Ch. 3: The Article Brief That Beat a DR60 Site

Ch. 3: The Article Brief That Beat a DR60 Site

Month 2, my outdoor-gear site had one article outranking a competitor with 10x my backlinks. I reverse-engineered why and turned it into a fixed brief.

— Scrape the top 10 for that keyword, list every H2 they share — those are table stakes, include all of them
— Find 2 questions in People Also Ask none of them answer fully — those become my differentiator H2s
— Pull the exact product specs into a comparison table above the fold (Google loves the dwell time)
— Add one original data point: I weighed 4 backpacks myself and posted the grams
— Word count = median of top 10, not max. I was overwriting by 800 words for nothing

That $54 article earned $2,100 over 18 months.

Lesson banked: a brief built from the SERP beats a brief built from your opinion, every time.