Marysville Meadows Project: Outranking a Competitor

Last week Mr. L. emailed me regarding a particular problem he is having with being out ranked in the SERPs by a competitor for keywords that has had a lot of time and money invested into the advertising. Mr. L.’s is highly frustrated and his situation is probably not that uncommon in the highly competitive market place of search engine rankings. So instead of hiring a questionable SEO firm, Mr. L. asked me if I would be interested in helping him surpass the competition.

Enjoying a good challenge, it is only natural to say yes but this strategy is far more than just hiring someone to out rank a competitor. Since Mr. L. and I are both real estate brokers within the same firm, and our offices are down the hall from each other, helping a competitor per say is usually not high on my priority list. Luckily, this case is different as I like Mr. L. and it opens doors for opportunities for myself.

To out rank the competition and solidify the rankings, a authoritative site is needed to almost instantly jump past the other sites and dominate the search term. So we came to the agreement that we will use my real estate website’s authority and create a custom landing page accenting key terms and lead capture to achieve the desired results. The page was released today and here is the Marysville Meadows page for all the world to see.

The primary focus to achieve top results was content. As a “content is king” fan, it makes sense to bring more content as that is what consumers are wanting. Not a teaser landing page rather a legitimate source that is helpful as well as information based.

Another factor in getting the page to rank well is the use of < h3 >, or header tags, within the post to separate and categorize the various information that is common with a real estate plat: intro text, images, maps, agents and lenders, and video, once Mr. L. shoots high quality footage. Organizing these features makes it simple and easy for a search to crawl, organize, and rank the page in the search engine results (SERPs).

Keeping the strategy onsite was more than creating a just a single page with content; it was about finding sources where internal links could be created using existing authoritative content. Blogging about Snohomish County real estate since 2005, I have many sources that can instantly reference the desired landing page. I used the follow pages:

– Featured Listing page
– Featured New Construction page
– Lot Sale Report page
– Marysville & Child pages

Internal reference links are critical and it should be noted that old content is not old, it just needs reinventing.

The final strategy in achieving the desired results is to push a lot of links from other creditable sources. From researching the competition it will not take to many links to achieve and the Marysville Meadows page can avoid being with any sort of search penalty.

It all boils down to how much work does a person want to invest to beat out the competition. In Mr. L.’s case, he hired someone already savvy in SEO realm and partnered instead of trying to do it all himself. It can be argued that using a partnership strategy will make more money than costing money in the long term and money is why work. So better make it effective and worthwhile otherwise we are just spinning our wheels.