I listened intently to a keyword research video by Dan Thies hosted at the Stompernet site (members area) and he absolutely advocated against looking at the competition before selecting keywords. His approach was to target the most relevant keywords with the highest volumes and ‘be a shark, not a flounder’ – fair advice.

Going after the big numbers is cool but research shows that over 25% of clicks on a page one SERP are distributed among the top 3 results.

Check out this link…

http://www.seoresearcher.com/distribution-of-clicks-on-googles-serps-and-eye-tracking-analysis.htm

With these statistics in hand continue with your keyword analysis looking at the competition and if one sees that the top 3 are .gov or .edu or some other high ranking domain then you can run into trouble when trying to rank quickly or even at all in the high echelons.

If you find that you are up against the big guns in your niche you might want to  consider this approach.Your primary keyword gets 2000 searchers a month so if you are outside the top 3 results you get an average of 6.5% of the available clicks equaling 130 clicks.

Your secondary keyword gets 600 searchers a month but the competition is less fierce. In this scenario the lower volume searches with weaker competition and the higher click through percentage would yield more clicks than a 2000 search volume keyword and behave at a return of 162.

Not bad and for less effort too!

Dan’s strategy is to go for the higher volume from the outset with the premise that one day you will eventually rank for the higher ranking terms and that makes perfect sense.

If we take Dan’s advice on board and optimise the on site factors for the high volume keyword and use this strategy in conjunction with using link building with anchor text for the secondary term (another of Dan’s tactics) we have a best of both worlds approach.

In fact, by optimising your web site for lots of secondary terms and pointing links with the keywords in your anchor text at your sub pages, when it is time to go for the primary keyword it should be a lot easier.

Chenk out this keyword research video for more tips.

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