Which of these brings more traffic to your blog?

[Michael]

Hey guys,

To all of you who have created a blog and got some good traffic with google SEO, I have a question.

Let's say, you have a choice between making blog posts about very common google searches and making posts about lesser-searched topics with equally less competition, which one should I go for if my blog is new?

Example: Writing about "weight loss" - a lot of competition (let's say 10 000 000 other websites) but a lot of searches (let's say 100 000) or making a post about "how to reduce weight when you are pregnant with twins" (let's say 1000 other websites but only 10 searches per month).

I hope I made clear that the ratio between searches and google competition is equal each time. So what's best to go for when creating a new blog? Going for lots of traffic in a shark tank or being a big fish in a small pond? I appreciate if anyone has tried both and can let me know how their post views developed, which ones got more traffic.

[...]

In my opinion the best way to bring to you site is pay google ads.

[MADLUV]

If it's a common search does that give me more options to click? that could be overwhelming and i might just click the ad and read those .. but if i get to many i'll re word my search.

I think you should do both.
I work with a google partner who will let me buy words at 2 clicks a day so i can hang with the big fish ..
but more times then not i'm lower hanging fruit and i buy the cheaper words /that are about my product. for 80% of my dollars but i still want some of the big words and trend words.
so 20% go with the popular option so i get a piece of that pie to!

[Scott]

I always suggest going after realistic long tail targets. Yes the search frequency is less, but your ability to rank for those targets will be much higher, especially if you have a relatively new or low performing website.

If you have a weight loss website, good luck. It is one of the most competitive online markets and most difficult for SEO - My SEO firm does not even work on weight loss based sites due to a very high failure rate given most owners extremely low budgets.

If you want your website to rank for "weight loss" you will likely need full time employees working on this with a very high budget (minimum 5 figures monthly).

Long tail is the way to go.

[Justin]

I would stop right there and get rid of the idea of targeting "weight loss" way to competitive and could take years to rank for.

Find a sub niche of weight loss like, weight loss for women, weight loss for kids, how to lose weight fast, weight loss for seniors.

I would imagine that these are still really competitive, find a sub niche inside these or something similar.

I would focus more on a general domain name for weight loss, exact match domains are useless nowadays anyway, do focus on something catchy people will remember.

I would start with long tailed easy to rank for keywords and progress up to the tougher keywords once you gain authority and traffic.

You could always use these long tail keywords and the traffic from them to funnel them over to the much more broad competitve keywords.

I use Long Tail Pro for finding perfect long tail keywords and determining how hard they would be to rank for, much easier than math recommended above.

Good Luck