Take your five long-tail keywords developed in your niche research and apply them as follows:

QSR stands for 'quoted search results' - now is the time to put that QSR to work for you.

Google "long-tail keyword" - where "long-tail keyword" is from the list you developed, placed in quotation marks and searched on Google. This is the page you are attempting to dominate with your potential website.

Look at the results - how many listings are paid advertisements? Unless you're planning on an adspend that outspends your competition, you're not going to be ranking here (you can, but that's another tutorial entirely).

Next, how many authority sites relevant to your niche, (Huffington Post, Tech Crunch, personal finance blogs, Fitness magazines) occupy the first ten entries?

If paid advertising and authority sites already dominate the above-the-fold (content that can be seen without scrolling) content, you've got your work cut out for you. This is not meant to discourage you, rather, paint an accurate picture of the road ahead. Continue searching for the first non-authority blog you see. That's most likely as high as you can rank with that keyword. (This does not mean to discard the keyword , as I will discuss later).

As you research each keyword, make a note of all the URLs for the non-authority sites that you find. These are your competitors for that keyword.

Now, go through the remaining four keywords to see what your possibilities are. If all you see on page one are sponsored ads and authority sites, your journey will be significantly more difficult than if the keyword research shows a barren wasteland of poorly implemented websites. Again, be sure to notate your page 1 competitors