The keywords and phrases you choose to focus upon for your business niche should be determined through domain expertise on what your business offers and what your clients expect, combined with expert SEO analysis in order to reach a strategic objective. The more targeted your business, the better the plan-to-action will be.

Specificity

The more targeted the niche the better, as competition is fierce in SEO. Within your targeted niche(s), it is important to see what valuable online resources are available and used by potential clients.

Reporting and analytics are absolutely crucial. While SEO remains somewhat of a black art and progress takes a lot of time, a comprehensive approach that collects data on past performance and iteratively applies results toward site and content refreshes is required. Within your business niche, reports on your performance, as well as those of your main competitors, should be used to identify areas of progress and areas that need improvement.

Keywords

Keyword targeting is crucial; research can determine the better keywords and phrases to use. If the keywords are too esoteric (and not actually typed in by searchers), then results will not improve. If keywords are too broad, then competition will dampen your results.