If you’ve tried to rank a website for medium- to high-competition keywords on a brand new domain, you’ll quickly discover that no matter how “great” your “content” is, you don’t get anywhere near the bottom of page 3, let alone position 1 of page 1.
I mean, I already know you know that, because I’ve already explained that quality content doesn’t exist. So you should expect that writing “great content” isn’t an SEO strategy.
You might wonder why you don’t rank. If it’s not because of content quality, why is it?
I invite you to join me in an experiment:
- pick a short, high-competition keyword in your niche, preferably one that you’ve tried and failed to rank for,
- go to ahrefs.com/keyword-difficulty, type in the keyword, and hit “Check Keyword,
- you are shown the current SERP chart for that keyword, along with some data for the first few positions.
Now, if you’re not sure what the numbers and jargon means, they’re a mixture of estimates of Google PageRank (of the domain and of the individual page relevant to the keyword you searched), and number of backlinks to the page that ranks.
Now, what do you see? Isn’t it funny how all the results have super high authority (often at least 50 for med/high competition keywords)? Isn’t it curious how the results are more or less numerically sorted by a mixture of DA and PA? What does that tell you?
And isn’t it curious that NOWHERE on this page – a tool created by one of the biggest players in the SEO industry – does it mention ANYTHING to do with content quality?
You can repeat this little experiment with ANY medium to high competition keyword in any niche, and you’ll find the same pattern.
If you’re not convinced, go to Google and search the term there. You’ll find the same websites appear, often in a slightly different order (this is expected given that AhRefs can only estimate authority).
To be clear – on this tool you’re seeing the live (or very recent) search results page for your keyword, followed by AhRefs’ estimates for authority and backlinks (which is what gives you authority). You can literally see with your own eyes that authority governs where a page will rank.
It’s not content, it’s not word count, it’s not technical SEO or any other nonsense that is king. AUTHORITY is king.