How Do You Rank In A Competitive Niche? (8 Proven Steps)

Last Updated on June 10, 2023 by Jordan Alexo

Ranking in a competitive niche can be challenging.

You probably have spent months writing content, but your blog doesn’t grow.

And you look at your Google Analytics metrics and see low traffic, engagement, and no significant improvement in your rankings.

But don’t lose hope!

It’s possible to rank in a competitive niche with the right strategies and approaches.

In this guide, you’ll learn eight steps to rank in a competitive niche. 

This includes identifying the most competitive niches, determining the competition level, implementing effective strategies to improve your rankings, and focusing on key factors such as E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness).

Let’s get started!

Key Takeaways

1. Understanding Competitive Niches: Competitive niches are specialized market segments with a lot of competition.
2. Most Competitive Niches: Health and fitness, finance, beauty and fashion, technology, and travel are some of the most competitive niches. Despite the competition, you can succeed by targeting sub-niches within these larger categories.
3. Determining Competition Level: Google Search, SEMrush, and Ahrefs (SEO tools) can help you analyze a niche’s competition level. Often competitive niches, most search terms are dominated by authoritative websites. These sites have high domain authority, thousands of backlinks, and tons of valuable content.
4. Strategies to Rank in a Competitive Niche: Focus on a sub-niche, create high-quality and relevant content, publish extensively, build backlinks from authoritative sources, and learn basic SEO techniques to improve your chances of ranking higher.
5. Importance of E-A-T: Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) are crucial factors for ranking in a competitive niche. You want to make your site look professional, trustworthy, and authoritative to Google. You must provide accurate contact information, use SSL certificates, and display copyright and privacy policies.

What Is A Competitive Niche?

To understand a competitive niche, let’s first talk about what it means.

A niche is a specialized, targeted market segment with specific needs, preferences, and identities. Basically, it’s a slice of the market that is highly specific and focused.

When you enter a niche, you purposely narrow your focus to appeal to a smaller, more targeted audience.

However, not all niches are created equal.

Some niches have more competition than others. For example, the fitness niche is more competitive than the underwater basket weaving niche.

Why Some Niches Are More Competitive Than Others?

Usually, a niche is more competitive because:

1. More businesses are competing for the same audience.
2. The audience is larger and more profitable, so there is greater profit potential. 
3. The niche may offer growth potential, which attracts more competitors.

So the more businesses, blogs, and whatnot trying to rank for a particular set of keywords within a niche, the more competitive it becomes.

It’s like you have a cake. If you only have two people trying to eat the cake, there’s plenty for both.

Now imagine you have twenty people fighting over the same cake – getting a piece becomes a lot harder, and someone is likely to miss out.

The same happens in a competitive niche – it becomes harder to stand out. But if you do succeed, the payoffs can be much greater.

What’s A Sub-Niche?

A sub-niche is a more specialized segment within a larger niche. Often you can find sub-niches inside competitive niches with less competition, which makes it easier to rank and target a specific audience.

Most people say a specific niche, like fitness, is overly competitive. Although true, that doesn’t mean you can’t succeed in a competitive niche.

You can always target sub-niches within that big niche to focus on a specific audience and make yourself stand out. And from there, expand to another broader audience as you grow.

What Is The Most Competitive Niche?

You have a few niches that have been around nearly since the beginning of the internet and continue to be highly competitive today.

Although you can find many products to promote as an affiliate or create as a business within these niches, you will face significant competition.

These niches include:

1 – Health and Fitness

This niche has always been a highly lucrative one. It’s not surprising since people are constantly looking for ways to lose weight, get fit, and improve their health.

Also, you can target many sub-niches within health and fitness, such as yoga, bodybuilding, supplements, diets, and more.

2 – Finance

Anything related to money is a strong contender for the most competitive niche. Most people want to find ways to make more money, save money, or invest their money.

A few popular sub-niches include banking, investing, insurance, and personal finance. Also, cryptocurrency has become extremely popular in recent years.

