I got into a little marketing chat this weekend with a couple of friends, both of which had only a short invested amount of time with online marketing, so you would have to consider them newbies. I like elementary marketers myself, but either way they were fairly new to marketing online.

Ok you can stop with the ahhh that’s sweet stuff. it gets better.

As we sat around chit chatting and kind of semi brainstorming, one of them threw out a question, or should I say more of what they thought to be a educated understanding, of the whole process of starting a niche marketing project. Sadly through they still had not really got it, and had the belief that all a person needed to get listed on the search engine was quality content, a good headline and backlinks. Ok well I would say partially right and grade that with a C.

But what about minimizing the competition ?

A few details ignored

Let me give a quick summary of what my friend said,

You start with the noticing phase, getting ideas of possible markets in the broad sense.Then you move into the analysis phase, gathering stats on traffic, competition, etc. Then you check if there are products to sell say as a affiliate, or if one could easily be created for the market?… Then
Once you have chosen a niche, you just need to create some good content with your keywords, a killer headline, make a blog, and start getting backlinks to it. Right?

Woa there! Back the wagon up bud. I had a feeling my friend was about to emerge into the battle field highly out numbered by competing pages unless they spent a little more time and aleast did a few minor tweaks.

S.E.O. The little things can make a big change

My friend (as far as I could tell) did not really think optimization was all that important as long as they had good content, that killer headline, and lots of backlinks.
Well I knew my words alone probably won’t stick, because what goes in one ear usually goes out the other. I needed to show my friend different.

The best way to actually prove to my friend that even a little SEO work on their content could make a difference, I decided to let google speak for me. Here is what I showed to my friend.

Using the keyword phrase speed reading, I did a few hack searches to display what the page competition would be when that phrase was included in your content at a few key areas.

I started with just the broad term: speed reading results- 37,500,000 pages

Next I searched using the match phrase “speed reading”: Pages- 1,390,00 Better!

Now lets check if I make sure its in the title as a match phrase: intitle: “speed reading”
Pages- 51,300 This is looking good

Ok lets hit it up with intitle: inanchor: inurl: all “match phrase”

Competitor pages: 9,830 WOW

I would say a little optimization makes a difference.

Will this guarantee a #1 place or even first page listing? I think you know I can’t guarantee what happens when it comes to the search engines, but I will say it could make the difference (as in this case) of about 27,670,000 competing pages