Read a great article by Alexander Pavlutskiy.
A small spoiler:
My biggest SEO fuckup of 2022
We wasted about $60,000 this year on several pages we specifically targeted and got no traffic. Even though the niches were completely different (betting, IT, SaaS), the mistake was identical across the board.
And it was a misinterpretation of the SERPs for our target queries.
Specifically, we saw a top 10 where 80–90% consisted of pages belonging to one SERP type (for example, all blog posts). And a few spots in this top 10 were occupied by product pages (usually in 6th to 8th positions).»
• So we thought to ourselves:
• a) there are still 1–2 sites from our niche in the SERP, so maybe we can jump in and rank higher.
• b) we saw examples of fresh sites with product pages ranking very well in informational SERPs.
• Based on that, we concluded it was worth trying.
• We tried with betting (promoting the homepage where only inner pages reach top positions), tried with IT (same story with the homepage), and tried in the SaaS niche (there was a blog SERP and our product page).
• In some cases, we even squeezed into the top 10, but in 90% of situations, 6th position (and lower) brings no traffic anymore, and we couldn’t jump any higher.
The bottom line is that for a commercial query, Google mixes various result types into the SERP—informational content, listings, news.
I’ll share how to capitalize on this for a positive return in the US.
Writing «best» articles is classic, but another level is taking a product category and creating an informational article to rank alongside listings in the SERPs.
There is a category with products under it, but people aren’t searching for «best,» and Ahrefs shows no search volume for it.
But we know that:
- there are products
- there is demand for them
This means you can try to rank in SERPs WITHOUT «BEST».
Some pages work out this way, some don’t, but overall it yields a positive ROI on such articles, squeezing informational articles right into commercial SERPs.
Of course, I understand that info like this is better off sold rather than leaked for free because nobody writes about it, but here’s a gift for you. If anyone drops a clown emoji on this info—don’t DM me anymore.🤫