How to get a website into the TOP of Yandex and Google for competitive queries

Hello everyone!

No, this article won't be about buying links, filling the site with texts, calculating keyword density, or some new invention in a complex internal-linking structure. Those who expect to read about that here can keep looking for a suitable article.

Well, let's begin. It's worth saying that the site deals with buying up cartridges. And right now I entered the most expensive query in this niche - "buying up cartridges". It was precisely for this query, plus a second query "purchasing cartridges", that the client set the task.

The promotion region is Moscow. The site is built as an online store.
The task was set in February 2016.

What was done?
To begin with, I decided that it was the home page that needed to be promoted, since it always carries the greatest weight among all the pages of the site. The first thing I did was determine how many key phrases were on it.

No, no. I'm not going to talk about keyword density. I'm talking about the absolute number of phrases that the search engine may regard as a "commercial query". For example, the home page mentioned "materials for office equipment" in its text.

So why is this query, and others of this kind, so bad? Because the home page answers dozens of queries at once, for which the search engine assumes that this page is being promoted (the webmaster who created it wants this page to be in the TOP for all of these phrases). If we assume that each phrase has its own "weight", then such text on the home page is like a sieve.

What did I do? I simply cleaned out all the key phrases that could be "competitors" to the two main queries I wrote about at the beginning of the article.

The result was text that contained the key phrases important to me, along with descriptions for them, written with maximum restraint in the "nothing superfluous" style.

What was done next? Internal linking. And again, not the kind you're thinking of. After all, at the beginning of the article I warned that there would be no complex internal-linking schemes. On all the site's internal categories (sections) I simply placed a link to the home page from the content area. That is, in this way I built, so to speak, a pyramid.

Of course, I optimized the metadata. But overall it wasn't the metadata that worked, but rather the adjustment of the text on the home page and the linking to the home page from the entire site. Everything was done so that it was the home page that would "take off". And for which queries? The answer is obvious, since there are only two of them!

Right now (at the time of writing this article), you can check the result yourself in Google and Yandex. And, let me remind you, this is the Moscow region. I run advertising in Yandex Direct for these queries, so I can authoritatively state that the special offer for these two phrases in Moscow costs 150-200 rubles per click.

This is one example of how you can find a solution to a task set by a site owner. It's just one particular case, which won't necessarily work in 100% of situations. But still, as you can see, you can achieve a result without any extraordinary actions.

Let me make a lyrical digression and say that the work of an SEO specialist consists precisely in selecting suitable tools, since no one will ever be able to say for certain that THIS works and THAT doesn't. It's all quite individual for each site, each business, each region, each particular situation in a particular stretch of time.

I sincerely believe that this article will be useful both to SEO specialists and to site owners. I draw site owners' attention to the fact that you shouldn't draw conclusions from this article along the lines of "so it turns out that SEO people do nothing and just eat through our money". This is, most often, an incorrect assumption. Yes, the freelance market is overflowing with resellers and dishonest specialists in this field. It has been this way for almost the entire existence of this IT direction.

I believe and hope that someday we will all (promoters, site owners, search engine specialists) unite and do everything in the best possible way for internet users, so to speak. After all, it's within our power, we just have to want it. For now, however, there is great distrust among all the parties listed. I, at least, am ready for compromises, learning, help, and honest, responsible work.

No one will ever get a guarantee from me that we will be in the top for the query "X" in "N" amount of time. They won't get it simply because such guarantees are given precisely by dishonest optimizers.

I'd like to end on something positive. There is nothing unreal in the world of the internet. There are bad performers. If there's a concrete goal - there are no obstacles to solving it!