Your Niche Isn’t Competitive (You’re Just Looking at It Wrong)

0:00This is the simple reason why you shouldn't be scared of competitors in SEO. Your niche is not as competitive as you think. And I constantly get emails like, I want to rank for this keyword and it's crazy competitive. Do you think I can do it? Or there's no way I'm going to be able to do it. You don't understand. My niche is so hard. My

0:19competitors are so savvy. They're not. Then I I I go and I look at the serp at the search engine results page for the keyword that somebody emailed me saying they want to rank for. And I see that very few or none at all. There's no optimized pages and low domain authorities. Most people only look at keyword difficulty scores. Don't do that. Actually look at the search engine results page. Look at the pages that are ranking for the keywords that you want to rank for. So this episode is about how SEO at the bottom of the funnel, where there is actual intent, SEO where there is intent in your niche is still a

0:59blue ocean. That's what this episode is about. We got to address the elephant in the room, which is top of funnel SEO is destroyed. It informational SEO has gotten destroyed over the last couple of years. This is from Ahrefs update. AI overviews reduce clicks by 58%. In December 2023, the average position one click-through rate for informational

1:23keywords was 0.076. In December 2025, this had dropped to 0.039. That is devastating. Click-through rate for informational keywords, even if you are ranking one, has gotten so much lower. So minimize your time playing that game. Minimize the effort and the time that you are putting into going after high-volume top of funnel keywords. Unless it's really easy and there is some benefit to ranking number one for it. Especially if it's really easy. You could rank number one for a top of funnel keyword and then use that ranking to internal link to more valuable pages that are targeting more high intent language. That will boost the pages targeting the high intent

2:08language. But generally speaking, it's not a good use of effort and time going after informational keywords. Now, if you sell something that people buy or use, or you sell a service, AI still needs to refer businesses. And this is where SEO is a blue ocean. And AI will always need to refer businesses. The only way AI knows who to recommend is based off of what the company says about itself and what people say about the company on user-generated content platforms. Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, TikTok. This is a blue ocean. So, what will happen is very often I will see a business that is already doing marketing. So, they

2:51already have some domain authority. There's no blockers for them to rank on Google. Like, a blocker would be their domain authority is too low, they're too new a site, or they were hit in the past with a penalty. Those are blockers. If If that's the case, you need more authority. If you have a brand new site, you need to build up some authority. You need to get backlinks. Yesterday's episode of the show was a really good one on how to get backlinks. Episode 1062 of the show, five link building methods that actually work, ranked plus real examples. Really good episode about how to get backlinks, meaningful

3:23backlinks. But most of the people who email me, they don't have any blockers and they're more established businesses. They've been doing business for over a year. They've gotten a bunch of links already. They've gotten direct traffic and branded searches where people are searching their brand name. They might already be ranking for some keywords, like very, very, very few. Maybe not even ranking number one, maybe just ranking at the bottom of page one, but they're already ranking. And these people will email me saying again, "My niche is so my keywords are so competitive, there's no way what you teach is going to work for me. And these people don't realize,

3:59and maybe you're one of them, that they have no relevance to the keywords that they think are competitive. When I get emails like this, the people who are emailing me, and I'm not saying this to insult these people, it's it's just a lack of knowledge thing, they think that just by using their keyword in their H1 and a few times in their page, that's all you have to do, and that's what makes your page relevant. It your H1, if you don't know, is the big text at the top of a page. But, they don't realize that actually the most important ranking factors, aside from authority, are

4:34having the keyword in your page title and your URL slug. And then, after that, then the H1, and then the beginning of the first sentence. And after that, you actually don't really have to use your keyword more on your page, if it's longer tail, because that could be perceived as keyword stuffing. That could be perceived as unnatural use of the keyword. If you're using it in the places that I just mentioned, and you're putting it in your meta description, and then you're using it many times on your page, Google might perceive that as keyword stuffing, and actually you might be over-optimizing, you might not do as

