A truly comprehensive answer!
Considering that it is a niche that interests me a lot I will definitely do as you advised me.
Thanks a lot for the answer!
No problem! One more thing I forgot to add. When you find a long tail variant of a more competitive keyword, you want to google it and assess the competition manually. There is no tool on the market that can predict organic competition properly. You can however do this yourself. It's actually very simple. You want to look for the following:
1) Top 10 results have user generated content (social media pages, forums, Q&A sites, other user generated pages. These are the easiest to beat.
2) Weaker sites showing up on the first page (sites with low DA/DR). SEO metrics are flawed, but not all the way. They work really well for competition analysis. When you have a bunch of data, metric based analysis is statistically significant.
3) Sites that are 1:1 - for example if you have an affiliate site, you want to see other affiliate sites on the first page that have weak metrics. If your site is e-commerce there should be e-commerce sites showing up. This ties into
search intent. Google's AI ranks pages based on what a user is looking for a particular search query. When people keep searching for a particular term, they tend to go to certain 'type' of websites. Over time Google associates that type of site as 'relevant' for that particular search query. This is why "best" or "review" keywords show a lot of amazon associate websites. People want an opinion before they make a purchase. Whereas product names or "cheap product name" is more e-commerce, because that is the search intent.
Make sure your content reads well and it is better than the rest of your competition. Better can be an article that provides a better or multiple solution and is usually longer than the competition. By following this strategy, I outperform several authority sites which rank for a particular keyword only because they have authority, and no one else has so far produced content that satisfies the actual search intent.
Put yourself in the shoes of the person typing in the query and then craft an original piece of content that answers the query in the best possible manner. If you find yourself stuck on the second page, try updating the article adding more words/providing more solutions etc.. A good article update can also push you ahead of the competition.
Interlink your articles properly. Just go to NY Times and see how they interlink. Just follow a similar strategy, and build 80% links to your home page and 20% to your articles. If you choose your keywords properly you'll toast the competition in no time.
