One of the biggest hurdles in SEO is knowing how to beat the competition - and here I absolutely mean putting yourself against competition that you CAN beat. There's no honour in putting your business on HARDMODE - make your own life easier by identifying your niche.
Think of it in terms of wrestling. You're a small business. You're a flyweight wrestling champion, with your incredible handmade candles/ceramics/greeting cards/ whatever. You are fantastic at what you do, and you have a certain amount of resources that are available to a small business.
Would you compete against a heavyweight champion? Would you compete against a big business? You're gonna get crushed baby and there's nothing you can do about it. You have to pick your battles, and pick them against the competition that are your level, slowly building up through the weight classses.
I don't know why I use wrestling as a metaphor, because I don't know jack about it, but I think this makes sense, right? I stole this picture from a reddit post, btw. I think its not even wrestlers but UFC? Whatever, it's just a helpful visual to go with my metaphor.
So, in turning this into your SEO Strategy, understanding where you stand in the competitive market helps to inform your keyword strategy. For more basic information on keywords, please see this blog post on understanding keywords.
A keyword strategy involves you choosing a single keyword each for each page of your website that will be your target. These keywords all have different statistics about how hard the competition will be, based on the popularity of the keyword and the amount of websites already targeting them.
For example, using the Ahrefs Free Keyword Generator tool (Set to UK), I can see that the keyword 'candles' has a rating of HARD. The keyword 'scented candles' has a rating of MEDIUM, and 'soy wax candles' has a rating of EASY. Which one do you think would be a more effective target keyword to choose?
Basically, the more specific your target keyword, the easier rating it will have, because typically there are fewer people searching that keyword. The number of people searching a keyword is called the Search Volume, which here we can see are the following stats
- Candles = ~10,000
- Scented Candles =~1,000
- Soy Wax Candles = ~1,000
So, in this case, there are WAY more people searching for 'candles', but that keyword is HARD. However, about the same amount of people search for 'scented candles' as they do for 'soy wax candles' - and one keyword is rated as EASY and the other as MEDIUM. All the more indication here that using the target keyword 'soy wax candles' might be the most effective choice here, even though 1,000 is a LOT fewer than 10,000. But, 1,000 people who DO see your website is SO MUCH better than 10,000 people who don't.
After all, if you had 10,000 people land on your website and buy 10,000 candles every month, starting tomorrow, would you be ready? Could you fulfil those orders? Without sacrificing your quality, standards and killing yourself in the process? If the answer is yes, you could, then that's obviously incredible, and maybe you aren't a flyweight after all!
My point is, to position yourself in a place where you can win. Where you can rank high in a Google search for your chosen keyword. This will help you make more of an impact, and enable you to slowly and sustainably grow your business.
If you need more insights into choosing keywords, check out the SEO for Shopify Masterclass, which is a full, detailed explanation of everything you need to know to rank on Google with your small business. You can also hire me for 1:1 partnerships and we can do the work together.
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