Conducting Competitor analysis will help get higher search engine rankings for your website.

Before we make the final decision on what keywords to use we need to look at who the competition are, and why they are raking so well for the keyword.

There can be several reasons for a site to rank well for a keyword and these can range from the accidental to the professionally optimised.

Obviously if we can find keywords that have little or no professionally managed sites then we can dominate these keywords with little effort.

If however we find keywords with professional optimisation we need to make a decision on how valuable that work is to us.

If it is going to take a lot of resources to get a word that will deliver us only 1% more sales then it might not be worth it, if however we could expect 20% more sales from that keyword then it might be worth putting in the extra effort.

Remember sometimes it is easier and more efficient to rank for 2 or 3 keywords that combined bring you 500 visitors than it is to take on Amazon for the one keyword to bring you the same visitors.

Ranking well for many keywords rather than just a few also has an effect on how the search engines react to your site, they think you know your subject and give you more credit for new terms you are attempting to rank for, this is how sites like Amazon, eBay and the BBC all rank so well for so many words.

Using this approach you can take a longer term view on some keywords and rank for them without spending the intense resources some newer sites might have too.