How to Compete for Highly Competitive Keywords?

We often find that competition is incredibly strong for our selected primary keywords. There are steps we should do if we face a very strong competition. In fact, we could find that even the lowest websites in the first page of search results already beat us by hundreds of backlinks. It becomes quite clear that building quality links would be time consuming and it takes years to achieve. For many new website owners, they don’t have the resources and money to compete with top players. So what we should do? It is clear that we need to create a proper SEO strategy. It means that we will stand a much better chance of getting better ranks for our keywords. But, is it enough if we consider that the competition has spent years and a lot of money building links and content?

One basic SEO strategy is to make sure that we can compensate even if we have very few links. We could start by identifying primary keywords that best identify our website. We should be able to come up with more than three keywords. In this case, we should choose those with the least competition and best traffic. The next step is to optimize our homepage and essential webpages around these primary keywords. Then, we should make a longer secondary list, consisted of more than ten secondary keywords. In this case, we could try to add three-word or four-word long tail keywords that are still closely related to our primary keywords. Then, we should create content that’s focused around our primary and secondary keywords. Content could be consisted of articles, animation, images and videos.

When optimizing articles, we should make sure that each should focus on one primary keyword and at least two secondary keywords. However, if there are interesting updates, we should also focus on only one secondary keyword, if we are sure that we will get sizable traffic from it. When creating links, we should make sure that the anchor text has at least one of the primary or secondary keywords. When syndicating articles to submissions websites, we should make sure that these sites are reputable and can provide us with enough traffic. The next step would be to focus on our link building campaign through social bookmarking, forums and web directories. However, our main goal is to create as many as many as inbound links from reputable websites that has similar relevance. It means that we should get links from content-rich websites and fewer from web directories, forums, blog comments and others.

If things don’t work so well, we should consider whether we haven’t chosen the right keywords. In many cases, the most obvious keywords are not the most suitable ones. Big players often spend millions of dollars in huge SEO campaign to rank high on those basic keywords in our industry. But it should be noted that changing our primary keywords could have a significant implication because they can divert our main topics, so we need to plan properly.