You always hear "gurus" say that they can get you to the first page of Google. What they don't tell you is they get to pick the keywords!
Here's a perfect example:
As a local lead generation method, I put up two websites that my business associate and I will use to capture contact information from local businesses. We want to focus on the city we live and work in, Livermore, California. It's a small town.
The two websites are:
Bet you can guess the angles we're shooting for!
Anyway, they are both squeeze pages with the sole purpose of getting interested parties to sign up to get a free book in return for leaving their first name and email address. Pure squeeze page. Nothing fancy.
They were put up a couple weeks ago with the idea that we would do some postcard and door-to-door marketing with them, point a few links their way, and that's about it.
Thus far, we have done nothing to promote them. Not a thing. However, they both sit on the first page of Google for the keywords we targeted. One is at #1! (That cracks me up.)
Here's SEO Livermore
And here's Livermore Fanpages
#1 and #3. Not bad for zero effort.
In fact, this is the ONLY mention, besides a local announcement, for either of the two sites.
In any event, it just goes to show you that choosing your keywords is vitally important to your website's success. However, don't be led to believe that ranking #1 on Google is the magic bandaid for making a lot of money.
There could be a reason that the two sites mentioned ranked high with absolutely no work done from an SEO perspective (there really isn't any content, either, another giant consideration in ranking at the search engines.
That reason might be that there is no competition in the area. It may also mean that there's no demand. If there's enough demand for a good or service, supply usually comes onboard pretty quickly to meet the demand.
But not in this case. There is really no competition (but myself–note this website in the SERPs for one of the KWs) and it could be because there's little to no demand for SEO services or Facebook fanpages.
So the long moral to the story is that you have to pick your KWs wisely–not too much competition but certainly some commercial appeal.