Update: Josh no longer works on Up Digital as he has pursued other SAAS adventures. Still, after doing nothing with his site for over a year, Up Digital maintains many top positions. See how he did it using Niche Ranker's products!
Now back to the article.

This article was written by Josh Bolstad, one of many SEO agencies that use Niche Ranker for their clients backlinks.

Hi readers! There's a lot of fluff and misinformation around ranking highly on Google. In under 4 months I was able to rank first in numerous Cities on Google for the competitive SEO keywords.

Have a look:

updigital.ca Rankings

Now, don't get me wrong. There's a lot of great tricks out there, and there are ways to do SEO "perfectly", but don't overcomplicate things. I'm going to give you the simple, bare-bones method to ranking first.

As only a 5 month old website, I was able to get first for "Edmonton SEO", beating competitors that had held the spot for 10+ years. In this article I'm going to tell you exactly how I did it.

Step 1: On-page

Here is my strategy that worked for me:

  • Have the keyword you want to rank in your title
  • Mention the keyword once in your meta description
  • Have the keyword in your URL (example: updigital.ca/edmonton-seo-services

Step 2: Content

Use ( SURFER SEO <--- Click ) to optimize your page's content for the keyword you're trying to rank. Here's my Ottawa SEO page for example:

Surfer SEO

In this example you'll see that I scored 100. I should mention, anything over 70 is fine. You should mostly stick to trying to hit the number of words it suggests, and completing many of the NLP keywords.

Step 3: Links

Start by building a natural profile. Use Niche Ranker's "Foundational links" service. Point these links to your homepage. Use branded/generic/url anchors. Click here for a guide that will help with choosing anchor texts. This does a great job at creating a natural anchor text profile, link diversity and homepage links. When link building, you always want to remember to send a portion of your link to your homepage. This looks natural in Google's eyes.

Once your foundational links are finished, move on to some harder hitting links like Niche Rankers "Niche edits", "DR 30+ Links", "Private Authority Links, "PBN Links" and of course, if your budget allows for it, the "HQ Journalist Links".

Follow the anchor text guide so that you don't over-optimize for exact match keyword anchors. Make sure you're targeting inner-pages. Use exact match/partial match anchor texts but don't forget to mix in generic anchors. Even on inner pages. Also, don't start to ignore the homepage either, continue to build links to the homepage as well. Your homepage should always stay ahead with the number of backlinks it has compared to inner pages.


There's a lot of bad SEO information out there. For example, a lot of people worry about building too many backlinks. This is wrong. Backlinks literally account for over 70% of your organic rankings. The more links, the more authority, the higher you rank. There is already a natural period of Google finding your newly built links and indexing them. This creates a natural "drip-feed". Build those links and get yourself ahead of your competition!

Step 4: Inner Linking

Make sure you interink your pages to each other. Homepage should link to inner-pages, and inner-pages back to homepage and other inner-pages. This goes for blog posts as well. This helps "pass" the link juice from one page to the other. Don't just use a header or footer for your inner-linking, it doesn't count in the same way.

Step 5: Rank Higher

It's literally that easy. Keep building links on a consistent basis. Keep inner-linking. Add relevant content to your site (blog posts) and you'll grow like no other. Niche Ranker provides the types of links that Google loves. Links from websites in your niche, on aged posts with high metrics. Thanks for reading, and have fun out there!

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Josh Bolstad
SEO Agency Owner
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