How did we achieve this? 
The truth is, there’s been a lot of work to generate these results.SEO is hard and complex. To simplify the results to a single strategy would be disingenuous and misleading. But if I had to distill the three most important components, they would be:
KEYWORD CLUSTERING -> TOPICAL AUTHORITY
A keyword clustering process that helped us formulate a topical authority content strategy. We used KeyClusters to generate 100s of article ideas across 6 main silos. From these, we prioritized 150 articles based on keyword volume, difficulty, and relevance.
BULK CONTENT CREATION -> PUBLISHING VELOCITY
We ran every article through Frase to calculate the word count. This gave us a total required word count of 200k words for 150 articles. Our team produces 1 million words a month so we have the in-house systems for bulk content creation. We then deployed our publishing system to drive fast indexation. Drip feeding a few articles every month will take years to see results. The faster you publish the quicker you’ll rank.
ON-PAGE SEO -> SILO’ED INTERLINKING
We used a streamlined on-page SEO process that prioritized silo’ed interlinking. We focussed on the 80:20 of on-page SEO. Specifically the following:
- URL slug -> targeting primary keyword
- Header Title and Meta Title -> targeting primary keyword
- Headers (H2, H3) -> hierarchical and targeting keyword variations
- Images -> every 250-350 words with keyword variation alt tags
- External links -> to authoritative (non-competitive) sources
- Internal links -> to other articles in the same silo on exact or close match anchors
I can’t stress enough the importance of internal linking within a silo. The idea here is to connect up your articles on anchor texts that signal to Google what each article is about. Not only does this help with indexation, but when you start scoring backlinks, these authority signals will flow throughout your site and help other pages rank. Any questions, just ask in the comments. 