When it comes to comparing content with links, you have to admit that great content offers better advantage and has more sway in Google. Undoubtedly, great content shines on the World Wide Web and through SERPs. While content may not be the King in the Google Kingdom, believe it or not, there are websites out there that have great content but do not have huge domain authority. There are pieces of content out there that bring millions of dollars, yet they have domain authority around 50 or lower.
So, what sets this content apart from all the rest? Three SEO experts Garrett French, Mark Traphagen, and Stone Temple, stepped out in search of the best content around the web. Here’s how they went about it:
Finding Great Content
The content had to be chosen according to the following criteria:
- The content URL could not be a homepage
- The domain could not have Domain Authority of above 55.
- The content has to earn the website more than $1,000,000 a year in traffic based on recent click through estimated CPC of keywords and traffic volume for which it ranks.
Soon enough, a number of domains were discovered. But what brought these contenders the success they had? Here are some features that set them apart from other websites in the market:
Feature 1: On-Point
The number one feature and trend that sets this content apart was how efficiently they answered their user’s queries. The content was to the point and gave enough information to the users regarding the subject matter. The content was highly relevant, regardless of its length. Most webmasters take the easy way out and just throw around content with a quick introduction and dimensions but the Sleep Train website provided their users more than just boring old paragraphs:
- Comparison images with dimensions
- Images showing people placement on different mattresses
- Textual table listing all the sizes of their mattresses
- A thorough textual analysis of the common bed sizes and who should buy what according to their height.
While it may not appear fascinating to you, you need to compare it with all the other websites. Keep in mind that Wikipedia consists of nothing but text after text. Better Sleep is also just text. SleepCountry is the only website that has an overlay chart, but none of the websites manage to answer their user’s queries as thoroughly and as succinctly as the Sleep Train website.
Feature 2: Bold
If you want to get noticed, you have to be bold and take risks. Doing what everybody else is doing just makes you seem predictable, and predictable is beatable. Over the course of a few years, it has been discovered that page speed plays an important role in helping sites achieve better rankings on Google. In fact, Google has recently announced page speed does make a difference in ranking. However, StyleGlam is a website that takes 24.9 seconds to load and the website is heavy, at 7.49MB, and features many ads as well.
When it comes to SEO, you need to compromise. Having a website that loads quickly requires compromising on images and text. Style Glam has hit it big as it has decided to improve their page speed. If you want to get to the top, you need to take risks. Conventional wisdom will rarely get you where you want.
Feature 3: Fresh
Can your content survive in high spam or high value keyword niches? Well, of course it can. Butterblog is a single page blog that brings more than $1,000,000 in traffic a year, not just this year but for years on end. It is a simple blog, which reviews top free movie websites on the Internet. So, how does a simple blog manage to bring in so much revenue? The key is to update your content.
If you do not update your content regularly, Google will be under the impression your page is slowly losing its reliability. If you want to be ahead of the competition, you need to keep updating your content. This piece of content has enjoyed long-term high rankings just by keeping their content fresh and up to date. It does not matter what their competitors do, they have ranked for thousands of keywords for many years.
