How I Outranked Gary V. on Google
Having your content ranked #1 on Google is something that most marketers dream of. The benefits are astronomical if you get positioned well on a very popular google search term.
- 📈More website traffic.
- 🤝Easier access to distribute your products or services.
- 🤓It’s also somewhat a weird flex in the online marketing community.
That’s why when I outranked well-known marketing influencer Gary Vaynerchuck on his own search term, I was happy, to say the least 😉.
Originally I wrote this medium article as a test to see if I could get top of funnel awareness for my text message marketing software. Just to be transparent, here are the business results that came out of spending 45 minutes writing this article.
To date, this medium article gets around 140 views a week. Of those views, around 11 visitors click through from soft CTAs to my text message software. Over the last two weeks, we had 2 sign-ups 🤳
Why does this matter? Ranking on Google can turn a piece of content into a tool that results in sales.
Keep reading this article and I’ll explain how I distributed this article to help bolster it to the top spot on google.
SEO Basics
Before we get too deep into the actual campaign, you need to understand a few basic principles about how google ranks its searches.
- You make content.
- People read and love your content.
- Google sees that googlers are loving what you made.
Without getting too technical, Google has an interest in servicing the right content when googlers search for things over the internet. If you can create content on a trusted website that people frequently visit in high volumes they actually take the time to read, then google will reward you.
This is what I did to make Google like my content 😍.
Creating content on a trusted website
In the world of SEO, marketers are always trying to earn trust aka digital clout from google (domain authority). You get this clout when googlers frequent your website as well as when other websites link to your content or landing pages.
As a new SaaS startup with a $0 ad budget, my website was not mature, lacking the traffic and backlinks needed to rank to the top of Google.
That’s why I chose to use Medium, an online publisher that not only has an internal audience but was a mature website with countless links from other websites.
Distributing your content is key
You may have heard the term, make it and they will come. If you make your content with this mindset, you’ll never get people to see what you made.
⬇️My strategy to distribute this article started on Linkedin ⬇️
I started by running a campaign via Linkedin, “Gary V. why are you texting me”? It was a funny guerilla tactic where I asked my followers to comment and tag Gary V in the comments of the post.
After some initial traction, I shared the post on my startup’s Linkedin page.
Using this tactic, I was able to get 42 comments for the Linkedin post with the help of my co-founder Peter.
We went into slack communities as well as DMed business influencers in our network to get initial traction for this post.
We also engaged with each comment that came in, which helped make my post as well as my article more appealing to Linkedin 👀. Same strategy different marketing channel
Make content -> People engage with your content -> Linkedin loves your content
What can you learn from this absurdity?
Quality content + The right readers = High google ranking
You need to make content that will attract website traffic as well as be good enough to hold visitor’s interest. I’ll let you be the judge of whether my article was worth reading (click here to read my article).
That aside, there are plenty of ways to generate quality traffic to your website without waiting for google to figure it out over time.
Leverage others’ audiences
You don’t need to be Gary V with millions of followers to get tons of people to see your content.
- Distribute your content on websites that already have an internal audience (Medium).
- Use social media to borrow your immediate network’s audience to drive interest in your content.
Be shameless
Don’t be afraid to get the word out about what you’ve made. If you aren’t willing to shout out to the world what you’ve made you can’t expect others in your network to do the same.
