On closer inspection, we saw that what caused this sudden spike was that the words “coconut water” were used in a blog post, as an analogy. But still — why was the page getting traffic and impressions for a term unrelated to finance?
Strong SEO for Success
The answer was simple: having invested months and years into the domain gave our client high authority. Even with a term like coconut water! Strong SEO matters — and brings results in the long-run.
Here are the fundamentals that enabled us to build a strong long-term SEO strategy that helped our client generate traffic and impressions.
Intent
Keyword research is one aspect of the game – but do your content and website actually satisfy the intent of the searcher? It’s easy to pepper a page or a post with keywords that are trending, popular and with high search volumes. But if the content doesn’t address the user’s need and solve their problem, it doesn’t sit well with the audience or Google.
Consistency
As we mentioned, we had been at it for months with our client. Going viral is no doubt exciting, but good SEO that is executed consistently pays richer dividends over time, because your website becomes a trusted source that puts out useful content and solves problems for your audience. We stayed consistent with our client, running experiments and keeping the SEO engine running.
E-A-T
Google is king when it comes to SEO and SERP results, and they use the acronym EAT to judge the overall credibility of a website. EAT stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, the pillars of making your content stand out.
Expertise: Is your site/ information accurate and factual?
Authoritativeness: Is the author of the page well-known and well-respected in their field, or are they gaining eyeballs with their content being shared and linked to on other established sites in the field?
Trustworthiness: Is the content being shared reliable?
Building on these three qualities helped position our client as a credible source.
In Conclusion
Investing in building a strong foundation of organic traffic through consistent, quality content and SEO inputs paid off. So much so, that an off-topic term could also pull in unexpected traffic to broaden our client’s TOFU leads and increase brand awareness.
This holds true especially if you are a new product in a nascent industry, or if your competition relies heavily on paid ads.
No matter what you write, if you do the best job you can, with the right strategy and a great page for the intended search query, you can rank for even highly competitive keywords within a span of just a few days!
Watch: Growth Powered by Coconut Water — And Smart SEO
For Curious Minds
User intent refers to the underlying goal a person has when they type a query into a search engine. Simply matching keywords is an outdated approach; success today hinges on accurately addressing the 'why' behind the search, which is critical for establishing your site as a valuable resource and achieving sustainable growth.
Failing to satisfy user intent leads to poor engagement signals, telling Google your page is not a good answer. A successful, intent-focused strategy, like the one used for our fintech client, involves a deeper understanding of the audience's needs. The core components include:
Informational Intent: The user is looking for information. Your content should provide direct, accurate, and comprehensive answers.
Navigational Intent: The user wants to find a specific page or site. Your site structure and branding should be clear.
Transactional Intent: The user is ready to make a purchase or take a specific action. Your page should make this process easy.
By consistently creating content that solves the user's problem, you build trust and authority. This not only improves rankings for targeted queries but also strengthens your entire domain, creating the conditions for unexpected wins. Explore how to pivot your content from a keyword-centric to an intent-centric model within the full analysis.
E-A-T, which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, is a set of quality guidelines Google uses to evaluate the credibility of a website and its content. For industries where trust is paramount, like finance, demonstrating high E-A-T is not just a best practice, it is essential for earning search visibility and user confidence.
These three pillars work together to build a powerful reputation that search engines reward. Building on them was central to positioning our client as a credible source. Here is how each component contributes:
Expertise: This refers to the accuracy and factual correctness of your information, created by a subject matter expert.
Authoritativeness: This is about your reputation. It grows when other well-respected sites link to your content, validating your position in the field.
Trustworthiness: This involves the overall reliability and transparency of your website and the content it shares.
For any business, but especially a new one, systematically building E-A-T is the foundation of a durable organic growth strategy that can outperform competitors who rely heavily on paid ads. Learn the specific tactics used to build each of these pillars by reading the full story.
A long-term organic SEO strategy creates a sustainable, appreciating asset, whereas a strategy reliant on paid ads is akin to renting visibility. Once you stop paying for ads, your traffic disappears. In contrast, strong SEO builds domain authority that generates traffic and leads continuously, often with compounding returns over time.
The key decision factors involve balancing short-term needs with long-term goals. Consider the following when comparing the two approaches:
Cost Over Time: Paid ads require constant budget allocation, while SEO's cost per acquisition can decrease as your authority grows.
Trust and Credibility: Organic rankings are often perceived as more trustworthy by users than sponsored results.
Sustainability: A strong SEO foundation, as our client developed, ensures traffic flow even during periods of reduced marketing spend.
