Target
30 High-Competition Keywords (90% outside top 10) to be ranked in top 10
Achieved in:
4 months
Strategies used
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Guest Posting
Domain and hosting is a very competitive and rather shitty niche. No matter how many ads you see, at the end of the day, you will buy domain names and hosting service from companies giving it at dirt cheap prices with heavy discounts on top or you would buy the hosting that your favorite influencers/bloggers recommend. Generally, hosting companies have lofty commissions and influencers promote the company that pays the highest commission. Ex- Bluehost gives away 60-80% as referral commissions which is why influencers promote it while they themselves use services like GoDaddy and MaxCDN. We went a step further than referral program. We gave bloggers tailored and custom commissions and we offered to write guest posts on their blogs about hosting and technical issues like redirecting, file management, phpMyAdmin, site migration etc that people face. They were getting commissions blog posts and backlinks from us. It was a win-win deal.
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Competitor Link Building
This is pretty simple and very effective even today. Use tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs to find out who is linking back to competitors like GoDaddy and Hostgator. She what article they are linking to. If the topic is relevant, write a better article- (better looking/presented with updated information in depth). And write to those blogs basically saying- you might wanna link back to this article over the old and outdated one. See SkyScraper technique for more details.
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Broker Link Building (link exchange)
As the name suggests, it’s ‘you link back to me’. A win-win for both. Especially micro-niche domain and hosting blogs were really happy to exchange links with Bigrock. This technique is used and works today as well, just that if you are not careful or do it too much, you can get penalized by google without even knowing how did this happen. I don’t suggest this if you are a newbie.
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On page optimization
This is one of the easiest, most obvious, and yet the most ignored aspect of SEO. It’s really simple- if you want to rank, tell the search bots what your page is about in a language that they understand and make the pages user-friendly so that users will like it and google will want to rank your site. Here’s the best checklist for on page SEO that I could find. It needs updating. I might write an article with an on-page SEO checklist seen but till then this is pretty good.
Challenges
Crunch quick-time target in very high competition domain name and hosting niche against established opponents, GoDaddy and HostGator.