How to rank #1 in search in one week with a low authority site, using trending news.
SEO Case Study: Watts Ahead Marketing
The Goal
Watts Ahead Marketing (this site!) offers digital marketing support for small businesses.
I’m in a competitive market, against lots of more established players with way more resources. SaaS tools, digital marketing agencies, other freelance consultants who’ve been in the game longer than me.
But I still want to rank high in search for relevant audiences. In my case, a relevant audience includes:
Small businesses
Searches related to digital marketing
So I wanted to create a piece of content that shows up high in search so I can get website traffic (and hopefully new clients).
For additional context, this site was established in Jan 2024 and with serious website content only started in Feb 2024, I have very low domain authority (i.e. Google doesn’t trust me).
I had an uphill task that would make Sisyphus think twice, because seemingly every topic has already been covered to death.
So what was the solution?
The Solution
I follow a lot of digital marketing newsletters and social media creators who share news, and I came across the news that GoDaddy had launched a new AI tool to support small businesses building websites.
Trending news is effectively a new topic. No one has written about it before. The same basic rules to approaching SEO apply: write unique, interesting, helpful content in a well-structured way.
The easy approach to trending news like this is to re-share the same info that GoDaddy itself shares on its own website, with the same screenshots and content.
But lots of sites will do that, and anyway that’s not helpful.
What I did was take the news of that new tool, try it out myself, and write a review of GoDaddy’s AI tool Airo.
The Result
Within one week that post was rank #1 in search, with a featured snippet, and a click-through rate of 14% (Google Search Console data).
The post has a lot of screenshots of the tool, lots of information about how to use it, none of it is written by AI, and it (hopefully) answers the question users are looking for when searching for it: is the tool any good?
I didn’t get any new backlinks, the domain authority of my site is still extremely low, I didn’t even share this post on social media.
It got ranked highly simply because Google identified it as well-written, relevant, and generally a helpful piece of content.
Learnings
The two main take-aways I have now are:
This keywords this post shows up for are pretty low volume, so I don’t get a ton of traffic from it
This isn't a high-converting piece of content. It answers a question someone is looking for, but isn’t necessarily going to get me a ton of new clients
Both of those things are okay.
I already made the content, so if I get only a handful of clicks a day, over time it’ll add up with no additional effort on my part (although I should update the post periodically to stay relevant).
And I don’t have a ton of relevant website-building content on my site yet. I’ll write some more, maybe something to convince visitors to work with me to build their website instead of using GoDaddy themselves.
SEO will always be an ongoing process, but hopefully this case study gave you an idea that you can be successful with a new, low-authority site, and without waiting months to get results.
