My best SEO tactic so far

I've had that same fear myself but it hasn't been a problem so far. It might be a problem for an academic deep into a field that isn't a fast-growing one.

My much larger site 10-15 years ago was primarily about language learning. It had some fairly niche topics I was concerned that virtually no English-language speakers would be looking for, and yet the traffic rolled in. It was a blog, though. Also, some of those topics became more popular over time. Extensive Reading and Spaced Repetition were two examples.

My current site is in my profile and it's pretty tightly focused around Elixir (roughly the 50th most popular programming language).

In my experience (marketing at a small tech company), you can get results even for reasonably competitive terms. The difference is in giving a quality answer to the query.

Many (most?) tech companies fill their sites with low-quality, jargon-filled pages that don't actually answer questions - either becuase they're written by marketers with a poor grasp of the technology, or because they don't want to 'give away' their expertise.

If you actually answer the question in a reasonably full way, there is nothing to stop you ranking highly. Google values valuable content.

I wouldn't discount backlinks. Google hasn't made much progress getting away from "page rank". Once you have that credible page/content, do focus on non-spammy ways to share it. Including grey area stuff like calling in favors, sharing it on HN, posting on Medium, etc. In the least spammy, most objective way you can.

As a concrete example, I found a grey area way to get a somewhat popular hardware tinkerer interested in something I did. Maybe I even skirted the rules a bit by sending him a free sample of my cool toy and some rough code samples. He took it well beyond what I could. I didn't ask for anything. The investment paid off. Aside from his initial blog post, others took inspiration and posted their own variations.

Google now thinks I'm the bomb for something very niche, but reasonably profitable. Likely because my efforts, plus other's work, netted some interesting backlinks. and backlinks to their posts. And maybe I am a badass in this very narrow niche, but I doubt Google would know if I hadn't pushed the envelope a little.

Recap: It's a pretty useless idea.

Almost all people are producing content for a company, product etc in which they are not the target customer and hence are not doing searches for.

It would have been useful had they explained how to methodically discover long tail keywords that aren't being satisfied with good content for any subject.

This is exactly what I did with rlhitboxes.com. I'm still the most-up-to-date source for the info, even though Epic née Psyonix put up a page with the same info after I launched. They haven't kept it updated as they release new cars.

It's just a pet project, but it's consistently in the top 5 of any given relevant search phrase.

No, not at all. Your perspective and style has value.

I answered a fairly simple question on Stackoverflow many years ago that has a bunch of upvotes, and still generates a few dozen a week.

I didn’t do anything magical, just wrote a response in a way that resonates with people. I have not repeated that feat either, so I possess no unusual skill. If you write every day, you’ll do the same thing eventually with something.

Even more concise: If you don't see a flag on some land, plant your flag there.

The problem with this approach is that it only works if you want to create content for the things you searched for. Just because I'm googling obscure shit doesn't mean I want to write an article with ads about it. I could see this technique work for someone who wants to start a technical blog -- make your posts the first result on a bunch of obscure issues you run into.

I did this recently, a new microcontroller claimed to support circuitpython but had no instructions on how to actually get it up and running. I eventually figured it out and documented it on my site (and shared a link in the official forum to help people if they looked there for it as it was the first place I looked). Few days later, their wiki had been updated with documentation that was almost identical to what I had written. I was mad at first, but it's not a huge deal - what I set out to accomplish was to ensure people could find the instructions. Ironically I still outrank their official wiki on Google :D

A better tactic, one that I've employed with fantastic results, is to interview your company's current customers. Get a very strong understanding of their pain points and discovery process.

Then create content that addresses these pain points very specifically.

SEOs tend to get blinded by search metrics and keyword data. There are countless long tail queries that might show negligible results in your keyword tool, but are very pertinent to your target market.

You won't get much traffic from such "pain point SEO", but whatever queries do come your way will be highly targeted.

In general, unless you rely on ad revenue, you should never use traffic as a success metric for SEO. It tends to blind your decision making. I've ranked for a single keyword that got me 80k visitors a month, but I've made more money from keywords that got me 10 visitors a month.

Whenever this happens to me, I create a StackOverflow self-q&a or a GitHub Gist synthesizing the knowledge. Then I use google to find my own content because I more or less remember the keywords of what I wrote. Also, many times, my coworkers find my answer on SO and get amused :)

(I could probably write some of those stuff on my personal blog, but SO has an added advantage of soliciting comments and alternative answers; people on blogs are less keen to do that IMO).

