The “fairly good” ranking seems pretty good.
Except it's not. At least not if you dig a little below the surface.
You will quickly realize that a “pretty good” ranking is actually a mirage, an oasis in a sea of cutthroat competition. That means it's unlikely, if ever, that you'll drink from the firehose of the traffic you're desperately looking for.
Here's how to uncover whether a “fairly good” ranking is likely to increase your revenue right away, or whether you need to solve a short-term problem to achieve a commensurate long-term ROI. I will explain.
Problem 1: Top 10 is not enough – you need at least top 3-5
Get current organic keyword rankings. Then enjoy seeing all the “fairly good” rankings we're picking up for the relevant keywords you're looking for.
Looks pretty good on the surface, right?
Picking up a few top 10 rankings and even top 20-30 rankings should bode well for the future.
The key word in the last sentence is “ought.”
Let's expand the list, look at it again, and then focus on it. what you can't see.
Give up?
There is no top 5!
But why is this bad?
Two reasons:
- This suggests a lack of topical authority. Most rankings in the top 20-30 bode well for the future. However, without topical authority, you will always face an uphill battle to achieve a long-term ROI that needs to justify all the time, effort, and expense that it realistically takes.
- The second issue comes down to organic click-through rates. On average, the top five positions receive about 70-80% of all clicks. This means that if you get stuck ranking outside of the top five, you may only get a fraction of the clicks you actually need to drive seven-figure customer acquisitions or more.
Breaking into the top 10 is a good start.
But this is not enough. Because location 10 might get the same fragment of traffic as location 20, 30, or 100+, which is zero.
And that's a bad sign especially when combined with some of the following issues:
Problem 2: Your “good” content doesn’t actually match what searchers are actually looking for.
Big brands are grabbing every break.
They can publish mediocre content on huge sites, but it usually works “pretty well.”
Everyone else? you can't. Here's why:
Let's look at another random SERP example.
Let's say the current page is an opinion article, how-to, or a landing page.
Now let's take a look at the actual content types that are currently ranking.
Um oh! Chances are your article is well written by an expert in the field. (No surface level AI garbage whatsoever).
It may be full of technical Babel stories that your ICP adores.
However, if this continues, your ranking will not improve! It's unlikely and won't happen anytime soon.
So while being in the top 20 may be “good enough” for now, there is no guarantee that you will actually land in the coveted top 3-5 positions that will bring you 80%+ results for this keyword.
Problem 3: Keyword cannibalization also turns off on-page optimization
Using a balanced scorecard to analyze underperforming content quickly reveals some of these issues.
This is because keyword cannibalization (or “fairly good” rankings for highly relevant keywords) can be difficult if there is a lack of topicality (very few top 5 rankings) and problems with search intent and content mismatch. It often happens. You're on the right track, but most of the time it's holding you back in the long run).
This is a bad sign.
Generally speaking, the reasons are as follows:
- If you want to create and optimize a single piece of content for a specific keyword or topic.
- It should cover semantically related subtopics, related questions, and additional content types (images or videos) specific to those keywords or topics.
So even if one piece of content gets multiple “fairly good” keyword rankings, it's very unlikely that it will get a good rank (top 5) on those additional keywords. (Unless you have a lot of duplicates in the SERPs.)
The easiest way to spot this problem is if you're well optimized for your primary keyword target, but not well optimized for the second or third keywords you're currently competing against. , there is an excellent detailed article to refer to.
So this is:
Great content, on-page optimization, and alignment of search intent for a single keyword.
But by revisiting on-page optimization for secondary cannibalized keywords, this content became mediocre by comparison.
There are many things that are missing “top topics” or semantically related concepts that should be covered in this article.
It is also an overall “average” optimization compared to its competitors, which is likely to remain in the top position almost always if this issue is not resolved.
These three issues we've covered so far are very common, but they mostly focus on how well you're doing your keyword research and content strategy.
In other words, all elements are 100% under your control and already on your site.
Yet, we have not yet addressed the issue of off-site strength.
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Problem 4: Competition is incredibly fierce
Keyword difficulty (KD) is a biased and incomplete metric at best, and a completely misleading or lying metric at worst.
Look it up in almost any keyword research tool. What you see is primarily the amount of referring domains to each top 10 ranked content page, rather than an accurate measure of your competitors' content quality or domain strength.
This is a big problem because it causes false positives.
You will be tempted to select keywords and topics because “KD” will otherwise display them as “easy” or “low.”
Look at the screenshot below for one of these “low KD” keywords and parse the number of referring domains from the current top 10 actual brand and domain strength.
Summarizing the screenshot above, we can see the following:
- Very strong domain level strength.
- Strong page-level strength (dozens to hundreds of high-quality links to each piece of content).
- Huge brand names (Gartner, HBR, BCG, McKinsey).
I mean, come on. It should already be obvious soon.
Search is a zero-sum game. In order for you to win, others must lose. That means you need to eliminate these competitors. (See “Issue 1” above.)
So what are the chances that you'll do exactly what these competitors do in this SERP? Especially if you are. do not have Already a huge brand (home category leader + DR 90+)?
Not even slim. Or close to impossible.
Either way, it's a terrible SERP to compete with most deadly brands.
Still, the unraveling from this SERP competition perspective is far from over.
Problem 5: The quality and quantity of referring domains are orders of magnitude different.
Now, let's put all these issues together.
There's usually more than one reason why something doesn't make the top five. Many of them are running on the same keyword and content match you are trying to improve.
And everything becomes even more difficult when faced with an arms race in the reference domain.
The last thing SEO Catch-22 wants to admit is that the highest-converting keywords on the web (i.e., the keywords that bring in the most revenue for your business) are also the most competitive and difficult to rank for ( This means that it requires a larger investment and takes longer to see meaningful results).
Let's look at an example again to visualize these problems.
The brand is big, the domain is highly rated, the content is great, and it integrates well with search.
Similarly, the quality and quantity of the top five referring domains is also very good.
So in an ideal world you would need:
Before I write a single word on this topic!
If you don't, you're just setting yourself up for failure (or at least waiting months or years and getting yelled at by your boss, investors, spouse, etc.).
Don't be satisfied with mediocre rankings
The “pretty good” ranking is just that. They are a good starting point.
But they do not have There are always good signs:
- you are on the right path.
- SEO + content strategy works in the long run.
- We don't yet have a ton of distributions that we need to bring immediate results.
A pretty good ranking is like a mirage.
On the surface it looks good.They are did it I hope it's a good sign.
Or it could be indicative of a serious problem that, if not fixed quickly, will continue to sacrifice your results for months and years to come.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily those of Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.