This blog post was co-written with Brad Zomick, the former Director of Content Marketing at Pipedrive, where this case study took place.
It’s tough out there for SEOs and content marketers. With the sheer amount of quality content being produced, it has become nearly impossible to stand out in most industries.
Recently we were running content marketing for Pipedrive, a sales CRM. We created a content strategy that used educational sales content to educate and build trust with our target audience.
This was a great idea, in theory — we’d educate readers, establish trust, and turn some of our readers into customers.
The problem is that there are already countless others producing similar sales-focused content. We weren’t just competing against other startups for readers; we also had to contend with established companies, sales trainers, strategists, bloggers and large business sites.
The good news is that ranking a strategic keyword is still very much possible. It’s certainly not easy, but with the right process, anyone can rank for their target keyword.
Below, we’re going to show you the process we used to rank on page one for a high-volume keyword.
If you’re not sure about reading ahead, here is a quick summary:
We were able to rank #1 for a high-volume keyword: "sales management" (9,900 search volume). We outranked established sites including SalesManagement.org, Apptus, InsightSquared, Docurated, and even US News, Wikipedia, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We managed this through good old-fashioned content creation + outreach + guest posting, aka the "Skyscraper Technique."
Here are the eight steps we took to reach our goal (click on a step to jump straight to that section):
- Select the right topic
- Create bad-ass content for our own blog
- Optimize on-page SEO & engagement metrics
- Build internal links
- Find people who would link to this content
- Ask people to link to our content
- Write guest posts on leading blogs
- Fine-tuning content with TF * IDF
Before we start, understand that this is a labor-intensive process. Winning a top SERP spot required the focus of a 3-person team for the better part of 3 months.
If you’re willing to invest a similar amount of time and effort, read on!
Step 1: Finding a good topic
We wanted three things from our target keyword:
1. Significant keyword volume
If you’re going to spend months ranking for a single keyword, you need to pick something big enough to justify the effort.
In our case, we settled on a keyword with 9,900 searches each month as per the Keyword Planner (1k–10k range after the last update).
That same keyword registered a search volume of 1.7–2.9k in Moz Keyword Explorer, so take AdWords’ estimates with a grain of salt.
One way to settle on a target volume is to see it in terms of your conversion rate and buyer’s journey:
- Buyer’s journey: Search volume decreases as customers move further along the buyer’s journey. Fewer searches are okay if you’re targeting Decision-stage keywords.
- Conversion rate: The stronger your conversion rate for each stage of the buyer’s journey, the more you can get away with by targeting a low search volume keyword.
Also consider the actual traffic from the keyword, not just search volume.
For instance, we knew from Moz’s research that the first result gets about 30% of all clicks.
For a keyword with 9,900 search volume, this would translate into over 3,000 visitors/month for a top position.
If we could convert even 5% of these into leads, we’d net over 1,800 leads each year, which makes it worth our time.
2. Pick a winnable topic
Some SERPs are incredibly competitive. For instance, if you’re trying to rank for "content marketing," you’ll find that the first page is dominated by CMI (DA 84):
You might be able to fight out a first-page rank, but it’s really not worth the effort in 99% of cases.
So our second requirement was to see if we could actually rank for our shortlisted keywords.
This can be done in one of two ways:
Informal method
The old-fashioned way to gauge keyword difficulty is to simply eyeball SERPs for your selected keywords.
If you see a lot of older articles, web 1.0 pages, unrecognizable brands, and generic content sites, the keyword should be solid.
On the other hand, if the first page is dominated by big niche brands with in-depth articles, you’ll have a hard time ranking well.
I also recommend using the MozBar to check metrics on the fly. If you see a ton of high DA/PA pages, move on to another keyword.
In our case, the top results mostly comprised of generic content sites or newish domains.
Moz Keyword Explorer
Moz’s Keyword Explorer gives you a more quantifiable way to gauge keyword difficulty. You’ll get actual difficulty vs. priority scores.
Aim for a competitiveness score under 50 and organic CTR/priority scores above 50. If you get scores beyond this threshold, keep looking.
Of course, if you have an established domain, you can target more difficult keywords.
Following this step, we had a shortlist of four keywords:
- sales techniques (8100)
- sales process (8100)
- sales management (9900)
- sales forecast (4400)
We could have honestly picked anything from this list, but for added impact, we decided to add another filter.
3. Strategic relevance
If you’re going to turn visitors into leads, it’s important to focus on keywords that are strategically relevant to your conversion goals.
In our case, we chose “sales management” as the target keyword.
We did this because Pipedrive is a sales management tool, so the keyword describes us perfectly.
Additionally, a small business owner searching for “sales management” has likely moved from Awareness to Consideration and thus, is one step closer to buying.
In contrast, “sales techniques” and “sales forecast” are keywords a sales person would search for, not a sales leader or small business owner (decision-makers).
Step 2: Writing a bad-ass piece of content
Content might not be king anymore, but it is still the foundation of good SEO. We wanted to get this part absolutely right.
Here’s the process we followed to create our content:
1. Extremely thorough research
We had a simple goal from the start: create something substantially better than anything in the top SERPs.
To get there, we started by reviewing every article ranking for “sales management,” noting what we liked and what we didn’t.
For instance, we liked how InsightSquared started the article with a substantive quote. We didn’t like how Apptus went overboard with headers.
We also looked for anomalies. One thing that caught our attention was that two of the top 10 results were dedicated to the keyword “sales manager.”
We took note of this and made sure to talk about “sales managers” in our article.
We also looked at related searches at the bottom of the page:
We also scoured more than 50 sales-related books for chapters about sales management.
Finally, we also talked to some real salespeople. This step helped us add expert insight that outsourced article writers just don’t have.
At the end, we had a superior outline of what we were going to write.
2. Content creation
You don’t need to be a subject matter expert to create an excellent piece of content.
What you do need is good writing skills... and the discipline to actually finish an article.
Adopt a journalistic style where you report insight from experts. This gives you a better end-product since you’re curating insight and writing it far better than subject matter experts.
Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet to speed up the writing part — you’ll just have to grind it out. Set aside a few days at least to write anything substantive.
There are a few things we learned through the content creation experience:
- Don’t multi-task. Go all-in on writing and don’t stop until it’s done.
- Work alone. Writing is a solitary endeavor. Work in a place where you won’t be bothered by coworkers.
- Listen to ambient music. Search “homework edit” on YouTube for some ambient tracks, or use a site like Noisli.com
Take tip #1 as non-negotiable. We tried to juggle a couple of projects and finishing the article ended up taking two weeks. Learn from our mistake — focus on writing alone!
Before you hit publish, make sure to get some editorial feedback from someone on your team, or if possible, a professional editor.
