And You Won't Believe What Happened Next...

Imagine you have a new site, looking to white hat it all the way to million-dollar company.

Before all of that cash, you are sitting with ~5k budget to spend on content.

You know your website sucks on authority right now so you are looking to target long-tail zero competition keywords.

But... You are a honest guy with a white hat on top of your head. Duplicate content is your biggest enemy...

There are keywords, e.g. "Basketball tips", "Basketball tips for students", "Basketball tips for business majors"

The life and death question: You know you need to tackle long-tail phrases such as "Basketball tips for business majors" AND eventually try to move up the ladder. However, "Basketball tips for students" and "Basketball tips for business majors" result in you writing pretty much the same tips but for different audience. Will Google consider this Duplicate content? Will Google penalize this young white hat gentleman? What do you do in such situation, where the tips, techniques don't really vary between the different target audiences, however, there are people searching for these specific phrases?


Looking forward for your answers, detectives.

just write for your audience. Create one long article called "basketball tips" and add sub-headings with the other keywords (for students, business majors etc.) in the article. Basically, cover ALL of the basketball tips in the world in one long article (3k-10k words) with each sub-heading addressing a different long tail. And then add a Table of Contents plugin to let your visitors decide which section (sub-heading) of your article they want to read.

But, I think basketball is a bad niche to get into as a beginner. I mean, if you're a basketball authority or ex-player with decent popularity you will get traffic, but if you're a newbie to SEO and/or blogging basketball is a niche with limited amount of content that can be produced. A much better option would have been to create a website on sports, and then add each sport you want to cover as a category and then narrow down each sport by other big topics in that sport like... I don't know... maybe top players, rules, competitions, etc. This way you will have had content to produce for years and your website would have been seen as an authority too once you started getting rankings.

tazarbm said:

just write for your audience.

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Thank you so much for your insightful answer! If I understand it correctly you are suggesting me to create one big article (3k-10k) words that would include all the topics mentioned above, right? Why would you think this is better than creating a big article on basketball tips, have 1 paragraph for students, and from that link to a more specific article which is based on basketball tips for students keyword?

By the way, I'm not creating a basketball niche website Thanks for the heads up tho! I'm starting with a website which is broader and picking a more specific niche just as you said. Just for confidentiality I don't want to reveal the real topic.

tazarbm said:

Basically, cover ALL of the basketball tips

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I have talked with couple of agencies that suggest for new sites to tackle these super specific keywords and make a new page for each keyword. So, for example - You are selling t-shirts, and you see a quite a demand for green t-shirts for girls. These agencies are suggesting creating a page only for green t-shirts that are for girls. What do you think about such approach?

Leave everything!
Tell me first that what happened next or change this super clickbaity title.

Juicerjuice said:

Thank you so much for your insightful answer! If I understand it correctly you are suggesting me to create one big article (3k-10k) words that would include all the topics mentioned above, right? Why would you think this is better than creating a big article on basketball tips, have 1 paragraph for students, and from that link to a more specific article which is based on basketball tips for students keyword?

By the way, I'm not creating a basketball niche website Thanks for the heads up tho! I'm starting with a website which is broader and picking a more specific niche just as you said. Just for confidentiality I don't want to reveal the real topic.

I have talked with couple of agencies that suggest for new sites to tackle these super specific keywords and make a new page for each keyword. So, for example - You are selling t-shirts, and you see a quite a demand for green t-shirts for girls. These agencies are suggesting creating a page only for green t-shirts that are for girls. What do you think about such approach?

Click to expand...

the agencies are right: you should start with super specific keywords until you rank and gain some traffic and authority, but in a niche like basketball there are only so many keywords you can target before you run out of topics to write about. That's why I suggested that you wrap it all up in one big, juicy article (google favors long articles, especially in less competitive niches), but since your niche is not basketball... well, a limited niche that is... you can do it any way you want (either like I suggested, or by linking to sub-topics from the 1st paragraph of your main article)

Harry Jodha said:

Leave everything!
Tell me first that what happened next or change this super clickbaity title.

