Why grow your blog traffic?

A blog is the best tool to generate free organic traffic for your website.

While this traffic is not exactly free, in the long run, it is pretty much close to free.

Because once you publish an article, it exists on the internet as long as it can be found by search engines and/or people:

Content marketing is not something that I cover on this blog.

There is a little bit of a rant involved, so bear with me.

What prompted me to write this article is the volume of misleading information floating across the internet regarding growing blog traffic exponentially, and that too from the gurus who themselves run a low-traffic website.

Disclaimer

Every second article promises you that if you follow their content marketing tips, your blog will get 100k or more visitors a month in little to no time.

So I start this article with the following disclaimer:

“I give you no guarantee/warranty that by following my tips and tricks, your blog will start getting 100k or more monthly visitors”.

This disclaimer makes sense because, for the most part presenting the so-called ‘high traffic growth strategies‘ without rigorous scientific testing to back them up won’t make them applicable in every type of situation, for every industry, for every business, and for every blogger.

For the most part, justification of such high-traffic growth strategies is anecdotal: Technique X worked for Company Y in particular instance Z, so it is obviously a technique that should work equally well for any individual or business.

But it doesn’t work like that.

While it is true that you can benefit from other people/business growth strategies, you can’t expect the same level of success just by replicating what they did.

In other words, you can’t create another ‘Facebook’, ‘DropBox’, ‘Amazon’, or ‘Airbnb’ just by replicating each and every step their founders followed to achieve extraordinary business success.

You have to do something different and better to beat the competition.

Now I have managed your expectations, let’s move on.

Let us start with the tips/tricks that will not help you at all in skyrocketing your blog traffic.

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Strategies that won’t grow your blog to million visitors

#1 Blog Commenting

If you are commenting on a blog hoping to get traffic back to your site, then best of luck.

Even with an exceptionally good comment, where the comment is much better than the blog post itself, don’t expect a flood of traffic to come to your website.

Blog commenting won’t help you in growing your blog. Period.

#2 Guest Posting

This strategy will not help you in growing your blog.

You need to do a lot of guest posting to drive your blog traffic.

But if you spend the majority of your time in guest blogging, then when will you find time to develop content for your own blog?

However, allowing people to guest post on your blog is a good strategy. You get free content and traffic promotion from the guest author.

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#3 Developing content primarily for social media

My news feed on Linkedin is full of people who post content almost daily, and some of them are posting really good stuff.

However, if you ask me, most of them are wasting their time because they are not building any assets at the end of the day.

They get like 15 minutes of fame with their social media posts. These posts are not crawled and indexed by Google and quickly get buried.

So they are developing all this amazing content, and it is all going down the toilet.

I also post a lot on Linkedin. But you should not copy me. I already have a website that gets millions of visitors.

And here is the thing. LinkedIn is one of our top traffic sources for us.

But where this LinkedIn traffic is going?

You guess it right, to our asset, aka the website. What are you promoting on social media if you don’t have an asset?

Yourself?

LinkedIn has become a very crowded place. People scan tons of content every day. It was relatively quiet when I started here a couple of years ago.

Now it is like a super busy railway station where a new train of thoughts arrives every few minutes. People may remember your post but not necessarily you.

And even if they remember you, how does that help?

Traffic from LinkedIn remains on Linkedin unless you direct it somewhere else.

You must bring at least some of your LinkedIn followers to your website and turn them into subscribers.

Be strategic about content development and marketing. Don’t develop content purely for social media platforms.

These platforms are there today but could be gone tomorrow.

Once they are gone or boot you out for whatever reason, they can take away all of your content with them.

If you have time to post on social media, you have time for blogging. Focus first on building an asset and then worry about social media.

Otherwise, you will regret it one day.

#4 Speaking in Conferences

This strategy can help you build a social media following and quickly build authority.

You see, many conference speakers have got thousands or even tens of thousands of followers on social media.

But their reach is still limited, as out of these thousands of followers, only a few hundred really care about what the conference speaker has to say. 

The rest of them are either dormant, or their interest lies elsewhere.

So even a large social media following will not help you grow your blog, at least not how you would like to.

Just like guest posting, you need to do a lot of public speaking in order to increase your reach.

But no matter how much, how often you speak, your reach would always be limited to a few hundred people in the conference room.

Unlike blogging, your speaking engagements, won’t give you reach of tens of thousands or even millions of people all over the world.

Moreover, the preparation behind public speaking is even more time-consuming than guest posting.

