The opening round of the Tour Championship tees off at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta on Thursday. Scottie Scheffler, the current world No. 1 ranked pro golfer, will begin the round with a 2-stroke edge.
The Tour Championship utilizes a staggered-scoring format, but Scheffler seems to believe the PGA Tour can find a different way to determine its season-long champion.
“I wouldn’t say that it is the best format to identify the best golfer for the year,” Scheffler said Wednesday.
The tour’s season-long winner claims the right to a multi-million dollar bonus.
“Jon Rahm played some of the best golf of anybody this year and he’s coming into this tournament fourth and he’s 4 shots back. And, in theory, he could have won 20 times this year and he would only have a 2-shot lead.”
Scheffler victories have yielded 4,218 FedEx Cup points — significantly more than fellow golfers Viktor Hovland and Rory McIlroy.
Hovland will start the Tour Championship at eight under, while McIlroy will tee off at seven under.
Brian Harman won the Open Championship this year and heads to East Lake at four under, while the rest of the field will begin at three under to even.
Scheffler said he is well aware that the playoff format makes sense for television.
“I mean, I get it,” Scheffler said. “It’s made for TV. It may be more exciting for the fans to have this type of format. But as players I think it’s not the best identifier of who is playing the best throughout the year. But with that being said, I’m starting this week with a 2-shot lead and, I mean, I’m not complaining about it.
“It’s pretty nice. And we’re playing for a lot of money this week, and I’m very grateful for that. But as far as identifying the best player throughout the year, I don’t think it’s the best format.”
McIlroy trailed Scheffler by 11 strokes last season, but he went on to win the Tour Championship — the third of his career. It also marked McIlroy’s most significant win significant victory since the 2019 Players Championship.
McIlroy offered a different perspective on the current playoff format saying he believes it provides a leg up to players who have performed well.
“I do like it this way,” McIlroy noted.
“I think it gives the guys that have had the better years an advantage going into the week, which I think they should have. If anything, Scottie this year, he probably should have more of an advantage than a 2-shot lead. But it makes it an exciting week, you know, if guys feel like they have a chance to win. Of all the iterations of the Tour Championship and the FedEx Cup playoffs, I think this is the best one yet.”
What separates the heavyweights of the search engine rankings from everyone else? That’s a question every good SEO constantly asks themselves as they look to outrank sites that seem to dominate Google for every relevant keyword (like Wikipedia or WebMD).
Unsurprisingly, these sites have more than a few things in common. It’s not just their age or authority either—factors that other sites can’t hope to match. There are plenty of similar qualities that help top sites stand apart from their competitors that you can copy and improve today.
Let’s review five of the most important and surprising factors and explain what you can learn from them and how you can use that to improve your own site.
1. Backlinks Reign Supreme
Let’s get the least surprising commonality out of the way first. The top-ranked sites on Google all have a serious number of backlinks. As we all know, high-quality backlinks almost always mean high rankings.
Research from Backlinko finds the first result on Google has an average of 3.8 times as many backlinks as the rest of the results on the first page.
The big boys have it made when it comes to acquiring more backlinks, too. They continue to get more backlinks over time as a result of their position in Google.
Research by Ahrefs finds that the top three results generate more new referring domains than the rest of the pages on Google. Pages ranked first and second get significantly more new referring domains. Those pages ranking first get between backlinks at a faster rate of between five percent and 14.5 percent per month.
It’s not just a large number of backlinks that are important. They need to be high quality, too. What does a quality backlink look like? It comes from an authoritative domain, is placed within its content, and has topical relevance to your website.
Let’s say you have a car blog. A link from another high-ranking car blog carries more weight and is of higher quality than a link from a major health website because it’s much more relevant to your niche.
You shouldn’t discount internal links, either. The biggest websites (and news outlets in particular) almost always put a lot of effort into making sure every new piece of content links back to several previous posts.
Great internal linking makes it significantly easier for Google to crawl your website and index your information. The easier your site is to crawl, the more likely Google will find and rank your content. They may not have the same power as backlinks, but internal links can still result in higher rankings.
All this is to say that you need to build backlinks in a scalable way if you want your site to compete with the biggest brands in your industry.
