Building a Site in the YMYL field (long term goal: authority site)

CokeAndCake

CokeAndCake

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Hello, I am currently starting a website from scratch in a YMYL niche, which is gonna make this super hard. Especially because I don't have any specific qualifications to score well in terms of EAT. I furthermore don't plan on buying any backlinks yet (I might in the future but I will try not to, my goal is to make this website whitehat). I'm starting this thread to hold myself accountable so that I don't end up ditching the project after a couple of days. I might not post daily but I will definately try to keep this threat up to date. I have done the following already:

  • Got domain (namecheap) and hosting (hostinger)
  • Connected to cloudflares free plan
  • Used Astra with elementor to build my basic pages (Home, About, Contact, Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions) with a template from Starter Templates (free version for all)
  • Installed free site security (Wordfence + WP Hardening + JS Guardian (Cloudflare App) )
I am starting fresh, the domain is new and I have no social media etc to give my site a boost.

Costs​

  • Got 1 domain from namecheap ($8.17)
  • 4 Year Hosting from hostinger ($72.60)
Total Costs: $80.77


Plan​


Because my niche is YMYL (financial, law, medical etc) google is very strict on who they let rank. I basically need to establish my site as trustworthy, which is very very hard because I am not an expert that is being interviewed etc so google doesn't see my as an authority. I do have quite some knowledge about the niche and I know how to research topics in depth so I don't just write blog content anyone could just come up with. But YMYL sites are very very hard to establish, almost impossible if you don't have a good plan. I don't expect to get anywhere with this site for the first year, 2nd year I might rank for some stuff but I am fully aware that this is a very long term project.

I need to write in depth high quality articles for very very low difficulty keywords. The goal is to rank for some keywords and show google "Hey this site has good high quality content". I don't expect to get any traffic at all from any of these and to be honest I think I might already run into huge problems ranking for those. The niche is so competitive, it's almost impossible to rank for anything and even the low difficulty keywords have fierce competition between unestablished sites. My idea is the following:
  • Find very low difficulty keywords
  • Of those, find the keywords with the lowest quality content (which unfortunately will already have decent quality).
  • Write very high quality content with good visualization of processes and a little spin that I have come up with
This will be the main work I will have to do now. Long term I will try to establish EAT. It is absolutely crucial for long term growth in a highly competitive niche. I have thought about multiple ways to go about that, but I will try to focus on my articles first.
 
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My goal for the next 3 days (22nd of july):

Extensive Keyword Research to come up with 100 very low difficulty keywords. The traffic does not matter, the keywords need to be in my niche and something a human theoretically would search.
I will not spend any money for this (ubersuggest paired with the moz plugin and keywords everywhere as well as the longtail pro trial version)

24th of july:
Rank Content Quality for each keyword

25th of July
Start writing content for the lowest content quality keywords
 
This is going to be a journey with good lessons to be learnt.
Best off, is you acknowledge the difficulty, the patience and consistency needed to be successful beforehand.
Will follow and wish you best of luck op.
 
Every journey starts with a solid plan and you've got a good one. Best of luck :)
 
CokeAndCake said:
Hello, I am currently starting a website from scratch in a YMYL niche, which is gonna make this super hard. Especially because I don't have any specific qualifications to score well in terms of EAT. I furthermore don't plan on buying any backlinks yet (I might in the future but I will try not to, my goal is to make this website whitehat). I'm starting this thread to hold myself accountable so that I don't end up ditching the project after a couple of days. I might not post daily but I will definately try to keep this threat up to date. I have done the following already:

  • Got domain (namecheap) and hosting (hostinger)
  • Connected to cloudflares free plan
  • Used Astra with elementor to build my basic pages (Home, About, Contact, Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions) with a template from Starter Templates (free version for all)
  • Installed free site security (Wordfence + WP Hardening + JS Guardian (Cloudflare App) )
I am starting fresh, the domain is new and I have no social media etc to give my site a boost.

Costs​

  • Got 1 domain from namecheap ($8.17)
  • 4 Year Hosting from hostinger ($72.60)
Total Costs: $80.77


Plan​


Because my niche is YMYL (financial, law, medical etc) google is very strict on who they let rank. I basically need to establish my site as trustworthy, which is very very hard because I am not an expert that is being interviewed etc so google doesn't see my as an authority. I do have quite some knowledge about the niche and I know how to research topics in depth so I don't just write blog content anyone could just come up with. But YMYL sites are very very hard to establish, almost impossible if you don't have a good plan. I don't expect to get anywhere with this site for the first year, 2nd year I might rank for some stuff but I am fully aware that this is a very long term project.

I need to write in depth high quality articles for very very low difficulty keywords. The goal is to rank for some keywords and show google "Hey this site has good high quality content". I don't expect to get any traffic at all from any of these and to be honest I think I might already run into huge problems ranking for those. The niche is so competitive, it's almost impossible to rank for anything and even the low difficulty keywords have fierce competition between unestablished sites. My idea is the following:
  • Find very low difficulty keywords
  • Of those, find the keywords with the lowest quality content (which unfortunately will already have decent quality).
  • Write very high quality content with good visualization of processes and a little spin that I have come up with
This will be the main work I will have to do now. Long term I will try to establish EAT. It is absolutely crucial for long term growth in a highly competitive niche. I have thought about multiple ways to go about that, but I will try to focus on my articles first.
Click to expand...
any special reason you want to go with a YMYL niche? Are you sure you don't want to go with an easier one to learn the ropes? i would strongly recommend it.
 