We also added a note at the end of the article where we solicit feedback for future revisions.
If you can’t get access to editors, at the very least put your article through Grammarly.
3. Add lots of visuals and make content more readable
Getting visuals in B2B content can be surprisingly challenging. This is mostly due to the fact that there are a lot of abstract, hard-to-visualize concepts in B2B writing.
This is why we found a lot of blog posts like this with meaningless stock images:
To avoid this, we decided to use four custom images spread throughout the article.
We wanted to use visuals to:
- Illustrate abstract concepts and ideas
- Break up the content into more readable chunks.
- Emphasize key takeaways in a readily digestible format
We could have done even more — prolific content creators like Neil Patel often use images every 200–300 words.
Aside from imagery, there are a few other ways to break up and highlight text to make your content more readable.
- Section headers
- Bullets and numbered lists
- Small paragraphs
- Highlighted text
- Blockquotes
- Use simple words
We used most of these tactics, especially blockquotes to create sub-sections.
Given our audience — sales leaders and managers — we didn’t have to bother with dumbing down our writing. But if you’re worried that your writing is too complex, try using an app like Hemingway to edit your draft.
Step 3: Optimize on-page SEO and engagement metrics
Here’s what we did to optimize on-page SEO:
1. Fix title
We wanted traffic from people searching for keywords related to “sales management,” such as:
- “Sales management definition” (currently #2)
- “Sales management process” (currently #1)
- “Sales management strategies” (currently #4)
- “Sales management resources” (currently #3)
To make sure we tapped all these keywords, we changed our main H1 header tag to include the words definition, process, strategies, and resources.
These are called “modifiers” in SEO terms.
Google is now smart enough to know that a single article can cover multiple related keywords. Adding such modifiers helped us increase our potential traffic.
2. Fix section headers
Next, we used the right headers for each section:
Instead of writing “sales management definition,” we used an actual question a reader might ask.
Here’s why:
- It makes the article easier to read
- It's a natural question, which makes it more likely to rank for voice searches and Google’s “answers”
We also peppered related keywords in headers throughout the article. Note how we used the keyword at the beginning of the header, not at the end:
We didn’t want to go overboard with the keywords. Our goal was to give readers something they’d actually want to read.
This is why our <h2> tag headers did not have any obvious keywords:
This helps the article read naturally while still using our target keywords.
3. Improve content engagement
Notice the colon and the line break at the very start of the article:
This is a “bucket brigade”: an old copywriting trick to grab a reader’s attention.
We used it at the beginning of the article to stop readers from hitting the back button and going back to Google (i.e. increase our dwell time).
We also added outgoing and internal links to the article.
4. Fix URL
According to research, shorter URLs tend to rank better than longer ones.
We didn’t pay a lot of attention to the URL length when we first started blogging.
Here’s one of our blog post URLs from 2013:
Not very nice, right?
For this post, we used a simple, keyword-rich URL:
Ideally, we wouldn’t have the /2016/05/ bit, but by now, it’s too late to change.
5. Improve keyword density
One common piece of on-page SEO advice is to add your keywords to the first 100 words of your content.
If you search for “sales management” on our site, this is what you’ll see:
If you’re Googlebot, you’d have no confusion what this article was about: sales management.
We also wanted to use related keywords in the article without it sounding over-optimized. Gaetano DiNardi, our SEO manager at the time, came up with a great solution to fix this:
We created a “resources” or “glossary” section to hit a number of related keywords while still being useful. Here's an example:
It’s important to make these keyword mentions as organic as possible.
As a result of this on-page keyword optimization, traffic increased sharply.
We over-optimized keyword density in the beginning, which likely hurt rankings. Once we spotted this, we changed things around and saw an immediate improvement (more on this below).
Step 4: Build internal links to article
Building internal links to your new content can be surprisingly effective when promoting content.
As Moz has already written before:
“Internal links are most useful for establishing site architecture and spreading link juice.”
Essentially, these links:
- Help Googlebot discover your content
- Tell Google that a particular page is “important” on your site since a lot of pages point to it
Our approach to internal linking was highly strategic. We picked two kinds of pages:
1. Pages that had high traffic and PA. You can find these in Google Analytics under Behavior --> Site Content.
2. Pages where the keyword already existed unlinked. You can use this query to find such pages:
Site:[yoursite.com] “your keyword”
In our case, searching for “sales management” showed us a number of mentions:
After making a list of these pages, we dove into our CMS and added internal links by hand.
These new links from established posts showed Google that we thought of this page as “important.”
Step 5: Finding link targets
This is where things become more fun. In this step, we used our detective SEO skills to find targets for our outreach campaign.
There are multiple ways to approach this process, but the easiest — and the one we followed — is to simply find sites that had linked to our top competitors.
We used Open Site Explorer to crawl the top ten results for backlinks.
By digging beyond the first page, we managed to build up a list of hundreds of prospects, which we exported to Excel.
This was still a very “raw” list. To maximize our outreach efficiency, we filtered out the following from our list:
- Sites with DA under 30.
- Sites on free blog hosts like Blogspot.com, WordPress.com, etc.
This gave us a highly targeted list of hundreds of prospects.
Here’s how we organized our Excel file:
Finding email addresses
Next step: find email addresses.
This has become much easier than it used to be thanks to a bunch of new tools. We used EmailHunter (Hunter.io) but you can also use VoilaNorbert, Email Finder, etc.
EmailHunter works by finding the pattern people use for emails on a domain name, like this:
To use this tool, you will need either the author’s name or the editor/webmaster’s name.
In some cases, the author of the article is clearly displayed.
In case you can’t find the author’s name (happens in case of guest posts), you’ll want to find the site’s editor or content manager.
LinkedIn is very helpful here.
Try a query like this:
site:linkedin.com “Editor/Blog Editor” at “[SiteName]”.
Once you have a name, plug the domain name into Hunter.io to get an email address guess of important contacts.
Step 6: Outreach like crazy
After all the data retrieval, prioritization, deduping, and clean up, we were left with hundreds of contacts to reach out to.
To make things easier, we segmented our list into two categories:
- Category 1: Low-quality, generic sites with poor domain authority. You can send email templates to them without any problems.
- Category 2: Up-and-coming bloggers/authoritative sites we wanted to build relationships with. To these sites, we sent personalized emails by hand.
With the first category of sites, our goal was volume instead of accuracy.
For the second category, our objective was to get a response. It didn’t matter whether we got a backlink or not — we wanted to start a conversation which could yield a link or, better, a relationship.
Developing such relationships and getting your name on other websites is becoming increasingly important for SEO. There is evidence that a trustworthy individual can improve trustworthiness of a linked domain.
