I'm thinking about tackling a fairly competitive niche. It gets a healthy amount of monthly searches and has high CPC.
The competition is comprised of sites that are mostly 5+ years old, have tons of backlinks, are well optimized, but are low on content. Many of them have less than 10 pages.
I'm not experienced in SEO, so I'd like to know if what I'm contemplating is realistic. Basically I want to try to beat the competition with LOTS and lots of quality content. I can invest in some back-linking, but not as much as most of the competitors have poured into it.
The site would be brand new, so PR and age would both be 0. Obviously getting a EMD is impossible.
Is content really king, BHW?
While you can do it with less backlinks if your site content is a lot better your chances of doing well in the scenario you are describing is not all that great, especially short term like out to a year or so.
Now having said that there is a way to go that is content heavy but you need to start with a lot of related long tails and lower competition keywords.
Lets say the main keyword you have in your sites is widgets. Instead of starting there set your sights a bit lower to start.
Create your main page about widgets.
Lets say there are four types of widgets so you set up those four as categories
Red widgets
Blue widgets
Green widgets
Yellow widgetsNow you you look for every single possible long tail in each category do not be picky about search numbers you are going to gather them all together so you want as many as possible.
So lets say one fairly popular type of red widget is fast red widgets
You take all those fast red widgets keywords and break them into groups to see how many articles will cover them all. How many you can put on a page is flexible. Personally I will use as many as I can without making the article sound stupid. It usually works out to 3-5 to a page. So you have one article that has the following keywords.
crazy fast red widgets
funny fast red widgets
fast red widgets are cool
I like fast red widgets
With the long tails you really only need to have most of them on the page one time to get it ranked.
Basically you are building a pyramid of keywords. You do the above for all your categories and you end up ranking for maybe a couple of hundred or more long tails. Once this process is underway you add in some links for your category keywords and some for the main keyword.
After awhile you will find that you are not only ranking for all the long tails but your category keywords as well. You now have a site that has a lot of ranking keywords that are both bringing in cash but are going to support your goal of ranking for that hard to get main keyword.
The disadvantage of doing it like this is it requires a lot of content. Since that seems to be the way you want to go then it sounds like a good fit.
There are three main advantages of doing it this way.
Income- instead of not making any money while you spend a year going after a high competition keyword you rank for all the long tails first and fast. This brings in some income while you are working on your main goal. Also do not discount those long tails, while separately they might not have a lot of traffic I have found that combined they sometimes generate as much traffic as the main keyword and sometimes more income as they tend to be buying keywords. In a lot of cases they rank very easily because the search counts are low so nobody bothers targeting them.
Stability- When you have a large number of keywords supporting your site you are not going to get freaked out when one of them drops off the first page, you are diversified to such an extent that those minor changes do not matter all that much.
Main Keyword Support- When you have a site already ranked for a large number of related keywords it is going to take a lot less links to rank for the main high competition keyword. By ranking for them first Google already sees the site as important in that area. Ranking for all those related lower competition raises the floor for your main keyword by quite a bit.