2. Provide High-Quality Content
Most top-ranking websites are well known for the quality of their content. Okay, some major sites don’t publish high-quality content all of the time, but every high-ranking site does produce exceptional content, at least some of the time.
Don’t forget, high-quality content doesn’t necessarily mean it’s longer or more detailed than everyone else’s. It might contain unique research that other companies can’t hope to copy. Or it could break a story. Or it could be designed better. Or it could go viral. There are lots of ways to create amazing content.
Doing so matters when it comes to SEO because high-quality content helps boost several ranking factors. It’s a magnet for backlinks, it reduces your bounce rate, and it should result in a higher clickthrough rate (CTR).
The top-ranked sites don’t just rely on the objective quality of their content, though. They also take steps to optimize it to perform better in Google. That means including keywords in header tags, throughout the content, in the page title, and in the URL.
Creating high-quality content isn’t easy, especially when there’s no objective way to determine how good your content is. That’s the job of your users. That being said, there are still steps you can take to make it more likely your users think highly of your content.
The first is to make sure it’s written by an expert. This is a pretty simple task for some top-ranking sites like media outlets. Journalists, by default, are experts on certain topics. However, there’s nothing stopping you from writing about your expertise or hiring expert writers, either.
You could even use a strategy adopted by some health websites, where content is written by a professional writer and then fact-checked by a medical professional. Doing so has the double benefit of having content written by an excellent writer while also being medically accurate.
3. Focus on User Experience
Top-ranking sites on Google put a premium on the user experience and do everything they can to keep customers coming back. This means having a great design, high-quality content as discussed above, an intuitive layout, and a great browsing experience in general. Yes, some of the highest-ranking sites may serve up ads on their pages, but they don’t ruin your browsing experience with them or use intrusive popup ads, either.
A great user experience is one of the reasons these sites are top of Google, after all. Google announced that user experience metrics would be used to rank sites, beginning in 2021. How your site loads, what it looks like, and how users interact with it contribute to your rankings, along with other factors like HTTPS, safe browsing, mobile friendliness, and the presence of interstitials.
Google puts such a big emphasis on your site’s user experience because it aligns with its goal of giving customers the best possible browsing experience. The search giant finds over half (52 percent) of users will be less likely to engage with a brand after a bad mobile experience. So why would it rank you if you have a high bounce rate?
Improving your site’s user experience and aligning it with the experiences provided by the top-ranking sites won’t just improve your rankings; it also makes commercial sense. Ad network Ezoic generated a 186 percent increase in earnings per 1000 visitors by improving the UX of a publisher.
4. Make Sure Your Page Speed Is Competitive
You’ve never had to wait for the New York Times to load, have you? That’s because top-ranking sites know the importance of delivering content as fast as possible. Page load speed has been a ranking factor for desktop searches since 2010, and Google announced it was also a ranking factor for mobile searches back in 2018.
Say it with me: A slower site means lower rankings.
You need to optimize for page speed if you want to mix it with the highest-ranking sites. It’s not so much about getting the edge over your competitors and making your site 0.1 seconds faster, however. It’s about having a site that’s fast enough to not impact the user experience negatively.
Research by Google finds over half (53 percent) of visitors abandon a mobile site if it doesn’t load in three seconds.
If you have a slow site, you won’t just get penalized for a poor load time. You’ll also get penalized for having a high bounce rate as users get fed up with waiting and choose a different site instead.
The easiest way to check your page speed is by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. It will let you know how fast your site is, give it a score out of 100, and suggest improvements.
Have you noticed how some top-ranking sites have several pieces of content that all seem to approach the same topic from a slightly different angle? That’s because they understand the power of user intent and the value Google places on it.
Google wants to serve up the best and most appropriate content for each query. A big part of that is understanding what the user is trying to achieve from their search. Are they trying to learn something? Research a topic? Make a purchase? Google delivers different results for each intent.
For instance, Google shows e-commerce pages where it thinks the user is trying to make a purchase, but it serves up blog articles for information-related queries.
Knowing what type of content Google thinks users want to see is key to becoming a top-ranked site, because you’re much more likely to get ranked if you create content that matches the user intent for each target keyword. This is why so many top-ranking sites have similar content targeting the same topics: to catch every user intent.
It’s not simply a matter of informational vs. commercial, either. There are dozens of types of informative content that users may want to access. In some cases, it’s a listicle. For other queries, a video may be more appropriate.