So if you spend the majority of your time in public speaking, then when you will find time to develop content for your own blog.

Public speaking works best for your blog growth when you are also consistently blogging.

This way your speaking engagements fuel your blog growth and your blogging fuel your speaking engagements.

However, it is very difficult and time-consuming to keep up with consistent blogging and speaking unless this is all you do.

#5 Developing “great” content 

Greatness is subjective. What may be ‘great’ for you, maybe ‘mediocre’ for others and vice versa?

Develop great content, and traffic will come. This is not going to happen.

Developing high-quality content is a bare minimum requirement for blogging. It is not something that can drive tons of traffic on its own. 

You need to do a lot more than develop content.

#6 Writing good headlines, writing in a conversational tone, creating a content calendar, and writing unique articles…… 

These are all good tips, but they are so basic that in the grand scheme of things, even when combined, they are pretty much insignificant.

#7 Hiring content writers to do your hard work

Some people get lazy and hire content writers to blog on their behalf.

There is nothing wrong with that, except the hired replacement seldom writes better than you, let alone exceeds your and your target audience’s expectations. 

Over time, your blog quality suffers, and you lose subscribers.

Remember, people read your blog because of ‘you’. If ‘you’ are missing, then what is the point of visiting your website?

If you run a corporate blog, then hire subject matter experts.

Do not hire someone who is good with ‘words’ and ‘rephrasing’ but does not know what they are talking about.

#8 Using AI to autogenerate content for your blog

Many AI-powered content generator tools have entered the market and promise to let you do content development at scale.

Using such tools may get you a short-term traffic boost, but eventually, Google will catch you and penalise your website.

Let me give one example.

I asked ChatGPT (an AI-Enabled chatbot) to write an article on attribution modelling, and it did. The article is factually correct. That’s the good news:

But when I again asked ChatGPT to write an article on attribution modelling, it re-worded its last reply.

When many people give the same instruction and ask the same/similar questions, they all will get the same/similar response from ChatGPT.

That means you can’t use ChatGPT for content development without the risk of being flagged for duplicate content or plagiarism.

I asked ChatGPT another question: Can machine learning detect the content created by AI?

Here is what it said:

Google work on machine learning and AI for a living. They will figure out whether a human or AI created the content.

Do you really believe that AI tools built by smaller companies can compete with the AI tools built by Google, which are powered by massive data centres and quantum computing?

Remember, Google has an army of engineers whose only job is to ensure you can not game the search results.

There are no shortcuts to success, whether it is SEO or life.

All the websites currently benefiting from AI-generated content will lose their ranking and traffic overnight once Google comes up with a new algo update targeting AI-generated content.

There are many more so-called ‘high traffic growth’ strategies floating around. But I don’t want to bore you with them.

The fact is that growing blog traffic is not as easy as following 1.2.3.. best practices. Growing a blog is really really hard.

18 strategies that can grow your blog traffic to million visitors

1. Develop contents that align with your business goals
2. Find a niche you are passionate about, and then just stick to it
3. Follow the 10000-hour rule to develop a world-class skillset.
4. Hire a subject matter expert and not a content writer
5. First priority should always be ‘Quality’ and then ‘quantity’
6. Ensure you consistently produce high-quality contents
7. Blog daily or do not blog
8. Take blogging seriously
9. Do your research
10. Treat your blog post as a lesson plan
11. Follow the AIDA communication model
12. Follow the 90/10 rule
13. Grow your email marketing list
14. No guest blogging.
15. Treat your blog as an ebook
16. Write crazy long articles
17. Use a content development checklist to maintain content quality.
18. Aim to rank on page 1 for as many high search volume keywords as possible.

Strategy #1: Develop contents that align with your business goals

If you are developing contents on topics which don’t really align with your business objectives then you are just wasting your time and resources. Because it won’t help you in improving the business bottomline.

So if you are primary a link builder, you would be better off developing content only on topics related to link building and content marketing because this is what you sell.

Similarly, if you are a wedding planner, you would be better off developing content only on topics related to wedding planning management.

Strategy #2: Find a niche you are passionate about and then just stick to it

Just a decade ago, I was blogging about everything from keyword research, local SEO, Social Media to Link building. 

It didn’t help me in building authority in any of these fields. I was writing about topics I am good at but not passionate about.

My blog started to get traction only when I found my true passion in web analytics and started blogging about it in every single blog post.

If you look around in the digital marketing industry, you can find many people who seem to follow this practice and are considered an authority in their respective fields.

