Is this a viable keyword strategy?

[dranfu]

Hello, this is my first post to the forum, though I have been reading it for a while now and have learned a lot from the discussions. I've been considering a low competition strategy which seems like it would work well, but I am not sure if I am totally underestimating or misunderstanding the basic concept of keyword competition.


The concept is this:

Say I have a plumbing site where I want to sell a video series that teaches people how to fix their own plumbing problems, so they don't have to hire an expensive plumber to do it for them. I have done some keyword searches in IBP, Web CEO, and Google Keyword tool and have noticed that there is not a lot of competition for popular phrases, such as:

unclog tub drain - 3,600 Monthly searches - Low competition
unclog drain - 22,000 monthly searches -- Low competition
bathtub drain - 90,500 monthly searches - medium competition.

Now, my question is, how difficult would it be to create an SEO strategy that would target these apparently non competitive phrases to get my site listed very high in Google or Yahoo, etc., for these phrases?

If I designed a nice site (Magento perhaps) with smart, targeted keywords, and if I was able to back-link to a number of good sites, would it not be possible to achieve a superior ranking in this non competitive keyword space? Or am I simply being naive and missing something crucial?

[JennSpencerIM]

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "low competition" but are the first 10 results for each of those terms authority sites? or are they sites you can easily get in front of in order to rank organically?

also be sure you are looking at the EXACT match keywords in google adwords tool so you'll get a much better picture of exact searches for your terms.

[dranfu]

Originally Posted by JennSpencerIM

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "low competition" but are the first 10 results for each of those terms authority sites? or are they sites you can easily get in front of in order to rank organically?

also be sure you are looking at the EXACT match keywords in google adwords tool so you'll get a much better picture of exact searches for your terms.

Hi Jenn,

Thank you for the replying. I will try that search again with exact match. And yes, on some of those terms, there are "authority sites," such as thisoldhouse.com and others. But for some terms, the sites don't seem to be authorities, but I am making that assumption on how the sites look, as I don't really know how to conclude if a site is authoritative or not.

But is it not possible to create a smart SEO strategy that would get a higher ranking than an authoritative site? Is this just impossible? This is what I'm wondering.