9 years of persistency paid off well. My unconventional journey of Blogging got rewarded with international fame and recognition.
I am the 1st place winner of ‘International SEO Challenge 2022’ by Serpzilla in the ‘Information’ category. Also won the first winner cash prize of 700$. Ka-Ching!
Check out all the details and how I won this SEO competition.
What is Serpzilla?
Serpzilla is Cyprus, Europe based online platform which specialize in the domain of white hat link building. They have database of 1 billion pages in their arsenal to boost your SEO and SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings. Till now, various worldwide users have placed more than 20 million backlinks via Serpzilla platform. They are witnessing real organic traffic via this link juice SEO technique.
Depending on your need, you can go for specific duration or perpetual backlink strategy. The user gets 40+ metrics to evaluation. Their automated process of link placement and huge inventory in every possible niche area increase your productivity. As per the relevancy of the project, you can take backlink from varied categories – forum, Q&A sites, magazines, news portal, blog and more.
International SEO Challenge 2022 by Serpzilla
Serpzilla announced the the SEO competition in two categories – Commercial and Information.
The participant has to create a project with 10 keywords and associated URLs. The task was to increase Google rankings of these 10 keywords in the stipulated timeframe (10th October to 15th December 2022) using various white hat SEO techniques and tools.
The scoring system was tough, because complexity of the keywords was a major factor. So, you cannot win easily with low volume search words (low hanging fruits). You have to use high competition keywords to increase you chances of winning. By following this strict system, the search frequency was aligned to level of competition. Such smart criteria nullified a huge chunk of entries and made the competition much more elite.
Serpzilla also roped in various SEO experts. Their role was to evaluate the entries on various technical parameters and help the participants accordingly.
I took part in this Serpzilla SEO competition to learn and grow. My blog – The Virtual Assist – is based on News. So, I selected the ‘Information’ category.
How I do SEO on my own?
I have been blogging for the last 9 years. And the biggest ‘SEO lesson’ I learned throughout this journey is: Don’t do SEO at all.
Sounds crazy?
Yes. It is.
It’s like unlearning all you have learned from so-called ‘SEO Gurus’ and ‘SEO Mentors’.
Mind well, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You need to see it from a different paradigm and frame of perspective. You need to escape the huge gamut of opinions and zero on an absolute point.
Did you actually understand the above paragraph? The answer is ‘No’. This is exactly what will happen if you ‘write an article to do SEO on it’.
So, how to write a SEO optimized article?
The answer is, write it in a meaningful and simple narrative. Because, in the above mentioned process, you will revolve around all relatable knowledge. You will cover various aspects of it in a fluid language. You can also cite a quote or facts and figures from an authority person / entity to establish the genuinity of your content. In one article, you need to solve only one problem or question. Don’t try to make a mixed bag of everything. It will kill the essence of it.
Such a nature of content creation will help to engage your readers. You just need to focus on 5 Ws (Who, What, When, Where, Why) and 1 H (How). This systematic approach will automatically make an articulate piece of work.
Always remember one thing. You are writing for a human, not for an AI bot. It doesn’t matter how strong AI becomes in future, it cannot inculcate human feelings and emotions.
Putting all these things at core, I created and nurtured my blog.
The best SEO strategies
As mentioned earlier, the biggest SEO strategy is to ‘talk human’.
If you observe the current trend of text and voice search, we humans are ‘talking’ with machines / AI bots like they are our human friends. The universe of Search Engines (Google, Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, Baidu) and AI assistants (Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana) are one of most used tools, unconsciously by us all.
If we are on a road, now we are not asking any human for directions. We just turn on the GPS and follow it. Rather than reading a bulky book, we prefer watching tutorial videos to learn something. Metaverse and Hyper Reality are slowly and steadily building up, after some initial hiccups. Both these things are actually making you a super human to achieve more in less time frame.
So, the best way to reach a larger pool of audience is by answering their questions in layman language. Always use visually appealing images to attract more users. You should also use infographics and links to other high authority websites, which are the fundamentals of SEO. It will help the reader to get more knowledge and fulfill his/her query.
There are two main things in this entire arena:
- Acquire new visitors
- Retain old visitors
If you can crack the system for sustaining these two things, you will get a huge traffic on your blog and your subscribers will grow exponentially. It is one of the best ways for efficient digital marketing.
I will show you how to do it step by step with my case study articles.
Acquire new visitors:
To achieve it, write articles on ‘Trending topics’. An in-depth article on latest trending topics will give you mammoth and genuine traffic. Following this system rigorously, you make your brand trustworthy. You will captivate others to follow you and your link building will grow tremendously.
How to get trending topics? Check Google, Twitter, YouTube to get it in real time. Reddit can be goldmine if you know how to use it.