FriendlyPufferfish said:
any special reason you want to go with a YMYL niche? Are you sure you don't want to go with an easier one to learn the ropes? i would strongly recommend it.
Click to expand...
I really like the niche and have quite some knowledge about it. I wish it was something else but I couldn't bring myself to just content mill myself through a topic I do not care about.
I understand that I am probably fucking myself that way, I honestly don't expect to get anywhere with this site before the three year mark maybe, and even then I won't have some authority site.
But I know because I like the topic I would be researching it anyways. I know seo decently enough that I don't think I will fuck up the site badly, but I will see what happens.
 
lawz123 said:
How do you plan on monetizing this?
Click to expand...
My first idea was ads but there are also a ton of affiliate programs possible. I think though that I need to be careful with affiliate programs because I want any readers to have confidence in the info I give out because there seems a lot of unnecessary stuff being pushed onto people.
 
I'll reading your progress posts, interesting in terms of hard niche and establishing EAT from scratch there.
I suppose you're writing articles from pseudonym not your real name, since you said you're not expert in your chosen niche.
 
If it's something you're very knowledgeable about then it's much easier to pump out content and stay motivated. Good luck :-)
 
Update:


I found 131 keywords with a difficulty less than 30 out of 100. From those 39 are under 25 which is what I will be targeting for the start of my website. I am currently looking over the content ranking for the 10 lowest difficulty keywords and check how many backlinks they have. I will decide which keyword to target first based on a score of:
  • the median number of backlinks from the first 3 results
  • The content quality (ranked from 1-10) as well as my ability to create better content (ranked from either lower quality, similar quality to mine and higher quality)
Hoping this works out!
 
braindancer said:
I'll reading your progress posts, interesting in terms of hard niche and establishing EAT from scratch there.
I suppose you're writing articles from pseudonym not your real name, since you said you're not expert in your chosen niche.
Click to expand...
Yes I am looking in establishing a persona for my site. I am on the side looking wether AI generated photos could lend credibility to that persona, very long term I might do something with youtube and a digitally changed voice.

I definately will go for social media too in the future, as it will give additional credibility to that persona and might establish some small EAT to start out from which I can work towards more.
 
It's going to take 3 years of hard work, a lot of content, and a lot of backlinks to become relevant in the niche. It's good that you understand the difficulty before starting your journey and prepared for it. You can try focusing on a category of the niche to grow your site in the beginning. As you mentioned creating unique content, you can outreach authority sites to get backlinks.
 
Starblazer said:
It's going to take 3 years of hard work, a lot of content, and a lot of backlinks to become relevant in the niche. It's good that you understand the difficulty before starting your journey and prepared for it. You can try focusing on a category of the niche to grow your site in the beginning. As you mentioned creating unique content, you can outreach authority sites to get backlinks.
Click to expand...
Yeah I really am on the fence in regards on what I should do to get backlinks. The problem is I don't have a big budget to pay for those at all. But I am thinking about a couple of things I could do to get them for free or cheap while I am starting my site.
 
So I found a keyword with the following stats:


Keyword-Difficulty: 15 (out of 100) according to Longtailpro
Content Length:
  1. 762
  2. 230
  3. 626
  4. 1029
The content is generally lower quality in not that in depth, so I think I can definately write a high quality article there. I will cite sources and really try to make the article visually appealing.

I am going to give myself 7 days (+- 2 days) to write this article including visualizations. I will have to do some deep research there but I think it's going to be worth it. Only visualizations are a bit a pain because it can take a while depending on what I am trying to visualize.

Question for anyone on here: Does anyone have a good way for citing sources wikipedia style with elementor? I am trying to build the article in elementor so I have more control in making it visually appealing all around but the problem is you can't really cite those sources effectively other than just link them.
 
im good at eating so hit me up if you need help with that, I have alot of qualification
 
CokeAndCake said:
So I found a keyword with the following stats:


Keyword-Difficulty: 15 (out of 100) according to Longtailpro
Content Length:
  1. 762
  2. 230
  3. 626
  4. 1029
The content is generally lower quality in not that in depth, so I think I can definately write a high quality article there. I will cite sources and really try to make the article visually appealing.

I am going to give myself 7 days (+- 2 days) to write this article including visualizations. I will have to do some deep research there but I think it's going to be worth it. Only visualizations are a bit a pain because it can take a while depending on what I am trying to visualize.

Question for anyone on here: Does anyone have a good way for citing sources wikipedia style with elementor? I am trying to build the article in elementor so I have more control in making it visually appealing all around but the problem is you can't really cite those sources effectively other than just link them.
Click to expand...
You think too much man
Make it standard blog post with Source Heading at the bottom
Source:
1. Link A
2. Link B

Or by any chance your article is academic article? Because it's useless to use citing on real blog

And why you spend 7 days writing the article. That's too long for 2500 word
Try to fuse the keyword into one post, or two post
Look at this Army ant method

 
akunbajak said:
You think too much man
Make it standard blog post with Source Heading at the bottom
Source:
1. Link A
2. Link B

Or by any chance your article is academic article? Because it's useless to use citing on real blog

And why you spend 7 days writing the article. That's too long for 2500 word
Try to fuse the keyword into one post, or two post
Look at this Army ant method

Click to expand...
Yeah I am using academic sources. The problem is the niche is not just "hard" but like actually painful to rank for if you don't have any EAT established. Smaller keywords seem more possible but even there lots of smaller sites are really competing for those and because its a YMYL niche the whole ordeal is pretty tough. Breaking into this niche is something I want to do systematically.

Now because of that I need to get the article done proper. I mean pitch perfect. Not just some good blog content but like actual high quality research and visualization. Also I think proper citing of academic sources helps a lot with building trust to your visitors. If you're a big authority site you can get away without that but when youre just starting out and noone has heard of you I think not citing sources could be a pretty bad look, I myself wouldn't trust it.

Problem is with that type of source citing people don't know from where you actually got which information. I want to be able to make clear that this part of my post or this visualization comes from x source.
 
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