🌶️ secret sauce alert
SEO doesn’t have to be slow.
In fact, it shouldn’t be that slow.
The faster you rank for a keyword, the faster:
- You get traffic
- You get data to iterate from
- You get to create growth for your business
So, if you’re still sitting there after 6-12 months waiting for anything to happen…🚩
Yes, it’s never gonna be “put $10 on Facebook Ads and get 10 visitors today” fast.
But with my strategy & content production clients, I see content rank and earn traffic incredibly quickly.
If the site has existing authority...I often see content rank in the top 5 in <48 hours.
If it’s a new site, sometimes those results take as little as a few weeks.
The reason?
I play to win.
→ Strategies that balance short and long-term growth
→ Content that’s designed to be better.
In this newsletter, I want to run you through some of the factors I care most about if I need content to rank fast.
🤗 If you enjoy this newsletter, please help me grow by sending it to a friend or colleague who might also enjoy it.
3 Big Factors that Help You Rank Fast
3-2-1 let's go.
1/ Weak Keyword Competition
To rank faster, choose keywords that are weak in competition:
- One part of this is site “authority”. If you see a website with lower authority than your own winning a keyword…good chance you can rank quickly here.
- Another thing I look for is the quality of optimization. Is the keyword you want to win in the title? The H1? No? Then good chance you can out-optimize them.
Often these terms are lower volume. But don’t be afraid of that.
Low-volume keywords are where you can get really specific and often find the highest intent.
⚡ Side note on search volume: Many SEO teams don’t rank for keywords I see actually driving revenue. You know why? Because they think those keywords are too low volume to be worth it. If your SEO team is measured on targets like “10% traffic growth per month”, this will only encourage them to avoid creating content that targets low-volume, high-intent keywords.
2/ Unsatisfied Search Intent
To rank faster, target keywords where the search results are “meh” at best:
- One factor is thin, sucky content that is likely to leave the searcher unsatisfied. If you look, you’ll see this everywhere. Simply, be better.
- Another factor is poorly targeted audiences. Let’s say you want to win the keyword “small business loans” and when you Google it, every result has a title like “top business loans for 2024” or “top business loans for large enterprises”. This is good. Those results are not focusing on the “small” aspect of the business loans audience—and that means if your content 100% focuses on the “small” audience it’ll be better & more click-worthy.
I see these techniques work again and again.
It takes some hunting, but these hidden gems are worth it.
3/ Better SEO
To rank faster, be the best at SEO:
- Craft long-form content that covers the topic in unique, interesting, and expert-driven ways.
- Cover a topic completely. Be the go-to resource.
- Get to the point. Solve their pain point ASAP, at the top. Then expand from there.
- Make sure you focus on winning a core keyword. Include that in the H1 and several H2s.
- Add internal links between topically relevant content. Never publish a blog without adding your internal links to it.
Those are the optimization factors that I see help content rank faster.
❓ What if I want to win keywords with high difficulty? That's where your long-term SEO planning comes into play. Two things that help win keywords with strong competition: topical authority and backlink authority. When I interviewed the team at Hotjar (and many other big websites with DR 90+) I was surprised to hear how core backlink building is to their strategy. Even coming from such a high DR, they built links to all their individual pieces of new content to make sure it moved to #1. Most of us don't have that kind of budget—so for you, I say hustle. Stick to those hidden gem high-intent keywords.
It’s worth noting that you’ll never rank for a keyword unless you have content to target it.
So if you want to rank for more keywords, faster, then it's crucial to create more content faster.
More inputs = more outputs.
Reach out to me at ben@thefxck.com if you want to add more fuel to your fire.
I also have a book on that.
