Has anyone here used the Army Ants method successfully?

Hanuman

Hanuman

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I recently published an article using this method for my client, and then have requested a bunch of orders from a writer for my own websites as well.

But recently reading a thread from @shaunm articles that use this method seems to be losing SERP positions after the latest update.

So, curious to hear from anyone else that have used this strategy for your articles. Are you seeing a drop in traffic to these articles?
 
Hanuman said:
I recently published an article using this method for my client, and then have requested a bunch of orders from a writer for my own websites as well.

But recently reading a thread from @shaunm articles that use this method seems to be losing SERP positions after the latest update.

So, curious to hear from anyone else that have used this strategy for your articles. Are you seeing a drop in traffic to these articles?
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Army Ants?
 
The premise of army ants is to bring together a bunch of questions on a topic that would not make good enough articles by themselves but would be a sort of an FAQ when put together.

Like,

"Taliban in Afghanistan - 12 things you didn't know"

and you could have different headers about 'when was Taliban formed', 'when did they lose power', 'who is their current leader', and so on.
 
MrMedia said:
Army Ants?
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I've always interpreted it as essentially being low comp, low search volume (potentially) "People Also Asked" questions as H3's at the bottom of an article- a keyword optimized FAQ designed to rank for long tail keywords that cannot be made into H2's.
 
Sure, why not. Google is doing faceted search or whatever they call it where they'll link users straight to a snippet of text. They're getting really granular now, so it "could" work. But I think it still stands that if you rank for 5 keywords in H3's in FAQ's and I come in with 5 different articles, each optimized for each specific keyword, you're toast.

You might save some time, but once I come through and analyze your keywords and see the opportunity, I'm not worried about saving time because I'm outsourcing the work. You're exposing opportunity for me and I'm going to take it from you. So you might as well do it right from the get go. You could still do the bigger post and link down to the individual posts from there, which would be even more beneficial.
 
secretagentdad said:
Any good examples of sites ranking with the seo army ants method?
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I found this term from the PassiveIncomeGeek site, and he gave this example on his YouTube: https://www.godownsize.com/boat-flag-etiquette/

I've previously considered building an article like this, but had always not gone with this idea since I wasn't sure if it would be ranking well. But looking this one up on Ahrefs, it sees a LOT of traffic (although if you look at other articles of a similar nature on his blog, it's not as much). And even this one appears to have dropped traffic since the latest update.

Perhaps it's due to what @Ryuzaki says - going to take a deeper look at this before I commit more articles of this nature.
 
Hanuman said:
I found this term from the PassiveIncomeGeek site, and he gave this example on his YouTube: https://www.godownsize.com/boat-flag-etiquette/
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You can run that domain through a free SEMRush account and it suggests there was over a 30% traffic drop on the domain from the June/July core algorithm updates. My blog had its army ants articles as well as other catch all article types hit on the July core algorithm update and I have had a few other people reach out saying the same.

Morten who runs the Passive Income Geek channel has put videos up recently going over it and what I am seeing is the same as him. Its pretty much what @Ryuzaki said, Google are favouring very low DA blogs/Reddit/Quora with a dedicated answer for a search query over a catch all article on a high DA blog right now.
 
shaunm said:
ts pretty much what @Ryuzaki said, Google are favouring very low DA blogs/Reddit/Quora with a dedicated answer for a search query over a catch all article on a high DA blog right now.
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They only prefer low DA because nobody else is taking the time to make dedicated posts. It's free for the taking by anyone with topical authority and a decent backlink profile.

Google isn't trying to be a search engine. They want to be an answer engine. He who provides the direct answer wins, as long as everything else is up to snuff. The days of writing monster articles that could rank for everything under the sun are long gone.
 
Ryuzaki said:
They only prefer low DA because nobody else is taking the time to make dedicated posts. It's free for the taking by anyone with topical authority and a decent backlink profile.

Google isn't trying to be a search engine. They want to be an answer engine. He who provides the direct answer wins, as long as everything else is up to snuff. The days of writing monster articles that could rank for everything under the sun are long gone.
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Totally agree, my focus right now is long tails with low search volume that are easy to write and take 30-45 minutes to churn out. They fit in with my schedule better allowing me to work my blogging stuff around my other projects and fit articles in when I have the time.
 