Fun fact: when I was interviewing for my last job, I got stuck on an unexpected issue when coding. I could use google, and found my gist from few years before with similar problem which got me unstuck (I totally forgot about having it written) as #1 item in Google.

IME, SO and gist index really well in Google and often end in top of results. HN, less do (unless you explicitly put hackernews or site:... in query).

That's a good observation. Come to think of it, according to Google's Search Console[0], most frequently searched for / visited posts on my blog are a) some very specific stuff about numerical methods that I wrote during my university years, b) a decade-old post about fixing issues with Polish diacritics and Y/Z swap on Windows - i.e. explaining how to use CTRL+SHIFT/ALT+SHIFT to fix keyboard layout/language, and how to disable it entirely.

I might start doing it - instead of trying to think of large topics to write, just describe results of any research I needed to do where I had trouble finding reasonable answers. Not for fame or SEO - but as a service to random strangers. Judging by unending stream of searches for over 10 years, I suspect that this post about keyboard layouts/language switch is the single most useful thing I've done in my entire life.

(As context for non-Americans: language & keyboard layout switches are all too easy to hit by accident, and suddenly your keyboard "isn't typing" some characters, or swaps Z and Y, or whatnot. This doesn't go away on restart (or at least it didn't use to), and completely confuses regular people, making them think their computer is broken. Those non-tech-savvy people usually resort to manually copy-pasting problematic characters from a file or from a website whenever they want to type them. You can imagine the impact on productivity and sanity, particularly at work.)

(And I just can't fathom how this is still a problem in 2020. Microsoft, WTF?)

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[0] - I don't use Analytics or any other tracking script on my site. Search Console gives you access to data on performance of your site on Google's search engine, and includes the only two things I ever cared about wrt. any analytics - how do people end up on my site, and what posts do they visit.)

I've never thought about it before, but I've consistently used "image" ever since I learned about the <img> tag as a kid. It's very interesting that you can segment groups by which word they use.

> you're benefiting those who come after you asking the same questions

Thanks! The idea of just being helpful on the internet is vastly undervalued.

Since this specific tactic is about avoiding competition, it does pretty much always lead to something very niche, very new—either in content or the audience/approach to the content.

Larger topics are often worth going after or necessary for a larger site, but then you have more authority and more resources to do so.

I'm not sure how the author found these queries, but looking at Google Search Console, I definitely see quite a few queries that I could write content around.

It is exactly what it is. Author described with how to write those content without making it spammy. All marketers use this strategy heavily as their #1 way of getting to front-page, but genuine content is hard to come by.

Yes indeed. "What's old is new again" truly applies here.

Something I enjoy about having been around since the beginning of the internet, is to watch the cyclical nature of information and how each new generation "discovers" bits and pieces from the past.

I could take the "get off my lawn" stance and just complain that "kids these days" don't understand logic gates or finite state machines, so what business do they have messing about with promises and javascript. But it's genuinely enlightening to see new approaches to old problems. Having an open mind was easy when I was young. Nowadays it can actually take effort to do so.

However, this one sits firmly in "duh! Wasn't it obvious?" territory with me. But I mean that in a nice way :)

Your strategy is definitely profitable for StackOverflow (and StackExchange).

But all these approaches end up helping others, regardless of who gets to make some money out of it.

That's pretty much what I do. I used to blog solutions (and before that do answers on experts-exchange). Blogging computer solutions would pay the hosting charges and buy a few computer parts - replacing the mediocre computer every couple of years. But then ad/Amazon revenue feel off a cliff. So might as well post to SO network.

Not everything that scores highly would produce revenue on blog though.

Yep! It is interesting though that the top 3 results for this totally not specially crafted /s query are the article (expected), this comments page (fairly expected), and then an outdated 5 year old article (not so expected).

I wonder if the overall quality of Google search would improve significantly if, for some topics where timeliness is important, they ranked things more heavily by date, emphasizing recent results. This would probably have a decent impact on some technical searches, but I wonder how wide the applicability would be.

More nuanced than that, I think. Brainstorming things you wish existed and writing about them doesn’t completely overlap with taking searches you’ve actually done and have ended up difficult to complete because of a lack or disparity of information and writing the solution.