In my experience (marketing at a small tech company), you can get results even for reasonably competitive terms. The difference is in giving a quality answer to the query.

Many (most?) tech companies fill their sites with low-quality, jargon-filled pages that don't actually answer questions - either becuase they're written by marketers with a poor grasp of the technology, or because they don't want to 'give away' their expertise.

If you actually answer the question in a reasonably full way, there is nothing to stop you ranking highly. Google values valuable content.

I wouldn't discount backlinks. Google hasn't made much progress getting away from "page rank". Once you have that credible page/content, do focus on non-spammy ways to share it. Including grey area stuff like calling in favors, sharing it on HN, posting on Medium, etc. In the least spammy, most objective way you can.

As a concrete example, I found a grey area way to get a somewhat popular hardware tinkerer interested in something I did. Maybe I even skirted the rules a bit by sending him a free sample of my cool toy and some rough code samples. He took it well beyond what I could. I didn't ask for anything. The investment paid off. Aside from his initial blog post, others took inspiration and posted their own variations.

Google now thinks I'm the bomb for something very niche, but reasonably profitable. Likely because my efforts, plus other's work, netted some interesting backlinks. and backlinks to their posts. And maybe I am a badass in this very narrow niche, but I doubt Google would know if I hadn't pushed the envelope a little.

> sharing it on HN

Perhaps it is more of a grey area. Probably not so much the whole Show HN thing, more of the hustle seen in the comments.

Usually you see someone comment on a post about some tech by saying "I am with X company and we are working on Y to solve this problem!".

Personally, I think this stuff is great. You gotta respect the hustle.

Right, it seems like a ploy to expand the author's SEO footprint. I wasn't lost to the author/OP's comments being a part of the hustle. Given the content of the article, the ploy could almost be called something like "meta-hustle".

I do want to expand the SEO footprint of my Elixir tutorial site, but writing about my strategies for doing so on a separate site with negligible traffic isn't the way to do it. On the contrary, it might even help and encourage people to compete with me.

The productive thing to do for that site to write Elixir tutorials or at the very least, write about things Elixir devs are looking for—instead of content marketing strategies—and to put it on the same site! Here's an example of piece I wrote which did move the needle a bit on the business side: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20721433

So why am I writing "meta" stuff on a totally new blog and submitting it here instead of putting all my time into the business site? Here's my best understanding of my motivations:

1) Internet points are fun! Not something I feel should be a major motivator, but it is what it is.

2) Increase my luck surface area. Who knows what opportunity could emerge or who I can meet, just because I do things and write about them?

3) Provoke discussion and maybe learn more about the topics I'm writing about and thinking about from all of you! Lammy and TeMPOraL have each already given me an idea in this thread.

4) Generate some level of goodwill from people who have found my writing useful or interesting. It's difficult to quantify the effect, but I believe that it will translate into more help, retweets, etc for my projects in the long run.

> Google hasn't made much progress getting away from "page rank".

Is that so? I thought conventional wisdom is that they now have much stronger signals about how well results satisfy queries, from Google Analytics and Chrome.

Yeah, some variation of page rank is still the number one signal. That's why subdomain/subdirectory leasing at media companies is such a hot deal right now: you take completely unrelated content (e.g. coupons with affiliate links), throw them on a subdomain of a news site (e.g. CNN) and then just watch your content rank that would have never ranked on a "normal" domain.

That "buying links" is the only deadly sin next to cloaking is more strong evidence for Google primarily relying on it. You don't get penalized for abusing Microdata, stuffing Emjois into your Title + Description or writing barely readable keyword-stuffed SEO texts, but get links from a well-known link-selling-site and watch your -100 penalty wreck your traffic.

Good insight. My intuition tells me that "buying links" is still the fastest path to ranking well, provided you are stealthy enough.

It is so, but it is largely now either "brand authority" or "backlinks" now. They aren't as sophisticated as they want you to believe.

Your example seems a lot less simple than you seem to believe. You created lots of high value interest instead of just getting some page to post links for you. In a way Google is correctly accessing real value here - you didn't cheat.

