Will high quality content and moderate SEO beat low quality content with lots of SEO?

[paulseowork]

A lot of the beginner guides (okay, sometimes, the "guru" ebooks as well) tell you to go after niches with low competition, as defined by keyword research, etc.

When does it make sense to fight for SEO and when to look for new ground? The top ten results for a lot of moderate competition (<50k exact searches monthly, <500k exact match results) are the same copy-pasted crap. All the backlinks are typical spam/low quality SEO. I swear I can make a more useful site for readers, especially for niches I know a lot about personally.

Is it worth it to fight? Can quality win over someone who just does xrumer/scrapebox/whatever all day?

 

[Staccs]

A lot of the beginner guides (okay, sometimes, the "guru" ebooks as well) tell you to go after niches with low competition, as defined by keyword research, etc.

Try to avoid picking niches because they're easy to rank. If you're doing AM, your goal is to make money, not rank as many websites as possible.

When does it make sense to fight for SEO and when to look for new ground? The top ten results for a lot of moderate competition (<50k exact searches monthly, <500k exact match results)

Also, don't define the niche quality by its searches, but rather its profit potential.

...I swear I can make a more useful site for readers, especially for niches I know a lot about personally.

If you can make a better site that visitors will appreciate more, and you'll enjoy doing it, you should always make that site. I don't understand why you would want to go for "moderate" SEO instead of "lots of SEO" in the first place. Make the quality site, then SEO it better then the other page 1 results.

 

[paulseowork]

Try to avoid picking niches because they're easy to rank. If you're doing AM, your goal is to make money, not rank as many websites as possible.



Also, don't define the niche quality by its searches, but rather its profit potential.


If you can make a better site that visitors will appreciate more, and you'll enjoy doing it, you should always make that site. I don't understand why you would want to go for "moderate" SEO instead of "lots of SEO" in the first place. Make the quality site, then SEO it better then the other page 1 results.

Thanks. I said moderate SEO, because I'm a noob and might not be able to do as well as an experienced person.

 

[C.Rebecca]

In smaller niches, its easy to beat competition and get high rankings.

But when it comes to competitive niches like health insurance, travel and hospitality, even biggies (sometimes) lose the game.

If you believe you can provide better content go ahead. Its easy to rue the smaller niche with good content.