Ranking for competitive keywords

[icanseeu]

Hi Folks,

I am relatively new to SEO and I was hoping folks here could give me some guidance/tips on ranking in a competitive keyword space. My client is a health care provider and they wish to rank for terms like 'heart attack' which I believe will be quite difficult due to it being a short tail keyword and it is a very competitive space. Any an all advice and input is greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Dave

[dotfly]

So your goal is:

to rank on high competitive short-term keywords in a stable position and over a longer periode, right?

There are 3 possibilities (which you won`t like):

1. your client has a fortune to spend for SEO and SEA

2. you can use black hat techniques

3. your client has patience (a lot of)

The last one is the most realistic and MAYBE (there is no guarantee!) the most effective way. You have to do a lot of on-page and off-page work to establish the authority of a new domain for a few of keywords. You have to prove that your site has the relevance to be an authority for e.g. "heart attack" - this process takes some time.

We needed several years to make clear that our website is the authority for the keyword "guitar" (the german word for it) within Google Germany - the result is a stable and constant high position for years as well (no.1)... but the list to (maybe) be successful with that is long...

I would always recommend to optimize a long-term keyword which is not so competitive. If you are successful to establish to be an authority for such keywords will help you for your next step: to become an authority fpr high competitive keywords ... try to make your customer clear that you can bring them on top very fast but that they will also fall down much more faster then!

It`s just like buidling up a good reputation or to establish a good credit history - but I believe you already know that!

[Chris.Menke]

Ciaran,

Starting from scratch to rank for a  term like "heart attack" would be quite an endeavor for a seasoned SEO with a client who had a fairly substantial budget, let alone for someone new to the discipline. Not that it can't be done, but knowing enough to inform the client what it will take and what might be more productive options for their practice is part of being and SEO.  It sounds like you're working on coming to grips with that knowledge at this very point.

Starting out, I'd recommend a couple of things: Do an advanced Open Site Explorer report on your client's site and then do a comparative OSE report against some of the other sites that rank on page one for that term.  Then do another report comparing your client with other sites even further down in the results to get a sense of where the client might be starting from and what they would need to do to get to the top.  Installing the Mozbar can be helpful too.

Moz has another tool that you might find handy--it the keyword difficulty tool  and be sure that you've read through their How To Do Keyword Research  guide, as well.