Website owners would make lousy hunters. Many webmasters make the mistake of trying to get one site or one article to rank well for too many broad keywords. That’s like a hunter shooting into the trees in the hope of bagging an elk, a bear, and a few wild turkey, all with one shot. It just doesn’t work that way.

In life, if you want something bad enough, you have to be willing to do the hard work necessary to get it. The same is true when you are trying to improve your website rankings. You can’t have SEO goals so broad that you are not able to focus on a specific keyword target and go after it. Yes, it’s hard work, but if your overall market has the potential to be profitable enough, then the sum of its parts should be as well.

Go extreme in your niche marketing

Specificity is the linchpin of good SEO. You don’t market cars with no details for your customers about what kinds of cars you sell. You don’t market professional services with no details for your prospective clients about what kinds of professional services you provide. The devil – and the profit – are in the details.

You should be willing to write at least one article with the on-page SEO designed specifically for a targeted set of keywords. Of course, that page may rank well for other keywords as well. Consider that a bonus. But if a narrow niche is not worth the time and effort to even write a page about it, what makes you think Google, Yahoo, or Bing ought to rank your site well for it?

If you are wanting to market for a broad subject area, you need to break it down into its niche market components. For instance, someone marketing architectural services would want to break it down by the type of architectural services: Film studios, custom homes, commercial, retail, office, warehouse, etc.

Each niche can also be broken down into micro-niche markets. Retail can be broken down into strip malls, shopping centers, big box stores, etc. You could add restaurants and other food service buildings to the list.

The point is to break your subject matter down into its smallest components. Niche works. Scattergun doesn’t.