Think of it this way: If Warren Buffett was to write an article about investing on a brand new domain, Google would have an incentive to rank this content higher because of Buffett’s trustworthiness.
In fact, there’s even a quote from Matt Cutts to support this:
“While there’s always a grain of salt involved with Google gospel, it does seem to follow along with what we knew (or suspected) about authorship: quality and trust signals are increasingly surrounding content and the individuals who write them.”
– Matt Cutts
And a video where he talks about this.
Bottom line: Establish relationships with other publications and get your name out there, regardless of any backlinks you might (or might not) get.
You can use a number of tools to make outreach easier. Here are a few of these tools:
We loved using a sales tool called MixMax. Its ability to mail merge outreach templates and track open rates works wonderfully well for SEO outreach.
If you’re looking for templates, here’s one email we sent out:
Let’s break it down:
- Curiosity-evoking headline: Small caps in the subject line makes the email look authentic. The “something missing” part evokes curiosity.
- Name drop familiar brands: Name dropping your relationship to familiar brands is another good way to show your legitimacy. It’s also a good idea to include a link to their article to jog their memory.
- What’s missing: The meat of the email. Make sure that you’re specific here.
- The “why”: Your prospects need a “because” to link to you. Give actual details as to what makes it great — in-depth research, new data, or maybe a quote or two from Rand Fishkin.
- Never demand a link: Asking for feedback first is a good way to show that you want a genuine conversation, not just a link.
This is just one example. We tested 3 different emails initially and used the best one for the rest of the campaign. Our response rate for the whole campaign was 42%.
Step 7: Be prepared to guest post
Does guest blogging still work?
If you’re doing it for traffic and authority, I say: go ahead. You are likely putting your best work out there on industry-leading blogs. Neither your readers nor Google will mind that.
In our case, guest blogging was already a part of our long-term content marketing strategy. The only thing we changed was adding links to our sales management post within guest posts.
Your guest post links should have contextual reference, i.e. the post topic and link content should match. Otherwise, Google might discount the link, even if it is dofollow.
Keep this in mind when you start a guest blogging campaign. Getting links isn’t enough; you need contextually relevant links.
Here are some of the guest posts we published:
- 7 Keys to Scaling a Startup Globally [INC]
- An Introduction to Activity-Based Selling [LinkedIn]
- 7 Tips for MBAs Entering Sales Management Careers [TopMBA]
We weren’t exclusively promoting our sales management post in any of these guest posts. The sales management post just fit naturally into the context, so we linked to it.
If you’re guest blogging in 2017, this is the approach you need to adopt.
Step 8: Fine-tuning content with TF * IDF
After the article went live, we realized that we had heavily over-optimized it for the term “sales management.” It occurred 48 times throughout the article, too much for a 2,500 word piece.
Moreover, we hadn’t always used the term naturally in the article.
To solve this problem, we turned to TF-IDF.
Recognizing TF-IDF as a ranking factor
TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) is a way to figure out how important a word is in a document based on how frequently it appears in it.
This is a pretty standard statistical process in information retrieval. It is also one of the oldest ranking factors in Google’s algorithms.
Hypothesis: We hypothesized that dropping the number of "sales management" occurrences from 48 to 20 and replacing it with terms that have high lexical relevance would improve rankings.
Were we right?
See for yourself:
Our organic pageviews increased from nearly 0 to over 5,000 in just over 8 months.
Note that no new links or link acquisition initiatives were actively in-progress during the time of this mini-experiment.
Experiment timeline:
- July 18th – Over-optimized keyword recognized.
- July 25th - Content team finished updating body copy, H2s with relevant topics/synonyms.
- July 26th - Updated internal anchor text to include relevant terms.
- July 27th - Flushed cache & re-submitted to Search Console.
- August 4th - Improved from #4 to #2 for "Sales Management"
- August 17 - Improved from #2 to #1 for "Sales Management"
The results were fast. We were able to normalize our content and see results within weeks.
We’ll show you our exact process below.
Normalization process — How did we do it?
The normalization process focused on identifying over-optimized terms, replacing them with related words and submitting the new page to search engines.
Here’s how we did it:
1. Identifying over-optimized term(s)
We started off using Moz’s on-page optimization tool to scan our page.
According to Moz, we shouldn’t have used the target term — “sales management” — more than 15 times. This means we had to drop 33 occurrences.
In addition to replacing those occurrences with lexically relevant terms, which we will discuss below, we ran our pages through MarketMuse to assess how well we’ve covered relevant topics on our site. This machine learning platform scanned your pages gave back a report which told us:
- Which topics we've covered comprehensively
- If there were any gaps in our topic coverage
This data helped us reduce over-optimized terms because it identifies where we under-optimized for related topics.
Google’s Hummingbird algorithm rewards sites with comprehensive topic coverage, so it’s important to broaden the topics you cover with your content, as well as be mindful of over-optimization for a single term.
2. Finding synonymous terms with high lexical relevance
Next, we had to replace our 28+ mentions with synonyms that wouldn’t feel out of place.
We used Moz's Keyword Explorer to get some ideas.
3. Removed “sales management” from H2 headings
Initially, we had the keyword in both H1 and H2 headings, which was just overkill.
We removed it from H2 headings and used lexically similar variants instead for better flow.
4. Diluted “sales management” from body copy
We used our list of lexically relevant words to bring down the number of “sales management” occurrences to under 20. This was perfect for 2,500+ word article.
5. Diversify internal anchors
While we were changing our body copy, we realized that we also needed more anchor text diversity for our internal links.
Our anchors cloud was mostly “sales management” links:
We diversified this list by adding links to related terms like “sales manager,” “sales process,” etc.
6. Social amplification
We ramped up our activity on LinkedIn and Facebook to get the ball rolling on social shares.
The end result of this experimentation was an over 100% increase in traffic between August ‘16 to January ‘17.
The lesson?
Don’t just build backlinks — optimize your on-page content as well!
Conclusion
There’s a lot to learn from this case study. Some findings were surprising for us as well, particularly the impact of keyword density normalization.
While there are a lot of tricks and tactics detailed here, you’ll find that the fundamentals are essentially the same as what Rand and team have been preaching here for years. Create good content, reach out to link prospects, and use strategic guest posts to get your page to rank.
This might sound like a lot of work, but the results are worth it. Big industry players like Salesforce and Oracle actually advertise on AdWords for this term. While they have to pay for every single click, Pipedrive gets its clicks for free.
Have you tried to rank for a competitive keyword before? Can you share your experiences researching the keyword and trying to rank for it?
Thank for this study case.
We use seachmetrics to have keyword search volume. Once we get the keyword volume, we rewrite and optimize the content. we check the title, wrote content with 1500 words and 3 paragraphs with h1 tag.
