How a VPN site made more money by ranking for LESS commercial keywords

How a VPN site made more money by ranking for LESS commercial keywords

Month 1: I inherited a small VPN comparison site, 9k visits, $600/month from affiliate signups at $35-$70 a pop. Every page targeted 'best VPN for X' — pure money keywords, brutal competition.

I spent four months trying to climb those terms. Built links, rewrote pages, barely moved. The big players outspent me on everything.

Month 5: I gave up the head terms and went sideways into informational stuff — 'is it legal to use a VPN for X', 'does a VPN slow down gaming', 'VPN vs proxy'. Lower intent, way lower competition.

Those pages ranked in weeks, not months. The setback: my conversion rate on info traffic was a third of the money pages — 0.8% vs 2.4%. For a while it looked like a wash.

Month 9: but the volume was 5x. 9k → 31k visits. Revenue $600 → $1,080. Lower conversion, far more bodies, and the info pages fed internal links to my few ranking money pages.

The takeaway: when you can't win the commercial keyword, the question 'what does this buyer Google the week before' often outearns the keyword itself.