soltimu

Something I keep seeing come up (and honestly struggled with myself when starting out) is this gap between "start with low competition keywords", and "eventually rank for the big ones." The advice makes sense in theory but the path between those two points is weirdly underexplained.

My site is in the leadership coaching niche. Brand new, no backlinks yet. I get that authority and relevance are the two main levers, and I get that long tail keywords are where you start. But here's the part I can't fully wrap my head around: do those early long tail keywords need to contain the seed, keyword, like "leadership coaching for remote teams," or can they be topically adjacent without the phrase i