We make a lot of post in our blog with internal link to the page where we want to be rank #1
The last step were a lot of linkbuilding around the anchor text which were the keyword itself.
It took us 6 months and a google algorithm update to rank #1.
Now, I have a question, once you ranked #1 how to stay #1
Thanks.
I would say - continue to improve your article, continue to add content to it, continue to add visuals and improve readability. Add an index of keywords and an outline to easily jump to different sections of the article. Think of it as a product which is designed to compete with all your competitors on the first page of Google. Keep improving it - that's the only way to stay at the top. Does this make sense?
Hello Dmitry,
Great insight.
I have found case studies to be more informative for learning SEO and other subjects.
I want to add to Nattyseydi's question.
(Now, I have a question, once you ranked #1 how to stay #1)
My question is for home page and product pages.
1. Home page ranks for more than 60% of keywords. How can we optimize the home page. Is the percentage of keywords too high for a single page?. can we do the same as you recommended for articles. Or can we create some extra pages for taking the load form home page.
2. Product pages - can we do the same as you recommended for articles.
Thanks
Rafe
Sorry for the delay in reply. Help me understand, you're asking about optimizing conversion for your homepage?
Sorry Dmitry, as I am not a native speaker, you couldn't understand my words.
I just wanted to know more about this comment of yours.
"I would say - continue to improve your article, continue to add content to it, continue to add visuals and improve readability. Add an index of keywords and an outline to easily jump to different sections of the article. Think of it as a product which is designed to compete with all your competitors on the first page of Google. Keep improving it - that's the only way to stay at the top. Does this make sense?".
I guess you have commented the above for articles. Just wanted to know, can we do the same for product pages and home page.
why i have asked this question?
I have a website whose home page is ranking for more that 60% of keywords that we are trying to rank.
My question?
Can we do the same like "continue to add content to it, continue to add visuals and improve readability" to home page so that it remains its position.
or Can we create some extra pages for taking some load (keywords) away from home page.
I have read in many blogs that you have to optimize a page for one or two keywords.
I guess we cannot treat a home page or product page as an article.
Thanks
Rafe
Hey Rafe,
Thanks for coming back and clarifying your question. The short answer is yes, whether it's a homepage which is ranking already or an article, it does not matter, if you continuously improve the content it should perform better.
I would first make sure your site load is fast and you don't have any major issues when you run it through https://tools.pingdom.com/ I would then work on your content.
If you're working on a landing page I would use https://snapcopy.co/ - they're the best when it comes to copy!
-Dmitry
Thanks Dmitry,
You have clarified my doubt.
Looking forward to other great case studies from your side.
Best
Rafe
This was a great case study Dmitry! Really appreciate your transparency. I've done this a few times with high value keywords, most recently with How to Choose a Domain Name. Sad part is that while I got the #1 ranking, GoDaddy has the featured snippet, which knocks me way down the SERP. Need to keep working on the formatting to see if I can gain that snippet spot.
Yea the snippet is tricky, the formatting has a lot do with it from what I understand and also timing. For example if there was no snippet there before and you rose to the top and stuck to the top spot chances are the snippet will be yours but if there was a snippet there already it's a tough one. In your case - was the snippet there before you published your article?
Yeah, pretty sure the snippet was already there. Gonna have to find a way to kick it out! We've seen other examples where, once you rank organic #1, you do have a chance to get that snippet too. Will keep slogging away at it.
Curious, in examples you have seen how long did it take as you stayed #1 to outrank the snippet?
I'm guessing you followed all this advice... https://moz.com/blog/ranking-zero-seo-for-answers :)
The best seo article I've read in months… We are working in several top keywords and this aticle will be extrmely helpful.
Thank you very much
Thank you! Glad to provide value. Let me know if you have any questions as you put this to use!
Every line is pure gold. Congratulations.
In my case, after 6 months of hard work I got the #1 for Inmobiliaria Alicante (translation: Alicante Real Estate), a region in the south-east of Spain. With 2.900 searchs (and a few related keyword with less traffic), it made a difference in their business and now online customers are a big part of ther business. We are studying the same process with other regions and cities in spain, and this article will be very useful.
I just discovered a few thinks that never thought about. Shorter urls tend to rank better, how you manage internal links.... Or the moz keyword explorer, I just forgot using it but it must come back. Finding the author for asking for links was awesome. We usually tend to overoptimize our keywords, great advices to make it perfect.
This is a must for every seo or web manager. It’s the first time I share a moz post in Linkedin. I just need to share this :) Congratulations.
Thank you so very much, I feel humbled! Blushing! :) Speaking of international SEO - have you listened to interview? https://www.evolvingseo.com/2017/03/25/062-aleyda-s...
It will be extremely useful as we are working in 3 countries in Europe. It's on my list now.
Thank you!
Very good post detailing on how to target keywords and which keywords are worth. I have in the course of my work noticed the following:
1) If you are a small business competing against a big business e.g. a hotel in a single location competing against a big travel agency operating nationally, you can have highly relevant content targeting the local area and manage to rank higher than the big businesses having much higher DA because of your relevancy. This is also the case when many times local businesses can outdo nationally or internationally operating businesses when the name of location is added to the search query
2) In case you have so called 10X content detailing everything pertaining to the query and all related terms and the high DA website covers the subject matter very briefly for the page that is ranked for this query , it will not be too difficult to out rank the high DA website.
Right..Local business has the power of Local Knowledge.
Thanks Joseph. Agree with you precisely. Topical depth seems to be a more important factor compared to DA and number of backlinks these days, there is a great study about this here, not sure if you read this one? https://neilpatel.com/2016/11/10/how-google-hummingbird-really-works-what-we-learned-by-analyzing-9-93-million-words-of-content/
Yes I have read it. Some years back when my website was just over a year old (in 2009 end), I used to rank no1 out of 145 million results in Google for "online examination system" although I had just 1 link which could be regarded as high quality to that page and the keyword density for the exact term was less than 3%
I have other example when I got a local hotel to rank for several terms over travel agencies operating nationwide just because they were a lot more relevant to the search query. (detailed under case studies in my website)
Hi Joseph, where can we find the example you mentioned about the local hotel? Regards.
I'm intereste too.
Thanks!
I love this post for a couple of reasons:
Thanks for the case study!
Jeff @ Fang
Thanks Jeff! Yes, over optimizing is something we paid close attention to towards the end of the project and I'd say it really helped us get the last few spots ranking. It does take a TON of work of course. Everything good in this life you have to work for haha, there is no free cake. :)
Have you had experience ranking for popular keywords yourself?
Dmitry, I am obsessed with this article. I literally stopped in the middle of reading and shared it with my entire team because I was enjoying it so much.
