I'm sure many of you have faced this problem before. I did and it was getting quite frustrating because it seemed to happen to me quite frequently. I would build a site, get it ranked and after a few weeks the rankings looked like this...
(this above site is actually a friend of mines - in the "fitness/training" niche)
The keywords were medium-hard competition. Targeting .co.uk.
Black Har SEOer story series:
QUICK SUMMARY
Let me quickly summarize my friend's site. The site is based on "fitness/training". He usually adds a bunch of high quality articles every week relating to training/staying fit (nutritional advice, workouts, supplements, etc). It's sort of like an authority site but the only thing is that it's not quite an "authority" yet.
He's been making some decent money through Amazon and affiliate, but he wanted to branch out and do something else. Because his site was an upcoming "authority" site, it meant people could trust the information he posted. It also meant that trust could eventually be converted into $$. He was already doing this on a small scale using Amazon's affiliate system and by adding in affiliate links into his supplements articles and so on.
However, he wanted to try something new. He came to me with an idea. He was going to create separate pages on his site that would correlate to a city in the UK. For example: domain.com/london-personal-training (just an example). He told me he spoke to a leading personal training company in *(city)* and they had agreed to a % commission on all leads that ended up converting. He had the potential to make up to £100 ($150) for each lead that converted. So he came to me for help.. and me being the nice person I am, I agreed.
OBJECTIVE
So - the goal was to rank domain.com/city-personal-training onto Page 1 to get some leads. Those leads were then sent over to the company he partnered with and he was to receive a commission for any conversions on those leads.
The "personal training" niche isn't exactly easy - especially in huge cities like London, etc.
THE PROBLEM
However, everything was going fine until I reached Page 2. I managed to get 2/10 keywords on Page 1.. but there were still 4 keywords that kept fluctuating between #15 to #17. It was getting quite annoying because I did everything I could "off page". And it was even more annoying because those 4 keywords were quite big.
I built all sorts of links, waited with the utmost patience, tried all sorts of experiments but nothing would push these keywords over to Page 1. The results on Page 1 were quite authoritative/aged so I figured that would explain the delay in rankings, but it got to the stage where I was waiting far too long to see movement. Something wasn't right and it was getting frustrating because normally I'm able to rank my own keywords to Page 1 relatively easily.
Not only that but I kept getting messages from my friend asking when he was going to hit Page 1. That was also annoying.
TIP: Don't do SEO for your friends or family, lol.
I ended up asking for advice/suggestions to a few SEO friends I had on Skype, and most of them gave me different answers. However, out of all those answers, there was 1 that really stood out and I thought it could work. He also sent me a link to an article on a blog which explained his suggestion in more detail, and I figured I could try it out.
A few weeks later and here are the results...
Managed to get those 4 "stuck" rankings to #5, #2, #10 and #3.
First thing I did was phone up my friend and before I could even tell him the good news, he told me how he's now getting an increased amount of leads already. Long story short, he was happy and I was happy (plus, I think he's making a handsome £XXX/week now).
Success.
There were 2 things I learnt.
- Never do free SEO for your friends/family.
- How to get "unstuck" for rankings you can't seem to budge.
THE "SOLUTION"
As I mentioned at the start, the site was primarily based on "fitness/training".
There were already hundreds of quality articles posted all covering various topics...
- diet management
- supplements
- workouts
- reviews
- recipes
- training videos
- q/a weekends (he would answer any questions submitted by the readers)
- etc
In the end, the page (domain.com/city-personal-training) had 2000+ words of content, plenty of images and videos and most of all - it genuinely looked better than all the other sites on Page 1 for "*city* personal training".
After reading the answer/post my SEO friend referred me to, I realised I was looking at the problem in the wrong way. Instead of focussing on "off page" factors, I should have been more focussed on correcting the problem "on page".
Make sense?
Let me explain.
The solution to my problem was pretty simple. Create "topic relevance". I had to establish topic relevance in relation to that landing page.
