key to SEO success – carve out your niche

Probably one of the most common mistakes website owners make when they start doing SEO is they target the wrong key phrases. It is so tempting to go after the big fish key phrases and put all of your efforts into those. The problem with that strategy is that everyone else is doing the same thing and you all compete against each other.

A much better strategy is to look at some of the lower level key phrases, you know the ones that don’t get as many searches but will still bring very targeted traffic to your site if you ranked well for the term. Just by focusing on the 5th or 6th best phrase in your industry you cut out a large majority of your competition.

For example, let’s say I ran an SEO company. I could do what every other SEO firm in the world does and try to target the phrase “search engine optimization” or “seo”. Yeah those phrases get searched 150k times every month, which is why so many people are trying to rank for them. The reality is that if I did that I would waste a lot of time and money and get 0 results.

Instead what I would do is look at a couple of the lower tier phrases like “small business seo” and maybe “seo service”. Those phrases bring in under 10k searches each month collectively and so they become an afterthought to many SEO companies.

If I put the majority of my effort in ranking for those 2 terms while everyone else is only putting an afterthought’s worth of effort on those same terms, all of a sudden I have a big advantage over most other websites. I would much rather get 1k-3k visitors to my site for those lower phrases than never even sniff the first page of Google for one of those big phrases.

All that matters is that people find your business and you make sales. For all you care they can search for donkey shoes as long as they become a paying customer. Find the phrases you can legitimately compete for and go after them like they mean the world to you, because they do.