High competition keywords are usually profitable but, by definition, difficult to rank for.

Almost any one or two word phrase will be highly competitive although chances are that you won’t see many adverts on Google for quite a lot of those phrases because they’re too generic and advertisers struggle to make them pay.

High competition keywords don’t necessarily mean there are a lot of searches for the phrase. It could just be that they’re high margin industries – for instance, anything a lawyer might be involved with – or that the lifetime value of a customer is high.

So how can you target a high competition keyword?

Most of the time, I suggest that you nibble at the edges of the keyword.

Let’s take weight loss as our example here.

It’s a big industry with an estimated 1.5 billion people worldwide being over weight.

In the USA it is estimated that there are over 108 million dieters – one in every 3 people!

And they spend lots of money trying to lose weight. Sometimes successfully but often not. But overall their spending in America alone is over $20 billion.

No wonder it’s high competition.

It’s as close as you’re likely to get to a universal keyword.

Unless you’ve got a big budget and almost unlimited patience, you need to start small.

That advice works for almost any niche you care to name,

You need to drill down a bit.

In this size of market, I’d suggest targeting keyword phrases that are at least 5 words long.

Maybe longer.

Why?

• Because there’s less competition for these phrases. But in a big market, less often still means a lot. One tenth of one percent of the USA weight loss market is still almost 11,000 people.
• Because the keyword tools don’t often suggest phrases of this length so there’s less advertiser competition as well as less organic competition. So you are less likely to see the results page filled with adverts “above the fold”.
• You’re more likely to get shown fast in the results as Google’s robots will let out a small “hooray” that they’ve finally found a relevant page to display.

One phrase I found a while back was “weight loss for men over 50”.

Quite a big market by any stretch of the imagination maybe a third of the male dieters in the USA are over 50, so potentially 18 million people.

But the first page of the results for that phrase only includes 2 titles with that exact phrase and maybe another 2 or 3 that are sort-of targeting it.

So at least half the first page of the results isn’t directly targeting the phrase.

Cut the age to 35 (the one that came up first for me in Google’s suggestions) and only one page is directly targeting that age group. Quite a few are targeting over 40’s but most over 35 year olds would balk at clicking those links.

Even those who did qualify as over 40 almost certainly don’t think of themselves as being “that old”.

See the gap?

That’s precisely the research you need to do for any highly competitive keyword.

Drill down to longer phrases and choose ones with next to no competition, even though logically it’s still a big market.

There are enough keyword phrases available at this level to keep you occupied in your chosen niche for as long as you want to stay there.

That goes for any market I’ve investigated, so I’d be surprised if your high competition niche was any different.

Target yourself to write one or two pages for your site most days, using one of your long keyword phrases as the basis for the title.

Each page is unlikely to get high volumes of traffic but once you’ve been working at it for a number of weeks, you’ll start to get rewarded with some traffic.

And that traffic will be highly targeted.

Because people who use long keyword phrases are typically in buying mode rather than “just looking” mode.

If you’d like to know more about writing your posts, check out how to write an article in 20 minutes and also internet marketing in an hour a day.

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