Why It’s Bad to Write About Topics That Are Too Hard to Rank

One of the biggest questions you need to confront as a marketer is what scale of topic you should be targeting with your content marketing.

I often see marketers making the mistake of viewing the internet as a sort of objective mass, a sea where merit and quality can lift you above other sites despite the overall conditions. While that’s true to some extent, it only goes so far.

The truth is, sometimes it’s just impossible to rank for a given keyword. Sometimes, it’s obvious; you aren’t going to rank for “Nike” unless you’re already an international shoe sales site. Other times, it’s less obvious that a keyword is too challenging to compete.

It’s also very contextual. A site I spin up tomorrow has no weight and can’t rank for much of anything, while a site I’ve been running for years and building up can rank for more topics that would formerly be inaccessible.

It’s a ladder, and it’s a ladder we all have to climb. Unfortunately, it’s also a ladder where the higher up you get, the further apart the rungs are.

What Defines a Topic that is Too Hard to Rank?

Before we talk about why it’s a bad idea to target topics that are too hard, we have to talk about what that even means. How do you rank a topic and determine how hard it is to rank in the first place?

Most people turn to a keyword difficulty checker. There are a lot of these, including features in platforms like Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush, and Mangools. There are also stand-alone tools that just check keyword difficulty.

These tools take keywords or topics you feed into them and check the SERPs for the results. They’ll evaluate things like the Domain Authority of the sites that appear, metrics about the content itself like word count, site-wide metrics like backlink profiles, and other data they can harvest.

The specific metrics used, as well as the algorithm used to weigh them, vary from tool to tool. It’s why platforms with more data like Ahrefs tend to be more accurate and why tools like LowFruits, which uses additional data to look for opportunities more broad-spectrum tools miss, can be more valuable.

You should generally think of keyword difficulty as a comparative metric. It’s not some objective rating of how hard a topic is to rank; it’s an evaluation of how much larger and more heavily weighted the other sites in the SERPS are compared to you.

A topic that you couldn’t dream of ranking for might be one that I could hit if I put in a lot of work, and it would be one that Forbes would be #1 for by the end of the day.

Understanding topic difficulty means being able to evaluate content and site power on the fly, either using tools or using your own insight, or both.

Targeting Too Difficult Topics Wastes Your Time

Why is it a bad idea to target topics that are too difficult? It’s a waste of time and effort, and if you’re paying for content/images/optimization, money.

You can broadly divide topics into four categories, at least in my view. These aren’t hard categories, and there’s a lot of fuzziness around them, but I’ll go through them to illustrate my point.

Category 1 is the topics that are too easy. These are topics that are beneath you; you could easily dominate the results for them, but the trick is that it doesn’t matter. These are topics where there’s little or no search interest and no real value.

Metaphorically, think of these like low-paying gig work tasks, the kind of thing you see posted on r/beermoney or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. You can do the task and get a guaranteed payout, but the payout is just a few cents. Your time should be worth more than that.

Category 2 are the topics that are just right. These aren’t too difficult for you to rank for and can bring in a decent reward. Think of it like having a part-time job. You work your hours, you get your paycheck, and while it’s not stellar, it’s workable. You get some rewards, whether it’s traffic, conversions, follows, sign-ups, or whatever. You still have to put in the time and effort, but the rewards are there for you to claim.

Category 3 is where we get into the more difficult topics. There are topics out there that are above your weight class but aren’t too high as to be infeasible.

A somewhat tortured metaphor might be a coin flip you have to earn. You have to work for, say, an hour doing a moderately difficult task, and your reward is a coin flip. If it lands on heads, you get a nice reward, rank for the topic, get some traffic and conversions, and grow your site. On the other hand, if it lands on tails, your content flops, doesn’t break the top ten, and sits there more or less uselessly.

While the gambling aspect turns some people away, I find these to be the most important kinds of topics to keep an eye on. Producing content for these topics gets you a potentially good reward, more than the category 2 topics, but more importantly, it’s growth. The more your site grows, the more of these topics become category 2 topics for you. Even older content you wrote and published for it that flopped can be picked up and grow later on.

