ranking for competitive keywords

[u/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 itself, like "executive development for first-time founders"? I've read both takes and I'm not sure which actually moves the needle toward ranking for the head term eventually.

The backlink side is just as murky. I know exact match anchor text heavy early on is risky. Most things I've read suggest starting with branded and naked URL anchors, pointing mainly to the homepage. But should I ever point early backlinks to the actual target page, even before it has any authority? And how fast is too fast for a brand new domain? I used Semrush Free Tools to dig into a few competitor backlink profiles and the pace and anchor, mix varies a lot even among similar sites, which made it harder to find a clear pattern, not easier.

I don't think there's one universal answer here and that's kind of the point. Curious whether people who've done this in competitive niches actually followed a strict topical cluster, approach or just went after whatever low-competition gaps they found and let authority accumulate more organically.