A question many small businesses ask is:
How can we compete with large business in the search results? They have huge teams, Huge budgets and far more time!
An Answer for Small businesses:
You have to be smart with how you do your SEO, you need to do keyword research at an advanced level, you need to get onto trends before big brands get onto trends by this I mean been first to market with products such as Google+.
How can we do this?
An example of how powerful keyword research can be is if all the big brands are targeting “Car Insurance” it has a competition level of around 95% from our analysis, it would involve far too much time to target this term. The best thing you can do is look for a lower tier, mid level traffic keyword an example could be “Best Car Insurance” with a competition of 52%, so if you are the smaller brand you can not loose focus on going for huge traffic and high competition keywords because it will be a waste of resource.
I have written a guide to doing advanced keyword research here on SEOmoz:
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/advanced-seo-keyword-research-tips-and-ideas-14216
This is only an example of how powerful keyword research can be in the SEO process to isolate the best keywords for you to target.
