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I previously gave an opinion on this here....

https://moz.com/community/q/how-to-handle-annual-content-2018-2019

Yes, guiding structure.   Showing clear ties from one service of the business to another.

Your client sounds like a Renaissance Man.  A person who has mastered many things.  A Leonoardo da Vinci.  If this person also has panache, presenting a business of many artistic services seems natural.

I would work on convincing the client about....

-- the value of cross-selling, many current clients probably use more than one service, they bought one and then bought more

-- the importance of uniting all of your assets to perform well in search

-- the relevance of these services to one another and how that might help them rank better in google and appeal to multiple customers

-- in these businesses it is hard to find someone you can trust and satisfies you... once you find that person or business it is much easier to allow them to do additional services for you... this is building loyalty of the customer and building their respect for your business

- so in general, it should not matter how many links are in the article, as long they're relevant and not too spammy looking?

That's my opinion for internal links.

For external links, relevance and the quality of the destination are important.

What's the best practice in terms of regulating number of links (internal or external) in an article?

I am all about linking to other relevant pages on my site within the text of an article.  I don't think that "how many" is the right question.  I think that there are a few other questions that are more important....

A) How relevant is the link to the overall article?  If the link is not great match then don't use it.

B) If you are piling on links that people don't need, don't use them.  Just because you mention something or somebody you don't have to link to it.  Only link to it if you think some portion of your visitors need the information at the link's destination and will click through to it.

C) How does it look?  Do you have so many links that they are distracting?  Cut back if the page is blue and smells like spam.

D) Some webmasters link to pages on their own site within the text of the article, but references and citations to outside websites are footnoted and placed in a box at the bottom of the page.

I think that the CTR varies wildly.

It depends upon the skill of the person writing the ads and the title.  It depends upon the topic they are working with and who they are promoting.  It depends how clickbaity, smutty or deceptive they are willing to be.  Depends if they are offering free stuff.

Here is how many people handle these...

If you write your own sentence that incorporates a statistic or a fact that is not original to you, then it is proper to attribute that information to your source.  This is usually done in footnote fashion similar to what you see in Wikipedia articles.

This wikipedia article on "citation" is a good place to see examples of how to dot it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation

Permission is not required if the work is publicly available on a website or in a published book, unless you have agreed to confidentiality of the informaiton.  Just use a footnote and a link to their website or a reference to a printed document.  Instead of a link you can give the full url if you don't want to use a hyperlink.

If you are going to quote verbatim a sentence or two, but not more than that, then placing that verbatim text in

is often done.  This indents the text, separating it from your own, with a footnote number in brackets at the end.  [2]  Permission is not needed for a short quote from a book or from a website (unless there is a confidentiality agreement).  Just make it clear that you have quoted and keep the length of your quote very short - a sentence or two at most.  Many people will also place the

text in italics to really make it clear that you have cited.

How many times can you do this in an article?  If you do it once with a sentence or two it should be fine.  But if you are going to do it multiple times you could run into an infringement problem.  How many times?  I would get permission if I was going to use multiple blockquotes from a single source.

If you have any doubts about using the text of others in references or quotes, then it is best to consult an attorney about the "fair use" part of copyright law.  I am not an attorney and can't give exact answers on this.  In fact, many attorneys will tell you that they can't give exact answers because copyright problems often need to be tested in court in front of a jury.  It is hard or impossible what a jury will return in many situations.

There are two reasons to optimize an image...

1. you can use file name, alt attribute and captions to improve the SEO relevance of your page with the goal of ranking in the organic websearch results for a specific keyword.

2. you can use file name, alt attribute and captions to improve the SEO relevance of your image for ranking in the image search results.

How many images should you use?  Again, we have two goals... 1) ranking the page in the organic search results, and 2) ranking the image in the image search results.

For goal #1, I would not start manufacturing images just to increase the number of them that you have on your page.  Just as I would not publish a ton of yada yada yada text just to pad the word count. However, if you have a lot of good relevant images that people will actually appreciate, then you should use as many as you think will be useful for your visitors or as many as is needed to properly illustrate your articles.

For goal #2, there are two things to consider.   First, image name, alt, and caption will qualify you for image search but they are of minor importance for ranking you.  The amount of searcher engagement is what will rank you.  So, tossing up a bunch of crappy images isn't going to do any more for you than publishing yada yada yada text on your page.  You need images that people will engage.  How many?  I would publish as many as you can economically produce and that can be justified with what you can do with the traffic that they will pull.  If you have two highly competitive images google will rank both of them.  If you have five, six, seven highly compeitive images, google will rank all of them.  If you are not capable of producing highly competitive images then don't bother producing any more than you need to illustrate your article.  They have the same value as yada yada yada text.  But, you can publish images optimized for the same keyword on different pages of your website and all of them have the potential for ranking for their optimized keyword in image search - if they are competitive enough in terms of searcher engagement.

I firmly believe that if your images perform well in image search that will help your page rank better in web search.  Google knows that people who have access to good images often are the same people who have the experience and knowledge to rank well in websearch.  That is a personal belief.  Some might argue, but I am convinced.

