A (very) basic model of an SEO+Content campaign in 2019

[bernard]

I listened to an Authority Hacker podcast last week with Matt Diggity about SEO in 2019. Matt said something interesting, which was about how you need to go, go, go, when you hit the trust treshold with Google.

I agree with that and following this I was inspired to write up a very simple method for starting from scratch in 2019. Just thinking out loud for discussion here, let me know what you think.

1) Set up static site info and content
This is stuff like About Us, a color and logo theme, various disclaimers etc. The BuSo DGC has everything about this. It really pays off to do this well. You need pics of writers, editors etc, or just you if a blog. Link to real social media profiles etc. The more real it looks, the better, the nicer it looks the better.

2) One (or a few) personalised single piece of kickass authority content
If you're in the health niche, you could look into one specific trend. When I say personalized, I mean, it isn't enough to do "top 10 toasters" style. A personalized would be "every toaster for under $100 reviewed (3 types of bread)" and then you'd get your hands on those toasters and you'd test each and every one and you'd go crazy with it. I've found this works better with a smaller subniche (for obvious reasons). And you'd need pics and a story and all kinds of interesting personal anecdotes. Bonus if you can get emotional points, like you never had a toaster as a child, cause you were amish.

3) Outreach the heck out of 2)
Then having a legit piece of kickass content, next up is to outreach the shit out of that content, to bloggers, newspapers etc. You'll get a better response, because you have no commercial content and you are really honest, desperate and interesting. This first outreach should respond in various links from comments, guest posts, press release, etc.

4) Rank and prove yourself
This first piece of content (or more), will now rank well and quick, cause you targeted a low competition keyword and you wrote a nice long piece of content. Now Google will send some traffic your way and this is key, where you need to deliver on user metrics, which you will cause you wrote the best artice on the topic. This now gives trust factor to that page and the site in general.

5) Expand from that trusted page into subtopipcs

Having now a trusted subpage, you can go from there and expand with links from that page. A simple method is breadcrumbs leading to an optimized category page (add a long secondary description beneath loop). From here you can build on your toaster theme into various closely related topics. Go look at Webmaster Console for which searches show up with impressions but no, or few, clicks. These are topics that Google is literally telling you to write about. Now is the time to do a more generalized linkbuilding campaign with those standard SEO links to various subpages (don't buy them imo).

And....

Repeat. Build another top notch, personalized, low monetized page, outreach, expand into a topic cluster, monetize, deeplink repeat.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I'd say this is a good plan. Start with an easy term and create superior content, promote it to get links, rinse and repeat till you can take down more competitive terms. Eventually you find that you popped some thresholds and you're ranking very easily for harder terms and immediately for easy terms. That's when you go hard on the easier terms and bask in the glory.

It also goes back to what @eliquid said before about starting with easy terms and growing a base of organic traffic. Whether it's explicitly true or simply a great model for what's hidden in the blackbox of the algorithm, there may be some kind of adjustment or dampening factor on sites where they can only qualify for terms of a certain volume by successfully ranking for lower volume terms and accumulating enough organic traffic. Of course there's instances where virality breaks through this mold, but it makes a lot of sense. And your plan would guide you through it.

My usual tactic is to create a few posts around terms I know I want to rank for eventually that are way out of my league for a brand new site. I don't actively promote them, I just get them live first. That way when I start producing lots of content for smaller terms , they can interlink to the posts I want to rank later. Often these are posts that most users expect to exist on the site to look like a fully fleshed out site for that niche. I can position these prominently to give an air of authority and age and trust to the users that Google doesn't think I have yet.