Walid Gabteni explains how he was able to win the Wix SEO Here Challenge. I am not an expert when it comes to SEO, I know a little but I do know $50,000 is a sweet prize.

The strategy that made me the global winner of Wix SEO Hero Challenge

Last year in November, Wix, a cloud based web development platform, announced a worldwide challenge inviting participants to create a website optimized for the words ‘SEO Hero’. The winner was to be decided basis the top result when searched for ‘SEO Hero’ over a 4 month period ending in March 2017. My website, www.seo-hero.tech, was announced the winner of this challenge in the first week of April 2017. This is a big win for me, as it validates my skills and knowledge as an SEO consultant in a global context. The prize money of $ 50,000 will help me in further developing and marketing of SEO Hero, an SEO tool that specializes in semantic optimization of web content.

There are several tactics I used which helped me become the winner, the first one being choosing the right name for my tool as well as the website. Since the contest was called ‘SEO Hero’, I decided to give my SEO tool the same name and chose a keyword-rich domain name, www.seo-hero.tech. Doing so, Google was able to differentiate my website from the other competitors. Many people who talked about my SEO tool started referring to it as ‘SEO Hero Tech’ which proved that the. TECH extension allowed people to differentiate my website from other contesting websites. Before seo-hero.tech got a great ranking on Google for the query ‘SEO Hero’, people were already searching for “SEO Hero Tech”. This eventually led Google to suggest ‘SEO Hero Tech’ even when someone searched for ‘SEO Hero’ and that worked greatly in my favor.

The second tactic that I used was to use multi-languages on the website. This gave me a big advantage over the competitors. Allowing people to use the tool on queries in English, Spanish, French and Italian undoubtedly helped me reach a lot more people and in turn got me a lot more traffic.

The third tactic that proved to be immensely helpful was to use social media to get the initial set of users. While SEO optimization is all about the content and backlinks, the value of social media is quite crucial spreading the word around. It was through social media channels that I found evangelists for my product who linked back to the website. Backlinks are a powerful ranking factor and my social media strategy not only helped me gain new users but also got me organic backlinks to the website.

SEO is a very complex universe and it’s difficult to master all the aspects, but there’s one focus area that should always be considered: Google loves businesses that stand out. I understood that and did everything possible to ‘stand out’, and choosing a .TECH domain extension was one of the ways to do it. Additionally, the new domain extensions offer excellent opportunities to find a keyword-rich domain name which is short, brandable and more relevant to the product. Also, do bear in mind that before thinking about Google rankings and SEO, one must remember that it’s important to build a credible brand that will stand the test of time. Choosing a suitable website address, which will become the brand’s virtual identity, is of utmost importance. The new domain extensions, thus, open a plethora of opportunities for winning at brand building, as well as at SEO, as has been proven by my win against competitors from around the world.

Walid Gabteni is an SEO Consultant based in Paris, France. He specializes in Google SEO services, net-linking, website optimization for search engines, natural SEO audits and advanced SEO training.