My clients ask the same thing your clients ask, “How can I be number one in the rankings?”
I know the answer.
In fact, I can tell you not only how to win at search (where I learned my strategy) but also how to win in any area including content marketing, social media marketing, inbound marketing, and in any niche online. Many marketers will swear you can’t guarantee a top ranking. That’s just not true – it just requires work.
4 Steps to Winning at Social Media Marketing (Source: Bill Belew)The Strategy to Win at Content Marketing
Step 1 – Quantity
Do a search on the key-word phrase/s that is important for your campaign to find out who comes up number one. Visit that site and count how many pages the website you want to beat has on that key-word phrase. Now, do more pages/posts, relevant and focused about that key-word phrase on your website than your competitor does and you will eventually beat them in the SERPs. For goodness sake, don’t stop reading. Search engines cannot make subjective determinations on what content matter or which style or writing is good or better. Search engines can, however, count. More is more and more pages/posts on a key-word phrase will win out provided you follow the next three steps.
Step 2 – Quality
There are more than 200 parameters that can go into a ‘perfect’ page. We also know pages that are over-optimized are not so perfect after all. I have learned that there are about 10 things that you can do that will get you 90-95 percent of the results you desire. Work the 10.
Get these factors right:
- Your titles
- Your keyword density.
- Your post and page length
- Your originality (don’t over-quote).
- Your images with captions and descriptions.
- Your link strategy (internal, external, and back).
- The balance between timely and timeless articles.
In just 3+ months my students EACH in their chosen niche, and some of my small business clients went from zero to an average of 4,000 unique search visits and more than 10,000 page views by working the 10. You can see the actual results of the students at Top Students by Unique Visitors, Page Views, Search Results in Inbound Marketing University.
Step 3 – Consistency
Go back to that website you want to beat and look back over a few months in their archives. Add up the number of posts and calculate how often their site is updated. Once a day? Twice a week? More? Less? Doesn’t matter. Once you determine how often your competitor updates his/her site, update yours more often. The more often you make real updates to your site, the more often the bots will check your site out. The more often the bots crawl your site the more likely the bot is to think, (if bots could think), “I’d better stick around this site ‘cuz it keeps changing” which equals better search results. Consistently update your site with quality content.
Step 4- Longevity
If your competitor’s site has been around longer than yours you obviously cannot go back in time and create a longer presence. You can, however, catch up in pace and excel at putting up a larger quantity of quality posts and stay with it longer going forward. Make no mistake, everyone gets tired. I get tired. You get tired. Your competitor gets tired. ‘Life’ gets in the way, sites go down, divorce and unhappiness happens. Disruptions occur and your competitor will get tired. When your competitor gets tired, don’t get tired. Simply outwork them.
In Summary
Put up a lot of good stuff that is focused and formatted correctly, do it often and stay with it and you will beat your competitor.
The number one reason why most businesses and web sites fail is because the business owners give up before their idea catches on. Don’t give up.
I am pretty sure I could beat Walmart or any other ginormous business no matter how many pages they have on a key-word phrase with the same strategy. It’d just be harder.
One of my recent students sells custom cutting boards. Who cares, right? She cares. She nailed it (record sales) over Christmas even she had NEVER ever sold a product online before then. Bed, Bath, and Beyond and Macy’s and the like were looking UP to her in the SERPs. because she applied the above strategy. She also told me yesterday she is still selling in January despite having never having sold anything before in January either.
The strategy works. It is pretty simple: if you work it works – but it’s still work.
(Images owned by Bill Belew)
