Your “fairly good” rating seems very good.
Except they aren’t. At least, not when you dig a little below the surface.
You’ll quickly realize that the “pretty good” ranking is actually more of a mirage, an oasis in a sea of fierce competition that means you’re unlikely, if ever, to drink from the hose of traffic you so desperately seek.
Here’s how to figure out if your “good enough” ranking is likely to generate revenue soon, or if you’ll need to fix some short-term issues to get the long-term ROI you deserve.
Problem 1: The top 10 isn’t good enough; the minimum ~3-5 should be
Increase your current organic keyword rankings. And revel in all those “very good” rankings you’re getting for the highly relevant keywords you’re searching for.
Looks pretty good on the surface, right?
Picking up a couple of top 10 rankings and then more top 20 to 30 rankings should bode well for the future.
The key word in the last sentence is “should”.
Let’s look again, expanding the list and then try to focus on what you don’t see.
To give up?
There are no top five rankings!
But why is this bad?
Two reasons:
This indicates a lack of topical authority. One could argue that many top 20-30 rankings bode well for the future. However, without topical authority, you’ll always face an uphill battle to achieve the long-term ROI you’ll need to realistically justify all the time, effort, and expense you’ll need. The second problem comes down to organic click-through rates. On average, they get the top five positions ~70-80% of all clicks. This means that being stuck outside the top five may only get you a fraction of the clicks you’ll actually need to generate 7+ figure customer acquisition.
Ranking in the top 10 is a good start.
But it’s not good enough because position 10 probably gets the same share of traffic as position 20, 30 or 100+, which is zero.
And that’s a bad sign, especially when combined with these upcoming issues.
Problem 2: Your “good” content isn’t really aligned with what searchers really want.
Big brands catch all the breaks.
They can post mediocre content on their giant site and usually do “pretty well”.
Everyone else? I can not. Here’s why.
Let’s take another random SERP example.
Say your current page is an opinion piece, a guide, or even a landing page.
Now, let’s look at the actual content types that are currently ranked:
Uh oh! Your article could be well written by real subject matter experts. (None of this surface level AI rubbish).
It might be full of the technical Babel-speak that your ICPs love.
But, it won’t rank as is! Not likely and not soon.
So while it may be “good enough” for the top 20 right now, that’s by no means a guarantee that they’ll ever see the coveted 3-5 positions that actually deliver 80% more results than this keyword.
Problem 3: Keyword cannibalization means on-page optimization is also disabled
Analyzing underperforming content with a balanced scorecard will make some of these issues more immediately apparent.
Because when you have no topic authority (little to no top five rankings) and have search intent + content mismatch issues, you’ll also often see keyword cannibalization (or “fairly good” rankings for a relevant keyword that make her look like you). you’re on the right track, but it will almost always hold you back in the long run).
This is a bad sign.
Because in general:
When you write and optimize a single piece of content for a specific keyword or topic. You should be covering semantically related subtopics, related questions, and additional content types (images or video) specific to those keywords or topics.
So, even if you have a piece of content that garners several “pretty good” keyword rankings, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll rank well enough (top five) for those additional keywords. (Unless you see a lot of overlapping SERPs.)
The easiest way to spot this problem is when you see a good, in-depth article that is well-optimized for your primary keyword target, but poorly optimized for the secondary or tertiary ones you’re now cannibalizing.
In other words, this:
Great content, on-page optimization and search intent alignment for a keyword.
However, reviewing the on-page optimization for cannibalized secondary keywords now makes this content look normal by comparison.
There are many “main topics” or semantically related concepts that should be covered in this article.
And generally “average” optimization relative to competitors who almost always continue to outperform you if this issue isn’t addressed.
These three issues discussed so far are extremely common, but focus almost exclusively on how well you’re doing your keyword research + content strategy.
In other words, all factors are 100% under your control and already in place.
And yet we haven’t even covered the off-site force issues!
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Problem 4: Your competition is incredibly fierce
Keyword difficulty (KD) is a biased and incomplete metric at best, and completely misleading or lying at worst.
Look for this in almost every keyword research tool. What you see is not a true measure of content quality or competitor domain strength, but primarily the amount of referring domains on each content page that ranks in the top 10.
This is a huge problem because you will see false positives.
You’ll be tempted to select a keyword or topic because the “KD” says “easy” or “low” when it’s not.
Take a look at the screenshot below for one of these “Lower KD” keywords and now look at the number of actual brand referring domains and the domain strength of the current top 10:
Recapitulating the screenshot above, it illustrates:
Insane strength at mastery level. Strong page-level strength (tens or hundreds of high-quality links to each piece of content). Giant brands (Gartner, HBR, BCG, McKinsey).
I mean, come on. It should be immediately apparent.
Search is a zero-sum game. For you to win, others must lose. This means you have to take down these competitors. (See “Problem 1” above.)
And so what are the chances of doing that, in this SERP, with these competitors? Especially if you are no is it already a giant brand (domestic category leader + DR 90+)?
Thin to no. Or almost impossible.
Either way, it’s a terrible SERP to compete for most deadly brands.
And yet, we haven’t quite unpacked that SERP competition angle yet.
Problem 5: The quality and quantity of referring domains are out of your league
Now, let’s put all these problems together.
There usually isn’t a single reason why you don’t rank in the top five. There are many that play the same keyword + content match you’re trying to improve.
And all of this becomes much more difficult when faced with an arms race in reference domains.
The SEO Catch-22 that most people don’t like to acknowledge is that the best converting keywords on the web (i.e. the ones that generate the most revenue for your business) are also the most competitive and difficult to rank for (i.e. which means it will require a larger investment and take longer to show significant results).
Once again, let’s look at an example to visualize these issues:
The brands are big, the domain ratings are high, and the content is good and well aligned with search.
Similarly, the quality and quantity of referring domains in the top five are also extremely strong.
This means that, in an ideal world, you will need:
All before writing a single word for this topic!
Otherwise, you’re just setting yourself up for failure (or at least, months to years of waiting and being called out by bosses, investors, spouses, and more).
Don’t settle for mediocre ratings
“Pretty good” ratings are just that. They are a good starting point.
But they are no always a good sign that:
You are on the right track. Your SEO + content strategy will work in the long run. You still don’t need a ton of distribution to generate results soon.
Pretty good rankings are like a mirage.
On the surface they seem nice. They can be a good sign.
Or, they could actually hint at deeper issues that will continue to sacrifice results for months and years if not addressed as soon as possible.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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