What about local services that on the first page is pretty much websites with regular search terms and you get to a landing page of their business. In other words just mostly 10 local business fighting for the same keyword.
No blogs or major brands with "50 best things" or anything like that. Could this still work?
This wouldn't be any different from the example I used. There may or may not be "50 best things.." lists or whatever for any given search term. That's kind of irrelevant. What's important is you're matching the intent behind the search term(s).
The only reason we created a list of birthday party places is because that's what we determined most people were looking for when searching that term.
The same thing applies to searches for "cincinnati dentist," or "cincinnati roofers," or "cincinnati landscaping companies."
The only reason we're using lists for a lot of these examples is because these are search terms where the intent is primarily to find a list - so we create a list.
If the search term was "picture of a large purple dragon," I'd put a picture of a large purple dragon on the page.
If it was "pictures of large purple dragons," I'd put pictures of large purple dragons on the page.
Then I'd make sure my page was better laid out, had better picture(s), and a title / meta description that encouraged high CTR.
Also on your competitor back links you said to link to. What if you have a good ranking web page, with a PR 3 or something like that you are just giving them a free niche related link and that could be the link that keeps them above you
Regarding this specific list tactic: Yeah I get the concern about linking to competitors. Here's the reason why I would recommend doing it:
If I'm a person looking for a dentist, and I see a SERP full of actual dentists, I'm going to click each one one at a time, read through the site, bounce back to search multiple times, etc. There's a lot of pogosticking going on there.
But what if I see a page titled "35 Best Dentists in Denver, CO" and the description is something like "Get aggregated ratings, reviews, pricing, .... for the top dentists in Denver, CO," and that page links to all those Dentists?
I'm going to be much more likely to click that and much less likely to pogostick because it gives me everything I want in one spot. Google's going to see that higher relative CTR and lower relative pogostick rate and bump you up because people are clearly finding more of what they want on your page than your competition.
If you don't link out, well then I have to bounce back to Google and search for each of those dentists individually. You haven't solved the pogosticking problem and you've cause me to search "dentist + your competitors names" more than "dentist + your name" and I wouldn't be surprised if that affected you negatively (or rather the others positively).
With that said, this is not a strategy that says "build a list of X and get ranked". The directory or the list is just a way to match the query intent for many localized search terms. It's only because people do a lot of searches trying to find lists of stuff - lists of dentists, or roofers, or plumbers. In those examples we're just giving them a list of stuff they want to find.
Take another term like "split test calculator." My intent is to find a split test calculator...clearly. But there could be more, less obvious intents:
- I was a split test calculator that explains how it works so I can confirm it's calculating correctly.
- I want to know why I'm getting different results from different split test calculators.
- Maybe I want to find a very related calculator, a split test duration calculator, but don't quite know the best way to phrase it and so I just type "split test calculator".
- I want the code for a split test calculator to host internally
- I could probably think of 10 or 20 other, very related possible intents behind that query.
You could create a list of split test calculators - and honestly, one of those videos in that guide I mention positioning your content uniquely - and this might actually work for this search term. The more really useful info you include about each one, the more easily you might rank.
Or you could create a split test calculator that uses different, selectable methods of calculation, explains how each method works, includes different variations like a test duration option, and maybe even compares the other split test calculators out there.
One's a list, the other's not. Both could potentially work, but more importantly, they both are taking search intent into account to just create something more useful than what is already out there.