The popularity of such articles might be for a smaller duration. But, it will help you for sure in the long run. Some of such articles are as follows:
‘Chhota Bheem: Kung Fu Dhamaka 3D’ in Hindi: Indian Animation movie from Green Gold Animation
Everything you need to know about RRR movie – Part 1
How Furious 7 used Digital Paul Walker Body Doubles and CGI : Great VFX by WETA Digital Studio
Retain old visitors:
The key to retaining old visitors is to write ‘Evergreen contents’. As the name suggests, such articles have a perpetual life and search. These go beyond geographic boundaries and age groups. Genres can be anything – gadgets, technology, business, finance, lifestyle, marketing, education, career and so on.
By this time, you need to focus on the pain points or challenges. Such an approach will help you to write a lengthy and knowledge based article.
What is the Best time to Post (schedules) on Instagram?
Top 7 sites to download High Quality VFX Stock Footage
Interlinking is a must. It increases ‘user sessions’ and ‘page on time’ factors, which are one of the most important aspects of SEO. You must do at least one backlink in each post to show relevance of the subject and enhance bot crawling. One trick for you. Give interlink to your old post. So, they can rank again.
Gradually, it also builds ‘relevancy’ between various posts of your blog. At the time of writing this article, I have 1K+ posts in ‘The Virtual Assist’ blog. I keep on doing interlinking to make a proper funnel of information flow to engage users.
Backlinking is also a very crucial factor to boost your SEO. You need links from high authority websites to speak out loud about you. You need this ‘link juice’ to increase the ranking of your blog. And mind well, you need do-follow links. No-follow links might do good, but do-follow links surely help for growth hacking.
There are many ways to get backlinks via social and digital marketing. Some paid ones might take a heavy punch of your wallet. Some can be barter or free, depending on a mutual collaboration. You hate or love it, but you need it. I didn’t buy any backlink to win this international SEO challenge of Serpzilla.
Some of the other standard and white hat SEO practices
Given below are some more best practices to follow. The more you take care of, better it will to rank higher in Google and achieve the Position Zero (P0).
- Always write relevant content
- Use SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate
- Decrease the page load time
- Use better hosting which ensures minimum downtime
- Proper use of H1, H2, H3 tags
- Always use ‘Alt text’ for each and every images
- Use of Structured Data for better user experience
- Upload optimized images only (jpg/png, non blurred, around or under 100 kb)
- Use bullet points and numbering for faster scanning of the text
- Never do keyword stuffing
- Use power words in your headlines to attract users
- Appropriate meta description and excerpt
- Use clutter free web architecture
- Give at least one backlink to any suitable high authority website
- Use actual facts and figures to validate your thoughts
- Write your own voice
- Never increase the word count by putting irrelevant text contents
Needless to say, I keep updating my approaches and writing format to make it easier for the end user. It is a never ending learning process. Such white hat SEO techniques help me to prevent harm from every Google core update. I always seek for organic traffic and tries to balance the ratio of new and returning visitors.
To be in a niche area or get diversified – it is completely your call. Based on the success of your blog and human comments, you need to act upon. Regarding my blog, I had started from the niche domain of 3D Animation and VFX (Visual Effects), but now I am covering the wide array of Media & Entertainment industries, Business, Education, Digital Marketing, SEO, Career, Technology, AR & VR, Finance, News and other related.
Results
This is the acid test of the said things so far to prove myself in the Serpzilla’s International SEO challenge.
Throughout these 9 years, I stood still on my strategies and SEO techniques of digital marketing. Not to mention, it was very hard to reach the current stage.
It took a long long time, shook me several times, made me disappointed and defeated, my DA and PA went down, I burned my midnight oil to heal it and so on. It’s exhausting to balance a full time job, family and blogging – all together.
Passion and Persistence are the two pillars which make my such unconventional blogging journey successful.
Some of the key highlights and achievements are as follows.
- To make it robust and authentic, I made it an officially registered brand (®) with the Government of India’s Trade Marks Act in 2018. It cut down a huge clutter instantly.
- Mozar’s Notes: A hugely successful series which is based on all latest developments of the AVGC (Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming, Comics) industry.
- The blog’s 70% to 80% traffic comes from Google Search.
- The Virtual Assist is the ‘Google News’ approved blog.
- The blog is featured in 60 Best VFX Blogs and Websites by Feedspot. It stands at 20th position, Worldwide and 1st position, India.
- The blog is recognized in the case study article of Best Overseas Locations for Animation Internships: India by the Animation Career Review website.
- My interview is featured on Startup.info. It is a Paris based collaborative magazine dedicated to the promotion of startups – From a VFX Artist & Educator to a Media & Entertainment Blogger
Winner of the International SEO Challenge 2022 – Amit Mozar
After all the hard work, now it’s the time of glory.
Serpzilla sent me this certificate of achievement of the 1st place in the competition. Loved to see ‘Amit Mozar’ and logo of my blog on it. Moreover, they will send the physical print copy to me at India, all the way from Cyprus, Europe. Kudos to you guys!
Serpzilla announced the results of International SEO Challenge 2022 in their blog section.
This announcement also got shout out on Serpzilla’s official LinkedIn page. Check out the screenshot.
A huge thanks to MESC (Media & Entertainment Skills Council) also. They featured me on their official MESC LinkedIn page.
So, keep calm and do blogging!