Blogging is a competitive sport. For you to rank, you need to compete and not just compete but compete to win.
When most bloggers start blogging, their whole focus is to write and write and write without properly doing keyword research.
Here's a fact: Keywords bring visitors to your site organically.
If you want to compete properly, you need to do keyword research first (long-tail keywords to be precise).
Second, you need to focus on searchers intent for that keyword.
Third, you need to focus on building backlinks to that keyword.
MISTAKES "PRO" BLOGGERS MAKE: THEY BUILD BACKLINKS FOR THE ENTIRE SITE AND HENCE, TRY TO INCREASE THEIR DA (DOMAIN AUTHORITY).
Have you seen bloggers selling their blogs even with high DA and with 1000 blog posts in it?
Have you asked yourself why?
Ans: High DA doesn't guarantee traffic. They bought into the lies told to them by "pro bloggers."
There's a principle known as the 80/20 principle which states that 80% of your traffic comes from 20% of the pages on your blog.
The MAJOR reason you don't get traffic to your site as much as you want to even if you've written 7k valuable words and built traffic is USER INTERFACE.
If I were to build another Facebook, it should look like this current Facebook.
Why do you think most search engines look alike?
Why do you think most Music sites look alike?
Why do you think NNU stood out amongst the rest?
Because it looks like nairaland thereby creating same user experience.
HOW TO KILL THE COMPETITION:
First of all, if a site has been there for years, you can't outrank it overnight. What you can outrank within a week or 2 is their keywords not their entire sites.
If you are a sniper, what you should be targeting is keywords of your competitors. Start with long-tail keywords first and then progress.
To cut the long story short, here's the step by step guide:
1. Get a keyword tool. E.g Semrush.
2. Go to Domain research and place your competitor domain there.
3. Keywords will rank based on traffic their site gets (from high to low).
4. Click on filter and filter it this way:
Exclude>SERP FEATURES >EQUAL > FEATURED SNIPPET
EXCLUDE>SERP FEATURES>EQUAL>LOCAL PACK
EXCLUDE>SERP FEATURES> EQUAL>INSTANT ANSWER
INCLUDE>POS>LESS THAN>11
INCLUDE>POS>GREATER THAN >0
INCLUDE>VOLUME>LESS THAN>1001
INCLUDE>VOLUME>GREATER THAN>100
INCLUDE>CPC>GREATER THAN>$0.3
This is a direct formula for picking the best keywords from your competitor using SEMRUSH. Once you've gotten a list, the next is to pick 1 keyword, put it on Google search to check for searchers intent (reason why searchers will search for such keyword).
Once you've gotten the searchers intent, the next thing is to compete - do better than them.
You will need to get related keywords and do on-page SEO to be on point.
Once you've published the post, wait till 2 weeks and check your rankings. You should be ranking at 7-15 position.
To boost your ranking, go to search console and copy all the keywords you are ranking for on that page and reuse them for that page to make the post lengthier.
This is the time you build backlinks for this page.
Use MOZ or ahrefs to spy on your competitors backlinks and once you've gotten them, start by building using 404 redirect method first and then move to web 2.0 to build.
What backlinks do for you is the same thing Messi does for his player. They assist you.
Now, if you noticed, the backlinks are not for the whole site but for a specific page. If your competitors have 20 backlinks pointing to their page with quality contents, to kill the competition on that keyword, build 21 backlinks with quality contents.
There are a lot of stuffs I skipped but this should help if you understand it.
Thanks.
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