3 – Beauty and Fashion

Another highly competitive niche is the beauty and fashion industry. You have a huge audience of people who want to look good and stay on-trend, making this niche very lucrative.

You can promote makeup products, skincare routines, haircare tips, clothing lines, and more within this niche.

4 – Technology

This niche has grown in popularity over the years and shows no sign of slowing down. You can promote everything from smartphones and laptops to software, apps, and gadgets.

A great way affiliates promote these products is by creating reviews or unpacking videos on YouTube.

5 – Travel

The travel niche might appeal to you if you enjoy traveling and exploring new places. You can promote travel packages, hotels, airlines, tours, and more within this niche.

One strategy is vlogging about your travels and experiences to build up a following, then partnering with travel companies for sponsored content or affiliate commissions.

How Do You Determine Competition Level?

You have several ways to see the level of competition within a niche. Here are some tools to help you out:

1 – Google Search

The simplest method is to perform a Google search using keywords related to your niche.

If most of the results you get have ads, a vast number of results, and are dominated by popular websites, then you’re looking at a highly competitive niche. For example:

2 – SEO Tools

You can use tools like SEMrush, Moz, and Ahrefs to get more in-depth insights into the level of competition within a niche.

These tools can show you the keyword difficulty (KD), search volume, the number of competitors, backlinks, and more.

If you noticed most search terms related to your niche have high KD scores and a lot of competition, it’s safe to say that the niche is highly competitive.

3 – Analyze Your Competitors

Another great strategy is to look at your potential competitors simply. And ask yourself:

• How many are there?
• How well are they doing?
• How strong is their online presence?

If most of your competitor’s websites have high domain authority, thousands of backlinks, and many social media followers, then you’re looking at a highly competitive niche.

In case you’re wondering how to check their domain authority, use Ahrefs free tool here.

8 Steps To Rank In A Competitive Niche

Now that you have a good idea about the basics let’s talk about five steps to help you beat your competition.

1 – Focus On A Sub-Niche

If you have a new website, it’s extremely hard to immediately target a broad niche and rank high in search engine results.

Often the search terms for these niches are highly competitive, meaning it will be challenging to achieve a high ranking.

However, just because “Fitness” is a highly competitive niche doesn’t mean you can’t focus on a sub-niche like “Fitness for Pregnant Women,” “Fitness for Seniors,” or “Fitness for People with Disabilities.”

See, that’s a quick way to cut down on competition immediately. In these sub-niches, you have far less competition, and you can find more easily search terms to rank for.

For instance, you start a blog about “Fitness for Pregnant Women” and create content, products, and services to help women stay healthy and active during pregnancy.

You can more quickly dominate this niche in a year or two compared to trying to compete in the broader fitness niche, which could take several years.

Also, once you become an authority in a sub-niche, you can branch out into related sub-niches and, eventually, the broader niche.

However, at that point, your site has already earned Google’s trust and authority, making it easier to rank for more competitive keywords.

2 – Create High-Quality And Relevant Content

You can dominate your niche by providing better and more relevant content than your competitors.

Sometimes, even sharing controversial or unique opinions can help you stand out and attract more people to your site.

For this reason, you should research your competitors and check their blog posts, videos, and social media profiles for content ideas.

You want to find loopholes or gaps you can fill with your content. If you can’t find any gaps, let’s say they wrote a comprehensive guide on “101 Fitness Tips for Pregnant Women.”

And their content is well-researched and helpful. The next thing you can do is to create a better version of that guide.

So, you should research several other searches and write an extensive outline that covers everything related to fitness for pregnant women that your competitor missed.

I typically check the first three pages of Google’s search results related to my sub-niche for ideas on what content to write about.

If you’d like to learn more about creating high-quality content, read this guide.

Anyway, another aspect many websites forget is content readability. Most people who browse online skim through content to find what they’re looking for. Only a small percentage read every word.

For this reason, you can provide more insightful information and ensure that your content is easy to read and skimmable.

Lastly, to reach a broader audience, you can pass your written content to other formats, such as infographics, videos, or podcasts. Not everyone enjoys reading a blog post, but they prefer to watch a video or listen to a podcast while on the go.

