Avoiding the Competition
"Better to be a big fish in a small pond than to be a small fish in a big pond." This proverb can be especially true in the Big Pond that is the Internet, and, more specifically, search engines on the Internet.
When choosing your keywords, knowing how to limit your competition is essential. Time and again, I see people construct their keywords using only one common word, such as "bike," and then they wonder why they aren't getting ranked high in the search engines.
When you choose common words such as "bike," you are typically giving yourself a great amount of unnecessary competition. For instance, at the time of the writing of this article, a search in Google for "bike" returns about 179 million results. Trying to get ranked high in a search term as broad as that is technically achievable, but why put yourself through the burden of competing with 179 million other results when you could just avoid it?
What I also find common is that the same site trying to target a common search term such as "bike" didn't need to, because the site was related to something more specific, such as "bike safety equipment." The search term "bike safety equipment" at the time of the writing of this article returns around 795,000 Google results. 795,000 results is still a lot of competition, but obviously far less then 179 million. In the case of your search terms, the difference could be drastic.
The point is this: If your Website is related to something specific, try targeting that specific keyword search term instead of opening yourself up to a ton of competition by being too broad. The less competition you have, the easier it will be for you to rank high in that search term.
Searches vs. Results
A technique you can use to find an excellent keyword search term is to compare how many searches there were for a keyword to how many search engine results there are for that keyword. One way of doing this is by using a tool such as
Using the information provided by this tool, you can find out which search terms have the stiffest competition and which search terms are in a sense "untapped."
Localizing Your Keywords
If your Website offers products and/or services locally, you can take advantage of that fact and optimize accordingly. For these examples, let's use a made-up Website for a store called Eddie's Mountain Bikes, which sells mountain bikes in Dallas, Texas. When choosing a keyword search term for this site, the first keyword that comes to mind is probably "mountain bike." Clearly, that word should be plentiful in this Website, but we shouldn't stop there.
Let's say, for example, we did stop there though, and that we targeted "mountain bike" as our main keyword search term for this site. Well, first off, what does our competition look like? At the time of this writing, the keyword "mountain bike" returns more than 26 million results on Google, which is quite a lot of competition. Secondly, let's say that we do end up getting in the top 10 results for "mountain bike" in Google. What are the chances that the people who were looking to buy a mountain bike are going to be in the Dallas area? At the time of the writing of this article, there are a little more than 300 million people in the United States and about 1.2 million in Dallas. This means you have a very, very small chance that the person who just found your site is living in the Dallas area.
Now, what if instead of being so broad and only using "mountain bike," we became more specific? Let's use the keyword search term "mountain bike Dallas." We have dropped from 26 million results to 760,000 results. Also, anyone searching for "mountain bike Dallas" is most likely in the Dallas area. You could also include surrounding areas to Dallas in your keyword search terms. Also take note that you haven't taken yourself out of the running for the keyword search term "mountain bike," because that is still part of "mountain bike Dallas." This means you could potentially be ranked high in both search terms. But if you only targeted "mountain bike" with no trace of Dallas anywhere, you wouldn't be a contender for the Dallas market any longer.
Things to Avoid
When becoming more specific in your keyword search terms, you do want to keep away from becoming too specific. For example, in the case of the Eddie's Mountain Bikes Website, you wouldn't want to get as specific as "mountain bike Dallas Maple Street," because that is not going to be searched for often, if ever. I'd suggest finding a good middle ground between a really broad search term like "bike" and a painfully specific one like "mountain bike Dallas Maple Street."
Make sure you're optimizing your Website for what it is really about. You may find a good keyword search term that has little competition, but don't just use it because of that. Visitors are good, but only if they find what they are looking for on your site. If your site offers products and/or services locally as well as nationally or internationally, make sure you optimize your Website for all of them. The area you want to target more particularly should be what you focus on, but be certain that if you sell products and/or services nationally or internationally that visitors to your site will be able to tell. It would be great to optimize your site locally and increase sales and traffic, but not at the expense of eliminating your other target audiences.
If you're optimizing for a site that has an extremely broad search term, such as "games," then these steps may not be for you. In that case, I would recommend researching and implementing other search engine optimization methods for your Website.
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