Seriously, thank you for taking the time to put together such a detailed "guide" on how to were able to rank for such a broad and sought after keyword—while I might not have time or a dedicated team to put this much effort into one keyword, I feel like I have a much better grasp on the little things I can do to improve keyword rankings.
Thanks again!
Haha, thank you for all the kinds words! Happy to be of value!
I meant to ask, what did you think was the most challenging part of the process? If you could go back to the beginning, what would you do differently the second time around?
I personally struggle with the outreach for backlinks, which is why I loved the example email that you broke down.
Let's see how huch this projet did cost. Three people for 3 months: 1400 hours. Assuming only 150$/hour, that is a 210,000$ project. Definitely not for every business. PS: Great article.
150$ per hour that's too much, isn't ?
Thanks Marc, tried to make this article at actionable as possible so others can follow along and implement some of these steps.
Your math is not quite correct here, employees at companies work on many projects at once and outside contractors do not charge this much. It's definitely not free, just like with any initiative you should measure how much you want to invest into something and what you plan to get out of it, in other words how much revenue would you make in the next three months after you rank for that given keyword, how many people can you convert into paying customers. These are all the questions you should be asking yourself as you do this type of work.
You are quite right. Cost is immaterial. The only thing that matters is how much profit is gained given the risk. I wanted to point out however that these projects are expensive and require top notch ressources, not your average Joe. PS: If these top notch ressources charge less than 200$/hour, they are missing out.
All good Marc, I hear what you're saying. It's all about risk vs. return. Agree with you this is not a cheap project by any means! Top notch resources cost a lot, anything good in life is hard work and costs a lot haha. Based on my experience very few "top notch resources" charge based on hourly rate.
Wonderful blog article ! Each word, phrase and sentence has been carefully crafted, it truly brings out the right perspective about how important Right Content is for ranking keywords. I am reading it over and over, and able to get new insights each time I go over it. You have rightly emphasised the importance of careful research and analysis of results.
Thanks for all your efforts.
Thank you Vijay! I do what I can and eat my own dog food! Haha. Let me know if you have any other questions as you start to put some of this to use!
Thanks Dmitry. The biggest challenge I face is to build this case with small clients. As a ranking can be projected but not guaranteed how do I show them the ROI - the costs involved, the time taken to implement this and a reasonable time before which we could see significant change in conversions? Most small clients want an immediate improvement to ROI and content stratergy,creation and outreach is more of a long term stratergy.
Please share your thoughts or direct me to good resources that could help with this. Thank you.
Hi Khadija,
Good question. Typically the way I like to think about it is: If I was #1 for this keyword what might my traffic to this blog post be? Let say 1000 people per day. Ok, from those 1000 people how many can I convert to paying customers? Let's say 20 per day. What's the life time value of a customer? Let's say $500. So I am generating $10,000 LTV per day when this blog post is ranking #1.
Does this approach make sense?
-Dmitry
Thank you Dmitry.
The approach definitely makes sense. It's a starting point. I will need to do much more resaerch to build my case.
Thank you.
And now you rank #1 for "rank #1 for high volume keyword". Nice!
I like the methodical approach, particularly revisiting the article to review some of the more technical aspects.
I also like the focus on a single article. Anytime you're doing marketing for a client or a company, time and resources are limited. So to concentrate on, for instance, inbound links just for this article is a great way to be effective with the time you have.
Thank you for the kind words! Glad this article was valuable to you! Speaking of focusing on "only inbound links" - give this a read, I think you'll like it: https://neilpatel.com/2016/11/10/how-google-hummingbird-really-works-what-we-learned-by-analyzing-9-93-million-words-of-content/
Yup, the focus on one article certainly keeps you laser focused!
So gooooood! This is a a key resourse for anyone who wants to target 'big' keywords. I'll take notes to try to do the same for my company, and in spanish market. Let's see.
Thanks Ana! Let me know if you have any comments or questions as you start to implement this, I'll do my best to answer anything I can. Feel free to contact me via contact link on my site. BTW, since you're focusing on Spanish, please listen to this, I think this podcast will really help you through through implementing SEO for spanish market: https://www.evolvingseo.com/2017/03/25/062-aleyda-s...
Could you tell the DA and PA before and after? Very good, I think it would be more interesting to use a page mae, or category (without the date of the article), and always good to learn new techniques, parabens
Thanks Lukareze. Not sure what you mean by this, can you clarify: "I think it would be more interesting to use a page mae, or category (without the date of the article), and always good to learn new techniques, "
Great case-study Dmitry. I particularly like your strategic thought-process, research and thorough explanation of your content creation & promotion framework. That said, I'm struggling to grasp how you managed 42% response rate to your 'Skyscraper' outreach. In my opinion, Skyscaper outreach has long since had its time and as much as you try to improve the relevancy and personalisation, in my opinion it's still damage limitation and nothing new. It frustrates the hell out of me when I get one of those emails. Maybe I'm being too critical because I work in the digital/SEO field, but I tend to scan these emails and look for the typical phrases:
For most, I've no idea who they are, I've not had any previous engagement with them on social media so asking for a 'link' means interrupting my busy schedule, and a follow-up email will only make me remember you for all the wrong reasons.
Again, maybe I'm too critical but the Skyscraper outreach process always seems like a desperate attempt for a link and is too often a huge waste of time and resources.
Hey Josh,
Good question! The template I point out in the article is a placeholder, I don't use it to do outreach, what I do instead is building a genuine connection with an influencer or a blogger by providing value up front. If you watch the video here: https://prthatconverts.com/ and fast fwd to 17 min you'll see four tactics there which I like to use to start a conversation, these are the main ways I start a conversation and eventually down the line I might ask for a link but at first I give them value.
Watch the video, is it more clear now?
-Dmitry
I am bookmarking this page so I can re-read it until I understand everything. The order, flow and visualizations absolutely help me understand this complex topic. I believe your estimates that it takes 9 man months of work to rank #1 for a high volume keyword. Of course, all of this hinges on picking a "winnable" project.
I am a big believe in the Pareto Principle where you are can get the 80% solution with 20% of the work. Loosely application of these numbers still puts you into the first page of the search with about a man month of work. This also fits in with a publishing interval with monthly pillar pieces. An example from this article is the July 27th 2016 update that caused a huge increase in site views.
Thanks Cole! Sure, give it a read and let me know if you have any questions! You are correct in saying that all this work hinges on picking the right keyword.
Here is my answer for another comment on how to pick the right keyword:
-----
Good question. Most certainly! Keyword research is a science in itself and could be a completely separate project from writing and publishing the article. I typically actually recommend that it's separate from the writing. Here are the tools I like to use:
https://ahrefs.com/keywords-explorer
https://www.semrush.com/
https://keywordtool.io/
https://answerthepublic.com/
is it possible to achieve a good result without using one of these tools? I'm using semrush and it's great though expensive.