3 – Publish Mountains Of Relevant Content

Gone are those days you could have a paper-thin blog with a few articles and expect to rank high in search engine results.

Today, Google likes beefy websites with lots of high-quality content. You want to build topical authority. In other words, you want to become the go-to source for information on a particular topic.

Nobody considers a site with ten blog posts an authority. However, a website with three hundred informative blog posts on a specific topic is a different story.

Your main strategy should be exactly that one! You want to publish as much content as possible while maintaining quality over quantity.

Often a website will only gain some recognition after having about fifty to one-hundred articles, but that is only the beginning.

Also, these articles should all be relevant to your sub-niche. For instance, if you have a vegan diet blog, here are some topics you could cover:

• Vegan recipes, plant-based nutrition, animal welfare issues related to farming and food production, vegan lifestyle tips, sustainability practices for veganism, etc.

As you can see, you don’t have in-between posts about “random topics” like cryptocurrency or fashion. Instead, you can easily tie all of your content together, making your website a valuable source of information on a specific topic.

This builds topical authority and makes it more likely for search engines to rank your website higher on their results pages.

4 – Build Backlinks

One of the metrics Google uses to score websites is the number and quality of backlinks pointing to your website.

You want to get backlinks from higher-authority websites in your niche. Now, I won’t tell you this isn’t a piece of cake because it isn’t.

Obtaining backlinks is monotonous and requires patience, persistence, and networking skills. One of the best ways for new blogs is to guest post on other websites.

So, here’s how you can do this successfully:

• Search on Google for websites in your niche that accept guest posts. You can easily do this by using search operators like “write for us+[topic]” or “guest post+ [topic].
• Some of these websites have a form where you can submit your pitch. For others, you may need to email the editor with your pitch and some writing samples.
• When writing a guest post, make sure you write awesome content. Sometimes people get sloppy here because the post isn’t for their website. But I always write content as if it is for my own website because you never know who will come across the post and potentially link back to your site.
• Also, make sure to leave two to three links on this guest post pointing back to your website. It should link to relevant articles you have written that support the topic of the guest post.

Many influencers say, “Oh… you don’t need backlinks anymore,” but the truth is that Google still puts a lot of weight on backlinks when ranking websites.

5 – Learn Basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

One way Google and other search engines understand the content on your website is through search engine optimization.

Their crawlers (robots) scan through your articles and, based on several factors such as keywords, meta descriptions, and headings, understand what the article is about.

So, you must have some basic SEO understanding. Nowadays, many content management systems (CMS) like WordPress have SEO plugins to help you out.

Also, most of these WordPress themes (site designs) are mobile-friendly and optimized for SEO which is a huge plus. 

However, my favorite themes are Kadence, Astra, and GeneratePress; they are lightweight, fast, and highly customizable without coding knowledge.

You can install a plugin like Yoast SEO or Rank Math to optimize your title tags, meta descriptions, and keywords easily.

Here are some basic content SEO tips to keep in mind:

• Include your target keyword in the title tag.
• Use your target keyword naturally throughout the content, but avoid keyword stuffing.
• Add your main keyword in your first paragraph to let search engines know what the article is about.
• Include the main keyword on your H1 and other related ones on your H2 and H3. In fact, your H1 should be the same as your title tag.
• Insert your main keyword on the URL of the article.

If you do this, you’re ahead of the game compared to many other websites that don’t pay enough attention to basic SEO.

Also, you can use AI SEO tools like Neuronwriter to speed up your SEO optimization process and get more advanced optimization suggestions. I suggest reading up on “Neuronwriter Review” here.

6 – Avalanche SEO Strategy

Another strategy that works well is the Avalanche SEO strategy.

This consists of creating content that initially targets low-competition and long-tail keywords—and trying to first dominate as many low-competition keywords as possible before gradually moving up to target more competitive ones.

This strategy is a great way to build up your website’s authority and organic traffic quickly (search engine traffic) for a new blog.

