Table of ContentsThe Effect of CompetitionThe Solution Lies in Volume and Unique ContentExampleI have observed the recent trend in search engine results. The current scenario has evolved to such an extent that for any topic or keyword, the top ranking websites occupy the top positions in the search engine results. So, if you have a low-ranking website or blog, you will find it very difficult to overcome the tough competition from high-ranking sites. These high ranking sites may have taken a long time to establish themselves, but that seems unfair, especially when they can easily rank on any topic compared to your low ranking site, even if you think have better wisdom or content to share. This has now become a natural problem for many bloggers. It's even worse for those targeting today's hottest topics. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The Effect of Competition I will go into detail on how exactly competition affects a low ranking blog. Just a few years ago, it was clear it was easy to write an article on the trending keywords of the day and get traffic, even a lot of it. Six (6) years ago, competition was almost zero. Even if it was there, it wasn't organized by Google. The Web offers many possibilities for targeting a variety of keywords that were not yet well exploited by webmasters. Year after year, instead of following best practices, many webmasters have tried to outsmart Google's ranking algorithms. Google has also evolved over the years. As webmasters were busy playing games, this presented an opportunity for real webmasters. These are the same webmasters you see today running high-ranking, established websites. Anyone who tried to exploit flaws in search engine algorithms was swept out of Google's search rankings. During this time, many people with authentic content to share have found a great opportunity. All of these have increased content on the web and increased competition. The recession then played a central role. Increased competition came from all sides. As a result, even a real blogger is less likely to attract search engine traffic. It's as if there is an SEO mafia (Search Engine Optimization) that is taking all the pie, leaving you with little or nothing. The problem is twofold. First, you face competition from high-ranking sites. You target any keyword, you will be ranked lower than established sites in case they have already targeted that keyword. Second, you face competition from low-ranking sites like yours. The Web is growing in unlimited ways. This is because anyone can become a blogger and share their ideas on the same topic, which everyone does too. This results in fierce competition for a future blogger. Today, it is even more difficult to establish your site among the top ranked sites. It's now more luck despite real effort. The solution lies in volume and unique content. From my experience, I found a solution to this problem. But there are also its own trade-offs. If you think something is better than nothing, you can read on. The idea is to focus on keywords (or topics) with huge search volume rather than those with low volume. So, even if the subject is old, it isBest to stick to a topic with huge search volume. For a low ranking website to generate traffic, the overall search volume for a keyword must be very high. You can't just filter out long-tail keywords and expect to get traffic from them. Because there is so much competition today, it's likely that most of the long-tail keywords you've been thinking about are already conquered. Since long-tail keywords will have less search volume than short-tail keywords, you will get less or no traffic at all. All that little traffic will be absorbed by high ranking sites.Here, let me digress. I've noticed over the past few years that many websites have opened up just to take advantage of trending keywords. If you don't know what trending keywords are, you can find them at google.com/trends. These are the ones that people are searching for more today than in previous days or months. If a keyword sees a sudden increase in traffic for any reason, it is said to be trending. There are also new upcoming keywords which could for example be the name of a new film whose volume increases once the film is released in theaters. If it breaks box office records, it will last much longer. Most trending keywords return to their previous or new average low volume after a while. It has also happened in the last couple of years that many websites have emerged to take advantage of long tail keywords. I tried that too. Indeed, most top-ranking websites like Wikipedia or YouTube already appear on the first page for any short keyword like “Greek mythology”. A new sub-keyword such as "Apollo in Greek mythology" ranks a different website first before the Wikipedia entry. An even longer keyword like "Apollo's sister in Greek mythology" pushed the Wikipedia entry further down. This means that one may have a chance to regain lost rankings by searching for a long-tail keyword that no one has written for yet. But this phenomenon has already happened and now there are many websites like Yahoo Answers, Wiki Answers, which already have entries for these. You can hardly stand a chance against these. So if a low ranking site needs to get at least a share of traffic, it needs to focus on short keywords. Back to square one. This certainly creates a lot more competition, however, if your content is unique, the huge search volume creates the possibility of low traffic for certain combinations of long-tail keyword searches that will match your content. These long keyword combinations shouldn't be popular enough that no one does it. I would have thought about it. Therefore, if you write unique new content yourself, you have a chance that a random search will match your combination. Don't worry too much about uniqueness. We are all unique individuals. Just write for yourself. Two people writing alone, even on the simplest topic, will write content that doesn't exactly match. Plagiarism certainly fails here. So you can see how the natural evolution of the Google search engine algorithm supports plagiarism. Now let's move on to the next problem: You've now decided to focus on short keywords, but write unique content so that they contain unique long-tail random combinations. But you have the volume problem. How to discover high volume keywords? Don’t all short-tail keywords have high search volume?No. Likewise, you can think of a long-tail keyword on an obscure topic, but it won't come up with any searches. The possibility of a random, unique long-tail keyword being searched by a random audience requires that its parent topic be extremely popular. Since you are getting very little traffic, you would want to get this flow over a long period of time, which means you should look for topics that will be trending for a long time into the future. So how can we predict the future? Here I will draw lessons from the book Antifragility by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In this book, the author had written a small section on predicting the future through a subtractive mechanism by giving a simple rule of thumb. I think the same can be applied to online search volume as a wall. The idea is that the future is already in the past. What has survived for a long time should survive for the same period in the future. This means that new ideas to come will likely have a shorter lifespan than the older ones we still have in use today. Note the word “expected” here. It's important. We are here faced with uncertainties. So we need to understand what waiting means. Waiting means on average. If you take 100 ideas that survived the last 10 years versus 100 ideas that only survived last year, you can say that more of the 100 ideas that survived the last 10 years will survive another 10 years than those of the 100 who survived 1 last year. However, if you look only at next year, you can expect more or less similar numbers from both 100s to survive next year. Sure, there will be some keywords, but there will be very few in the second set of 100 that survive over the next 10 years. After 10 years, you will have very few people from the second batch in your first list of 100 from that period. If you still don't understand the paragraph above, spend a little more time on it. I would even suggest reading this book Antifragility. It's the read of a lifetime. Then apply in the current context. Example We can apply this easily to predict future keywords. I'd better illustrate with a simple example. Let's look at searched keywords in the context of movies. For me, Titanic has always been the most popular film. Well, it won many Oscars and created an all-time box office record until Avatar broke them. Both from legendary director James Cameron. In this image taken from Google Trends, we look at the search volume from 2004 to 2013 (so far) for three films Titanic, Avatar and After Earth. These three are represented by the colors blue, red and yellow respectively. As you can see, Titanic is indeed popular. It maintained average search volume the same or slightly higher than the peak for this year's release, After Earth. Avatar is much more popular. After its release in 2010, it reached its peak. Its average volume in recent years is barely greater than that of the Titanic. We'll then see how their search volume compares to recently released films that became popular and generated good box office revenue during those years. I took movies released in 2010 which include Inception, Iron Man 2 and "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows". Look at all the replicas in five colors. The colors are in respective order: Titanic, Avatar, Inception, Iron Man 2 and "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows". At the start of 2010, it was unclear which one would be more popular. But only one in four has stood the test of time. Avatar is still today the most sought-after film that.