Is it possible to rank for long tails with content pages?

Question

First, let's assume there is a huge long tail search demand for phrases "X basketball players", where X has top variations such as "most accurate", "american", "white", "deaf" etc.

And let's assume there are some articles/blog posts that cover these topics indirectly.

Is it possible to outrank existing content via simpler but more useful landing pages? What are the needed characteristics for those pages to beat competition? Thought of creating infographics for each page and asking popular blogs to use it in their blog posts and link to it when possible.

Your thoughts?

Answer 1

You generally cannot outrank established websites for these terms due to amount of historical backlinks and other ranking factors aside from just on-page content. You can, however, try and outrank for long-tail queries first then build authority on the topic. This is more of a long-term play and is a great strategy for taking some traffic from the big guys.

Some examples:

• Basketball Players (general topic, high competition)
• [country] basketball players (more specific but still relatively general)
• [country] basketball players born in a different country (long-tail but great content for an infographic with a map)

You could then optimize your internal linking to link back up to parent categories like "[country] basketball players" and also to player profiles and other types of pages. If infographics is your thing then you should be able to easily spin them out for all these different variations about players so you'll become THE source for interesting infographics about basketball.

This will then be what sets you apart from all these other sites and will make you worthy of being linked to and outrank, to some degree, the big guys.

Answer 2

It depends. First: what are the websites you want to outrank? Second: how many backlinks your webpage receives from good sources?

If the websites you want to outrank are very well known like CNN, ESPN, Yahoo etc. or even the most famous blogs in the category, there's no way you can do it now, and if you don't do inbound marketing for the future.

In case you are competing against pairs, you can do it optimizing your webpage title strictly for a single keyword variation and then optimizing your body content for plurals, synonims, etc. and other stuff you can see hee for example https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

Having a good enciting description is a way to increase clicks from organic search page to your webpage. It's not a ranking factor.

Infographics and such are a way to get backlinks, because people are often willing to share and hotlink them.

Guest posting also is a way to gain reputation.

But remember that page titles and backlinks are maybe the 2 most important "technical" factors. But backlinks are not just "technical", because they involve endorsement by other people, so it's also about marketing. And title is not just a sum of keywords, is also your content title, it's about copy.