Choosing competitive or non-competitive keywords?

When it comes to selecting keywords, many people go for the big money keywords. Unfortunately, these keywords are also extremely competitive, and you need to be a top SEO (search engine optimizer) in order to rank for those highly competitive keywords.

Instead, you can select a less competitive keyword to optimize for, one with FEWER searches per month, and get MORE traffic than if you had optimized for the more competitve keyword phrase.

How so? When you optimize for a very competitive keyword phrase, unless you are an experienced SEO, you will not be able to rank as high as you can for a less competitive keyword with fewer SEOs attempting to optimize for the keyword phrase.

For example, "insurance" is a competitive keyword. You may only be able to get as high as the fourth page for that keyword (in position # 41-50). Being on the fourth page of that keyword might bring you only one hundredth of the traffic a top ten listing would bring.

Even "health insurance" is highly competitive, even more so than "insurance". But optimizing for health insurance, chances are good that a searcher will find what they are looking for in those first three pages of results, before they ever see your page in the results.

However, if you optimize for a less competitive phrase, such as "family health insurance", not only have you identified a niche market, but you are also competing with fewer people than who are optimizing for insurance (who could also be targeting traffic for life insurance, car insurance, dental insurance, house insurance, etc.)

Even optimizing for a low traffic keyword phrase such as "affordable family health insurance" and getting top rankings for it would bring you more traffic than being buried several pages down for a more competitive keyword phrase.

Consider these comparisons from the WordTracker and Overture keyword tools.:

As you can see, "affordable family health insurance" only has 502 searches per month, but with a number one or two ranking, you could get a large percentage of those searches directly to your site.

But if you go too far, you could select a keyphrase that is so uncompetitive that not even searchers are using the term to search for. For example, "affordable cheap health insurance" occurs fewer than three times in the WordTracker database, and was only searched for 28 times last month. Even if all 28 of those searchers visit your page, with conversion rates sitting anywhere from 2% to 5% for many affiliate programs, you might not even see a single sale for being number one for that keyphrase.

Choosing uncompetitive keywords for optimization is a problem many new to search engine optimization have - they are pleased to rank for an obscure keyword phrase, when in reality, it might only bring in one search a month. That is why it is so important to use a tool such as WordTracker, and ensure that your chosen keyword phrase is not too competitive for your current optimization skills, yet competitive enough that people are searching for it and will click through to your site.

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