ranking against .gov sites

I have a political forum that is doing OK, have about 20 active members out of almost 400 and about 55K posts over the last 9 months.

I have found that I am ranking top 5 for a keyword on the supreme court and the power they have. It gets about 140 searches a month though and has only 1 .gov site in the top spot. So I did some more digging and found some keywords that are getting about 4400 local US searches each month no competition and pay around $3.00 CPC.

The problem I see is that the top 3 positions are .gov sites. Are these hard to beat out in the SERPs? I guess I could be happy with the 4th slot and I am sure I can get there in a few weeks to a month as I have learned a lot about SEO from this site.

Just not sure about going against .gov sites and the favor Google shows them.

forgot to ask, if there is no competition showing in Adwords, how are they paying so much for a keyword?

Could be hard. I have one in my top ten for a 150k exact, and it's been a pain passing it. Mine is a 10 year old site with several thousand links, and a lot of time and money put in.

jon_xx_x said:

Could be hard. I have one in my top ten for a 150k exact, and it's been a pain passing it. Mine is a 10 year old site with several thousand links, and a lot of time and money put in.

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That was what I was afraid of. Even if I could get an EMD of the keyword, which I can, I am not sure if I could take that top spot.

Exactly. EMDs aren't as powerful as they once were. Probably not worth the time for 4400 exacts per month, unless it was big money.

yep.. emds lost value... But still you can rank it if you work smart...

No, you can over take .gov websites easily... But forum is a dynamic website and when it comes to Static vs Dynamic... Static website wins.

Yes, it will be very hard and time consuming to surpass these guys. Start working now, get quality backlinks from the same gov sites you want to outrank. Work hard and a lot, results will come. Advertise your forum, get more visitors. There are many things to do, I suggest you do them.
Some keywords are higher paying, they are more searched for,etc. I didn't understand who s paying more for them, though.
Good Luck!