One experiment. Two very different outcomes.
And a question worth investigating: What if the key to ranking a highly competitive keyword quickly is giving Google something it hasn’t seen before?
The experiment: manufacture a new comparison landscape
The target keyword had everything SEOs want and everything that makes ranking difficult.
It was a bottom-of-the-funnel query. Searchers were comparing options, the commercial intent was strong, and the keyword difficulty was high.
The obvious strategy would have been to build a better landing page, strengthen topical relevance, earn backlinks and wait for the page to compete.
I wanted to test a different hypothesis.
What if I gave Google a comparison page containing information that did not previously exist anywhere on the web?
The idea was to create something with no direct content equivalent for Google to retrieve. Rather than competing head-on with established comparison pages, I would introduce a completely new set of entities and product attributes.
I used Medium as the publishing platform and created a fresh account.
The article featured the brand I wanted to promote alongside fictional competitors. Their names, features and product details were invented for the experiment.
The page targeted the commercial comparison query.
Within a week, it appeared on Google's first page.
For a keyword where the conventional route looked difficult, the initial result was striking.
But there was a second part to the test.
The twist: I replaced the fiction with facts
Once the article had ranked, I changed the content.
I replaced the fictional competitors and invented product information with real brands and accurate information.
The article was no longer the same comparison in any meaningful editorial sense. Its entities, claims and competitive context had changed.
