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?