As a search marketer I know from experience that no worthwhile phrases are easy to rank for. If a phrase receives traffic, it has websites running SEO and PPC campaigns to rank for that phrase. For many small businesses, a successful website can make or break them, and many local businesses are often put in the ring with the big dogs, the guys whose commercials you constantly see on television, the guys with thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on marketing. The good news is that a small, well-run, quality SEO campaign can compete with the “big dogs” given a reasonable amount of time for ranking increases.
With many local clients in Baltimore and throughout Maryland, I became curious about the most competitive phrases in the area where Dragonfly is based. Who has it toughest where SEO is concerned? I took ten often-searched keywords and added Maryland to them, resulting in the following 10 keyword phrases:
- maryland hotel
- maryland lawyer
- maryland doctor
- maryland florist
- maryland dentist
- maryland seo
- maryland car dealership
- maryland restaurant
- maryland limo
- maryland photographer
To determine who has it toughest, I utilized 2 tools: SEOMoz’s keyword difficulty tool and Google Adwords Keyword Tool. SEOMoz’s tool provided a 1-100% score for keyword phrase difficulty, with 100 being the most difficult to rank for. From Google Adwords I pulled PPC costs and competition scores, attributing a 30 to High competition results, 20 to Medium, and 10 to Low. Here are the results:
| Keyword | SEOMoz | Competition | PPC Cost | Score |
| maryland hotel | 67 | (High) 30 | 2.47 | 99.47 |
| maryland lawyer | 15 | (High) 30 | 13.13 | 58.13 |
| maryland doctor | 35 | (Low) 10 | 2.71 | 47.71 |
| maryland florist | 1 | (High) 30 | 4.38 | 0 |
| maryland dentist | 18 | (High) 30 | 5.26 | 53.26 |
| maryland seo | 32 | (Medium) 20 | 13.37 | 65.37 |
| maryland car dealership | 1 | (High) 30 | 4.05 | 0 |
| maryland restaurant | 35 | (Low) 10 | 0.67 | 45.67 |
| maryland limo | 1 | (High) 30 | 2.98 | 0 |
| maryland photographer | 1 | (High) 30 | 2.55 | 0 |
Unfortunately, the SEOMoz competitive analysis did not return credible results for florist, car dealerships, limo, and photographer, so they were eliminated from the results. Based on my analysis, the order of difficulty to rank for keywords, with #1 being most difficult, is:
6. maryland restaurant
5. maryland doctor
4. maryland dentist
3. maryland lawyer
2. maryland seo
1. maryland hotel
I’m no statistician and there are probably loads of holes in this study, but the results don’t surprise me. SEO is naturally near the top because SEOs know how to SEO themselves, and dentists, lawyers, and doctors–all professionals–fall within the same range as each other. Based on my scoring system, hotels are by far the most difficult to rank for, and if you’re in the hotel business you’ve got your work cut out for you.
This analysis was mostly for personal curiosity, so I wouldn’t cite any of these results in any dissertations if I were you…
