Assessing the Competition

Hi all,

I'm currently using Traffic Travis and I know I shouldn't rely on this completely but I had to ask about a niche I think could work.

I found an exact match domain belonging to a set of keywords that no one else uses. When I enter the keyword into Traffic Travis it tells me that no one uses the keywords in the Title, Description or H1 tag. There are a couple that have an H1 tag, and another that uses the Title, but that's about it. So to me no one is really optimizing.

The problem I see is the number of backlinks. The site in the #4 position for instance has 150+ backlinks. I know this isn't a huge amount but the thing I noticed about all his backlinks are they weren't even using the keywords i'm trying to optimize for. He does have a similar set of keywords on his main page where he is pointing his backlinks.

So basically, if I wanted to optimize for "green fishing flies", my competitions backlinks are mostly for "bass fishing nets". But he/she does mention "green fishing flies" on his/her site.

So I guess i'm wondering how much value his backlinks are getting for the keyword i'm trying to optimize for. Can I beat him with backlinks that are more relvant to the keywords?

Thanks all!