I’m not an SEO expert so I won’t claim that I can give you a concrete answer. I was going through my content aggregator, and I came across this blog post from Search Engine Journal: How do you outrank bigger sites for high competition keywords?

Can strategic content writing help you outrank your competitors? It can. It requires effort and persistence.

Aside from other things, what I found revealing and surprising is that the author says that the word count doesn’t really matter as long as you have structured your content well.

This means, a web page with 500 words can outrank a web page having 2500 words if the content on the web page having fewer words is organized better than the web page with more words.

I have observed this pattern even on my own blog. Sometimes I’m able to rank well even when the blog post has just 300-400 words. There might be many other reasons, but what I’m trying to say is, a blog post doesn’t always have to be very long to rank well.

So, what can you do to outrank your competitors according to the above Search Engine Rank blog post? Here are a few things you can do:

• Your web page should be relevant to the query being searched for.
• The information should be easy to read and longer text should be organized using headings, subheadings and bulleted points.
• Schema should be well defined – what is the web page about? Is it an FAQs page? Is it a product description? Is it an information article? Is it a review? Does it explain your pricing?
• You should use interlinking. The crawlers should be able to access other parts of your website and blog through the current web page or blog post they are crawling.

Aside from these tips the author has also explained a few SEO-related things you can do.

How does strategic content writing help you outrank your competitors?

First of all, at least in the beginning, don’t focus on outranking your competitors if you are just starting. Focus on publishing lots of relevant and quality content.

Your competitor – assuming he or she has used fair means – must have spent months or years to deserve the rankings he or she enjoys right now. You cannot suddenly decide to outrank just because you want to.

The better approach is, start providing information that your visitors will find useful. Write content on interesting topics.

Make a list of all the topics that you can write about. The list should be around 50-60 topics.

Then write or get written the best possible content around these topics.

Of course, simply publishing content is half the job done. You need to spread your content. Follow SEO content writing practices. Make sure that your content is written and formatted in such a manner that it is easy for search engine crawlers and human visitors to read.

Share your content on social media websites. Broadcast the links using your newsletter. You need to promote your content. You can also use paid advertisements on LinkedIn and Facebook to promote your links.

Also, focus on longtail keywords containing your main keywords for which you want to outrank your competition.

Even if it is extremely difficult for me to rank for “content writing services”, I can try “content writing services for email marketing”. Or, “content writing services for web design agencies”.

As I have mentioned above, rather than worrying about outranking your competition, try to provide better content than your competition. Your rankings will automatically improve.