How can I outrank them?

Hey guys, need help outranking my competition, any help would be appreciated.

*** This is not for the USA/English market, this is a foreign site
*** This is a costumer from my day-job (SEO firm) and I can't use the obvious 'black' ways...

Screenshot of Comp:



This may seem easy to some people but I cant get my hands around it.

The top 10 sites are major travel agencies that rank for pretty much everything based on their domain authority, as you can see the inner pages don't have much links. Kindda like ebay and amazon rankings for tons of terms...

Some of these sites get strong links on a daily basis (News sites etc) and some have strong networks. I can't use News sites because they play dirty and charge A LOT of $$$ and I don't think networks is the problem because I did made a lot of article exchanges.

More info

Here's what I've done (3 months) ALL MANUAL

• Forum (contextual) links
• Q/A sites links (well actually we only got 1 Q/A site in our country). Links from relevant Q's, i.e I opened a question and answered it.
• Some index sites, most of the index sites we have are pure garbage.
• Some article sites
• Article exchange - exchanged articles with other SEO firms that have sites in my niche. You could call it guest posts I guess.
• Web 2.0 - about 7 of these, tumblr,wordpress,blogger,weebly and others in my language. These are manual, original content, pics&videos, some posts without links, each web 2.0 at least 5 posts.
• Some bookmarks, again - we don't have good bookmark sites in my language.
• News sites comment - some comments on travel related news on sites which allows that.

So...this is what I did and I can't see ANY CHANGE. My main kw was #30 when I started, 3 weeks ago it got to #20...then #17...then #13 and now (for 2 weeks now) its steady at #25...
The other 2 keywords are at the exact same place they were, maybe 1 or 2 higher...

What can I do to outrank them?

FYI - I got another client, his keyword is a lot more competitive and there is about 15 SEO firms trying to rank their clients for this term and plenty of affiliate sites. I mean, this is a word that being ranked in 'purpose', not just a 'side effect' of the domain authority...
I did the exact same process and got from #24 to #5 after 6 weeks, and also I keep that spot ever since.



I need your help guys to figure this one out, what can I do to improve my rankings?
Even getting to the 1st page would be a huge success for me.

Please keep in mind that I don't think I could use the services in the BST section since, again, its a foreign keyword and I gotta play this one as 'white' as I can.

I'm not an expert in SEO like others here, but I would say that you need a combination of quality content and time. It seems like you've done a fair amount over three months, so if you haven't seen much of a change, you might want to take a look at your content. For a few of my sites, I compensated for traffic by launching an ad-words campaign until my SEO was up to snuff.

JessePinkman said:

I'm not an expert in SEO like others here, but I would say that you need a combination of quality content and time. It seems like you've done a fair amount over three months, so if you haven't seen much of a change, you might want to take a look at your content. For a few of my sites, I compensated for traffic by launching an ad-words campaign until my SEO was up to snuff.

Click to expand...

I forgot the mention that I changed the content of those pages (3 main pages) to really AWESOME content, about 1,500 words and VERY helpful!

any help guys?

I didn't mentioned I never did any 2nd tier link building.
Do you think it have anything to do with it?
(99% of the SEOers in my country don't do 2nd tier, maybe just a couple of manual forum posts here and there...)