Be as specific as you can to avoid high levels of competition.
Dominating your “ego” or “primary keyword” is a huge task depending on what the keyword is that you are focusing your efforts towards, and of course, how competitive that keyword is. You see, another question that I get asked a lot is “How can I rank #1 for my main keyword in Google”. I never answer that question. Instead, I return fire with another question. “What relevant long tail keywords are you trying to rank well for?”.
Human nature says that we want to do the best that we possibly can in the shortest time frame possible, so when someone says to me that there are more long tail keywords in existence than primary keywords, I can understand this notion and how it applies to me and my business. However, to the newbie, this is not all that clear and easy to put into perspective. The money is where the broad keywords are, IF you can rank well for that keyword, so naturally when we are trying to rank our website well for our chosen dominant keyword, it is always going to be a hard task unless we learn to take our time and dominate the long tail first.
Let me be as clear as possible about this, as this is an error that I see a lot of webmasters make every single day. In competitive niches where there are plenty of broad dominant keywords, you are always going to have a hard time ranking well unless you have won in the long tail first. Not only is relevancy in the search engines going to be a difficult obstacle, other competing webmasters are going to be able to see you a mile away, and will take preventative measures to protect their websites position in the search engine rankings.
Let’s use an example to explain this methodology a bit further. Lets say that I am creating a website based on electric guitars. Ranking for the keyword “electric guitars” would be very tough considering how many people are already competing within that niche. In fact, at the moment, there are over two million people competing for that keyword in Google. This doesn’t mean that I don’t want to focus on that keyword. Instead, I am going to narrow down a list of longer tail keywords. For instance, Fender Guitars is a subcategory in that main keyword. Let’s look at it in Google. There are now 500,000 people competing for that keyword and is still tough to compete, but winnable if we go further down the long tail. “Fender Telecaster” is a bit deeper into that niche, but with 700,000 people competing, it is going to be hard to compete. Again, lets go deeper. “American Nashville B-Bender Telecaster” has only 16,000 people competing.
So, lets put this into perspective for a moment, to avoid losing you on a tangent here. Google bases its search queries on relevancy. This includes things such as bounce rate, time spend on a domain, and so on and so forth. If you are creating a website that is focused on a broad niche, you need to be broad and focus on as many directly relevant keywords and phrases in order to dominate the number one position. This is unavoidable if you want to win a major keyword. With the above example, I demonstrated that broad keywords are extremely hard to win unless you start working on the longer tail keywords first. In the above example, I would focus first on the guitar brand names rather than the main keyword. If you win smaller keywords such as these first, you will find that over time, your website will become extremely relevant to your main keyword that you would like to dominate, and over time, your chances of becoming an authority site within your niche increases significantly.
So, there we have it. Although, within certain extremely high competition niches, this is not going to be that easy. However, this should serve as a decent guideline for you when planning out your next website concept, and as a solid reminder of the importance of researching your keywords before you start a new project. Remember, any niche is winnable, but rarely winnable by focusing on only your ego keyword.