For example, Bill Slawski was a recognized authority on Patents and he wrote about patents for more than a decade. 

Jason Acidre is widely known for link-building and persistently writes on link-building topics. 

Joost de Valk (Yoast) has become almost a synonym for ‘WordPress SEO, and he also persistently writes on topics related to WordPress.

Everywhere you look around, you can find people who are considered authority in a subject field.

But you will rarely find anyone who is considered an authority in multiple subject areas/disciplines. 

In fact, it is almost impossible and also impractical for any individual/business to try to build authority in multiple subject areas.

Stick to just one niche.

Building authority in a single industry vertical is relatively easy and is something which is possible through hard work, dedication, networking and a bit of luck.

You also need to show a lot of passion to carry on, especially during difficult times otherwise, you will give up sooner or later.

Find a niche you or your client is passionate about, and then just stick to it.

Strategy #3: Follow the 10000-hour rule to develop a world-class skillset.

Malcolm Gladwell made an interesting observation in his book ‘outliers’.

This observation is that

The people who achieve extra ordinary success in their field spend at least 10,000 hours perfecting their craft. 

Though you can’t follow the 10000-hour rule on behalf of your clients, you can certainly hire people who have been following this rule and have spent at least 1000 hours perfecting their craft.

We call such people ‘Subject Matter Experts.

Strategy #4: Hire a subject matter expert and not a content writer

We often hire content writers with good language and literary skills to develop content on … any topic.

Now the problem with this approach is that at the end of the day, the quality of the contents suffers in terms of value-added to the business bottomline.

Perfect grammar is not going to help you get sales and conversions, value proposition will.

Anybody can develop (or dare I say rehash) content on any topic these days through little research on the web. That’s why the internet is jam-packed with poor/mediocre quality content.

In order to stand out, you need to demonstrate a high level of subject matter expertise.

For that to happen, you need people who are experts in their fields. 

Without the help of the ‘subject matter experts,’ there is no way to build authority in any niche.

Hire a subject matter expert and then train him to become content developer.

For example,

The best person to write about wildlife photography is a professional wildlife photographer and not just any photographer.

And certainly not someone who writes about anything under the sun from ‘how to fix your cycle’ to ‘how to change your baby diapers.

Similarly, the best person to write about skateboarding is a professional skateboarder.

These subject matter experts are going to cost you much more than professional content spinners.

But you get high-quality content because subject matter experts really know what they are talking about.

I know it is not easy to find and hire such people, but then it is not easy to build authority either. 

And without authority, you won’t get high-quality backlinks and desired user engagement and exposure, all of which are required to grow blog traffic.

Strategy #5: First priority should always be ‘Quality’ and then ‘Quantity’.

If you have been following me for more than a year or so, you must have noticed a great improvement in the quality of my content.

There are three main reasons for this.

First, I blog only about one topic now, i.e. web and marketing analytics.

When you are blogging about the same topic day in, day out, you are in a do-or-die situation. You have to come up with new ideas. Otherwise, you risk failure.

Second I follow the 10000-hour rule, which has exponentially improved my subject matter expertise. And this expertise reflects in my blog posts.

Third I spend a lot of time deciding how to structure my articles and how to present them to you so that it is incredibly easy to understand and, at the same time, instantly useful.

I remember once I spent around two months researching legal contracts for this blog post: SEO Contract | Sample SEO Contract Template.

The whole point of telling you about my story is to reinforce the fact that developing contents that actually drive sales and conversions require a huge amount of time and resources. 

It is not something that can be done in just an hour or two.

You can’t expect to move the corporate needle or build authority by writing 5 blog posts in one hour or churning out mediocre content every single day.

So roll up your sleeves and get ready to spend some serious amount of time and money on hiring subject matter experts and/or developing great resources for your target audience.

Strategy #6: Ensure you consistently produce high-quality contents

1. Hire subject matter experts. Only they can bring expertise to your website and ensure high-quality content on a regular basis.

2. Develop contents that provide a smart, simple solution to improve customers’ lives and, at the same time, influence buying behaviour. Just developing unique, easy to understand content is not enough.

3. Create editorial guidelines and content calendars and follow them religiously. Every aspect of your content development and marketing should be planned out well in advance.

4. Constantly measure the performance of your content. If you don’t measure the performance, you will never know what works and what doesn’t, and you may end up beating a dead horse.

5.  Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t work. It is not rocket science.

