Found a smart competitor with a 3y headstart. What to do?
jacquesm: It's good to know they exist, they'll probably be aware that you exist sooner or later as well.It's a big world!There is more than room enough for two, three or 50 companies doing what you're doing, the market is more than large enough for that, especially if you look overseas as well.A three year headstart is your advantage. After all, you get the benefit of their three years of product development without having to go the long way round. Check out what they've got and learn from it.Stick to your plan, observe them like a hawk and make sure that you give your customers excellent service. They won't go looking for a competitor until you mess up.Don't worry so much about keyword rankings, a solid business does not solely depend on search engines for its traffic. And there is always advertising if you want to go and acquire new customers in a higher volume.As for going 'niche' that might be a great strategy to stay under their radar until you've been able to level the playing field and you have a bigger war chest.But in the long run their existence shouldn't matter much, it's not like you're going to go head to head with microsoft or google on operating systems or search.It's just another company, they come and go. Likely there are other competitors out there that you haven't picked up on yet.In a market with no competition, anybody can be 'top dog'. Such markets are illusions, any way that you find to make a living someone else will come and see you and think 'hey, nice idea'. Some of them will be better, some of them will be worse. There is no hard and fast rule that says that the first mover will be the one to win the game.The there is the subject of locality. If you are going to address the 'self employed' market then there are so many options so 'slice' that market that if you make it easy to adapt your product to a niche that you could also address many of these niches in parallel, effectively you are still 'broad' but you now have a unique advantage for each of those little sub markets.Which should remedy some of your keyword worries, since it is much easier to rank high for combinations of keywords than that it is to rank high for individual keywords.good luck!