Quantity

Do a search of the keyword/keyword phrase that is important to your campaign and find out who ranks number one with Google. Visit the site you want to beat and see how many pages it has on that keyword phrase. Now, you should be doing more pages/posts and including more relevant and focused keywords, on more pages on your website than your competitor does. Eventually, you will beat them in the search engine results pages (SERPS). And don’t stop reading! Search engines cannot make subjective conclusions on what content matter or which style of writing is good or better. Search engines can, however, count. More is more, and more pages/posts about a keyword will win out provided you follow the next few steps.

Quality

You’ve probably heard us talk about quality content before – and this doesn’t mean we’ll stop talking about it in the foreseeable future. We know that there are 200-300 parameters that can go into the ‘perfect’ page. Though, we also know that pages which are artificially over-optimized are not so perfect after all. There are however 10 key things which you can do that will get you the majority of the results you desire. Work these 10 until they’re brilliantly perfected.

Get these factors right:

  • Titles
  • Keyword density (3-5%!)
  • Page length
  • Originality (if you’re using quotes, don’t over-quote)
  • Images with captions, descriptions and alt tags
  • Balance between frequent new blogs and articles, to evergreen ones that won’t grow old

Consistency

Go back to the website which you want to compete with and ultimately beat. Look back over a few months in their archives. Add up the number of posts and calculate how often their site is updated – is it once a day, once a week? Doesn’t matter – your aim should be to update your website more frequently than theirs. The more often you make real updates to your website, the more Google’s bots will check your site out. The more often these bots or “spiders” crawl your website, the more likely they are to think (if they could think,) “I’d better stick around this website – it keeps changing! This equals better search results. Update your site consistently with quality content.

Summary

Put some good stuff up that’s focused and formatted correctly – stay with this principle and you will beat your competitor. The number one reason why most businesses and websites fail is because they lose faith in what they’re doing and stop updating altogether. Not all ideas catch on in the first week/month/year of their inception; don’t give up.

The strategy works. It’s a simple premise – if you work, it works.