How we held #1 for “Best Musician of 2019” for twelve straight months, on purpose.
We built a deliberately absurd page and ranked it #1 for the entire year, then peaked at #3 for “best musician” against the whole internet. Not for vanity: to prove that a handful of fundamentals, done properly, produce almost all of the result.
The myth that SEO is complicated.
A persistent belief in search marketing says you need dozens of finely tuned on-page factors to rank. We suspected the opposite: that four or five major things done properly account for at least 95% of the result, and that everything else is noise.
So we ran an experiment where nothing could be attributed to a beautiful page. The site was a parody, obviously not to be taken seriously by anyone reading it, with deliberately weak on-page polish. If it could rank, and hold, the fundamentals were the explanation.
Five fundamentals. Nothing else.
- Powerful, non-spammy links. The main site was strengthened with quality links from relevant sources. This did most of the work.
- An optimized URL. The address said exactly what the page was about.
- Heading tags. H1 and subheadings written around the target phrase.
- Meta title and description. Clear, keyword-led, and written to be clicked.
- Optimized images. File names and alt text aligned with the keyword. Beyond these five, we did nothing.
Number one for the whole year. Then we deleted it.
The page held #1 for “Best Musician of 2019” every month of 2019 and into 2020, appearing directly under Google's own music-artist carousel of Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and Bruno Mars. For the broader keyword “best musician,” it moved between #9 and #3 over the same period.
When the experiment had made its point we deleted the website. It had no value beyond the lesson, and we take what we do seriously enough not to leave a joke ranking for its own sake. The lesson stands: rankings come from a few fundamentals executed well, not from complexity.
The experiment
Parody page published with five fundamentals and nothing else.
#1 all year
Held the top spot every month for “Best Musician of 2019.”
#3 overall
Peaked at #3 for “best musician” against the entire web.
Deleted
Point made; site removed on purpose.
Whatever you have been told about SEO being a black box, it is not. The same five fundamentals that ranked a joke page are what put dental practices, contractors, and architects at the top of their markets.
Screenshots are taken from Google Search Console, Google search results, and our own correspondence. Client-identifying details are redacted where the client asked.
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