Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
I’ve been talking a lot about SEO lately. Google Authorship this, social signals that, links here, and good content there. All for a very good reason. Before I get into that, let me say something that we’ve all been thinking.
Is SEO Dead? Did the pandas, penguins, and other wild animals beat the SEO ‘gurus’?
To be brutally honest, they did to some degree. The good news is, out of all the SEO chaos Google has thrown at us in the past year, something good has emerged: a new age of SEO—a better, fairer set of rules and a more fundamental version of SEO. Call it what you will, I call it authority SEO.
In this guide
What is authority SEO?
Authority SEO is really search engine marketing. It’s about promoting your own website and using untapped strategies to drive hordes of visitors directly to your content without relying on a single automated link-building tool. Black Hat SEO is finished! It’s through!
Once again, to be very honest with you: I am glad. It means no more crappy websites ranking for terms they have no business ranking for. I, like the next person, want truly relevant and authoritative results when I search for a term on Google. If I’m looking for medical advice, I want to see results by real professionals, not geeky marketers who know how to build juicy backlinks.
Authority SEO is about building an authority website
A digital property that has true value. How do you know when your ‘digital property’ has true value? Average time spent on site!
If visitors aren’t spending at least 4 minutes on your website, it’s not good enough. You want to build sites that are true resources. If you’re building a dog training site, it better cover everything to do with dog training. You want to build a one-stop resource for people in the niche.
You also want to build a credible, reputable avatar/personality or presence in the niche. You want to be well-known and trusted by Google, that’s the bottom line. Once you achieve that authoritative domain status, ranking for keywords becomes stupidly easy. When you get that status, Google will instantly rank you for competitive terms.
The only way to rank quickly for competitive keywords
Think about sites like Amazon, Yahoo, even blogs like Askmen—whenever they publish something, even if it’s barely related to the subjects the site covers, they will instantly rank for competitive terms.
Step One: Good Niche Selection and Keyword Research
If you’re targeting a small niche, stop now. You always want to target a fairly broad niche when building a site.
If you know exactly what you’re building and just want to know how to rank, skip this step. By targeting a small niche, you set yourself up for failure right from the start. Why? Simply because there is a limit to how many topics you can cover, which means eventually you’ll have written about everything, and the site will have no room for growth.
At the same time, you don’t want to aim to take over a giant niche like weight loss or exercise. Target a broad niche but leave room for growth. Niche research flows into keyword research. For authority sites, you should first hand-select a handful of monster keywords in your niche. 3-6 is a good number. These are the keywords that you’d like to rank for long-term.
Short term and long term keywords: Short term keywords are the monster keywords that you will eventually rank for with this strategy. Start by ranking for the easy keywords and slowly move up the keyword ladder toward more competitive terms. Aim for 100 short-term keywords, and by the time you’ve published 100 articles, you should be ranking for them all, and your site will naturally begin ranking for the monster keywords.
Depending on how much optimization you do and the competitiveness of the niche, these figures will greatly vary.
Click Here To Continue To Part Two
Comments
Mark
This post is really informative! I never thought about authority SEO like this before, but it makes so much sense. Thanks for sharing!
Sarah T.
I have been trying to get my site ranked for months, and I think your advice here is spot on. Especially about targeting a broader niche. Thanks, David!
John W.
I’m not sure I agree with everything you said about black hat SEO being finished. Some techniques are still very much in use. Do you have any data to back up your claim?
Emily
Great post! I’ve been working on my site’s authority, and it’s already seeing improvements in rankings. Thanks for the guidance.
Tom
Authority SEO seems like the only way forward in today’s SEO landscape. I’m going to start implementing some of your tips right away. Keep up the great work, David!
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →Lily K.
I’ve been following your blog for a while, and this is one of your best posts! How are things going with you? Let’s catch up soon!
Mike
It’s interesting that you mention niche selection. I had a similar issue with a site that was too niche-focused, and it became a dead end. This is really useful info!
Chris
There’s this tool I’ve been using for keyword research called SEMrush that I think complements your strategy really well. You might want to check it out if you haven’t already!
Nina R.
This post is fantastic, David! Your insights on authority SEO really opened my eyes. I’ve been struggling with SEO for a while, but now I feel like I have a clear direction. Thank you for sharing your expertise!
Adam C.
I have to say, I’m a little skeptical about the idea that black hat SEO is completely dead. Do you have any recent case studies or data that show the impact of using these outdated techniques versus authority SEO?
Jessica W.
Thanks for this detailed guide, David! I do have a question about niche selection—how broad is too broad when it comes to choosing a niche? I’m worried about covering too much ground and losing focus on my site.
Peter G.
While I agree with most of your points, I think you’ve oversimplified the importance of short-term keywords. In competitive niches, it’s not always that easy to climb up the ladder. Do you have any additional strategies for competitive keywords?
Maria L.
Great post, David! Long time no see. I’ve been busy with my own projects but reading this reminded me of our old discussions about SEO. How’s everything going on your end? Let’s catch up sometime soon!
Eric M.
Reading this brought back memories of when I was building my first website. I made the mistake of targeting too small a niche, and eventually ran out of content ideas. This approach would have saved me so much time and effort back then!
Steven H.
There’s a tool called Ahrefs that works similarly to what you mentioned in your keyword research strategy. I’ve found it incredibly useful for building out authority SEO, and I think your readers could benefit from it as well. You might want to give it a try!
Lara P.
This post is a game-changer for me. I had no idea that building an authority site could be this straightforward. I’m definitely going to apply these tactics to my own website. Thanks so much for breaking it all down in such a clear way!
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In plain English: write good stuff people actually want to read, on a subject broad enough that you don’t run out of things to say. That’s ‘authority SEO.’ It didn’t need eight paragraphs about pandas and penguins to say that.
We called it ‘building a real website’ in 2009. Every few years someone renames the same advice and an algorithm update makes it look like news.
Tried the 100-articles-for-100-keywords plan on my own site two years back. By article forty I was repeating myself — the niche wasn’t broad enough after all, despite picking what I was sure was a wide one going in. Had to fold in an adjacent topic just to keep finding anything worth writing.
Kelsey’s experience at article forty is precisely what concerned me when I began this at sixty-one — that a niche which seems broad enough on paper reveals its limits only once you are actually inside it doing the writing, by which point a great deal of time has already been spent finding that out.
‘If visitors aren’t spending at least 4 minutes on your site, it’s not good enough’ is doing a lot of unexamined work here. Average time on site is heavily skewed by a small number of long sessions — someone leaving a tab open, someone reading three articles in one visit — so a site can clear a 4-minute average while the majority of visitors bounce in under twenty seconds. Median time on page would be a much more honest number to chase than the mean, and neither this post nor the analytics dashboards most people are using make that distinction obvious. Treating 4 minutes as a clean threshold to hit gives people a target that doesn’t actually mean what they think it means.
The strongest case for the ‘is SEO dead’ framing, even though I don’t fully buy it myself: if algorithm updates keep punishing whatever worked last year, then chasing ‘authority’ is just this decade’s version of chasing backlinks — a target that will also eventually get penalized once enough people copy it.
Walt, ‘this decade’s version of chasing backlinks’ is the sharpest line in this whole thread.