Click to expand...

Haha! Golden marketing method, used for many thousands of years, to attract more eyeballs... I must decline your offer to drop this amazing clickbaity title...

IT IS UP TO YOU TO DECIDE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT!

Don't think about writing content for every keyword like this -

article 1 - what are red widgets?
article 2 - why are widgets red?
article 3 - where to buy red widgets?

That is old school but Google has moved on from that; they know that people searching for all of those keywords, as well as variations like "what red widgets are used for" and "what is the purpose of red widgets?" are searching for the same or very similar information.

So you need to think about keyword clustering and covering "topics" with your content, rather than individual keywords.

Here is a more visual representation of that - below is a screenshot from some Ahrefs research I did recently - this is a single article on a competitor's website, look at the number of keywords they are ranking for and the total search volume for those keywords. No, they're not getting the full share of that traffic, but the article is pulling in around 2k traffic per month from that one article according to Ahrefs. It also has 210 top 10 positions and of those, 30 first place positions.

tazarbm said:

the agencies are right: you should start with super specific keywords until you rank and gain some traffic and authority, but in a niche like basketball there are only so many keywords you can target before you run out of topics to write about. That's why I suggested that you wrap it all up in one big, juicy article (google favors long articles, especially in less competitive niches), but since your niche is not basketball... well, a limited niche that is... you can do it any way you want (either like I suggested, or by linking to sub-topics from the 1st paragraph of your main article)

Click to expand...

Nice! So, as everything in SEO, it depends. Haha, but if seriously, I see what you and agencies are saying. Thanks for the insight, however, one thing still bothers me... How different do the pages have to be? Again, let's take the basketball students and business majors as an example.

Let's imagine that there is decent search demand for "basketball exercises for students" and "basketball exercises for business majors" The exercises WON'T vary too much. For example 5/10 exercises are going to be the same in both pages but written for a different target audience. Would everything be alright with such pages? Wouldn't this be penalized for duplicate content, as some, not all, of the exercises are the same, however, directed to a different target audience? (The paragraphs themselves would be originally written, so there wouldn't be paragraphs written EXACTLY the same)

davids355 said:

Don't think about writing content for every keyword like this -

article 1 - what are red widgets?
article 2 - why are widgets red?
article 3 - where to buy red widgets?

That is old school but Google has moved on from that; they know that people searching for all of those keywords, as well as variations like "what red widgets are used for" and "what is the purpose of red widgets?" are searching for the same or very similar information.

Click to expand...

I see where you are coming from, I'm not disagreeing with you, however, because I lack some experience I still have some questions about your point of view.

As I understand correctly, you are suggesting to cluster the similar keywords in a super blog that will answer all the questions about the "red widgets" However, do you think that this is manageable with a completely new site? There are many big players in my niche that have 1-2 articles about my topic but no one goes deep and specific. I think, as a new site without any authority I wouldn't be able to rank for 700 keywords, and creating broad, huge articles will take so much time to rank. This is how I look at the situation, what are your thoughts about this? Looking for your reply Thanks, again.

Juicerjuice said:

I see where you are coming from, I'm not disagreeing with you, however, because I lack some experience I still have some questions about your point of view.

As I understand correctly, you are suggesting to cluster the similar keywords in a super blog that will answer all the questions about the "red widgets" However, do you think that this is manageable with a completely new site? There are many big players in my niche that have 1-2 articles about my topic but no one goes deep and specific. I think, as a new site without any authority I wouldn't be able to rank for 700 keywords, and creating broad, huge articles will take so much time to rank. This is how I look at the situation, what are your thoughts about this? Looking for your reply Thanks, again.

Click to expand...

Not a super article, just a normal article but think about writing somewhere between 2k - 4k words per article and group together similar keywords.

To work on the example that you gave - "Basketball tips", "Basketball tips for students", "Basketball tips for business majors" - these 3 keywords can 100% be answered by a single article. So look up those 3 keywords on Google, you will find common sites and most likely common articles ranking for each. Then if you look at those articles and grab their ranking keywords from Ahrefs you will find lots of very closely related keywords that they are also ranking for.

