It’s time to do a little experiment with getting ranked on Google with less competitive keywords.

To start with I should mention that I am #1 on Google for poodle manicures:

Now I didn’t really keep track of how long it took to become #1 on Google for this phrase and there are only 15,800 people competing for it.

So I think I will start from scratch with a totally different keyword phrase.

My goal is to be ranked #1 on Google for the phrase “Biggest Absolute Failure”. I also will track how long it takes to be in the top 10 on Google.

Doing a search on Google for the phrase I find that 286,000 sites are competing. That seems like a lot!

So I decided to do a phrase search (just like a normal search but your search is in quotes) and found only 3 sites contained the exact phrase.

There aren’t many sites competing for the actual phrase and so I am hoping this shouldn’t be too difficult.

What I am going to do to make this blog post rank #1 on Google for Biggest Absolute Failure:

• My targeted phrase will be in the url of this page
• My targeted phrase will be in the title tags
• My targeted phrase will be in an h2 heading
• I will have no incoming links (of my own doing) to this page
• My targeted phrase will be sprinkled throughout the post
• 2 of the screen shot images have my targeted phrase in their filenames and 1 of the images has my targeted phrase as an alt attribute
• I will have Google Analytics setup so Google knows right away when someone goes to the post for the first time.

That’s all I plan to do. Let’s see how long it takes.

So why I am doing this?

Too often I hear others say how hard it is for anyone starting out to get a decent ranking on Google for a given phrase.

This is utter rubbish.

You can rank high and it’s not that hard. You just need choose your keywords wisely.

Don’t target very broad & competitive phrases like bad credit which has 45 million sites competing for the top spot!

Instead target very specific phrases that almost always have a significantly smaller number of competing sites.

The phrase bad credit motorcycle loans has only 356,000 competing sites and if you do a phrase search (searching with your keywords in quotes) there are 69,000 competing site. That’s a lot more manageable than 45 million!

Please know that the credit industry is highly competitive and it’s hard to rank well with almost any keyword. But there are numerous other niches where it’s not difficult to rank high on Google or even be number 1 for specific keyword phrases.

I have found niches where the number of sites competing for the exact phrase is just a few hundred.

Just for fun I just did a search on Google for hummingbird food homemade and found that there are 25,000 sites competing. Not too bad.

And if I do an exact phrase search there is only 1 site that comes up!

Now you may be wondering how I came up with that keyword phrase.

I went to Google Suggest and searched for hummingbird food and Google tried to guess what I am going to search for and suggested things based on what people have searched for in the past. The phrase hummingbird food homemade was something Google suggested it to me.

WordTracker is also a great source for keyword ideas.

Unfortunately many people never even try. They become so afraid of failure that never attempt anything.

So my goal here is not only to tell you that you can do it, but also to show you. It shouldn’t take very long for me to rank high for Biggest Absolute Failure and then this experiment will be a success. How ironic.

UPDATE

It’s been just a couple hours and Google has crawled this post and now I am ranked #1 on Google. Yippee!!