Don't get me wrong - my friend's site had plenty of content - but none of those articles were "relevant" to the city he was trying to rank domain.com/city-personal-training in. In other words, even though he had lots of quality content on the site and a very well structured/written landing page for the city he was targeting - there was no other content on the site that established relevance.
In Google's eyes, the site was mainly based on "fitness/training" and Google also saw that there was a very well made landing page for personal training services for the particular city. However, that was it. There was no other content on the site that Google could have linked to the landing page to establish relevance.
All I had to do was create "pillar articles" to support the main topic. In this case, I had to create extra content which was based on/around the landing page. For example.. if the landing page was domain.com/london-personal-training and my keyword was "london personal training" - I would go out and create several articles specifically related to "london personal training". I would then contextually add a link inside those articles to the landing page, thus creating relevance.
This might sound quite "simple" to a lot of you but after doing a bit more research afterwards, I realised quite a lot of people miss this very simple concept. Many people these days complain about not being able to rank despite building every link possible. However, at the end of the day the solution may actually be as simple as adding a few relevant articles on your site and then contextually linking it to your target page to establish relevance.
I created a quick illustration to explain this very "simple" solution..
BREAKDOWN
I hope this isn't too confusing. It's pretty much similar/identical to silo'ing your site.
Start by creating at least 10 posts, each containing quality content of at least 500 words. Use images and videos where possible. The main purpose of these posts is to establish relevance but try to make these posts look good so that if a reader was to stumble upon them, it'd provide value.
For example, if our target landing page was domain.com/london-personal-training and our main keyword was "london personal training", we'd need to make these 10 posts directly related to "london personal training". That's how you'll be establishing relevance. Don't talk about "how to get a 6 pack" because that's not creating any relevance to the target landing page.
On each of those 10 posts, add a contextual link to your target landing page. Make sure the anchor you use is also relevant. For example, in this case, I could use "london personal training", "personal training london", "personal training in london", "london personal trainer", etc as anchors.
You can also interlink the posts so that you're also linking to the other "london personal training" posts you've created, thus improving your internal linking AND establishing/strengthening the relevance.
Get these 10 posts indexed (which shouldn't be a problem anyway). Once indexed, you can build some links to those posts if you'd like but it's not really necessary.
Give it a few days/weeks for your posts/pages to be recrawled (or you can force it inside WMT) and then wait a few weeks. Feel free to build some links in the meantime to your target page (in this case, the landing page) and you should see those rankings finally starting to move.
You don't need to create "exactly" 10 posts. You can make more/less but it's probably a good idea to have at least 10 to establish relevance firmly.
These extra posts act as a "reference" for your landing page. Next time Google sees your landing page, it'll also see that there are 10+ relevant articles linking to it, thus establishing that relevance. Those articles are "supporting" this landing page.
"Relevancy" is only 1 of the hundreds of ranking factors. I can't "guarantee" this method will finally help you "unfreeze" your rankings, but it's definitely something you should be doing if you aren't already.
CONCLUSION
Again, I know this section might have sounded extremely simple/basic/"noobish" to a lot of you.. but I can guarantee most people don't spend much time on their internal linking structure/relevancy. The point of this section/topic was: just because you've covered the basic "on page" factors and you've built every single link out there - doesn't mean you're going to rank easily. Most of the times our problems are usually due to very simple solutions, and in this case, I completely missed the part about establishing relevance. I assumed that because the site already had plenty of quality content, ranking that landing page would have been fairly straight forward. It was.... until I reached Page 2. Here, I learnt that internal relevancy/trust was important in this case to move this site over to the 1st page.
Do you have a page just now that you're trying to rank and you're struggling? If you don't already have relevant "supporting" articles contextually linking to your target page, then go out and create them! Make sure you create these supporting articles on your site and not using Web 2.0s or whatever. It needs to be on your domain. Give it a few days and see if that does anything
.Black Har SEOer story series:
Once again, I know this section might not have been that useful to a lot of you, but this is something that had me going crazy for a few weeks. I'm glad I finally found the "solution" and I'm glad that the solution was rather straight forward.
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