Hey Erezelias, I would recommend at least one tool to use for Keyword research, Ahrefs is a good one, so is SEMRush or Keywordtool.io is good as well. You do need at least one of them to do the keyword research part.
-Dmitry
Nice write up, Dmitry.
I was waiting for the part where you switched it from a sub-domain to a sub-folder! :P
Thanks David! Haha, yea, didn't make that switch for this scope work, but certainly agree that would have been nice. I found that the best is not have either the subdirectory or subfolder, simply have the slug after root domain have the title of the article. Usually the first four words after the root domain are the most important and I hate to have the subfolder be one of them. Curious to hear your experience with this.
Hey Dmitry, such a case study! Appreciate that you admitted your mistake with the over optimization and told us how you fixed it. Hopefully the next article will be "How we got the snippet in 3 months". Cheers, Martin
Haha, thank you Martin! I always admin any mistakes and issues and am 100% honest about all of them. I hope the next one will be how we got the snippet in 3 months! haha! Working on it! Any experience with snippets on your side?
Good post Dmitry !!
I will keep it in mind from now on for my SEO. Although also once you get to keep up you also take your effort to a lesser extent, we can not neglect that "keyword" thinking that everything is already done.
A greeting!!
Thanks Javier. Send over any questions you have as you implement this stuff!
Thanks for sharing your insights Dmitry. Your methods are remarkable.
In my opinion most businesses aren’t looking for educational content. It’s hard to pick under the name of content marketing when you know other shark competitors will eat out your content tactics. Targeted keyword in the header can be viable for your website.
That’s a smart thing you did; talking to an expert. It can be the deal breaker for creating a bad-ass content.
Visuals and infographics convert more readers but it should not be stuffed after every line.
I use a simple tactic for writing click-bait headlines. Put yourself in the shoes of your reader and then try to create headlines that resonates with the reader. It’s difficult but I am still working on it.
Your methods are remarkable.
Thanks Patrick! Sorry for delay in response, there is just too many comments here to keep up with :) Thanks for the kind words. I'm curious - do you use any plugins to help you optmize your headlines?
-Dmitry
What I like (love!) about this is that it puts into simple terms, the importance of getting things just right and how you can do it.
Top marks for such a well thought-out and in-depth article Dmitry :)
-Andy
Thank you Andy! Sounds like you're speaking from experience of reading other similar posts or working through this process yourself?
Worked through this many times myself before in different situations - which is why it is so nice to see it put down on (virtual) paper and explained in great detail :)
I do what I can, glad it was helpful. Send over any questions or comments. You can hit me up via contact link on my page.
Hello Dimitry,
Thanks for the case study though one question where do you find the related words that you had used in the "Key terms [Sales glossary]" section. I mean did you used any tool for this or just normal research ??
Good question. Most certainly! Keyword research is a science in itself and could be a completely separate project from writing and publishing the article. I typically actually recommend that it's separate from the writing. Here are the tools I like to use:
https://ahrefs.com/keywords-explorer
https://www.semrush.com/
https://keywordtool.io/
https://answerthepublic.com/
And I was thinking no one can dominate Wikipedia. Thoroughly described article. Very well done! Thanks for sharing. :)
Thanks! As you might have seen in the comments above with Rand, working on position #0 the snippet now! :) Always more work to do!
Hi Dmitry Dragilev, Thanks for sharing this nice post with us. I am agree with you "selecting a right topic" is much important for getting more attention and also helpful to get rank in top.
Thanks Neetu! Shoot me a note if you have any questions as you implement this stuff!
Thank you sir Dmitry Dragilev, I hope Moz is best platform to get all answers about SEO's. So firstly I want tell you we are a SEO services provider company based in India and have some great clients to do seo for that projects but unfortunately we are unable to find 1st page ranking till now within 2 month. That is a eCommerce website, that's especially selling printed shirts and shoes for mens. So what tactics should I use to get rank soon? your suggestion may be work as panacea for us and our website's ranking.
I love how if you say "keyword density matters", everyone in the industry laughs at you and thinks you're an idiot, but if you say "we used TF-IDF to optimize" everyone sort of nods and goes hmm, ah, yes, TF-IDF.....
Yeah, totally different, nothing to see here lol
Haha, your comment made me smile, agree with you 100%! :)
Wow!! This article has a really high level! 3 months only!!!
Such an awesome case study Dmitry, thank you for sharing it! We often have felt we sometimes have overdone our keyword in H1s and H2s on different website pages, while still being relevant and helpful to the user, and it was cool to read that your trimming those done on your website and using LSI keywords, etc, was a factor in helping you rank #1 for your high volume keyword. We will definitely be implementing these tips you shared.
Sounds good! Yup over optimizing is something I have been paying a lot of attention to lately. Thanks for the kind words. Feel free to ask questions or share your experience as you implement this stuff!
This is the best guide to rank high in SEO. One problem that I face during blogger outreach is that the blogger doesn't respond. This is one frustrating thing.
Hi there, thanks for he note! Here are two resources for you:
1. Watch the video on this page, fast fwd to 17 min if you need to, watch the four tactics of how to do press outreach here, let me know if this helps? https://prthatconverts.com/
2. Read this: https://www.criminallyprolific.com/pitch-journalis...
Let me know if these help!
-Dmitry
Thank you.That was awesome. I will try them out and let you know how it worked.
Thanks for this case study. The use of related keywords to build a piece of content that is built around a topic definitely supports what seo experts like the team at Moz have been saying lately so it's cool to see the results in a real-world example.
Cheers Patrick, thanks for the shout. Feel free to share any experiences you had with keyword research or skyscraper, I love to chat about this stuff!
Love this case study Dmitry, one thing we have to watch ourselves on is overdoing it on the headers, which you mentioned. Writing with modifiers also makes it so much more natural for a user to read, as opposed to repeating keywords or rearranging them for attempted "SEO purposes". You definitely earned you rankings here and thank you for sharing your success with your content.
Cheers! Thank you.
This is a very good article, do you not think though that this totally depends on the keyword it self? Okay yes this worked for this keyword but it does not mean it is the blueprint of SEO. Don't get me wrong I have used this strategy a lot in my time and it does come to work very beneficial, but it all depends on what keywords you are going for.
If you respond to Dmitry and you can share the experiences could you please drop me a email with this?