Ryuzaki said:
Google isn't trying to be a search engine. They want to be an answer engine. He who provides the direct answer wins, as long as everything else is up to snuff. The days of writing monster articles that could rank for everything under the sun are long gone.
Click to expand...

This is fascinating, makes a lot of sense, and has a large impact on the way I think about writing new posts. (After I've just finished adding chunky FAQs into a couple new articles lol)

shaunm said:
Totally agree, my focus right now is long tails with low search volume that are easy to write and take 30-45 minutes to churn out. They fit in with my schedule better allowing me to work my blogging stuff around my other projects and fit articles in when I have the time.
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My concern is having sub-1000 word articles on your site just for hyper-focused long tails, do you see that as a potential problem?

Or are you perhaps still looking for more long-tails to go with it, but perhaps "just enough" (2-3) to get it over the line (1000) so an entire post isn't just a couple paragraphs. And only the hyper-relevant ones to it?
 
I think this method is suitable for the one just starting in the publishing biz, Marten from passive income geek has a video with this.

 
OtterSock said:
My concern is having sub-1000 word articles on your site just for hyper-focused long tails, do you see that as a potential problem?

Or are you perhaps still looking for more long-tails to go with it, but perhaps "just enough" (2-3) to get it over the line (1000) so an entire post isn't just a couple paragraphs. And only the hyper-relevant ones to it?
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I can usually find 3-4 sub header ideas from the google drop down/people also asked for each one. Its basically the same strategy that PhilReddit7 used for his case study last year on Reddit and the blog he built using it is bringing in over $3000 per month now.

I like to use different keyword strategies on my blogs incase something like the July core algo update rolls out for catch all articles or the affiliate update from April for buyer intent anyway. So for the month of August I'm just churning out these shorter laster targeted articles for low competition long tails. Next month I will probably run out of keywords for this strategy and switch over to higher search volume stuff again.
 
Ryuzaki said:
Google isn't trying to be a search engine. They want to be an answer engine. He who provides the direct answer wins, as long as everything else is up to snuff. The days of writing monster articles that could rank for everything under the sun are long gone.
Click to expand...
How this affects long posts? Should we keep writing 3000+ words posts (or longer)? Or is better to write 2 x 1.500 words that complement each other?
 
StormGirl said:
How this affects long posts? Should we keep writing 3000+ words posts (or longer)? Or is better to write 2 x 1.500 words that complement each other?
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You should write as much as is required to deal with the intent of the search query in as full of a depth as needed, and not a lot of extra breadth (which is what we used to do). Some queries don't need more than 100 words. Look at dictionary sites as an example.

With all that being said, all of my sites have different "minimum word counts" for different sections of the sites, because it depends on what your goal is too. Do you want someone to go through a full buyer's journey / funnel in one post? Do you want someone scrolling a long article for more ad impressions? Or do you want to keep it short and sweet and send them on to an affiliate partner quickly?

It's an art, not a science. There's no static answers here, and definitely no paint by numbers. But between what the query demands and what your needs are, you should find answers.
 
It's an interesting quetion as there may be questions like "How tall is *" or "what is the net worth of *" and the answer could be wrapped up in one word
 
I started experimenting with "solitary ants" so to say to see if the opposite works. That is publishing very short articles answering a specific query.

You still need some where you can write at least some 700 words (without fluff) and so far this seems to be working. It's still extremely early to draw conclusions, since I only started doing this a couple of months ago with just over a dozen articles (on an established site) but there are positive signs (eg - getting some traffic& rankings already).

So the length of an article doesn't appear to be that important when we're dealing with very specific questions. At the same time, my articles are still not ranking above any of the more widespread, army-ants ones. But it's still a bit too early to draw conclusions.
 
calinel said:
I started experimenting with "solitary ants" so to say to see if the opposite works. That is publishing very short articles answering a specific query.

You still need some where you can write at least some 700 words (without fluff) and so far this seems to be working. It's still extremely early to draw conclusions, since I only started doing this a couple of months ago with just over a dozen articles (on an established site) but there are positive signs (eg - getting some traffic& rankings already).

