Taking Weaker Site's Keywords as an SEO Strategy

[CaptainHustle]

Builders,

I am currently building out my second site and I wanted to get your thoughts on the right strategy to adopt for a new site. Usually when I start a site, I focus on 0 competition keywords (not 0 search volume). These are keywords where the results do not satisfy the query and do not have the keyword in h1. In the niche that I am targeting (YMYLish), I am struggling to find good 0 competition keywords with decent volume.

What I did find however were several low DR (>10) sites that were getting a lot of traffic. In this case, would a strategy of building out all their pages on my fresh site be a good idea or is that unlikely to bear fruit until I have some traffic/relevance/trust?

The reason I ask is that even on my previous site, a lot of sites around my DR have tried to clone my pages but have not got anywhere close to beating me.

That being said, I am confident that I can build palpably better pages than these sites. Moreover, these sites have little to no links or any real authority in the space. But they are optimized for snippets (bolded paragraph answering the query in a robotic manner). Topical relevance is varied across these sites with a few of them having a good idea about content clusters and the others with a few articles getting a lot of traffic while the other pages are unrelated failures.

My advantages over these sites:
1. Professional looking site
2. Qualified writers with credentials (EAT)
3. Lots of money for links
4. Better on-page
5. Social media presence

Interested in hearing everyone's thoughts on what I should do with my available options. I hope to start a journal thread for this site soon.

 

[secretagentdad]

Dude just make stuff.

You’re Micro analyzing keywords with next to no volume. Of course you can rank.

Also target the 2-3 word keywords. You can grab most of the 4 + word ones with a single section heading and a mention on the proper short tail article.

 

[illmasterj]

Yep I publish content that is high difficulty (and it often out ranks high authority), while also pubbing low comp long tail stuff.

Even if it doesn't rank today those high difficulty topics are probably still relevant supporting content (internal traffic), and probably sends some sort of signal to the Goog.

I barely consider difficulty these days. If it's a medium to long term project it will have a chance of performing eventually.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I would do this if you can work at scale. It's a shortcut that allows you to cut out a portion of keyword research while validating the keywords. If your on-page is equal or better and you have better link metrics and usability (speed, technical SEO stuff), then it's a walk in the park.

However, you can't assume you've covered the gamut of keywords in those ranges, because this involves trusting worse SEO's than you to have done a complete job. And when you're working at scale, completion matters.

It is absolutely a great way to get started and a method to continue to use, like when you're DR50 and you're plundering DR30 sites instead of DR10 sites. It's a great starting point to find keywords to help you find more topics to find more keywords, etc.