Content SEO Growth Hacking
Meta Title: Content SEO Growth Hacking – Vamossy Case Study
Meta Description: Is there any shortcut around slowly working yourself up in rankings and traffic? The answer is occasionally, yes!
Industry: E-commerce (Virtual gaming products and services)
Website: www.rpgstash.com
Domain Age: 22 Years
Domain DR: 43
Challenge: Growth Hack Content SEO Results
In general, the most competitive articles get the top spots in search engines. Search terms vary from ones with barely any competition, to ones that have crowds trying to conquer it.
In general, a high search volume term gets targeted much more frequently, and has higher competition than lower search volume terms. The same correlation also works for the value of a click, some terms are very valuable, while others are almost worthless.
One thing we should never forget, is the backlink equity boosting effect of content. A secondary benefit of content marketing is the extra gained backlinks from the extra traffic, which improves your entire site’s ranking.
So, is there any way around working your way up the ranking ladder? Occasionally, yes!
Project Execution
Such an occasion was found while we were working for rpgstash.com’s content marketing in the game Path of Exile. Unique to the game, it gets an expansion / new patch every 3-4 months. The contents of the new patches than gets searched once they are released.
One of the pattern during these new patches is that search terms are “game version + keyword”, and old, well performing keywords retain their high search performance, just with the new game version’s term, such as “3.22”.
Our goal was to rank #1 for the “new patch+high traffic keyword” combinations, and we managed to achieve this with some technical SEO trickery. 2 weeks before the release of a new patch, such at “3.22”, we created a new article on a new, 3.22 optimized URL with the content of the exact same topic article that was made for 3.21. We also 301 redirected the “3.21” URL to the “3.22” one.
With this technique, we started ranking at the top of the competition without fail for “3.22” searches 2 weeks before patch launch, as we had zero competition. As the new patch got near, search volume increased for “3.22”, while new information of the patch’s content appeared, helping us to rewrite the articles for “3.22” in order to stay at the #1 spot even after the competitors publish their articles.
Unique to SEO, articles climb in ranking much harder than they drop. If you are at #1 position, you will only drop in rankings if someone steadily outperforms you, while for climbing in rankings, sometimes it is close to impossible, no matter what you try. Below are the results of our efforts.
Results
Despite lacking authority in the game, our patch optimized articles outperformed the competition without fail. As you see, suddenly at peak search times we managed to get 6-7k clicks daily for the terms “poe” and “path of exile”.
Conclusion
Make sure to do a thorough keyword research, and understand the search intents and search mechanisms of your keywords. Look for factors that can be taken advantage of, such as the fresh, low competition keywords.
Our suggestion – Also make sure to compete for search terms that are within your realm. If an authority website ranks at the top with well-optimized content for a specific keyword, it is unlikely that you can make such huge improvements that you take over. On the other hand, you can immediately rank and gain traffic from low competition terms, and be able to target more and more difficult ones over time.
Note – Unless you are very experienced and proficient in content and technical SEO, we suggest against trying to find shortcuts, as most likely you will create more problems for yourself than benefits.