Hey Cory, so it depends of course, nobody out there, even the Google Search Team themselves can come up with the perfect strategy which works to rank on Google every single time for every single keyword. I will say that I have used this approach for a number of keywords I currently rank for, here are just a few:
funny email signoffs - #1 in US: https://www.criminallyprolific.com/email-endings/
cold email - #2 in US: https://www.criminallyprolific.com/cold-email-temp...
email endings - #3 in US: https://www.criminallyprolific.com/email-endings/
So yes I'd say this strategy works well, there are two factors to success here: #1 picking the right keyword which has weak content on first page search result #2 writing something that is 10X better
Hope this helps?
You have to analyze the difficulty of the keyword when doing this tactic and choose a keyword that you can actually rank for with this method. Any additional difficult, challenging keywords, you must use additional tactics combined with this.
In that case it will work.
Agree 100%
But TF * IDF has nothing to do with keyword stuffing. The more frequently you mention the keyword - the bigger TF * IDF gets. And you never described how did you actually used the TF*IDF formula. Just "name dropped" it :))
Hey Alex,
I like to refer to this article for looking and keyword density and TF-IDF, I follow the advice and stats here: https://blog.rankwatch.com/3-reasons-for-copywrite...
Do you have some tactics to help folks make sure they are not over optimizing for a keyword?
-Dmitry
It is impossible to rank #1 on SERP. I have tried several methods and i spend a lot but none of any trick or tips help me out. I have started a brand new website https://scottadlhochdigital.com/ and my keyword is Scott adlhoch. I have tried several methods like On-page SEO & Off page SEO, PPC, CPC, Campaign and all other stuff but, nothing works for me...
I am now really disappointed... if anyone suggest me straight way to rank my website #1 then, i will be gtreatful.
Great work on the article and the SEO in general. Do you have any plans for trying to beat out Wikipedia in the Featured Snippet?
Funny you ask that Will, sometimes we outrank Wikipedia on search results but not the snippet yet! :)
I love the way you selcted the right Keyword(s) to target. Reminds me of the story of wood cutter who spends 2 hours sharpening his Axe and cuts a tree in 10 Minutes.
When you're sure it's worthwhile to target, the time time and effort invested is justifiable.
Thanks for this great insight!
Absolutely! Couldn't agree with you more, great analogy! I actually just answered a comment with the following answer below, I'd say we took quite a while to come up with the right keywords, it's crucial to a successful outcome.
====
Good question. Most certainly! Keyword research is a science in itself and could be a completely separate project from writing and publishing the article. I typically actually recommend that it's separate from the writing. Here are the tools I like to use:
https://ahrefs.com/keywords-explorer
https://www.semrush.com/
https://keywordtool.io/
https://answerthepublic.com/
There are so many aspects of best practice SEO being implemented here that it's awesome to see it paying dividends. Fascinating to see the effects of TF-IDF and all backed up with stats. Brilliant work. For now, I can only aspire ... :-)
Thank you Ewan. Don't get too overwhelmed with all this info all at once, start out small and simple and build it up one by one. When I started I had nothing and just kept slowly adding more and more to it. I'm sure you can achieve the same results, just need to start and be persistent!
Thanks for the great article Dmitry Dragilev.. This post has entirely changed my view on posting the content in a right way. From now on wards I will follow all the points that are mentioned in the article and will compete with my competitors. Thanks again for the insights.
Thank you! Glad to be of help! Shoot me a note if you have any questions along the way as you implement this.
Amazing article. This was really informative.
My question is, how much time and effort would you spend on your Guest Post articles compared to your main article? Looking at the examples you gave, your guest posts were shorter but the content still seemed genuine.
A folow up: do you write the guest post before you find the lead or write the guest post after you have your lead?
Thanks and love the work!
Great questions!
Typically I'd spend 1/2 of the time writing the guest post compared to the main article.
I write the guest post article with a few leads in mind and look for the lead as I write it. But it all depends, a number of our students just write the article and then pitch it to many publications. Take a look at Hiro's case study here:
https://prthatconverts.com/#case-studies
Great article.
This has reconfirmed that I over optimise still.
I maintain a few websites and recently they have got stagnant, hitting position 4/5 but not increasing. I do have strong incoming links but I think my onpage is over optamised and seeing the results after you changed your approach is pushing me to do the same!
Yes, on page seo is something to look into, this is a great guide if you haven't seen it, check it out: https://backlinko.com/on-page-seo
I love seeing how people organize and produce great content. I'm also a fan of using ambient background music or "noise" in order to focus. A Soft Murmur is a favorite of mine when I'm trying to stay focused.
Thanks Dmitry, it is fantastic to have such a detailed case study to refer to when conveying the amount of work that goes into a task like this. Your target / goal in the case study is very relate-able to a clients potential requests.
Thank you Brendon. Let me know if you have any questions as you implement some of this stuff. Have you had any experience ranking for a popular keyword yourself?
Hi Dmitry!
Thanks for your post. Can i ask you some questions about your outreach?:
1) How much was your conversion rate at outreaching? By conversion i mean get a link.
2) How did you get those guest post in sites like Inc? HARO? Some contact in there?
3) You changed your outreach template anytime or used the same everytime with this campaign?
4) You think that a brand like yours (somehow known) helped you to get those links? Or just the good quality of the post did the word?
Thanks for taking the time! I bookmarked your site to check it later.
Thanks for the questions Carlos. Answers below!
1. Typically 50% -60% of all my emails get opens and around 30% get responses. I personalize them a lot. The email template I showed in the article is a very basic one which I would not use as is, I would use it a placeholder to modify and improve and personalize for each person you're reaching out to.
2. I've published close to 1400+ articles: https://www.criminallyprolific.com/press-list/ A lot of it has to do with building relationships with publications, I talk about how to do this here: https://www.criminallyprolific.com/pitch-journalis...
3. As I mention in #1 above I change my template constantly. I personalize it for each person I'm reaching out to.
4. The brand might have helped a bit but it's not a must to have to get a response from people. Think of it like dating someone - how can you get someone to be interested in dating you? There needs to be a natural genuine connection there.
Hope this helps!
-Dmitry
Great article Dmitry. I do agree with @Marc Poulin regarding ROI on this. A lot of businesses do not have that much investment on SEO. Our average clients are $3-$5K in average. Do you agree?
This is good if you are doing it for your own sites. If they have $3k-$5k in budget, this strategy is not good for them unless they can put in the hours to write up the content, and you have the ability to hire VA's to do the contact sourcing and emailing.
For me it all comes down to ROI, when I rank #1 how many customers will I be able to convert. I justify my spend on trying to rank on this analysis.
What an excellent case study. Great to see all the tips I've been gathering over the last few months pulled into one concrete example. I will be filing this for future reference. The increase in page views by reducing your keyword density was interesting. Do you have any guidelines on how often your target term should appear (apart from putting it in the first 100 words).
