Climbing up Google’s search rankings

Results of two years of SEO and inbound marketing

3 min readJan 17, 2014

The following is a summary of the 3 key SEO strategies we took which brought us to top 3 in Google’s search results. For a more elaborated article, please refer to this post: Getting to Top 3 on Google

For the second part of this series on other marketing strategies, please read: Creating Marketing Growth Spikes

Figures and company name in this post has been edited due to the sensitivity of information presented.

I started working on inbound marketing and SEO around early 2012. Over the past 1.5 years, we saw a 3.5X increase in unique visitors to our site.

When I first started thinking about inbound marketing, I created a test campaign on AdWords with the free $150 credits I had. I quickly learnt that buying ads was not a viable solution to increasing discoverability, as the Cost Per Click (CPC) was way too high. I decided to take a leaf from Rand Fishkin’s talk and embark on SEO instead.

(a) Target keywords

By using a combination of the (now defunct) Google Keyword Tool, as well as observations of user search patterns, we came up with a list of keywords to target. The initial list of keywords followed the pattern of “<competitor> alternative” and “<us> vs. <competitor>”.

(b) Seed Content

We placed a stronger focus on our blog to generate commentaries and essays which were insightful. Each of these blog posts went through SEO-pass before they were published. By leveraging on the “Wordpress SEO by Yoast” plugin, we were able to take the actionable suggestions to improve the SEO score of our posts.

(c) Competitor page

We put up a competitor comparison page which not only had SEO purposes, it was informational/ educational for clients who were seeking answers on how we compared with a different competing product. We created subpages with the pattern <us>.com/<competitor>, with clear SEO-passed essays on how we fared against our competitor.

While we tried to be objective in our comparison essays, there was still controversy regarding the particularly pointed style of the writing. In fact, the pages garnered so much attention that it even trended on Hacker News, which was exactly what we needed to provide a growth spike to our site. (Read: Thinking about Growth)

Today, we rank top 3 in Google for feature related, industry related, and competitor alternative keywords. There is also a longer list of keywords where we rank front page on Google.

All these work would not have been possible without the hard work of our writer, whose articles have been a SEO treasure trove ☺

The above is a summary of the 3 key SEO strategies we took which brought us to top 3 in Google’s search results. For a more elaborated article, please refer to this post: Getting to Top 3 on Google