The first step of improving your SEO is to analyze your website against your competitors websites to begin understanding where the SEO opportunities are. This is called Keyword Research.
Keyword Research is when you investigate which keywords you should be chasing after.
During your keyword research, you’ll choose a list of keywords you want to rank higher on Google for. Then you’ll want to use a tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush to see if its realistically feasable to rank for those keywords. These tools will tell you which keywords your competitors rank high for and which keywords you can realistically rank for with a little bit of effort.
You may WANT to rank for a certain keyword, but doing some research will reveal that some are just impossible for you to ever rank for.
Take a look at this screenshot from my tools. It shows that the “engagement ring store” keyword is INCREDIBLY difficult to rank for, and Blue Nile currently holds the top position.
If you looked deeper into my program, you’d see that the reason Blue Nile ranks so high for this keyword is because they have thousands of backlinks to their content pages. They’ve spent years creating content on their website and thousands upon thousands of other websites link to their website. This is a main ranking factor. So realistically, no matter how much you spend or put into your SEO for that particular keyword, you’ll never outrank Blue Nile. It would be a complete waste of time and money to even try to rank for that keyword.
So in this case, you’d be better off using paid Google Ads to reach customers for those search terms.
This is why doing proper keyword research is an integral part of your marketing strategy. You need to learn where the real ranking opportunities are and aren’t.