Which is exactly what Matt Cutts and Samantha Fox were saying 20 odd years ago.

Provide genuine value to people making web searches. Google will keep updating their algorithms to make searches result in better results for people.

“Tricks” can sometimes make you rank quickly, but building genuinely valuable content is the best long term strategy. (And I acknowledge that not everybody is looking for long term value from sites they build, which means they shouldn’t follow that advice. If you are trying to rank a site for a one off event, for example, where you really don’t care about search traffic in 12/18/60 months time, your site will end up looking a lot closer to SEO-spam de jour.)

To be clear, I researched popular folks in the "Arduino, control a physical thing that is visually interesting in this space".

I then sent several folks a free sample of a thing, and also rough code, that costs me $100 or so.

And the gamble paid off. One of them ran off with it. It benefitted them pretty much zero as far as I know.

I totally gamed the system. It was not natural in any sense. I got ~3000 sales, and maybe $10k of upside, which was disproportionately in my favor. Most of the magic was this person's fruitful efforts to take my rough idea into something popular. But I like to selfishly think nobody really "lost" in this little microcosm.

But how is that gaming the system? Sending free samples for review has been a thing since there were advertisements.

Reviewers are meant to send back their review units. A lot of professional reviewers refuse free review units entirely and purchase the items themselves.

Google has posted a warning on their Webmaster Blog about providing free review samples, they will take action against companies that do it:

"Bloggers should use the nofollow tag on all such links because these links didn’t come about organically (i.e., the links wouldn’t exist if the company hadn’t offered to provide a free good or service in exchange for a link)."

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/03/best-practices-for...

Sounds to me like what was mentioned by tyingq was described accurately:

"Maybe I even skirted the rules a bit by sending him a free sample of my cool toy and some rough code samples. He took it well beyond what I could. I didn't ask for anything."

Certainly seems easy enough to argue complies with:

"send bloggers free products to review or give away in return for a mention in a blogpost"

If you don't ask for mentions in blogs, that Webmaster Blog post doesn't technically apply, right? There's gray area in choosing to send free samples to people you are pretty sure will mention/link to you in a blog post, but where you don't ask them to (or place any expectation on them to). So "skirting the rules a bit" sounds about right to me. There weren't "review units", they were "free gifts". No request or expectation of a "review".

I agree with you mostly, and I don't want to suggest that the OP did something particularly egregious. "Skirting the rules a bit" seems accurate to me. I'm nitpicking and playing devil's advocate here.

That said, as far as ethics & free gifts, this is why politicians, journalists and businesses usually have rules about accepting free gifts, often requiring them to return the gifts or give them to charity instead.

Here's a post on Journalism Ethics relating to accepting free gifts:

https://ethics.journalists.org/topics/gifts-free-travel-and-...

That's roughly where my head is. I don't feel guilty per se, but I am aware that my ranking isn't really "organic". I knew the value of backlinks and went after it in a very deliberate way.

> It benefitted them pretty much zero as far as I know

They got attention as well. They may well be the center of the attention for your product now, with people with questions asking them or their community first.

The trade you entered is quite common with reviewers nowadays.

> I thought conventional wisdom is that they now have much stronger signals about how well results satisfy queries, from Google Analytics and Chrome.

Do you have any official source for this? I remember they clearly saying that Google Analytics data is not used and will not be used for search in any way.

For niche searches they might not simply have enough statistically significant data for "time on page" to be a useful metric.

I wouldn’t call that rule skirting at all. Just good networking!

A better tactic, one that I've employed with fantastic results, is to interview your company's current customers. Get a very strong understanding of their pain points and discovery process.

Then create content that addresses these pain points very specifically.

SEOs tend to get blinded by search metrics and keyword data. There are countless long tail queries that might show negligible results in your keyword tool, but are very pertinent to your target market.

You won't get much traffic from such "pain point SEO", but whatever queries do come your way will be highly targeted.

In general, unless you rely on ad revenue, you should never use traffic as a success metric for SEO. It tends to blind your decision making. I've ranked for a single keyword that got me 80k visitors a month, but I've made more money from keywords that got me 10 visitors a month.

