Ethan Smith explains how to rank editorial content against high-authority competitors like MBA.com. Focus on niche sub-categories where you're already strong, expand coverage to include long-tail keywords competitors miss, and optimize title tags using Search Console data to capture high-impression queries just outside the top positions.
Amelia, do you want to come on?
I would love to. My question is, what are the most important tactics to pay attention to for editorial content in competitive categories? Like specifically, if you're getting articles published that are important to the topic, but you're going against competitors with like really high DRs, is there anything that you can do to jump up the SERP and get over them? We've played around with like featured snippets and stuff. But yeah, if you're competing against like very established competitors, what can you do to get editorial content to rank? Better, more frequently, et cetera.
Awesome. And do you have a specific key search or topic in mind that I can speak to?
For one example, MBA, where like the scope of articles is actually somewhat constrained and there's like MBA.com and Poets&Quants and like these established players that have been in the field for a long time.
Yeah. So there's a few things. The first thing is that you might not, you don't, you're not going to have as much authority as MBA.com. but you might have a lot of topical authority specific for specific schools or for maybe, you know, executive MBA or like you might find some niche that you're known for that you're gonna outperform on. So whatever that is, and you can find that by looking at your keywords. We also have a free topical authority tool, which I can find and put in the chat, but find where your topical authority is. Where are you ranking right now? And then double down on stuff that's adjacent to that. Topical authority is essentially your authority for a particular category over total authority. So if all your authority is all about Stanford Executive MBAs, but your total domain authority is not that high, your ratio is really high and therefore you're going to rank for that because you're going to be a niche expert. That's the thing one. So leverage your topical authority. The second thing is the content score. So look at your content score and the common mistake is for Stanford MBA to only look at Stanford MBA and not look at the other 50 variants of the keywords that you're targeting. So there's probably like 300 different search, popular search keywords for the Stanford MBA topic and you're not, you're only scoring on the head term. So I would do a clear scope where we have a tool for more of the keywords in that keyword group because no one else is looking at that and you're basically ignoring the whole mid and long tail. And what Google's doing is they're looking to see how many of these subtopic questions have you answered. And if you're the only one that knows the subtopics that are in the mid and the tail, then you're the only one that has that and your content score can beat an MBA.com. And then the third thing is title tag optimization. So if your landing page is how to get into Stanford GSB, I would go see how, see where that's ranking in Search Console. Go into the keywords that you're ranking for, and there's probably gonna be some themes with any of those keywords with high impressions where you're ranking number 8 and you're not mentioning it. So an example of that would be how to get into Stanford, and then it might say like interview questions or templates or stuff like that, and it's not in your title tag and you're ranking number 8. So you might rank for it if you mention it. So put in interview questions. So how to get into Stanford MBA, interview questions, templates, examples. And then you immediately start ranking for those things. And we've repeatedly seen projects we've worked on outperforming huge high domain authority sites by doing these 3 things. So you can do that if you have enough, some sufficient amount of authority. And then yeah, Luisa just posted in the chat the topical authority tool that you can use.
