Size Up Your Competition to Win

One of the first things you should do while choosing which keywords you would like to target is to take a view of the competitive landscape and look for opportunities to outrank the competition.  It is important to assess how difficult it will be to achieve a high ranking, and which keywords give you the best chances of ranking high given your resources. This can help you decide which sets of keywords that you want to target in your SEO efforts. 

One of the best tools to help you quickly size up the competition is SEO for Firefox, or alternatively the SEO Toolbar for Firefox.  They allow you to quickly see the PageRank, number of backlinks, etc. for all the sites in the SERPs for any query or for any site you visit.  Now you can quickly gauge the competition.  If you the top ten results are filled with domains having tens of thousands of inbound links, great domains with good age and keywords in the domain, and well optimized sites, you may want to target less competitive terms.  If you have the budget and the time, you can still go after ultra competitive terms, and this process will give you a good idea of what you will have to achieve to rank well.

If the competition looks too tough, and you don’t feel like taking on that challenge, do some keyword research and find some more specific phrases that may be more attainable.  Some good 3 or 4 word phrases can be much more easily won, and often convert very well.  The truth is that the long tail makes up the majority of searches, so a site that is optimized for a variety of related terms can often to very well, despite not ranking well for high volume 1 or 2 word phrases.