Impossible to get traffic from competitive keywords because of PPC

[gelsi]

If ppc ads take the first 4 spots and then 'rich snippets' or a 'local map' or 'latest news box' takes up the next space on the serp then you have to scroll a long way down to get to organic listings which are invariably taken up by high authority sites.
It seems its a waste of time trying to rank for any keyword that has ppc ads.

 

[Syrinj]

Adapt: Traffic leaks, unless its MFA

 

[Ryuzaki]

@gelsi, You have to work within your sphere of influence. You can look at your current analytics and find out which keywords you currently successfully rank highly for and figure out their pattern. They'll likely have similar volume and SERP competition. You can use that knowledge to scale where you can actually move the needle for your site. Eventually that sphere expands where you can take down better sites. Even these big authorities were small sites at one point.

I think it was @eliquid, many years ago, who said something I found provocative. His theory was that Google validates you first by sending you the longest tail traffic. Once you accumulate enough of that, you can graduate to the next tier up. I'm paraphrasing, and maybe he can expand on it, but I think the point was you have to start at the bottom of the barrel and gradually move your way up (by becoming a content and backlink authority).

I've seen a lot of that myself. You need enough content on a topic to establish yourself as an authority. If you notice in Search Console, Google actually lists all the words they find on your site and the number of uses they count. You can start to get an idea that they're actually seeing who shapes themselves as an authority on a topic, not only by breadth of related keywords but depth of usage too.

Then for links, all the guest posts, forum posts, blog comments, and whatever you can get from related sites will drive home the topical relevancy and authority. Any big links helps too, lots of which you can get from Traffic Leaking as @Syrinj said.

There are countless SERPs where you see smaller, less authoritative sites outranking the big boys, and that's because they have their authority on a topic so tightly dialed in with relevancy (and on-page) while the big sites aren't focusing that hard on it, they just tangentially mention it and rank until someone comes along and says "this is my relevancy territory."

But people aren't as dumb as we think either. Lot's of people are ad blind in the SERPs and scroll right past all the ads, local packs, featured snippets. We don't trust that stuff. Lot's are suckers too, but there's GOBS of traffic to be had in the top 3, and Google will always show organic on the first page or they'll cease to be used.

 

[eliquid]

Yeah @Ryuzaki

Part of that ( the long tail traffic, etc ) was that in the grand scheme of things if you can't handle what's given to you, why should you get more?

I know that sounds odd, but that was the basis for that theory and experiment. While probably not's Google's intention, it's what I took away from it in doing it.

When trying to rank for something ( as in new site, new niches ), go for the long tail first. Google's not gonna let you rank for "ugg boots" off the bat anyways even if you built your whole site around "ugg boots".

You'll only have enough authority and link juice for the long tails in "ugg boots" and that's all you're gonna rank for off the bat anyways ( excluding blackhat stuff here ). If you can handle that and keep building your site ( and building trust and authority ), you'll eventually rank medium tail terms, and at some point, the "ugg boots" ( after a few years and work ).

Many people will stop building when they don't rank for "ugg boots" and just get the long tails. They give up.

If you can't handle that, why should Google give you more? This was my line of thinking. But actually how it ends up with Google in reality many times.

So what I would do is just build for the long tail. I would be an expert in "ugg boots for size 6 mens in lebanon". I would rank for that worthless term ( not that term exactly, but I am sure you see past my stretching the truth here for example sake ) and rank 1st for it.

Rinse and repeat a few times and your building up authority ( even if worthless or long tail terms ) and ranking 1st - 3rd for these long tails and possibly some medium tails.

After some time, Google sees you rank for a lot of these "ugg boots" terms. Even if semi-worthless. You get some "street cred" now in their algo and ranking history for these ugg boots terms. We know Google keeps a history of terms and your performance in Adwords ( Quality Score ) and knows your performance on them compared to competitors, so why couldn't they use the same methods for organic? Hmmmmm..... if you are smart, you see where I came up with this theory now.

So you have this history of these ugg boot terms now, and compared to other competitors ( big and small ) you start building authority in the general "topic" while not ranking for the big term itself.

At some point though, this ends up becoming your advantage moat and when you start breaking first page for "ugg boots" in the future, you end up deserving it compared to say maybe CNN who wrote an article about it and only hit the front page for a week or 2 and dropped.

I stayed vagued in my example above on purpose. But the smart readers will understand what I am getting at.

Start small, grow big.

If you can't handle the small shit, why should deserve the big shit?

.