I accidentally ranked for some big branded keywords(literally their brand), on the second page.
be careful with this! Some companies (usually the big, filthy rich ones that are registered in the West) don't like people making money off their brand, so they might sue you or take your site / business down if they see you getting lots of traffic for their branded keywords.
It might never happen, but it's good advice not to rank for their brand if you can abstain from doing it
I'm shocked how big their traffic is.
if it's a big brand I'm not shocked.
I'm sure you can see how brands like Apple, Samsung, etc can have 100s of keywords with many millions of searches, so it's not that shocking
My question is, if it's just branded intent, why they don't just click the first rank and be done with it?
again, if those keywords have millions of monthly searches it's normal for some of that traffic to go beyond page 1, it happens a lot...
As for why they don't click on the first website, well.... they might have clicked on the first ranked website but you wouldn't know.
Or they might have clicked on the 1st organic entry but they might not have liked what they've seen.
For example, let's assume that someone searches for a keyword like "iphone 13 vs iphone 14" (made up keyword, don't get stuck on whether or not it's a real keyword or how much traffic it has, I just came up with this keyword for the sake of argument).
So, someone looks that keyword up in google and the 1st ranked site is apple.com (what a shock, huh?) ... Well, I don't think that Apple have a comparison page that targets this keyword specifically so that people can get the comparison chart between the 2 iphones, and we all know how google loves ranking big authority sites before everyone else even when the intent is not there.
If this is the case, you can't be surprised that people see only big authority sites / pages ranking on page 1 but none of them addresses the intent of their query but they rank based on authority and trust alone. So, it's normal for people to go to pages 2 and beyond in order to find the answer they're looking for, which is something I do a lot of too...
What else potentially people are searching for?
the actual intent that google refuses to provide? Or maybe they're doing research for their sites? Who knows...
Does that mean there is any opportunities?
well, in life there are always opportunities for everything, but not too many can see and / or seize them
But what kind of opportunities are you talking about here? SEO opportunities to rank for these keywords, or what exactly?