Competitive Moat: High domain authority is difficult for competitors to replicate quickly, creating a durable competitive advantage.
The most effective approach often involves using paid ads for initial traction while simultaneously investing in a robust, long-term SEO strategy. Discover how this hybrid model can be structured by exploring our complete analysis.
A 'go viral' strategy chases temporary spikes in attention, which can be exciting but rarely builds lasting value. In contrast, a consistent, methodical SEO approach focuses on creating a trusted resource over time, resulting in sustainable organic traffic and high domain authority that produces predictable, long-term results.
The choice between these strategies depends on your ultimate business goals. Here is how they compare:
Traffic Pattern: Viral content creates a sharp, unpredictable spike followed by a steep decline. Consistent SEO builds a steadily rising baseline of traffic.
Audience Quality: Viral traffic is often broad and untargeted. SEO attracts users with specific intent who are actively seeking solutions.
Brand Perception: Viral success can be fleeting. A consistent strategy positions your brand as a reliable authority in its field.
The fintech client's success shows that the dividends from a long-run strategy far outweigh the glamour of a one-time viral hit. This approach turns your website into an asset that continuously generates TOFU leads. Dive deeper into the article to see how to structure a content calendar for consistency, not just virality.
This unusual ranking is compelling proof that a strong SEO foundation creates a 'halo effect' that extends far beyond targeted keywords. It demonstrates that when Google views your domain as highly authoritative, it may rank your content for unrelated terms used in analogies or examples, thereby opening new, unexpected avenues for traffic and brand discovery.
The return on investment (ROI) here is not just about ranking for finance terms but about building a domain so powerful it captures searchers' attention from completely different verticals. This specific case highlights several key benefits:
Broadened TOFU Leads: The traffic from 'coconut water' introduced the brand to a wider audience, increasing top-of-funnel awareness.
Resilience and Authority: It shows the domain's strength is not dependent on a narrow set of keywords but on its overall credibility.
Validation of Consistency: This result was not an accident but the direct outcome of months of consistent effort in building E-A-T.
This is a clear example of SEO paying dividends in unforeseen ways, proving that a long-term investment can outperform narrow, short-sighted tactics. See the full story to understand how these foundational efforts translate into such powerful, unexpected results.
The fact that an irrelevant term like 'coconut water' broke into the top 20 traffic drivers for a finance-focused website is a stark illustration of exceptionally high domain authority. It reveals that once a site establishes significant trust with Google, the platform is more willing to test its content for a wider range of queries, even those only tangentially related to the main topic.
This specific metric demonstrates a critical SEO principle: authority transcends individual keywords. Here is what this data point truly signifies:
Google's Trust Signal: Google trusted the domain so much that it was willing to surface its content for a competitive, unrelated term.
Content Quality Overlap: It indicates the page's overall quality and structure were strong enough to compete, regardless of the keyword.
The Power of Analogy: Even a simple analogy, when hosted on an authoritative site, can become a source of significant traffic and impressions.
This outcome shows that the ultimate goal of SEO is not just to rank for specific terms, but to build a domain that Google sees as a premier source of information. The full article explores how this level of authority can be systematically built.
For a new edtech startup, building an SEO foundation is about establishing credibility and demonstrating value from day one. Instead of chasing quick wins, the focus should be on a methodical, long-term approach grounded in the principles of consistency and E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
A successful implementation plan mirrors the strategy that yielded long-term results for the fintech client. Here are the first three steps to take:
Define Your Niche Expertise: Identify a specific subject area within edtech where you can become the definitive source of information. Create deeply researched, accurate content that showcases true expertise, perhaps authored by recognized educators or industry professionals.
Develop a Consistent Content Cadence: Commit to a realistic publishing schedule for high-quality, problem-solving content. Whether it is one blog post a week or two a month, consistency signals reliability to both users and Google.
Build Authority Through Outreach: Actively seek opportunities for your experts to contribute to other respected publications in the education field. This builds backlinks and validates your authoritativeness.
Executing these foundational steps patiently will build the domain authority needed to compete and eventually lead the market. The full piece provides a deeper dive into sustaining this momentum over time.
An e-commerce business must move beyond simple product pages to build true domain authority. The goal is to become a trusted resource for customers throughout their entire journey, from initial research to post-purchase support, by consistently satisfying user intent with high-quality content.
Here is a stepwise plan to implement such a strategy, inspired by the foundational principles of long-term SEO success:
Map the Customer Journey: Identify the questions and problems your customers have at each stage (awareness, consideration, decision). This reveals dozens of content opportunities beyond just product descriptions.