Finally, you have category 4 topics. Category 4 topics are playing the lotto, except each lotto ticket costs hours of your time and effort. You put in your hours, and all you get is a 0.00001% chance of ranking. If it hits, it hits big time, and you can get a ton of value out of it. It won’t, though.

So, that’s your #1 reason why targeting topics that are too difficult is a bad idea: it just wastes your time. No one wants to spend hours of their lives learning about a topic, researching and compiling sources, coming up with unique ideas, creating high-quality content, publishing it, and promoting it, only to have it be resoundingly ignored by the search engines. It sucks!

How to Win with Difficult Topics Anyway

While there are some topics that are too difficult for all but the top-tier sites to land, difficulty is more of a fake metric than you might think.

• Google will often prioritize local results where relevant, so a local business can outdo the big brands.
• One topic is actually a million sub-topics, and breaking it up can be a huge source of value.
• Content with a unique angle or unique value can stand above the rest.
• There are ways to get around difficulty and rank with a little support.

So, if you’re interested in trying to stretch your wings and see how high you can fly, you can do it. You just need to do things the right way.

Look for unique angles or value you can add.

One of the biggest tips is to find some unique value you can bring to the topic.

• Does your history or personal experiences bring a unique perspective to the topic?
• Do you have the resources or access to bring new data to a discussion others couldn’t?
• Can you process data in a unique way to draw insights from it?
• Can you look at content from an overarching viewpoint and draw second-tier conclusions from it?

There are a lot of ways you can bring unique value to a topic, but it requires having a very good idea of two things. First, you need to know what already exists on the topic so you aren’t retreading the same ground, even if it feels innovative. Second, you need to ensure that your unique perspective brings value to the discussion.

Unfortunately, that second one is the hard one. A lot of people think they have a unique perspective, but their opinion ends up poorly thought out and doesn’t really add anything; it ends up nothing more than noise.

Look for ways to break up and cluster the topic.

The biggest opportunity, to me, when targeting high-difficulty topics is to recognize that no topic is ever just one topic. Virtually every topic you can think of is a question made up of sub-questions, which themselves are made up of smaller sub-questions.

While the overall topic might not be attainable, breaking it into a dozen sub-topics with longer-tail keywords not only gives you a dozen posts you can create but also gives you the opportunity to cluster them and build a singular pillar post powered by those sub-topics.

Identify and capitalize on specific user intent.

Another key is identifying a specific search intent and aiming your content at that specific intent.

Some topics have clear intent, while others could fit multiple different kinds of intent. If you find one that can fit multiple intents, identifying the one with the least coverage – and the one most relevant to your brand – gives you more of an opportunity.

A lot of people write content that ends up relatively generic, without a strong focus on any given intent. Being more laser-targeted technically narrows your audience but increases their satisfaction and engagement, which goes a long way toward building your brand.

Find a way to rope in influencers and those with stronger brands than yours.

If you can’t beat them, join them, right?

Well, it’s harder to do that with marketing in this sense, but it’s not as impossible as it sounds. For example, if you want to target a difficult topic, you can piggyback on the existing results by creating a sort of compilation post.

Find relevant quotes from the experts already ranking and compile them into one resource. Shoot out emails to other influencers who haven’t contributed to the discussion and ask them their opinions as well. Boom: unique value, potential backlinks from the people you quote, and opportunity, all in one package.

Link the topic to something newsworthy and capitalize on surging traffic.

One of the advantages a small site often has over larger sites is agility. A big site might have two or three layers of editors who have to approve topics, copyedit, content edit, request revisions, manage ordering media, approve final drafts, and find a slot in a rigid publication schedule to post.

You, meanwhile, can take a topic, write about it, and have your content published in short order. As long as you’re fast about it, you can beat the big sites to market almost every time. This is, by the way, why a lot of the big media sites focus on building connections so they can have the information before everyone else.

If you can capitalize on surging traffic with rapid-release content, even if the overall topic is difficult, following the news wave can get you ahead.

By using all of these techniques – and clustering them together – you can tackle much more difficult topics than you might think were possible. It doesn’t make it guaranteed, but it’s better than stagnating on topics that get you a hundred hits a year, right?

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