cold outreach.
Reverse image search.
Paying for links (let’s not pretend this isn’t a thing).
What is the success rate?
The tough part of link building is that in order to do it right, you need to invest a TON of resources to see success.
Authority Hacker did an awesome job with a study in which they sent 600,000 emails asking for links, which resulted in 4,300 root domains earned. They used the cold outreach technique.
Based on their math, that’s 140 emails for each root domain earned. Their investment was a success:
Root domain growth over time
But the question is: Do you have the resources to send 600,000 emails?
What’s the time investment needed to earn a link?
Let’s talk about the time needed to generate a single link, then scale up to a level where it will actually make an impact.
In order to generate a single link, a person would need to:
Identify a target website, using a tool or their brain.
Find an appropriate page to link from the target website to their website.
Find a good person to contact.
Write an email (likely a template).
Follow up a few times.
Get the link placed or move on.
After writing this I went through steps 1-4 and got the whole process done in five minutes and thirty seconds.
Assuming I follow up with a brief message two more times per website, it will take me an additional two minutes.
That’s seven minutes and thirty seconds per website outreach.
According to the Authority Hacker study, they earn one root domain for every 140 emails.
If it takes me 7.5 minutes for every three-email sequence to generate a link, then it would take about 350 minutes to generate one root domain (about 6 hours).
So if I hire someone to do nothing but build links 40 hours a week, they should be able to generate about seven quality links per week.
So should you do link building?
Maybe.
It depends on the pages the links are going to, the quality of the sites your link builder is acquiring, the monetary return on the pages being impacted, and whether or not you have enough money to invest in the resources needed.
What we can say for certain is that you need a LOT of time to get it right.
What you might want to think about instead
Link profiles were REALLY, really important years ago. Google was much more mechanical (and understandably a bit more clunky) than it is now.
(And links are a super easy way to quantify stuff.)
X links at Y quality equals Z domain/page value.
Pretty simple stuff.
But at this point, Google isn’t ranking pages based solely on link metrics.
It’s trying to find the very best content that satisfies the reason the person searched for it. In order to do that, it’s measuring:
Topic coverage: How well the content covers the subtopics for the keyword.
Dwell time: How long someone spends on the content before returning to search.
Pogo sticking: How often people visit content, then go back to search results and click on something else.
Click-through rate: How often searchers click on your content when it shows up in search results.
So in order to do a good job satisfying these new “searcher indicators”, you need to know exactly what people are looking for, and create that content.
And, it might be much faster and more effective to do than building links.
Title tag modification example
We were bouncing around position one and two for “eczema over the counter treatment” and were sporting a fairly low CTR.
We used the RankBrain Auditor Tool to modify the title tag from “Eczema & Over-the-Counter Treatment” to “Top 5 Eczema Over-the Counter Treatments.”
The result was a nearly doubled CTR and clicks.
Total time commitment: 10 minutes
Result: Nearly double the clicks
Content optimization example
Another easy way to send non-link signals is by writing more in-depth, thorough content than your competitors.
This one is a double-whammy: it sends signals that the content has more topic coverage than previously, and when searchers land on the page they will likely “dwell” longer, sending another positive RankBrain signal.
Here is an example of a piece of content we re-optimized:
Oh, and we took position one with only 56 root domains, compared to position two’s 217, and lower UR rating than all.
Total time commitment: 2 hours
Result: 25 clicks per day to 250
Content and title tag optimization example
In this example, we modified both the content and title tag using the RankBrain Auditor Tool.
Here were the results:
And here are the root domains for the top ten pages:
We are in position one with a lower DR, UR, and root domains than any of the top pages, by far.
Would building links have been as/more effective than taking a content optimization approach?
How much time would it have taken to even match my competitors’ link profiles? Months? Years?
Total time commitment: 2 hours
Result: 3 clicks per day to 100
Conclusion
Yes, link building certainly can be effective.
It’s a strong ranking signal, and people can and do effectively build links all the time.
But the question is whether or not it’s right for your particular situation.
The two questions you need to ask are:
Are you already re-optimizing your content, title tags, and on-page experience?
Do you have enough resources to justify the time it will take to build links correctly?
It seems to me that searcher signals and content depth are becoming increasingly important.
And I’m not saying that everyone should stop building links.
But I am saying that you should probably optimize your content and title tags first, because it’s faster, cheaper, and potentially more effective.
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