I did this recently, a new microcontroller claimed to support circuitpython but had no instructions on how to actually get it up and running. I eventually figured it out and documented it on my site (and shared a link in the official forum to help people if they looked there for it as it was the first place I looked). Few days later, their wiki had been updated with documentation that was almost identical to what I had written. I was mad at first, but it's not a huge deal - what I set out to accomplish was to ensure people could find the instructions. Ironically I still outrank their official wiki on Google :D

Whenever this happens to me, I create a StackOverflow self-q&a or a GitHub Gist synthesizing the knowledge. Then I use google to find my own content because I more or less remember the keywords of what I wrote. Also, many times, my coworkers find my answer on SO and get amused :)

(I could probably write some of those stuff on my personal blog, but SO has an added advantage of soliciting comments and alternative answers; people on blogs are less keen to do that IMO).

Fun fact: when I was interviewing for my last job, I got stuck on an unexpected issue when coding. I could use google, and found my gist from few years before with similar problem which got me unstuck (I totally forgot about having it written) as #1 item in Google.

IME, SO and gist index really well in Google and often end in top of results. HN, less do (unless you explicitly put hackernews or site:... in query).

Recap: It's a pretty useless idea.

Almost all people are producing content for a company, product etc in which they are not the target customer and hence are not doing searches for.

It would have been useful had they explained how to methodically discover long tail keywords that aren't being satisfied with good content for any subject.

In the first few paragraphs, he explains that this advice applies only to solo niche writers and not companies or products.

Even more concise: If you don't see a flag on some land, plant your flag there.

The problem with this approach is that it only works if you want to create content for the things you searched for. Just because I'm googling obscure shit doesn't mean I want to write an article with ads about it. I could see this technique work for someone who wants to start a technical blog -- make your posts the first result on a bunch of obscure issues you run into.

It worked very well for my old blog about language learning and teaching, too. That blog later lead to me partnering in a brick and mortar language school and it was also extremely helpful for recruiting.

I'd say the question is, "Do your in-depth searches cluster around a general topic?"

I've had that same fear myself but it hasn't been a problem so far. It might be a problem for an academic deep into a field that isn't a fast-growing one.

My much larger site 10-15 years ago was primarily about language learning. It had some fairly niche topics I was concerned that virtually no English-language speakers would be looking for, and yet the traffic rolled in. It was a blog, though. Also, some of those topics became more popular over time. Extensive Reading and Spaced Repetition were two examples.

My current site is in my profile and it's pretty tightly focused around Elixir (roughly the 50th most popular programming language).

In one way, this is essentially the "wedge". You start with a very specific long tail keyword, but you also cover related searches and topics, and the nice part is that your website analytics will then feed you more long tail keywords that are related but not exactly this page: those are ideas for other pages.

This is one reason why you'll see a page with one topic as a title often branch off to cover many related but sort of unexpected topics throughout the page - it's to cover the main keyword but also grab coverage on the related ones that might be easier to rank for (by simply mentioning it in a page vs. dedicating a page to it). As the owner of that site, you might see that one of these pages could be getting traffic from hundreds of keywords, and 10 of them are on a distinct enough topic that warrants another page. So you build a page for that, etc.

No, not at all. Your perspective and style has value.

I answered a fairly simple question on Stackoverflow many years ago that has a bunch of upvotes, and still generates a few dozen a week.

I didn’t do anything magical, just wrote a response in a way that resonates with people. I have not repeated that feat either, so I possess no unusual skill. If you write every day, you’ll do the same thing eventually with something.

Agreed. I have a few answers on the StackExchange network that have upvotes tricking in year after year.

Sometimes I think I should have made a blog and added some pics. Then those upvotes might have been ad revenue.

This is exactly what I did with rlhitboxes.com. I'm still the most-up-to-date source for the info, even though Epic née Psyonix put up a page with the same info after I launched. They haven't kept it updated as they release new cars.

It's just a pet project, but it's consistently in the top 5 of any given relevant search phrase.