So the length of an article doesn't appear to be that important when we're dealing with very specific questions. At the same time, my articles are still not ranking above any of the more widespread, army-ants ones. But it's still a bit too early to draw conclusions.
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This seems to be like the "Phil" method described on reddit of low comp long tail articles that are on the shorter side. He does publish en masse though, and apparently has made lots of similar sites quite quickly using that method.

Interested to know how those articles will be doing after 8 months or so. Please update us if you can. Thank you.
 
calinel said:
I started experimenting with "solitary ants" so to say to see if the opposite works. That is publishing very short articles answering a specific query.

You still need some where you can write at least some 700 words (without fluff) and so far this seems to be working. It's still extremely early to draw conclusions, since I only started doing this a couple of months ago with just over a dozen articles (on an established site) but there are positive signs (eg - getting some traffic& rankings already).

So the length of an article doesn't appear to be that important when we're dealing with very specific questions. At the same time, my articles are still not ranking above any of the more widespread, army-ants ones. But it's still a bit too early to draw conclusions.
Click to expand...
Hi @calinel - want to check how this strategy is working for you. I'm beginning to work on a few articles with this strategy.
 
calinel said:
I started experimenting with "solitary ants" so to say to see if the opposite works. That is publishing very short articles answering a specific query.

You still need some where you can write at least some 700 words (without fluff) and so far this seems to be working. It's still extremely early to draw conclusions, since I only started doing this a couple of months ago with just over a dozen articles (on an established site) but there are positive signs (eg - getting some traffic& rankings already).

So the length of an article doesn't appear to be that important when we're dealing with very specific questions. At the same time, my articles are still not ranking above any of the more widespread, army-ants ones. But it's still a bit too early to draw conclusions.
Click to expand...
Shorter articles answering specific questions have been successful for me.
But I make sure there is context. For example, the query can be answered in 1 or 2 paragraphs.
Then I usually have at least 3 others, just to provide context, and considerations that might be relevant.
Those can link to other articles.
Usually, there are more than 5 paragraphs tho.
 
WinMore said:
Shorter articles answering specific questions have been successful for me.
But I make sure there is context. For example, the query can be answered in 1 or 2 paragraphs.
Then I usually have at least 3 others, just to provide context, and considerations that might be relevant.
Those can link to other articles.
Usually, there are more than 5 paragraphs tho.
Click to expand...
Thanks @WinMore - can you also help me with how you go about your title.

If your article is about 'Can dogs eat cookies?', do you title it the same way, or do you have something like 'Dogs and Cookies - Everything you need to know'.

I want to use the latter so I can hit a wider range of keywords, but worried that this would mean I would stop hitting the top spot for the main targeted keyword.
 
I go for the more specific one, so in your case "Can dog's eat cookies?"

If I get many related posts like that ("Favorite cookies for dogs by breed", "Watch out for unhealthy dog cookies!", "The best treats to give your dog", ...) then I might make another post as you suggested.

Treats for your dog - Everything you need to know
Make this article as useful as possible. List stuff like what their optimal diet is, how it depends on breed, exercise, and how much you can stray from it (maybe even a formula by breed).
This could link to an article that explains how many treats/calories you can give for example. And then THAT article might link to the cookie one. You need to figure out what makes sense and what might be useful for your audience.

Forgive me, I know nothing about pets and diet.

The articles that you don't link to in your main article, but are still somewhat related (and you want to link to), you can just add in a section "Read also" or "Related articles" at the bottom.
That way they don't diminish your actual article, but you still get the internal link.
And if you give it an interesting title, people might even click it just because they are curious!

I go for the more specific title because it answers a very specific query. The idea is to beat out the more generic articles. I like to think people just want an answer to their specific question, fast. They don't want to learn everything about the subject. If they did, they would have searched for that.

It seems impractical to me to cover a whole subject in one go anyway. Why not cover it one section at a time, so when you cover it fully you have tons of smaller articles to boost your main subject?
 
Good point but, wouldn't this decrease ad revenue if you do it this way? Not only ad revenue but affiliate revenue as well.
 
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