So my point is this - group similar keywords together if it's logical for you to cover them in a single article. Carry out additional research as well and find maybe 10-20 keywords that you can also cover in the article. So it's not a super article it's just a good piece of content that answers questions for quite a few readers and a closely related set of sub-topics.

Write 10-20 of those and you have a decent website that should definitely start ranking at least somewhere before you even think about link-building.

Juicerjuice said:

Nice! So, as everything in SEO, it depends. Haha, but if seriously, I see what you and agencies are saying. Thanks for the insight, however, one thing still bothers me... How different do the pages have to be? Again, let's take the basketball students and business majors as an example.

Let's imagine that there is decent search demand for "basketball exercises for students" and "basketball exercises for business majors" The exercises WON'T vary too much. For example 5/10 exercises are going to be the same in both pages but written for a different target audience. Would everything be alright with such pages? Wouldn't this be penalized for duplicate content, as some, not all, of the exercises are the same, however, directed to a different target audience? (The paragraphs themselves would be originally written, so there wouldn't be paragraphs written EXACTLY the same)

Click to expand...

Juicerjuice said:

I see where you are coming from, I'm not disagreeing with you, however, because I lack some experience I still have some questions about your point of view.

As I understand correctly, you are suggesting to cluster the similar keywords in a super blog that will answer all the questions about the "red widgets" However, do you think that this is manageable with a completely new site? There are many big players in my niche that have 1-2 articles about my topic but no one goes deep and specific. I think, as a new site without any authority I wouldn't be able to rank for 700 keywords, and creating broad, huge articles will take so much time to rank. This is how I look at the situation, what are your thoughts about this? Looking for your reply Thanks, again.

Click to expand...

Ps - Please use multi-quote

Juicerjuice said:

Nice! So, as everything in SEO, it depends. Haha, but if seriously, I see what you and agencies are saying. Thanks for the insight, however, one thing still bothers me... How different do the pages have to be? Again, let's take the basketball students and business majors as an example.

Let's imagine that there is decent search demand for "basketball exercises for students" and "basketball exercises for business majors" The exercises WON'T vary too much. For example 5/10 exercises are going to be the same in both pages but written for a different target audience. Would everything be alright with such pages? Wouldn't this be penalized for duplicate content, as some, not all, of the exercises are the same, however, directed to a different target audience? (The paragraphs themselves would be originally written, so there wouldn't be paragraphs written EXACTLY the same)

Click to expand...

Man, I honestly don't know because it depends on the niche. Some people rank with 30-40% duplicate content, others rank only with 100% original content. Google have made so many algo tweaks and updates that no one knows exactly what works in every niche. That's the best things nowadays are to test things yourself and look at what your competition is doing.

For example, if the 10 pages ranking on the 1st page of google all have 3k-4k words long articles it's obvious you won't rank with 1k words article. Not as a newbie anyway. If you're an experienced SEOer you might run some shady stuff like 301 redirects, lots of quality PBN backlinks or links from websites like Forbes or NY Times or whatever. But as a newbie you won't be able to rank any of those websites with thin content and even without, or with very few backlinks, much less with poor quality backlinks.

On the other hand, if the 10 websites ranking on 1st page of google are either forums, or pinterest boards, or youtube videos, facebook pages, etc (very rarely but can happen) you can be sure that you'll rank with only a short article and a few quality backlinks pointing to the page you're trying to rank. You need to test and study your competition all the time and mimic what they're doing. If those guys are at the top of google it means that they're doing things right, so you have to mimic them and once you get there, on the 1st page, improve your content 5-10% and get a few extra quality backlinks to outrank them.

This is in a nutshell how to rank on the 1st page, but again, the effort you must put in (creating the content) and the money you must invest in backlinking will depend from one niche to another. For example, you can bet your ass that you have no chance (again, AS A NEWBIE) to outrank anyone in the financing and web hosting niches. These niches are so competitive that you're growing old by the time your website sees rankings in these niches. But if you target "balloon inflating with the help of elephants" just make a page on your website called like that, add a 300 words article with an ALT tag'd image and the keyword in the 1st paragraph and you're good to go. Of course, that was just an example niche, I don't know if that even exists...

