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If you’ve consumed any of the content on our YouTube channel or blog, I’m sure you know how much we like to target low-competition keywords. In this email, I’m going to tell you why we sometimes do the opposite.
Believe it or not, we post quite a bit of content on a couple of our sites that has very little chance of ever climbing to page 1 in the SERPs. Yes, we sometimes get lucky with one of these posts, but that’s not the driving factor for publishing these pieces.
To make this super clear, let’s use our public site, My Backyard Life, as an example. Go ahead and head over there and see how many recipes Ben has published. Spoiler alert: it’s a lot.
While you’re at it, head over to his YouTube channel to see what he’s doing there, because the content on that channel falls into the same category.
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While a few of those recipes do rank and bring in traffic, the majority of them do not. If you look at the top 100 posts on My Backyard Life, only a few of them are recipes.
So what’s the point in producing all of this content, when it doesn’t directly drive traffic? There are a few reasons, all of which are important.
First, whenever you create a niche site, you want it to look and feel authentic. In the case of My Backyard Life, Ben started that site as a grilling site. Would you expect a site about grilling to be void of recipes? I surely wouldn’t.
Publishing content on your site that your visitors expect to see has many benefits. Not only will your readers trust your content, but they’ll also click around to see other pages. They might even come back if you’re lucky 🙂
Another huge benefit, at least in the case of recipes, is that they drive backlinks. Even though most of those recipes don’t rank high in the SERPs, they account for a ton of the high-authority backlinks pointing to the site.
Although we don’t actively build backlinks on any of our sites, they are super important to have and will help to drive the growth of your site. Having the right type of content on your site can lead to some of these natural backlinks, as it has with My Backyard Life.
Another benefit of publishing content that won’t rank is that it can help to build your topical authority. When you have a grilling site, having a bunch of recipes about the Big Green Egg, the Blackstone, beef, chicken, pork, etc. can only help to show Google that you know something about these topics.
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Lastly, and this one is definitely a long-term benefit, is that publishing this type of content can help to build your brand awareness. This is more in regards to producing content off of your website, like on YouTube or any other social channel.
By getting your brand out there on different platforms, you’re sending signals to both Google and your readers that you’re the real deal. Even if most of that content doesn’t drive traffic, you’re putting your name out there across the web, which definitely helps to build your brand.
So as much as we say to focus on low-competition keywords, publishing hard-to-rank content can, and does, make sense in some situations. Don’t overdo it, but at the same time, don’t neglect it completely.