Taking time to understand the user intent for each keyword or topic you’re targeting can yield serious results. Marketing SaaS CoSchedule saw a 594 percent increase in search traffic when they aligned content with user intent.
Top Ranked Sites: FAQs
What do the top-ranking sites have in common?
They all have a lot of high-quality backlinks, great content, an excellent user experience, a fast-loading website, and content that matches the user’s intent.
Why do the top sites have so many more backlinks?
This is partly because of the quality of content but also due to the fact that they sit at the top of Google. This makes them an easy target for people trying to link to an authoritative source.
How can better content improve my rankings?
Better content can improve your rankings in several ways. High-quality content attracts more backlinks, but Google also rewards in-depth content and results in users spending a long time on the page.
Why does user experience matter?
Google wants to provide the best experience to its users. Part of that means sending them to sites that are easy to browse. It’s why user experience factors are now ranking factors.
Google the keyword you want to rank for and look at the pages that appear in the results. If all of the content has the same format, that’s the type of content you should create.
Conclusion: What You Can Learn From the Top Ranked Sites
You can’t turn your website into a top-ranking site overnight. However, you can learn a lot from them and implement tactics they use to improve your site’s Google ranking. There are more than a few things they do in common, as you’ve learned.
Make sure you have a scalable system for generating backlinks, create high-quality content, focus on the user experience, ensure your site loads fast, and consider user intent when you create content.
Do these five things, and you could be well on your way to having a top-ranked site in the future.
When I started doing SEO on NeilPatel.com I used this advanced formula
to rank for 477,000 keywords.
Over time, my traffic started to flatline and I wasn’t ranking for many more keywords, even though I was continually creating more content.
But then I figured out a simple hack that took me from
477,000 keywords to 636,363 keywords as you can see in the image above.
So, what was this hack?
Well, it’s so effective that I just updated Ubersuggest so that includes the
hack.
So how did I do it?
When someone does a Google search, what are they typically
doing? They are trying to find a solution to their problem, right?
So how can you easily identify these problems people are
searching for?
Typically, you want to look for 3 types of keyword phrases:
Questions – people type in questions because they are looking for answers. And if your product or service helps answer those questions, you’ll see a boost in conversions.
Comparisons – when someone is searching for comparison keywords such as “MailChimp VS Converkit” there is high buyer intent, even if your company isn’t mentioned in the search phase. (I’ll go into how to leverage this in a bit.)
Prepositions – when keywords contain a preposition, they tend to be more descriptive. If you aren’t sure what a preposition is, simple prepositions are words like at, for, in, off, on, over, and under. These common prepositions can be used to describe a location, time, or place.
But how do you find these keywords?
Well, I just updated Ubersuggest to now show you questions, comparisons, and prepositions.
Just head over to Ubersuggest and type in a keyword that you want to go after. For this example, I typed in the word “marketing”.
Then as you scroll down, in the keywords ideas table you’ll see tabs for questions, prepositions, and comparisons.
I want you to click on the “view all keyword ideas”.
You’ll now be taken to the keyword ideas report that looks
like this:
Now, click on the tab labeled “questions”. It will adjust the keyword recommendations to show you all of the popular questions related to the main keyword you just researched.
You’ll then see some suggestions that you could consider
going after. Such as:
Why is marketing important?
What marketing does?
How marketing works?
But as you scroll down, you’ll find more specific questions such
as:
Why a marketing plan is important?
How marketing and sales work together?
How many marketing emails should you send?
Now that you are able to see these questions people are typing, in theory, you can easily rank for them as most of them have an SEO difficulty score of 20 or so out of a 100 (the higher the number the more competitive it is).
More importantly, though, you can create content around all of those phrases and sell people to your product or service.
For example, if you created an article on “why a marketing plan is important,” you can go into how you also can create a marketing plan. From there you can transition into describing your services on creating a marketing plan and how people can contact you if they want your help or expertise in creating one.
You can do something similar with the “how marketing and sales work together” article in which you can break down how to make each department work together. From there, you can either be an affiliate for software solutions that help merge the two departments like HubSpot or sell your own software if you offer one. You can even pitch your consulting services that help tie sales and marketing together.
