Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
The fundamental reason why people fail at SEO is because they can’t differentiate between medium and high competition. People often don’t understand what makes their niche more or less competitive.
Without knowing how competitive a keyword is, many follow conventional SEO practices without adapting to the level of competition. They start creating content, publishing articles, and building links like wikis, bookmarks, and profiles, without realizing they need a different strategy for competitive niches.
If you are new to SEO and want to succeed, focus on mastering keyword research and targeting untapped, low-competition niches.
In competitive niches, experienced SEOs have big budgets. Success comes down to who can acquire the most high-authority backlinks. If you don’t have at least $200 a month for SEO, it’s pointless to pursue competitive niches. Avoid niches like:
- Weight Loss
- Acne
- Credit Repair
- Insurance
- Mortgages
- Finance
- SEO
- Web design
Most offline businesses go to agencies for SEO, which are often inefficient in spending their budgets. With a reasonable budget of $200-$500/month, you can make progress in these niches by targeting less competitive keywords.
Step One: Setup a Badass Site
If you’re investing in SEO, start by investing in your website. Good design and proper social profiles connected to your Google Plus account are essential. Set up Google authorship for your site.
Step Two: Launch Your Site in Month One
Whether you have a new or old site, this step applies. New sites need time to build trust with Google. Focus on publishing content and acquiring high-authority links during the first month.
Regularly publishing fresh content will help your new content get indexed and ranked faster. For the first 4-6 weeks, publish content bi-weekly and build a few high PR authority links.
To learn how to find and buy high PR backlinks, read this post.
Spend the majority of your SEO budget on high PR backlinks from relevant sites. Aim to spend 70% of your budget on PR4-5 domains and create relevant websites that link back to your site. Use the remaining budget to buy high PR links from other relevant sites in your niche.
Focus on domains with strong link profiles (1,000-5,000 incoming links is good) and avoid sharing PR pages with adult or gambling sites. Tools like Majestic SEO can help analyze link profiles.
Step Three: Wait and Build a Social Presence
After building your high PR links, stop building more links and give your site time to stabilize and gain trust. Use this period to publish more content and create a social media presence. Social signals are important for simulating viral growth.
You can boost social activity by using services like Fiverr to get Facebook likes, retweets, and manual bookmarks. Forum posting is another excellent way to drive organic traffic and improve your site’s natural presence.
Step Four: Continue Building Links
Once your site is stable, continue building 1-2 high PR backlinks each week until you reach your target rankings. To maintain your rankings, continue building links consistently or switch to a less aggressive approach by building conventional links like wikis and profiles. Using tools like SEnuke can automate this process.
If you prefer a more controlled strategy, focus on creating your own high PR sites. This allows you to remove problematic links if your site is penalized, giving you more control over your link-building efforts.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below.
Comments
Olivia Greene
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →This post is so insightful, David! I’ve been struggling with SEO in competitive niches, and your breakdown here really helps simplify the process. Thank you for sharing your expertise. I can’t wait to apply these strategies to my site!
Marcus Hill
I find it hard to believe that simply focusing on high PR backlinks can make such a big difference. Do you have any case studies or data to back up these claims? I would love to see some real-world examples.
Sophia Nguyen
Thanks for the great tips on building high PR backlinks. I’m curious, though—how often should I be checking my backlinks to make sure they’re still effective?
Jason Wright
While I appreciate the detail in this post, I think it’s a bit too focused on high-budget strategies. Many of us can’t afford to spend $500 a month on backlinks. Do you have suggestions for those of us with smaller budgets?
Emily Waters
This is such a well-written post! It’s been a while since we last caught up—how have you been, David? We should definitely meet up soon and chat more about SEO strategies!
Luke Carter
I faced a similar problem when trying to break into the finance niche. It’s incredibly competitive, and I didn’t realize how crucial high PR backlinks were until I read your post. Now I’m focusing more on building quality links, and I’m already seeing results!
Amira Patel
If anyone here is struggling with SEO, I highly recommend checking out SEMrush. It offers an in-depth analysis of competitors and has really helped me refine my strategy. It complements everything David talks about in this post perfectly.
Hannah Blake
Wow, I’ve learned so much from this post! I never realized how much of a game-changer high PR backlinks could be. I’m definitely going to start incorporating these strategies into my SEO plan.
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I am wondering also about the niches listed to avoid — ‘insurance’, ‘finance’ — this is written very much for an American reader. In my market, cosmetics distribution is competitive for entirely different reasons than the ones described, mostly around trust and local reputation rather than backlink budgets. Does this guide translate at all outside of where it was written for?
‘$200-500 a month for SEO’ is doing a lot of assuming here — assuming you have that spare in the budget the same month rent’s due. Some of us are optimizing keywords during a lunch break, not deciding between PR4 and PR5 domains.
Cass raises a fair point about who this is written for. From the company side, most reps I worked with who succeeded on limited budgets did it by picking one long-tail keyword cluster and owning it completely rather than trying to compete on the list of ‘avoid these niches’ terms at all, big budget or not.
I think what’s being missed here is Renata’s point actually strengthens the post rather than undercutting it — owning one keyword cluster completely is exactly the ‘less competitive niches’ advice the post gives, just phrased more practically than the post itself managed to phrase it.
‘Owning it completely’ — over what timeframe? Against how many competing pages?
Buying artificial Facebook likes and tweets so a piece of content ‘seems’ more popular than it is isn’t really a grey area, whatever this post calls it — it’s telling a reader something false about how many people actually engaged with what you made, in order to get more of them to trust it. The post frames it purely as a tactic, something that either works or doesn’t, and never once as a question of honesty toward the actual person reading the article. I don’t think everything in business needs a moral lecture attached to it, plenty of this stuff is just strategy, but this specific piece — paying for the appearance of an audience you don’t have — is worth asking what kind of habit it builds in a person, whether or not Google ever catches it.
Hollis is right. Fine, call it a ‘nice SEO boost’ if you want. It’s still buying a lie about how many people liked your article. The post just doesn’t want to use that word.
Reading ‘wait and build a social presence’ as its own separate step made me tense up a little, honestly — I’d turn that waiting period into six weeks of second-guessing whether the links were ‘good enough’ instead of actually publishing anything in the meantime, which defeats the entire point of the step.
Sorry if this is a basic question but I don’t fully understand the difference between the low-competition strategy and the high-budget strategy described here, is the idea that if you can’t afford the monthly SEO spend you just shouldn’t try to rank for anything competitive at all, or is there a middle path the post doesn’t spell out?