6. Keep an eye on popular blogs in your niche and get ideas/inspiration from them. Reading can spark a lot of new ideas and topics to blog about.

7. Do your keyword research before you write on a topic.

Strategy #7: Blog daily or do not blog

This is the number 1 mistake the majority of bloggers make. They don’t blog daily or weekly.

And let’s be honest, not everybody can maintain consistency.

Blogging is a soul-crushing exercise with no apparent return on investment at least for the first year. The majority of people who start blogging give up sooner or later.

Where the majority give up, you need to persist.

Ideally, you should publish at least two articles a week.

If you can’t do that, then at least one article a week.

If you can’t publish even one article a week, then don’t blog at all.

Success in blogging is directly proportional to publishing frequency.

The more you blog, the better.

It doesn’t matter how good your content is. If you can’t maintain frequency, your blog will not grow. It is as simple as that. Consistency is the key here.

Blogging is not a sprint. There is no quick win here. It is an endless marathon.

As long as you keep running, it is all well and good. The moment you stop, traffic drops.

Strategy #8: Take blogging seriously

Blogging is not a fun time/pastime activity. You don’t blog whenever you feel like it or whenever you can find the time. 

Blogging is serious work, and it requires commitment.

Just like you never forget to eat each day, you don’t forget to blog each day. 

Spend an hour or two each day to create new content.

I often hear this excuse from people, “I don’t have time to blog”. 

Well, then find the time!

Sleep faster, eat faster, burn the midnight oil, use weekends, public holidays……..

If blogging is not on your priority list, then you will never find time to blog. 

And if blogging is not your priority, then don’t blog at all.

You are simply wasting your time and resources by blogging once in a while, whenever it is convenient for you. 

Because without consistency, your blogging efforts won’t yield any result.

Strategy #9: Do your research

I usually spend a week doing research. Sometimes I spend a month or more. But I always do research.

I never publish any article without doing some sort of research on the topic I am going to cover.

Strategy #10: Treat your blog post as a lesson plan

The majority of my blog posts are highly technical, and it is always a challenge to explain technical topics in an easy to understand words.

I spend a lot of time structuring my articles, what should come first, what should come second, and what readers may need to know in advance before they are in a position to absorb my material.

I think this is where I stand out.

A lot of technical bloggers do an awful job of explaining what they want the readers to do. They assume too much from their readers.

They do not clearly outline all the prerequisites and deliverables and just puke technical instructions and code and hope readers will get it somehow.

Strategy #11: Follow the AIDA communication model

This communication model is old school, but I still follow it religiously to write each blog post.

In AIDA:

1. A stands for getting attention.
2. I stand for raising interest.
3. D stands for building desire
4. A stands for obtaining action.

 I have explained the AIDA model in great detail in this article: AIDA Communication Model and Conversions.

Strategy #12: Follow the 90/10 rule

When it comes to content marketing, follow the 90/10 rule.

Spend 90% of your time promoting your content and only 10% time (relatively) in developing it.

No matter how good your content is, if nobody knows about it, then nobody will consume it.

Develop great content and traffic will come on its own is not going to happen.

You need to go out of your way (but not in a spammy way) to promote your content.

You should be promoting your content 7 days a week. One effective way to promote your content over and over again is by repurposing it.

You can use the same content to write an ebook, create a youtube video, publish a new podcast, publish a new blog post, create a new webinar, new Slideshare, on Facebook live, share an excerpt on Instagram, Tik Tok etc.

Do not develop content if you do not have a distribution strategy in place.

And don’t worry about repeating the same stuff over and over again in different formats.

Most people do not remember what you posted a day ago, let alone what you have posted so far.

You can promote the same stuff over and over again, and it will almost always look new to them.

Strategy #13: Grow your email marketing list

Marketers globally rate email marketing as the most effective digital marketing tactic and the one which delivers the best ROI.

All of the high-traffic blogs out there have got a ginormous email marketing list. 

I have got over 100k.

The bigger your email list, the less you need to depend upon rented advertising platforms (like Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc) which is a good thing as it reduces your ad spend.

You need to grow your email list to the point where you can easily survive even without Google.

There are four powerful methods to grow your email list:

1. Create and use powerful lead magnets
2. Use pop-ups on your website that promote your lead magnets.
3. Re-target website visitors via ads and buy signups via lead magnets.
4. Keep your email deliverability high and avoid ‘promotion’ and ‘spam’ folders

#1 Create and use powerful lead magnets

Getting newsletter signups is becoming increasingly hard because of market saturation.