5:05well. If it's a keyword where it's unavoidable, that's fine. So, a keyword that's very short, for example, and there's just no way to avoid using it many times on the page. But, when you can, you're better off using variants of your keyword to cover even more keywords. You're using variants the other variants that people also search for that are related to your keyword, so you can rank for your keyword and then the variants of the keywords. So, if your target keyword is enterprise SEO consultant, instead of repeating it 15 times on your page, you would use enterprise SEO expert or enterprise search consultant or technical SEO

5:41consultant for large companies. These are variations of your target keyword. This helps your page rank for more keywords with less work. These businesses that email me, they don't realize that their competitors are not doing this, too. So, they don't have enough relevance for their target keywords, and they don't realize that their competitors also don't have enough relevance for their target keywords. And so, I'm recording this episode for the businesses that think that their obscure niche is secretly so competitive. And their problem is one, they are undervaluing relevance as a ranking factor. Having their page or their post be relevant to their target keyword. They are

6:25undervaluing how important relevance is. They probably think that it's all about authority when it's not. Authority plays a major part, but only up until a certain level, and that level isn't even very high. Two, these businesses that think that their niche is so hard, they don't know how to evaluate competitiveness within their niche. Which is, look at the SERPs and see if your competitors are actually optimizing for the keyword in the ways that I described. Putting it in the page title, the URL slug, the H1, the beginning of the first sentence. And the third mistake that I see is these people emailing me are just targeting the most

7:04head keyword, the most obvious key A head keyword is is a short version of a keyword. It's the most like basic version of a keyword, the most obvious keywords that everybody is actually targeting. That's where it's more likely that there's going to be real competition, where other people are targeting that keyword, where other

7:20websites are targeting that keyword. It's the the most obvious keywords. But, this third issue is surprisingly rare among the emails that I get. It's mostly one and two, which is people undervalue relevance as a ranking factor, and two, they don't actually know how to evaluate competitiveness in their niche or competitiveness for a keyword. They're not looking at the SERPs, they're looking at keyword difficulty scores, and even if they are looking at the

7:47SERPs, they don't know what to look for. And for the rare people who are having issue number three, where they're just going after the most obvious keywords, in this case, the solution is to just look through competitor rankings to find longer tail, more specific, high-intent keywords. These usually are less competitive or just straight-up downright easy to rank for because these

8:07ones are not being targeted properly. So, your niche is not as competitive as you think, and your keywords are also not as competitive as you think. Look at the SERPs, look for relevance. When you actually know what to look for, you realize that a lot of the keywords that you thought were competitive are not, and you go, "Oh my gosh, I can actually

8:28do this. I can rank for these keywords. I can get traffic, meaningful, qualified traffic, where people are searching for what I sell, and I just have to become more relevant to the keywords, have to just put up a page that is more relevant to my target keyword." So, it's great news. It's great news for SEOs out there. It's great news for businesses out there who want to sell stuff using SEO, and that's why I'm making this episode. If you want to go deeper on this method of finding a relevant, high-intent keywords, my SEO course, Compact Keywords, has a 2-hour section showing me finding these keywords, showing me making pages targeting these

9:06keywords, along with specific templates to use to sell a single product or service or multiple products and services with an SEO landing page. I show how to structure your site for these SEO landing pages. These are conversion-based SEO landing pages. I have multiple templates, which shows how to structure your site for these, how to build links, how to do a technical audit, step-by-step how to do a technical audit, and so much more. And if you have employees, this is a perfect course to get for them. I love this

9:37review from John Ray. Give Edward's framework in the course to one of your motivated junior employees, have them follow it exactly as he's laid out, and your employee is going to gain a power skill that will serve them for the rest of their career. You don't have to do anything, and you're going to gain a six-figure, you know, SEO level employee just by having them go through

9:59this course. Thank you for that, John. You can get the course at compactkeywords.com. That's everything that I got for you on this episode of the podcast. This is episode 1,064 of my daily search engine optimization show, The Edward Show. 1,064 days in a row doing this podcast. I have not missed a single day since I started

10:201,064 days ago, and we're going strong. If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening. And I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.