And as for the “how many marketing emails should you send,” you can create content around that and have an affiliate link to popular email tools that have high deliverability and offer automation. Or you can promote your own email product.
Now imagine all of the extra keywords you can rank for by going after question-related keywords. What’s amazing about this is most of these keywords are competitive and they have extremely high search intent.
Can it get any better?
Speaking of search intent, I want you to click on the comparisons
tab.
You’ll see a list of ideas just like you did with the questions tab. But what I love doing here is typing in a competitor’s brand name here.
Let’s say I am offering an email marketing tool. I could type in “Mailchimp” and see what comparison ideas Ubersuggest comes up with.
Now for this example, I want you to imagine that you have an email company called Drip and Drip isn’t really mentioned in any of these keyword comparison ideas.
What’ll you want to do is create articles on all of the popular comparison terms like “Mailchimp vs Constant Contact” or “Mailchimp vs Convertkit” and within those articles break down the differences and also compare them with your own tool Drip.
Be honest when writing the comparisons. Show off which is the best solution using facts and data and break down how you are different and in what ways your own solution is better than the two solutions the reader is comparing.
This will bring awareness to your solution and you’ll find
that people will start purchasing it even though they were comparing two of
your competitors.
If you want a good example of how to create a neutral
comparison type of blog post, check out this article
comparing web hosts.
And if you want to take it one step further, you can click on the “prepositions” tab to find even more ideas.
Sticking with the Mailchimp example, you can see that people are curious about Shopify and WordPress integrations.
You can write articles related to integrations and also push your own product and break down how it differs from the others.
If you want to take it one level deeper, it will give you ideas on how to modify your business. For example, if I created an email marketing tool, I would create a Shopify, WordPress, Woocomerce, and Squarespace integration based on the ideas I got from the prepositions tab.
So how did I rank for 636,363 keywords?
I didn’t use all of the examples above on NeilPatel.com because I am not really trying to sell a product and I don’t have the time to write thousands of new blog posts.
But I did type in my domain name into Ubersuggest and then headed over to the top pages report.
From there I looked at the pages that are already ranking well on Google and clicked on the “view all” button to see the exact keywords each page ranks for.
As you can see from that page I rank for questions like “what
is affiliate marketing” as well as popular prepositions and comparisons.
How did I do this?
Well, that top pages report shows you keywords each of your pages already ranks for. So all you have to do is research each of those terms through Ubersuggest and find popular questions, prepositions, and comparisons.
Conclusion
The natural instinct for any SEO or marketer is to rank for
popular terms that have a lot of search traffic.
But there is an issue with that strategy. It takes a lot of time, it’s extremely competitive, and many of those search phrases don’t cause a ton of conversions as they are super generic.
So, what should you do instead?
Focus on solving people’s problems. The way you do this is by creating content around the questions, prepositions, and comparisons people are searching for in Google.
What do you think about the new Ubersuggest feature?
When I started doing SEO on NeilPatel.com I used this advanced formula
to rank for 477,000 keywords.
Over time, my traffic started to flatline and I wasn’t ranking for many more keywords, even though I was continually creating more content.
But then I figured out a simple hack that took me from
477,000 keywords to 636,363 keywords as you can see in the image above.
So, what was this hack?
Well, it’s so effective that I just updated Ubersuggest so that includes the
hack.
So how did I do it?
When someone does a Google search, what are they typically
doing? They are trying to find a solution to their problem, right?
So how can you easily identify these problems people are
searching for?
Typically, you want to look for 3 types of keyword phrases:
Questions – people type in questions because they are looking for answers. And if your product or service helps answer those questions, you’ll see a boost in conversions.
Comparisons – when someone is searching for comparison keywords such as “MailChimp VS Converkit” there is high buyer intent, even if your company isn’t mentioned in the search phase. (I’ll go into how to leverage this in a bit.)
Prepositions – when keywords contain a preposition, they tend to be more descriptive. If you aren’t sure what a preposition is, simple prepositions are words like at, for, in, off, on, over, and under. These common prepositions can be used to describe a location, time, or place.
But how do you find these keywords?
Well, I just updated Ubersuggest to now show you questions, comparisons, and prepositions.
Just head over to Ubersuggest and type in a keyword that you want to go after. For this example, I typed in the word “marketing”.