Create High-Value Content Hubs: Develop comprehensive guides, how-to articles, and comparison tools that address the informational intent of your audience. For example, a home goods store could create a definitive guide to choosing the right mattress.
Optimize for Trustworthiness (E-A-T): Ensure all content is accurate. Feature expert authors, cite sources, and prominently display customer reviews and testimonials to build credibility.
Maintain a Consistent Publishing Schedule: Regularly update your blog and content hubs with fresh, relevant information to keep your audience engaged and signal to Google that your site is active and reliable.
By transforming your website from a simple store into a knowledge base, you build the authority that drives sustainable organic traffic. Discover more advanced tactics for e-commerce content in the full article.
This phenomenon implies that the future of SEO is less about targeting a narrow list of keywords and more about building deep, topical authority and overall domain credibility. While keyword research remains important for understanding user language, its role is shifting from a prescriptive tool to an inspirational one for creating comprehensive, high-value content.
Brands must adjust their strategies to focus on becoming a trusted entity in their space, not just a collection of keyword-optimized pages. This strategic shift requires a more holistic approach:
Focus on Topics, Not Just Keywords: Build content clusters around core topics, aiming to be the most comprehensive resource available.
Invest in Brand and Authorship: Elevate the profiles of your experts and your brand as a whole, as this directly contributes to E-A-T.
Embrace Natural Language: Write for humans first. The use of analogies, examples, and natural language, as seen with the 'coconut water' instance, is rewarded when hosted on an authoritative site.
The key takeaway is that a rising tide of domain authority lifts all boats, including pages with incidental or analogical keywords. To prepare for this future, brands should read our full analysis on building entity-level trust.
Businesses that neglect to build a foundation of trust and authority through E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) are positioning themselves for long-term decline in organic visibility. As search algorithms become more sophisticated at discerning quality, sites without strong credibility signals will be increasingly marginalized, especially in high-stakes industries like finance and healthcare.
The long-term implications are significant and can impact the entire business. A failure to invest in authority will likely lead to:
Decreased Rankings: Competitors who invest in E-A-T will systematically outrank them for valuable keywords.
Higher Customer Acquisition Costs: An over-reliance on paid ads will become necessary as organic traffic dwindles, increasing marketing expenses.
Vulnerability to Algorithm Updates: Websites with weak authority are more susceptible to negative impacts from Google's core algorithm updates.
In essence, failing to build authority is a strategic risk that can render a business invisible on search over time. The market will reward those who, like the successful client, invested consistently in becoming a trusted source. Read the full article to learn how to future-proof your SEO strategy.
Peppering pages with keywords while ignoring the user's underlying need is a counterproductive tactic that severely damages search performance. This approach leads to poor user engagement signals, such as high bounce rates and low time on page, which tells Google your content is not a satisfying answer to the search query, causing your rankings to fall.
This common mistake is rooted in a misunderstanding of how modern search engines work. Here is how it backfires and what the solution entails:
The Problem: Keyword-focused content often fails to solve the user's problem, leading to immediate dissatisfaction. Google's algorithms are designed to detect this and demote the page.
The Solution: An 'intent-first' approach, which begins by asking, 'What problem is the user trying to solve?' This shifts the focus to creating comprehensive, high-quality content that directly addresses the query.
The Outcome: Content that satisfies intent earns user trust and higher engagement, which in turn builds the Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) that Google rewards.
By prioritizing solving for the user over solving for the keyword, you build the foundation for long-term success, just as our client did. The full article explains how to conduct intent-based research for your content.
Abandoning SEO prematurely is a critical failure because it treats a long-term investment like a short-term tactic. Building genuine domain authority and trust with search engines is a marathon, not a sprint. The initial months are for laying a foundation that will pay dividends for years, and quitting early means you sacrifice all future compounding returns.
This impatience often stems from a misunderstanding of how organic growth works. The solution lies in adopting a different mindset and process:
The Problem: Expecting immediate ROI from SEO ignores the time it takes to build credibility, earn backlinks, and for Google to recognize your site's value.
The Solution: Adopt a mindset of consistent execution and experimentation. This involves regularly publishing high-quality content and patiently running tests to refine your strategy, just as we did for our client.
The Payoff: This persistent effort builds the authority that leads to stable, long-term traffic and unexpected wins, such as ranking for highly competitive or even unrelated keywords.
True SEO success is achieved by those who understand its value as a cumulative, strategic asset. Learn more about developing this patient, consistent approach by reading the complete case study.
Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.
Growth Strategy and Planning
