Hey, thanks for the reply, Mike.

Yeah, funny about the difference between industry terms and regular people-speak, isn't it? I'm pretty sure a radio station PD would file my music under "AAA", but your average American music listener hears that and thinks, "oh right, that's who I call when I lock my keys in my car".

One unrelated thing: I was on your site and came across your interview with John. I was interested in listening, but couldn't find a way to download the audio in order to listen later, while driving. Did I miss the "download" button somewhere?

Mike Baker said
Hey John (and Mike) - a few further questions on authority site SEO for you:

 

So I went back through my notes on all of the various SEO trainings that have been offered so far,  and I noticed that although you've explained how to find useful longer-tail keywords, you've also often talked about just deciding to go after very high-competition keywords as well (if you're going to spend a few years building an authority site, anyway).

 

I came across a keyword that fits this category, but I'm wondering whether the competition might still be too stiff, even for someone who's planning to crank out quality content for years in a purposeful SEO campaign.

 

An intitle search for the exact phrase returns about 675,000 results; inurl returns about 375,000. I used Market Samurai to check the competition; result #8 is a Facebook page with 7 backlinks, result #9 is a youtube video with zero backlinks. There are a couple of other results with zero backlinks too (though the domain is similarly imposing).

 

Am I reading these results right - are these beatable? - or are the sheer numbers of other sites with the keyword in the title/url just too huge? Thanks!

My methods are a little bit low-tech these days. Generally when it comes to checking out the competition, I only pay attention to the top 3 organic sites on the main page. That's where you need to be if you want to get a half decent amount of traffic. If any of those sites has a page rank of 3+ and has the keyword you're after in the URL, Title and H1, you'll probably have a rough go of it. Especially if they also have an aged domain.

However, social signals seem to have risen in their ability to influence rank - so if you have better content (i.e. a lower bounce rate/faster load times) and have signs of social engagement on your site (likes, social shares, on-site comments) - it's possible that you can dethrone a site that has more links and domain age.

If this is an authority site that you're building and you're passionate about it - I wouldn't let the competition sway me too much.

However, if you're building a niche site that you want to rank quickly and you don't really care about - I would target another keyword if you see the competition actively targeting the same keyword in the title, url, h1 and have significant PR and links.

This is just my two cents.

I've got another question related to this month's training. Regarding the mini-site strategy; I know that it's in your best interest to get an exact match domain name that's identical to the keyword you're targeting. Would it be just as effective to get a wordpress.com blog with your keyword in the URL as it would to establish a self-hosted site with a similar URL?

That is, would "purehiphop.wordpress.com" work as well as "purehiphop.com" in this context?