Then as you scroll down, in the keywords ideas table you’ll see tabs for questions, prepositions, and comparisons.
I want you to click on the “view all keyword ideas”.
You’ll now be taken to the keyword ideas report that looks
like this:
Now, click on the tab labeled “questions”. It will adjust the keyword recommendations to show you all of the popular questions related to the main keyword you just researched.
You’ll then see some suggestions that you could consider
going after. Such as:
Why is marketing important?
What marketing does?
How marketing works?
But as you scroll down, you’ll find more specific questions such
as:
Why a marketing plan is important?
How marketing and sales work together?
How many marketing emails should you send?
Now that you are able to see these questions people are typing, in theory, you can easily rank for them as most of them have an SEO difficulty score of 20 or so out of a 100 (the higher the number the more competitive it is).
More importantly, though, you can create content around all of those phrases and sell people to your product or service.
For example, if you created an article on “why a marketing plan is important,” you can go into how you also can create a marketing plan. From there you can transition into describing your services on creating a marketing plan and how people can contact you if they want your help or expertise in creating one.
You can do something similar with the “how marketing and sales work together” article in which you can break down how to make each department work together. From there, you can either be an affiliate for software solutions that help merge the two departments like HubSpot or sell your own software if you offer one. You can even pitch your consulting services that help tie sales and marketing together.
And as for the “how many marketing emails should you send,” you can create content around that and have an affiliate link to popular email tools that have high deliverability and offer automation. Or you can promote your own email product.
Now imagine all of the extra keywords you can rank for by going after question-related keywords. What’s amazing about this is most of these keywords are competitive and they have extremely high search intent.
Can it get any better?
Speaking of search intent, I want you to click on the comparisons
tab.
You’ll see a list of ideas just like you did with the questions tab. But what I love doing here is typing in a competitor’s brand name here.
Let’s say I am offering an email marketing tool. I could type in “Mailchimp” and see what comparison ideas Ubersuggest comes up with.
Now for this example, I want you to imagine that you have an email company called Drip and Drip isn’t really mentioned in any of these keyword comparison ideas.
What’ll you want to do is create articles on all of the popular comparison terms like “Mailchimp vs Constant Contact” or “Mailchimp vs Convertkit” and within those articles break down the differences and also compare them with your own tool Drip.
Be honest when writing the comparisons. Show off which is the best solution using facts and data and break down how you are different and in what ways your own solution is better than the two solutions the reader is comparing.
This will bring awareness to your solution and you’ll find
that people will start purchasing it even though they were comparing two of
your competitors.
If you want a good example of how to create a neutral
comparison type of blog post, check out this article
comparing web hosts.
And if you want to take it one step further, you can click on the “prepositions” tab to find even more ideas.
Sticking with the Mailchimp example, you can see that people are curious about Shopify and WordPress integrations.
You can write articles related to integrations and also push your own product and break down how it differs from the others.
If you want to take it one level deeper, it will give you ideas on how to modify your business. For example, if I created an email marketing tool, I would create a Shopify, WordPress, Woocomerce, and Squarespace integration based on the ideas I got from the prepositions tab.
So how did I rank for 636,363 keywords?
I didn’t use all of the examples above on NeilPatel.com because I am not really trying to sell a product and I don’t have the time to write thousands of new blog posts.
But I did type in my domain name into Ubersuggest and then headed over to the top pages report.
From there I looked at the pages that are already ranking well on Google and clicked on the “view all” button to see the exact keywords each page ranks for.
As you can see from that page I rank for questions like “what
is affiliate marketing” as well as popular prepositions and comparisons.
How did I do this?
Well, that top pages report shows you keywords each of your pages already ranks for. So all you have to do is research each of those terms through Ubersuggest and find popular questions, prepositions, and comparisons.
Conclusion
The natural instinct for any SEO or marketer is to rank for
popular terms that have a lot of search traffic.
But there is an issue with that strategy. It takes a lot of time, it’s extremely competitive, and many of those search phrases don’t cause a ton of conversions as they are super generic.
So, what should you do instead?
Focus on solving people’s problems. The way you do this is by creating content around the questions, prepositions, and comparisons people are searching for in Google.
What do you think about the new Ubersuggest feature?
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