People will not give you their email address easily unless they are getting something really valuable for free.

Following is the lead magnet that we use. It took us almost a year to create this lead magnet.

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#2 Use pop-ups on your website that promote your lead magnets.

I personally don’t like popups.

But pop-ups have repeatedly proven to increase newsletter signup rates. The data is out there, which proves that they work.

Every time, we removed popups from our website, our sign up rate declined by a whopping 60 to 70%.

So despite personal dislikes for pop-ups, we keep using them.

Don’t let your personal biases make important business and marketing decisions for you. Look at optimization objectively. Do what is best for your business and not what is comfortable for you.

#3 Re-target website visitors via ads and buy signups via lead magnets.

Not every website visitor will sign up for your newsletter on their very first visit. So it is important that you re-target them via paid ads and generate even more signups.

People visit your website to consume information and/or to buy a product. They don’t visit your website with the objective of signing up for your newsletter.

Therefore it is important that you re-target them via paid ads.

The re-targeting audience is also more likely to optin via ads if they have a good user experience on your website and/or they found your content useful.

You can considerably improve your newsletter subscription rate through re-targeting ads.

Another advantage of this strategy is that now you don’t need to worry about ad blockers that block popups. The less dependency on third-party tools, the better.

#4 Keep your email deliverability high and avoid the ‘promotion’ and ‘spam’ folder

If you want to keep your email deliverability high and avoid ‘promotion’ and ‘spam’ folders, then stop counting and hoarding inactive subscribers.

Stop sending emails to those who haven’t opened a single email in the last 60 days:

Often people keep inactive subscribers on the off chance that someday they might open one of the emails and then convert.

But that rarely happens. In reality, keeping them will only cost you money and deliverability issues. The inactive subscribers are worthless, a dead load.

If a person is really interested in your offer/content, he will subscribe again. If he doesn’t, then let him go.

Don’t hoard his email address on the off chance that someday he might open one of your emails.

Here is what I learned about email marketing analytics after sending out millions of emails over the years…

#1 The first thing I learned is about the various deliverability KPIs like ‘inbox placement rate‘ and ‘sender score‘.

#2 I learned about the technology used by mailbox service providers to make inbox placement decisions.

#3 I learned about the various techniques to avoid spam filters and blacklists.

#4 Techniques to monitor and improve email deliverability and subscriber engagement.

#5 I learned about the inbox monitoring tools, which provide far superior email analytics than any regular ESP (Email Service Provider) can ever provide.

#6 I learned not to rely on a single IP address to send out emails. As a result, we use half a dozen different IP addresses for different purposes. So the bad reputation of one IP can not affect the email deliverability of all other business communications.

#7 I started using a dedicated IP address for mass mailing. Shared IPs are never good for mass mailing like sending out newsletters. Because all you need is just one bad actor to destroy the reputation of your shared IP.

There is a reason why your inbox is always full of emails.

Email marketing works and it works wonders, provided you know how to keep your inbox placement rate and conversion rate consistently high.

If you want to learn more about improving email deliverability, then check out my booklet called ‘Master the Essentials of Email Marketing Analytics: The journey from inbox placement to conversion‘:

This book is just a couple of hours of reading. But the information that I have shared here, you won’t find it anywhere else.

Strategy #14: No guest blogging.

I generally don’t guest post (there are a few exceptions because of special relationships I need to honour).

I believe all of my hard work should remain only on my blog.

I avoid blogging even on social media platforms (like LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, etc.). They are today, gone tomorrow. The day they shut down, they will take away all of your content with them.

This policy has helped me in growing my blog a lot. If you spend the majority of your time guest blogging, then when will you get time to develop content for your own blog?

Strategy #15: Treat your blog as an ebook

I don’t consider my blog as a blog. I treat my blog as an e-book.

Each blog post is a work in progress and one of the pages of my online book.

It is a live document, just like Wikipedia. I keep updating my articles on a regular basis, so they continue to rank high in search engines.

And my updates are no ordinary updates. I add brand new content, which can be several pages long.

Strategy #16: Write crazy long articles

Most people write 3 or 4 paragraphs and call it a blog post. Such articles rarely rank well on search engines like Google.

The average length of my article is 10 to 15 pages long. Sometimes they can be 20 to 40 pages long.

Others may call such long articles “ebooks”. But for me, it is still a blog post.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not asking you to add unnecessary words just for the sake of making an article long.

