ranking in a competitive industry

Originally posted on https://www.thehoth.com/blog/competitive-industry-ranking/

Most SEO advice goes like this:

“Find high volume keywords with low competition and try to rank for those.”

This might be good advice for newbies, but let’s face it…

You’re not in this to add a tiny trickle of traffic to your business…

You’re in this to WIN!

There are not a lot of good reasons to not be the biggest in your space.

So how do you do it?

The Enormous Value Of SEO

First, you need to understand really how valuable SEO actually can be.

For instance, did you know that Ahrefs can show you the estimated traffic cost of organic traffic if you were to pay for it with adwords?

Here are some examples of estimated traffic value for some large websites:

  • Datingadvice.com – $685,000
  • Thewirecutter.com – $5.2 Million
  • Nerdwallet – $60 Million

Did you know those estimated traffic value figures are PER MONTH?

Can you imagine getting hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars per month worth of free traffic from Google just by doing content + SEO?

There is some MASSIVE money being made by ranking!

So the question is how to do you compete in a very competitive niche?

How To Win In A Competitive Niche

There are lots of things to say about this, but the first part starts with how you even approach SEO.

Here are 4 tactics to help you dominate:

1. Start with a mindset and a plan to WIN

You want to eventually rank for the most competitive keywords in your niche, and you need to start planning for it.

Understand that you’re in it to WIN. And then go about SEO like that.

2. Set out to build the biggest, baddest authority site of them all

Google loves authority sites. When sites like Wikipedia or Mashable or Nerdwallet put up a new article, it immediately has SEO strength because of the punch that their site packs.

To be one of the big dogs you have to make more content than anyone else, period.

3. Start building up to rank for big keywords NOW

Most people avoid really competitive keywords, but that’s not always the best idea.

The keyword difficulty score is often inaccurate – keywords are sometimes way easier to rank than you think (and sometimes harder).

Instead of just relying on keyword difficulty as a definitive metric, go for keywords that make sense for you.

Start building your content now, but be realistic on how long it might take to rank.

4. Focus on truly making your site better than anyone else

You need to put yourself in your reader’s shoes. What would make them choose your site over your competitors?

Take a look at the larger picture including web design, user experience, loading time, and of course quality of content.

Make sure the entire experience on your site is an A+ from start to finish.

Conclusion

If you create your SEO strategy with these ideas in mind, you’ll be set up for success.

The best part is, there are the same ideas we’ve implemented for ourselves. It’s what we do, we drink our own koolade.

That’s how we got featured on the 2018 INC 5000 list as one of the fastest growing marketing companies in the world.

When you want to play SEO at a high level, you need to think in terms of scale.

That’s why we invested literally millions in developing scalable content creation and link acquisition systems.

We’ve made it easy for you to give the big dogs a run for their rankings.

We’ve built a suite of 16+ products to help you achieve success in competitive spaces. Check them out now and get started!