Best Keyword Strategy for Lower-Authority-Ranked Domain
-
Hi,
What should a lower-authority-ranked blog (DA - 21) who is trying to increase general traffic focus on above all when selecting keywords: difficulty, monthly volume, opportunity, or priority? I know that all are important factors to consider, but I fear that without an already consistent following our new content will just get hidden behind more established domains if we select too difficult of keywords. I'd love to hear from someone who's built up a blog audience as to what strategy they used here.
Thanks!
-
Thanks for the suggestion (and the initial response). This was a really helpful explanation of what quality content entails!
-
Ross Hudgens has a good article that describes what it takes to be competitive.
-
What exactly did you mean by 'ability to compete' though?
Ability to compete is the ability to create spectacular content, promote it with titles and headlines that people will respond to and spontaneously share, and have a tribe that will do that for you, or an ability to ask for and get valuable links.
Most people can't do this.
Most who can do this only achieve it with a fraction of their articles - even though they work hard at every one of them.
A lot of people think that they have "good content". Perhaps an English professor would have given the writing and the presentation a "good grade" but that isn't enough. You need writing and images that people see and say... Wow!... then they share it because they want their friends to know what they have found. For that to happen you must have content that is at least one clear step above all other competition.
-
Thanks for the response! At this point we're primarily going to be doing informational. Our tribe is about 15,000 spread across various social media platforms (not so much email yet, unfortunately).
It's encouraging to hear someone say that it is indeed possible to rank for difficult keywords with good content--which I'm confident we can create--when there are already juggernauts out there. What exactly did you mean by 'ability to compete' though? And is there a difficulty score that would be considered too high right now for a beginner? I'm looking at publishing an article this week focusing on a keyword with a difficulty score of 39 and a priority of 46 (the highest score I've found for the topic). the competition for which would be some fairly established websites, including NBCNews. I've also looked at similar keywords with with lower difficulty scores, but they also have somewhat lower priority scores.
I look forward to your response.
-
I believe that the strategy is better determined by 1) the type of site you are working on (transactional vs informational); 2) the quality of content that you are best able to produce; 3) the investment that you are willing to put into the content; and, 4) the strength of your tribe.
For informational, you can pick and choose the keywords to where you have the ability and resources to defeat the best content on the web, or at least compete with it. If you don't have the content-producing ability or the ability to pay for it, your chances of success are greatly diminished. If you can compete with the best content of the difficult keywords then you should attack the biggest keywords where you have the ability to compete. Don't fear competition because where there is a lot of competition, there is usually a lot of traffic and a lot of money changing hands.
If you don't have the ability to produce or pay for highest quality content and intend to attack with prattle, then your chances of success are greatly diminished. Just sayin'.
In transactional, a good method is to publish content that is highly useful for the people who are about to make a transaction or have made a transaction and now need information. How to select the product, how to use it, how to fix it, how to enjoy it are very good fields for transactional websites. They earn respect of shoppers and earn respect of people with an interest in the products you are offering. They pull links, traffic, social engagement and make your site a "go to place" on the web.
Your tribal resource might be current traffic who will share your content or current social strength that will enable you to share and that sharing be spread. Here, again is where highest quality content succeeds and prattle is not worth much.
It's not about the authority that you have today... its the authority where your content can take you.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ranking Keyword
Hi! I am Amelia My site rank 5 keyword in united states show that Ahref's and I check in Moz but that shows 1 rank key word and Ahref's shows the 59 backlinks and Moz shows 5 to 6 backlink why that shows low keyword and backlinks that's my site problem or Moz issues. Check My website and tell me issues.
Moz Pro | | Oiebyut0 -
I need help with analysys of one the site with unxplainable extremely high MozTrus rank-> G ranking
Hi MOZ experts. After spending numerous hours analyzing one of my client's competitors site and not being able to figure it out I have no other options but to ask you for help. The site in on first page for at least an year for terms like: windows doors Toronto, windows Toronto etc (very comparative niche, difficulty score 41%) Site : http://www.aztechdoors.com Very few links found: | www.chainmailconnection.com | 31 |
Moz Pro | | ALYR_SEO
| ontarioclassified.com | 29 |
| www.windowsdoorstoronto.com | 13 |
| www.ontario-businesses.com | 11 |
| www.shajinfotech.com | 10 | I would say , low end links, only 1 link caught my eye : www.shajinfotech.com with mR 5.43 (without any reason, site without links , history etc.) Other then that , can't find any reason for high ranking and for high mozRank. Please help me to understand. I don't care about this particular site but I'm trying to understand how things works. Thank you in advance for the help. Alex1 -
What's the best way to keep track of keyword rankings
Here's the deal. I keep track of my keyword rankings with the help of Rank Tracker from seopowersuite.com for the most part. I ran it on a daily basis and my keyword was not in top 100 for a few months. Moz.com panel shows pretty much the same (not in top 50) for the same months. That said, if I check that keyword ranking in my Google Webmaster Tools (avg. position) it says that its position (ranking?) was on average: 49, 7, 7, 8 (for the last four months). So, I'm not sure how it's even possible? How come Rank Tracker and Moz don't see any rankings and Google gives me sorta decent avg. positions at the same time. I assume that avg. postion means that same as avg. ranking, right? I'm not sure what I'm missing here.
Moz Pro | | VinceWicks0 -
Ranking dropped significantly
We have been doing SEO optimization based on SEOMoz reco. However, our page ranking for key words dropped significantly last night.. We used to be on page 3 but now could not even found it on top 20 pages. Not sure what happened last night. I checked google webmaster tool but did not find anything. Can you help?
Moz Pro | | hisstory20010 -
Keyword Difficulty tool
Hello Guys, Please someone explain how the keyword difficulty tool works and decides the difference super competitive v easy to rank keyword. Also the performance of this tool has been really bad since August i have been getting errors i.e. try again in 20 minutes. Thank you in advance for your replies 🙂
Moz Pro | | um090 -
How fast can Domain Authority be established?
I am wondering how much time it takes to grow a new site's domain authority. More so, based on a consistent stream of links, syndication, and content, how fast can a website grow from 0-20, 21-40, 41-60, etc. in terms of domain authority?
Moz Pro | | NickEubanks0 -
How to crawl the whole domain?
Hi, I have a website an e-commerce website with more than 4.600 products. I expect that Seomoz scan check all url's. I don't know why this doesn't happens. The Campaign name is Artigos para festa and should scan the whole domain festaexpress.com. But it crels only 100 pages I even tried to create a new campaign named Festa Express - Root Domain to check if it scans but had the same problem it crawled only 199 pages. Hope to have a solution. Thanks,
Moz Pro | | EduardoCoen
Eduardo0 -
Keyword Rankings Question
Does the Keyword Rankings tool track all urls or just the main. Example: Say I put www.domain.com to have tracked. Will the Keyword Rankings tool also track www.domain.com/landing-page and any derivative of the main domain or would this be considered a separate campaign. Thanks
Moz Pro | | montage0