How to optimize keywords against inferior websites

Question

I have a website that ranks well for several long tail keywords. These keywords attract a few customers, but mainly provide good content for readers. Additionally, according to Moz, Ahrefs and others, I have a significantly higher domain rank than my competitors.

My competitors typically offer very thin content, purchased from a vendor that sells websites with the same content, but optimized by city. Mainly, by keyword stuffing.

The problem is I can't seem to rank for a very competitive, long tail keyword combination against these competitors. I've read the following posts here several times, but still not sure what to do next:

Why do some bad websites rank well?

Does long tail keyword rank impact the rank of short tail keywords too?

What are the best ways to increase a site's position in Google?

It's not a new domain, it has substantially more and better backlinks than my competitors, decent CTR and bounce rate. Speed shouldn't be a factor as my site loads a full 1-2 seconds faster than my competitors.

My question is, what should I be doing to improve rank for specific keyword combinations? Should I write more pages/content that uses these keywords? I have just a few landing pages now with these keywords as I've tried to avoid being spammy and looking too much like my competition. Is there a different post here I should also be reading for this?

Answer 1

Your question is on a very broad subject so you won't get an actual 100% working answer for it but can chime in with some suggestions.

What you have is a scenario and only you know that scenario because you haven't mentioned the keywords and other info (You shouldn't as we don't want that getting crawled here) therefore everything that I say will be just my best guess.

You already know the basics so won't go into those.

What you really need to ask yourself is are you willing to take a leap of faith and go for other longtail keywords?

Leap of faith because if it is relevant to the existing subject to the keywords you are already ranking for then it won't be much of a problem, but if it is slightly off the niche then you have to decide on taking that risk.

Also if your existing rank is for inner pages and as they are going to stay there it won't be any drastic effect if you add some more inner pages with other relevant keywords with relevant content and backlinks to it. (All blogs/news websites do this whole day long)

So if your website ranks for Cold Drinks and one of your inner pages ranks for Coca Cola then you can surely go for another page and target Pepsi. But if your main website Ranks for Cold Drinks and your inner page is ranking for Coca cola and you go after Ice Cream then you have to take calculated risks.