What I am asking is to focus on creating content that covers a topic in great depth.

Strategy #17: Use a content development checklist to maintain content quality

If you are blogging yourself, you may not need a content development checklist.

But if you are outsourcing your work or training a subject matter expert to be a content writer, then you should definitely create and use such a checklist.

The objective of this checklist is to do quality control when it comes to content development.

You can use the following content development checklist:

1. When you are explaining a concept, get to the point as soon as possible with little to no repetition and in as few words as possible.
2. When you are explaining the benefits of something, use a numbered/bulleted list (either for real or in your mind). That will force you to get to the point ASAP in as few words as possible.
3. If you know all the possible reasons/options, then use the numbered list. Otherwise, use the bulleted list.
4. Avoid using chunky numbered or bulleted lists. A numbered/bulleted list should not contain more than one sentence. Instead, use sub-headings and paragraphs.
5. Do not justify text. Keep it left aligned.
6. Use formatting like bold, italic, quotes etc, to give emphasis to important words, sentences etc.
7. Use sub-headings wherever possible and use questions as sub-headings wherever possible.
8. Center align all the images
9. Use short sentences wherever possible. Long sentences are hard to read. So wherever you can, break it down into two or more sentences.
10. Once you finished writing a paragraph, re-read it and see whether you can explain the same thing but in fewer words.
11. Do not try to explain two different topics/concepts at the same time. This is going to confuse readers.
12. People don’t read articles on the web, they skim them. So make your article as easy as possible to skim.
13. Explain everything in steps whenever possible.
14. Use screenshots and other visuals at every opportunity to explain a concept.
15. Make sure there are no factual mistakes in an article.
16. Do not skip any steps (no matter how small) when writing a ‘how to’ article.
17. Add a table of contents to your article wherever applicable.
18. Link out to other articles on your website at every opportunity.
19. Before you write an article, do a quick search on your website and make sure that there is not already another article on the exact same topic.
20. Uses Grammarly to fix any spelling/grammar mistakes
21. Make sure that there are no incorrect spellings in the images
22. Make sure that the image/screenshot you use does not show the client name or personally identifiable data (like product name, account number, container ID, property ID etc)
23. When you are pointing out a particular element in a screenshot, try to make it as sharp and visible as possible.
24. Make sure there is no blurry or hard to read text in your images.
25. Make the images as clear and sharp as technically possible.
26. Make sure that you keep the image sizes as short as possible without sacrificing the image quality and readability.
27. When you are updating an article, go through all the steps mentioned in the article and actually perform that task.

Strategy-18: Aim to rank on page 1 for as many high search volume keywords as possible.

The more high search volume keywords your blog rank for, the more organic search traffic your blog will get.

But often, high search volume keywords are highly competitive.

If you want to rank on and stay on page 1 for crazy competitive keywords, you need to do only two things right:

a) Keep making your articles objectively better.

What that means is regular content upgrades. 

You make your article so informative that all the articles ranking above or below you on page 1 (or even page 2) can no longer compete with you in terms of content quality and quantity.

Google will recognize your efforts over time, and all the thin articles that are currently ranking above you (because of manual link building) will be downranked. 

However, bear in mind that this could cost you a fortune in content development, esp. when you are targeting highly competitive keywords.

Just to give you an idea of the content development cost. 

We currently rank on page 1, position-1 for the keyword phrase ‘best excel charts’.  

The article which is ranking for this keyword is around 100 pages long and it has cost us close to $20k so far in dozens of content upgrades. 

This article has acquired a lot of backlinks from .edu domains. 

As a result, we have been consistently ranking on page-1, position-1 for this keyword phrase for years.

In SEO you get the real leverage, not through your SEO skills but the amount of money you can afford to spend on content development and marketing. Whoever spends the most, wins. 

I know this will not sit well with many SEO experts out there but it is the truth. It takes real money to displace real money.

Your SEO skills won’t save you if you can’t outspend your competitors.

B) Focus on the internal linking and website architecture. Aim for flat site architecture. 

What you don’t need to do is manual link building. 

What most SEOs do is beg for links instead of focusing on the content and the website architecture. 

You should automatically get backlinks over time because your article has become so good that there is no equal.

Your aim should be to eventually neutralize competition in your niche.

You raise your standards so high that your competitors start quitting one by one and are forced to move to other markets because they can no longer directly compete with you.

This is what Amazon is currently doing with warehousing. No e-commerce business on this planet can directly compete with them in warehousing capabilities.

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