How do i beat my spammy competitors? they are ranking on page 1 of google!

calvinkj

my competitor is ranking on page 1 of google. he has 3.4 million backlinks and 1400 refering domains. he has aquired these backlinks from various websites, but he doesnot have links from his niche . how do i beat my competition with less backlinks because if i follo his technique, it would a takea lot of time and people to build backlinks

one of my strategy is to get .edu links
second strategy is to have 6000 word content and rank for really low competition keywords related to my website.( my competitors website has 1500 words content!)
any other strategy you can suggest?

Advanced-Air-Ambulance

Your best strategy in beating a spammy website is following the best practices of SEO and web development.

You've already outlined two key components you will need to use: high quality backlinks and rich relevant content. As you've pointed out, generating a wide network of backlinks takes a lot of time and many relationships. That is a big reason as to why links have a high value in SEO. Although it is not as effective as it previously was due to the increasing number of variables, it still holds a lot of equity amongst the signals used by Google. Your .edu strategy should be noteworthy, as only established institutions are afforded this domain space.

Because at first you will be outmatched on the off-page SEO like backlinks, focus on the on-page factors. This includes content relevance, content quality, page speed, and others. You will find a lot of resources available here on Moz that you can refer to.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/on-site-seo

https://moz.com/learn/seo/on-page-factors

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/on-page-seo

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/technical-seo