Thanks for the note Helen! Happy to hear you found the article valuable. In terms of keyword density I wouldn't focus on numbers that much, I would say to make sure you have them in the URL slug after the root and the headline of the article as well as title and description and then naturally throughout the article. The minute you start squeezing a keyword artificially into text is the minute you run into trouble. Hope this helps?
Yes, it does, Dimitry. Thanks. I realize keyword stuffing is a non-no, but as you found in your case-study article, you can accidentally overuse your keyword. I discovered that SEOBook has a free online tool that can be used to analyze keyword density. It's a quick way to check for repetition. As you say, avoid overkill.
Ah, I think someone told me about this tool, going to check it out now, might be useful to check and make sure you're not overdoing it. very cool. Thanks for the reminder! Have you used their tool for a while?
Helen - I have done countless analyses and although it depends on the keyword, I've been seeing slightly below 1% pretty consistently the last few years. And ideal content lengths that used to settle around 400-600 are looking more like 900-1000. Just rules of thumb but those numbers seem to come up a lot, and if you don't have time to do an analysis I think they're a reasonable place to start
Thanks Dmitry, your case study reveals that on-page work is more important than off-page work like backlink building. We reached #1 (6 month duration) for some of the keywords with quality backlink creation. We might ranked #1 earlier if we had concentrated more on on-page.
Backlinks are still important, don't get me wrong. It's a combination of quality content and backlinks which usually works the best. Do you have a case study written about how you ranked utilizing backlinks?
First of all, your article is one of the best i have read in last years. Have you ever tried tools like searchmetrics content optimization or onpage tool to analyse your content?
Thank you! To answer your question I have tried some of these tools a tiny bit, not extensively. I do want to give these tools another ago. Have you had luck with one specific tool which you like best?
I think pouring your heart into the content will yield the best result as you have shown here. A goot writeup(not great) can make upto to the 9th or 10th position on google serp without any backlinks.(Kindly keep in mind the ranking factors). It gets very challenging after that because you have to create BACKLINKS.
Moz should make a strategic guide to "How to start/approach a conversion with a business owner /webmaster for link building". But really good blog.
If ppl think that they can STILL rank their product pages for "competitive" keywords(B2B)....please update yourself.
Agree with you that backlinks still play a role in ranking but I will say that they're not as important as they used to be, topical depth has been something I tend to pay more attention to, check out this article:
https://neilpatel.com/2016/11/10/how-google-hummingbird-really-works-what-we-learned-by-analyzing-9-93-million-words-of-content/
Can you rank for "Sales Management" without making any backlinks? PLEASE....do not take this the wrong way...Do you think you can rank (1st) for "sales management" by writing a 2000 words article and then not making any backlinks?
Note: 2000 words is just an example.
I have never tried that, I think any page which you want to rank needs to have a combination of at least some backlinks and amazing content. Have you ever ranked without any backlinks?
Zing! +1 for Dmitry
Haha :) Thanks for the shout. In all seriousness, you do need at least a few links pointing to you to make the site look legit :)
Hi Dmitry Dragilev
Thanks for the great article
Your article is to good and very help full for my site.I am waiting for your next article.
Your article is provides knowledge of all gays.
I will sharing this article in my group
Thanks for your efforts.
Thanks for the kind words. It does take a while to write high quality stuff haha, will do my best to publish something else of this caliber this year!
WOW awesome post and result! One of the best I've read in a while. Do you mind sharing how you convert readers to leads? Is it just sign up email fields or pop up CTA? . Also if you didn't know already, for finding internal links you can also use the screaming frog extraction feature :)...I find this a lot easier than the site command! Cheers Matt
Hey Matt, thanks for the kind words and the question! Converting visitors to leads - it's a science in itself. I do work on this a lot of my PRthatconverts.com students actually.
A lot of it has to do with converting 30%-50% of all your visitors into email subscribers and then lead nurturing them through emails and webinars. Very hard to communicate the process to you over a comment haha. But yes, it's email sign up and then lead nurturing from there.
Can you elaborate a bit re: internal links and frog extraction, can you tell me what you're trying to accomplish with this?
-Dmitry
Great case study. Steps to steps you really explained well. I just assigned to my Jr.SEOs to read this post.
I would like to know that what was your website DA before published piece of content?
Thanks for the this case study!!!
I have a website that has PA and DA is tool below. This is new website. I have researched a lots of seo strategy, yet I am not deciding that content should publish on internal blogs or external sites (Guest Post, Infographics, Q/A, etc.).
What you suggest me for long time seo?
After reading this case study, I am going to start SEO on Short Tail as well as High Volume.
Waiting for your reply......
Thanks,
Nishi Chandra
Hi Nishi, I'm having a bit of tough time understanding your question, can you please rephrase it?
Wow, what an awesome and thorough case study! I often try to build this case with small clients and its usually a struggle. I have used this strategy a lot before and it does yield good results but really depends on what keywords you are going for.
Exactly right, this entire strategy highly depends on the keywords you pick. I spend one month or so just doing the research to pick the right keyword in some cases. How long do you typically take?
Hi,
You still have 2 H1 tag in your article !
As you know it is not very search engine friendly or natural approach to use more than one <h1> per article.
Thanks for the note. Can you point out which H1s you're talking about?
There are lot of new things came from your case study. Thanks Dmitry for sharing with us.
The biggest factor I understood that check the competition first and read what are the information they included in their articles. It must possible that some of articles are about definitions, some of about how, some of about why, what, features, etc. So when we want to rank top on such competitions then include all those things in your article. It should be a mixture of all the information of your competitors. Also don't forget to make it fresh and focusing on current trend.
Another thing I noticed that Google give more weightage to fresh images hence must create custom image for your article and follow above mentioned process. You'll rank definitely :)
Thanks for the note Abhishek. I had a bit of tough time understanding your comment, but I do agree with you generally. This process has worked for a number of my students and clients.
Let me know if you have any specific questions, always happy to answer!
-Dmitry
Thanks for sharing this case study, Dmitry! There's a lot of actionable tips here that i'm eager to explore some more. I had a question about ranking more generally; this article is about one focus piece that, through a lot of work, ranked #1. Would you say that this is the best practice for breaking through onto the first page with SEO, as opposed to optimizing a blog or website across multiple pages?
Hey Grace, good question! In general it's the topic depth of your entire site which helps to contribute for you to rank for any given keyword term. Here, take a look at this article, this explains this well, it's all the terms you've written about which support that one keyword ranking you are going for: https://neilpatel.com/2016/11/10/how-google-hummingbird-really-works-what-we-learned-by-analyzing-9-93-million-words-of-content/
Does this make sense? Let me know if it does not, really let me know, I'll take another stab at answering!