Personally - and with this I'm closing this long message - I would create a long article (again, long articles rank better) on the main topic of the website and add long tail keywords as sub-headings and then have the article indexed. Once it gets indexed I'd build a few quality links (guest posts and PBN backlinks from relevant websites which get organic traffic from google) to the homepage of my website for a few months while posting more content and if that long-ass article won't even make it into top 30 within 3 months despite of being quality content, long, and by having quality backlinks pointing at it then the niche is too competitive and needs more backlinks, more content and more time.

By the way, you said that your website is new. Well, generally, new websites (domain names I mean) rank harder nowadays. I've heard some people say that it takes at least 6-7 months of continuous work before you start seeing rankings, so be prepared for this, too!

Thank you so much, David! As I don't know a lot about duplicate content, before changing the website structure and start grouping keywords in these related topics I'm going to research this a bit more. But your answer exceeded my expectations and I'm grateful that I have been blessed with The Notorious David's knowledge. Thanks again!

Sorry for the multi-quote! Won't happen again

Juicerjuice said:

Thank you so much, David! As I don't know a lot about duplicate content, before changing the website structure and start grouping keywords in these related topics I'm going to research this a bit more. But your answer exceeded my expectations and I'm grateful that I have been blessed with The Notorious David's knowledge. Thanks again!

Sorry for the multi-quote! Won't happen again

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Definitely mate, do some research as well because there is never a right answer in SEO, you have to try and see what works for you based on what others are doing combined with your own twist. Let us know how you get on as well.

tazarbm said:

By the way, you said that your website is new. Well, generally, new websites (domain names I mean) rank harder nowadays. I've heard some people say that it takes at least 6-7 months of continuous work before you start seeing rankings, so be prepared for this, too!

Click to expand...

I'm prepared for this! I really do believe in what this project stands for. Regarding the SEO side, you really put everything beautifully. Now I completely understand your point of view I will do the research, constantly test and look at the competition! Thank you so much for your time and insights, you really helped me a lot. If there is anything I could help you it would be a pleasure

davids355 said:

there is never a right answer in SEO,

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For sure! If you will need anything, hit me up! I will see what I can do

Juicerjuice said:

I'm prepared for this! I really do believe in what this project stands for. Regarding the SEO side, you really put everything beautifully. Now I completely understand your point of view I will do the research, constantly test and look at the competition! Thank you so much for your time and insights, you really helped me a lot. If there is anything I could help you it would be a pleasure

Click to expand...

Thanks! And don't worry, I don't help you to expect something in return. I help you because I'm an old fashioned dude who still thinks that the way forward with evolution lies in doing good deeds, unconditionally. Besides, others on the forum have helped me too when I've had problems, so my conscience urges me to give back

And yes, SEO is a constantly changing game. At its core, it's simple: you need great content + enough great backlinks to achieve rankings. But the way to achieve those rankings differs from niche to niche, from keyword to keyword, and equally important, from year to year. What's worked 10 years ago doesn't work today anymore and (probably) won't work 10 years from now. You need to test and tweak things constantly.

Juicerjuice said:

Imagine you have a new site, looking to white hat it all the way to million-dollar company.

Before all of that cash, you are sitting with ~5k budget to spend on content.

You know your website sucks on authority right now so you are looking to target long-tail zero competition keywords.

But... You are a honest guy with a white hat on top of your head. Duplicate content is your biggest enemy...

There are keywords, e.g. "Basketball tips", "Basketball tips for students", "Basketball tips for business majors"

The life and death question: You know you need to tackle long-tail phrases such as "Basketball tips for business majors" AND eventually try to move up the ladder. However, "Basketball tips for students" and "Basketball tips for business majors" result in you writing pretty much the same tips but for different audience. Will Google consider this Duplicate content? Will Google penalize this young white hat gentleman? What do you do in such situation, where the tips, techniques don't really vary between the different target audiences, however, there are people searching for these specific phrases?


