How do you rank a site in a very competitive market?

[shauna7084]

Do you focus on article submission, social media backlinks or what?

[EGOL]

How do you rank a site in a very competitive market?

1. Spend time learning about the market, its products, their uses, their problems, their customers, maintain this effort as long as you are working this industry.

2. Concurrently, be working on a website that shares all that you are learning about the products, their uses, the problems that they can solve and the problems that come with them.  Share what people want to know, share what they need to know but don't know that they need know.

3. Plan to be on this journey for at least several years.

[DonnaDuncan]

As you can see from Egol's response, you need to take a big picture approach to optimization. There aren't any quick fixes anymore, especially in competitive markets.

Rather than focusing on article submissions or social media backlinks (which sound like you're emphasizing link growth first), take a step back and come up with a strategy that's going to work long-term for your website, industry and specific target market. There are a ton of good resources on the site to help you do that. This query surfaces helpful Q&A and articles from the last year alone. I suggest you start there.

Then, come back here with more questions. The more specific you can be, the better the answers you'll get. There are a lot of people who are willing to share their lessons learned and past experiences here.

Good luck!

[ChrisAshton]

Building links is important for SEO but if you're just starting out on a fresh site, I don't suggest starting there. Spend the time improving the website's onsite factors and overall user experience so it's a place users want to go.

It can be difficult to build legitimate backlinks if your site is very thin on content and hard to use because, quite simply, it doesn't look trustworthy.

We've had great success in competitive industries by starting almost exclusively with onsite elements then steadily shifting the focus toward building genuine links. Below are just some of the more important elements we work on in the early days, regardless of industry. These are in no particular order:

• Page titles
• Meta descriptions
• Headings
• Nav structure and layout
• URL structure
• Landing page content (my recommendation is 1500+ words of uniquely valuable content per landing page though this figure is anecdotal - better to have 1000 words of good content than to pad it out with rubbish for the sake of an arbitrary word count)
• Site speed
• Call to action
• Overall user experience - how easy is it for users to satisfy their intent on your site?

There are certainly plenty more things to consider which Moz and Backlinko cover quite well. The important thing to remember here is that you're not jumping through arbitrary hoops to "improve rankings", you're building a trustworthy, more helpful website for users. The early ranking improvements are really just a side-benefit in the short term.

The concept of article submissions is thankfully quite dead these days. There are some instances where it makes sense but very rarely. Just like everything else in SEO, if done with the right intent (providing a helpful resource, not just building a backlink) then it can be done with reasonable success but there are better ways to spend your time.

Also, backlinks from social media are quite different to a link from another website. These "social mentions" are important because while they may or may not directly improve your rankings, they do work to build a stronger image for your brand; "146,000 people follow this brand on Facebook, they're obviously quite a strong company!".

I hope at least some of this proves helpful! Don't forget to do some thorough competitor analysis to see what your competition is up to as well. You'll never beat someone by copying them but their tactics might spark some great ideas.

[MattRoney]

Hi Shauna!

I agree with everyone here, and I'd encourage you to specifically not focus on the practices you've mentioned.  I'd also like to suggest two specific resources for you—Cyrus Shepard's "How to Rank" post and ebook, and our Beginner's Guide to Link Building.