Kw Research Question

As we know a lot of health related terms are dominated by sites like mayoclinic, webmd, etc. These sites could rank a page for a kw based off their domain authority alone. Way back then, you used to be able to buy EMDs and rank for those kws just by virtue of having the kw in your domain name.

New update, EMDs are out.

But if you do market research for kws in Market Samurai for instance, you'll get results where webmd or mayoclinic is ranking for the term without having the kw in the title, h1, or even url. And backlinks to page is less than 100, even though backlinks to domain are in the hundreds of thousands. Would you still go for it? Or would the domain authority just dominate everything else in this case?

Per example:

990 searches/month
7/10 with no optimization for url, title, desc, h1, no dmoz, no yahoo
7 pages on serps with pr0, 1 pr1
only 1 domain age 2 yrs, the rest above 15
6/10 have backlinks to page below 100

my concern is the backlinks to the domains are all in the 6 figures, even in the millions. Which is normal in the health niche. So what do you guys think? would you go for it?

It sounds like you would have a change to rank. Make sure that your content is good. 1000+ words for the page. Also, you would need to get some quality backlinks to the page. I've been able to outrank webmd and theose types of sites before without much trouble. If the domain is high but the page you are trying to outrank doesn't have much in the way of pr or quality backlinks, you should have no problem.

Last year I had a few projects in health niche that ranked higher than webmd and mayoclinic. They still rank well in 2015 and receive enough traffic, however this year webmd has over ranked them without links pointing to their page...

It depends on Your site, I would say that you need big site with thousands of pages to rank for these keywords, even that these are low search. Of course a lot depends on your ability get quality links which could help You rank with less pages. But my advice would be go with authority site and focus on long tails.

I'd say it's worth trying. If you have 1000+ of high quality content, and fully optimize you're onsite while optimizing offsite, I wouldn't see how you couldn't outrank for that term.

sergey007 said:

Last year I had a few projects in health niche that ranked higher than webmd and mayoclinic. They still rank well in 2015 and receive enough traffic, however this year webmd has over ranked them without links pointing to their page...

Click to expand...

THIS. I've experienced exactly the same thing, even in my local google. Authority sites are getting all the love now, even though they're not seo-optimized that much (no kw in url, title, h1, description, etc).

A site like webmd ranks for almost all permutations of a kw. It's really like the strong getting stronger kind of a situation.

I always tread lightly when popular authority websites appear in the SERPs. For example, if I had a small health site and I discovered the keyword "south paw monkey syndrome" and saw that WebMD was ranking in the SERPs for "diseases caused by monkeys" without the keyword I discovered (or any LSI variations) appearing in the SERPs, I would definitely try to rank for it.

However, if I saw that WebMD was ranking for "south paw monkey syndrome" or any LSI variations in their title, slug, or header tags (even if they're not necessarily targeting that exact keyword); I would avoid that keyword. Of course, there are many other factors I would consider (such as the other top 10 websites, their statistics, etcetera) before ruling the keyword out completely.

You need to do first keywrod reaserch.


If you keyword selection is good then you get result.