As your website gains more authority in Google’s eyes, it becomes easier to rank for more competitive keywords and drive even more traffic.

So, adding all up, you want to create mountains of high-quality content optimized using basic SEO techniques and the Avalanche strategy.

By doing this, you can achieve higher rankings in search engine results and attract more organic traffic to your website.

Ultimately leading to better engagement and conversions.

7 – Analyze, Improve, And Be Patient Like A Monk

I undoubtedly learned while building Jordan Alexo to constantly analyze, improve, and be patient, like a monk when it comes to SEO.

Often, despite having advice, we still mess up and make mistakes. We target highly competitive keywords that take too much time to rank for, or we don’t optimize our content properly.

Or, we think only thirty articles will be enough to make a huge impact on our website’s SEO when in reality, it takes time and consistency.

So, when it comes to ranking for a competitive niche, you constantly analyze several aspects, such as:

• Can I improve my content? Make it more skimmable, engaging, and relevant to my target audience.
• Am I targeting too competitive keywords? Perhaps, you need to focus on long-tail keywords or find a more specific sub-niche.
• Are my meta titles, headings, URLs, and content optimized using relevant keywords?
• Have I built enough high-quality backlinks to my website? You may need to outreach to other content creators to build more links.

One of my biggest mistakes with my blog was publishing content all over the place without a clear strategy or goal. This resulted in poor rankings and low traffic for a long time.

I used to publish a post about “how to buy land on the Metaverse” and the next day about “Best Web Hosting Companies in Europe.”

And you want to avoid this if you’re aiming for higher rankings in a competitive niche.

Actually, I suggest reading this post, “33 Essential Blogging Tips for New Bloggers.”

So, if you don’t see any improvements in your organic traffic after a few months, then analyze and see what can be improved or changed.

But it’s important to wait some time because search engines take time to crawl and index your website.

Often a blog may take six months to more than a year to start seeing significant organic traffic and SEO ranking results.

8 – E-A-T

E-A-T: Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness is other crucial aspect to consider when ranking in a competitive niche.

You want Google to see your website as a credible and authoritative source of information. Even if you have an affiliate website, you have a few things you can do to improve your E-A-T.

Many of them, we already mentioned, such as creating high-quality content. But other ways to improve E-A-T include showcasing your:

• Author’s credentials
• Providing clear and accurate contact information on your website. If possible, get a business address and phone number.
• Using a secure SSL certificate
• Having a copyright and privacy policy on your website demonstrates your commitment to user privacy and data protection.

It’s crazy how many people overlook these crucial aspects of building their online presence. And then, one day, their site gets penalized by Google because it lacks basic info and looks shady.

So, make sure to get all the important details right and build your website’s E-A-T to improve your rankings in a competitive niche.

Last Thoughts

Now you have a good idea about how you can rank in a competitive niche. It starts with choosing a sub-niche. You don’t want to tackle a highly competitive market immediately, but instead, focus on a specific aspect within that niche.

For instance, if you run a travel blog, don’t cover general topics like “best places to visit” but focus on sub-niches such as off-the-beaten-path destinations, budget travel, luxury travel, or adventure travel.

By choosing a specific sub-niche, you’ll face less competition and attract readers who are more interested in that topic. Also, later you may expand to a broader audience as you establish your authority and improve your rankings.

Remember to create high-quality and valuable content targeted to your specific audience. And don’t expect you’ll make it with only a few posts.

Instead, you must publish over relevant fifty to one hundred posts to start noticing significant improvements. From there, the more you publish, the more you’ll improve your rankings in your niche.

You can also apply the “avalanche SEO strategy,” where you first dominate low-competition keywords and then progressively target more competitive ones to improve your rankings.

Furthermore, learning the basics of SEO and consistently applying them to your blog can significantly impact its ranking in search engines.

And that’s all! If you have any questions or additional tips, please leave them in the comments section below.

Also, I suggest you read “Why Do Most Bloggers Fail? (9 Reasons & Solutions),” so you don’t fall into the same traps.

Questions? We Have Answers.