Are highly competitive keywords worth trying to rank for? Is it impossible or would it just take a ton of back links, social links, article submissions etc? How long would it take to begin ranking for a extremely competitive keyword?
Your answer is in your question - It will take ton of backlinks to rank depending on what your keyword is . No one can comment on how much effort is required to rank unless you tell us what keywords you are talking about . It is like asking "What top speed a car can reach" without telling which car you are talking about .
It depends on your chosen "extremely competitive keywords." Target long tail keywords, although it is hard to find niche which are not yet saturated but highly profitable, but once you do find one, your effort will be greatly rewarded. Do your homework by studying the top sites appearing on the first page of SERP. Study their PR, backlinks, content, etc. If you will be persistent, you can rank 3 - 6 months for competitive long tail keywords. If you are targeting keywords like "search engine optimization" you will meet heavyweight websites at the top results. Yes you can compete with them but it will take a lot of effort, money and time. And in the end you can't tell if your site is going to convert well or not and you will be losing rather than winning the competition at the end.
For new website, I will not prefer to opt for highly competitive keyword, instead log tail keyword or less competitive keyword will be better. Once you will start ranking for less competitive , then ranking for highly competitive keyword will be easier.
Like you said, it will take a lot of backlinks to accomplish that. Nothing is impossible and just keep in mind that if you put the time and effort in it, you could achieve whatever you want. Yes it will take a very long time but once you make it, the traffic you will get to your website (if it's a very competitive keyword), if done in the proper ways, could be transformed into a massive amount of sales. I'm guessing if it's very competitive then it probably has very high searches per month. In the long, competitive keywords are the best to be optimized for. After all, what's the point of getting optimized for non-competitive keywords. It's not worth fighting over keywords that nobody look for.
There should be no fear of 'high competitive" keywords.... one should work properly and the keywords will definitely come up with good results.
use 'high competitive" keywords in long tail phrases, think actual usage, no experienced searcher just uses 'high competitive" search words, target a different long tail niche with each different article, 100 articles = 100 different key word phrases all built around a small selection of 'high competitive" keywords proves to work very well
Yes, with the help of quality backlinks, you can get ranking for highly competitive keywords but it takes times to achieve the ranking
As they say, not all links are created equal. There are no real formula on how long will it take to rank a keyword. I have experienced using some paid tools on checking backlinks and found out that the quantity of backlinks cannot determine your ranking on SERPs. I suggest you get some backlinks from authority sites.
If you are targeting competitive keywords, it takes time to rank on them, but really worth it when you have achieved your goal. If not so, you can stick with low competition keywords where you have a higher chance to rank well in SERPS.
Because it is easier to way to boost your keywords like in your website you put the outsource that keyword coming quickly as compared to other keywords
It's worth the efforts, but just do minimal effort and maximize your efforts on smaller keywords for your subpages. Just minimize the daily SEO for the highly competitive keyword, but do something every day. In the long term this will pay off
The answer is in the question - if a keyword is highly competitve then by definition its going to be difficult to rank for. As previous posters have said, you would be better of researching long tailed key words that contain the highly competitive words you have identified.
It's not beneficial for new site because any highly competitive keyword take so many time to take top position in google ranking. Thanks
Almost Nothing is impossible when it comes to SEO. You can outrank any site for any keyword. But you'll have to put more of your efforts and time if you're going for "make money online" as compared to "this is an extremely easy KW to rank for" Spy.
High competitive keywords takes times to ranking and build more quality backlinks that helps to ranking.