This is my first post in a while. The reason I generally go through dry spells here on the blog is that I have clients that I’m tending to, it’s a great problem to have! I found a few minutes on a late Saturday night and wanted to share something that I’ve been sharing with my clients lately, an effective strategy for maintaining your #1 ranking.

The client in this picture came to me a couple of months ago and asked, “How do I stay at number 1?” He was obviously enjoying the fruits of his labor and wanted to make sure that he stayed at the top as long as possible.

Number 1 Ranking

My advice to him was simple. Do what you’ve been doing. For him, the successful link building strategy was my private blog network.

My general strategy is to do half of what you have been doing. If you got to #1 by building 300 links per month, now drop that down to 150 links per month. You’ll keep your ranking and have a larger profit by saving some of your link building budget. This particular client wanted nothing to do with that and actually reinvested more of his profits into long tail keywords and launched a new business.

Since you’re at #1, you have already defeated your competition, but that won’t always stop them. In fact, moving ahead of your competitors can often force them to start a new link building project so they can try to get back to where they were. If you’ve ever been at #1 for your primary keyword, you know how that feels. One day you’re making money, the next day your income is down to just 25% of what it was yesterday.

Keep in mind that this is a general strategy. If your website is your primary business you might never want to stop building links. Recognize that your competition will likely never stop building links, but to maximize your profits spend half of your previous link building budget and save the rest.