Looking forward for your answers, detectives.

Click to expand...

To know if its duplicate, just look at the keyword intent. How? Search at google with your targeted kw. If each kw have same result then you need make one article. If different, you can make 2 article targeting each kw.

The worst about duplicate is there's might be a problem with the ranking in the future. The ranks will switch depends on google thinks which your page that closely related. Since every page have different authority.

Juicerjuice said:

however, there are people searching for these specific phrases?

Click to expand...

Google is really smart at detecting question with the same search intent

Search results will remain the same and would shuffle a bit depending on authority. For instance, queries related to groundnut and peanut would show up same snippets as they're the same thing.

People type questions in different format but Google's duty is to converge them to the same spot

MAN! This is almost 100% one of my highest open email subject line title haha. Well done you clickbait whore

SEO is part art, part science, no niche is the same, but the only thing that is sure, is that quality over quantity is more and more relevant. Focus on the intent of the reader, not for google, their AI know better everyday if an article is shit or not. For link building which would be the next part it's the same.. quality link is better than 1000 spam links. It's finish the time where you write shit and buy cheap links. Today the only important thing is to think about your user and what they want, what do they search? and why?

llarasati said:

To know if its duplicate, just look at the keyword intent. How? Search at google with your targeted kw. If each kw have same result then you need make one article. If different, you can make 2 article targeting each kw.

The worst about duplicate is there's might be a problem with the ranking in the future. The ranks will switch depends on google thinks which your page that closely related. Since every page have different authority.

Click to expand...

Absolutely! To get the right user intent is crucial! Thank you so much for you reply!

HustleTong said:

Google is really smart at detecting question with the same search intent

Search results will remain the same and would shuffle a bit depending on authority. For instance, queries related to groundnut and peanut would show up same snippets as they're the same thing.

People type questions in different format but Google's duty is to converge them to the same spot

Click to expand...

Thank you so much for your answer. The example with groundnut and peanut is perfect! Do you have any tips, strategies on how to check what the user intent is?

Willyfish said:

MAN! This is almost 100% one of my highest open email subject line title haha. Well done you clickbait whore

SEO is part art, part science, no niche is the same, but the only thing that is sure, is that quality over quantity is more and more relevant. Focus on the intent of the reader, not for google, their AI know better everyday if an article is shit or not. For link building which would be the next part it's the same.. quality link is better than 1000 spam links. It's finish the time where you write shit and buy cheap links. Today the only important thing is to think about your user and what they want, what do they search? and why?

Click to expand...

Haha, I have to somehow get your attention! You got fooled by your own bait... I truly believe with quality over quantity, its about VALUE VALUE VALUE.Value is king, do you know any tips or strategies on how to check user intent? Thanks for your insights they are really helpful!

Juicerjuice said:

Absolutely! To get the right user intent is crucial! Thank you so much for you reply!



Thank you so much for your answer. The example with groundnut and peanut is perfect! Do you have any tips, strategies on how to check what the user intent is?



Haha, I have to somehow get your attention! You got fooled by your own bait... I truly believe with quality over quantity, its about VALUE VALUE VALUE.Value is king, do you know any tips or strategies on how to check user intent? Thanks for your insights they are really helpful!

Click to expand...

Understand what your customers really want. The deep desire behind the google search they did.

Juicerjuice said:

Absolutely! To get the right user intent is crucial! Thank you so much for you reply!



Thank you so much for your answer. The example with groundnut and peanut is perfect! Do you have any tips, strategies on how to check what the user intent is?



Haha, I have to somehow get your attention! You got fooled by your own bait... I truly believe with quality over quantity, its about VALUE VALUE VALUE.Value is king, do you know any tips or strategies on how to check user intent? Thanks for your insights they are really helpful!

Click to expand...

Yep value value value like you say. In 2021, we sell value, we sell a lifestyle, we sell a benefit, we don't sell products anymore. it's what all marketing experts say.

Same in SEO, copywriting is all about selling value When you do that good enough, selling products after become a piece of cake