I would have one if I was a dentist.  I would want to show a photo of my building, tell people where they can park, tell people about bus stops and other transportation details.   Driving to the nearby town is very easy, getting to an address can be more difficult.  People arrive in many different ways.

I would use image names, alt attributes, and captions that fit the images as closely as possible.

Make a folder with the title...  /golf-tournament/

Today the index file in that folder features information about your 2018 Golf Tournament.   You keep it up-to-date throughout the year.  Before the event it has who, what, where information needed for people who want to enter, photos of the course, short info about past winners, etc.

After the event you fill that page with results about the winners, cameos about the winners, big list of results and lots of photos about the event.  You leave that up for a few months.

Then, you move that entire page to a subfolder.... /golf-tournament/2018/  which will serve as a scrap book page for that year.  And, you put information about the 2019 tournament on the index file.  You have obvious links to the 2018 scrap book page so any interested person can see it.

Over time you grow a big collection of pages for each of your annual tournaments

/golf-tournament/2018/  /golf-tournament/2019/  /golf-tournament/2020/  /golf-tournament/2021/

Anybody who links to your index page will always send people to fresh information.  Anybody who wants the historic information just clicks a link for that year.

In a lot of niches there is not enough traffic to pull in 20k relevant visitors.

In niches that have enough traffic, top positions were earned by worthy websites twenty years ago.  In those niches you must earn your way to the top and that earning will take highly linkable content and an attack that could require a year or more of work.

There is no quick and easy route to 20k per month.

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From your website.... did you try it yourself ?

Top 30 handpicked ideas to generate huge targeted traffic

Unpublished?   404's?

I would not delete them.  Instead, I would enhance them (with permission of the bride and groom).  Ask the bride, groom and family and attendees, the photographer, the baker, the florist, the officiant, the catering service to contribute photos, memories, and more.  If you provide good reasons, people will share these pages, link to them, revisit them, browse them and more.  Imagine links from the photographer's site, bakers, florist, etc...

As your collection for a specific destination grows you have more cred in search, more in bound links, more type-ins and direct traffic to your website.  Allow people to sign up to receive a message a few weeks after the wedding when the page has some enhancements.

Yes, this will take a lot of work but it might be worth it.  It might be an add on that you can use to earn an extra fee. You might be able to get an interface where the bride and groom or their friends can help build and take the work burden off of you.  This might be used in advance of the wedding to communicate.

Just wild ideas as I am not in this business but know how many people like to build things and share stuff.

We use #4 in almost every instance.

We believe that it is more valuable to optimize the title tag for ranking and for eliciting clicks.  Everyone can see our domain in the URL.  Our website has been online and pulling lots of traffic for over 20 years.  Still most visitors are first time visitors.  Anyone who knows us, knows us.  Domain in the title is a waste of valuable optimization or impact space.

Wow!  It sounds like you are really reaching for your competitors' throats. 

I don't know Google's position.  However, I do have thoughts about this...

Great websites link to other great websites all of the time.  If you have a great website you can feel confident about linking to another great website that links to you.... but this is usually not done by agreement, it is done for the reason of attribution [such as in a footnote or reference] or in a helpful gesture to your visitor [done instead of giving an unlinked mention because you are damn selfish or scared to link to another great website that competes in your space].  People who run great websites are too busy running a great websites and don't have time to fart around swapping links.  They don't gotta do it.

I think that obvious gaming of the system isn't going to work much of the time.  Google is smart enough to know that one crappy website linking to another crappy website is done to game the system.  Nobody links to crappy websites, except other crappy websites who can't get a link any other way AND people who are paid to link to crappy websites.

Our practice on linking is... we only link to pages on other websites that have content that is superior in some way to the content that we have on our page.... OR.... link to pages where attribution is appropriate - much like the footnotes in wikipedia.

I think that there are many correct answers to your question... my strong bias will be shown in my response.

1. If you want a keyword optimization answer, then the keyword or keyphrase that you want to rank for should be in the title tag on the left.

2. How the company name appears is governed by marketing, ego, arrogance, and sometimes by common SEO sense. Some businesses or their owners/directors feel a need to SHOUT their company name in everyone's face.  These businesses place their company name on the left of the title tag at the expense of their page optimization.  Those who have it really bad got to have that company name in ALL CAPS.

3. Other business owners feel that the topic that they are publishing takes priority over the name of their company, so they place the title of the article on the left of the title tag and their business name on the right.  They use UpLow or in ALL CAPS depending upon how hard they usually pound their chests.

4. Some people have "a message to get out" and that message is bigger than their egos or the amount of noise that they try to make when they pound their chests.  So they use the title tag to the fullest extent possible to convey their message.  They know that every person with common sense will see their URL in the SERPs and the name of their business at the top of their website.

There you have four options.  Choose one that works for you.

Your organization will have at least one person who has lots of contact with lots of donors.  Perhaps that person would be willing to approach them about a link.  Lots of donors (though not all lf them) enjoy spreading the word about how they contributed to worthy causes (think about those photos of oversized checks in the newspaper).  These folks might be willing to write an announcement (long articles not needed) about their recent gift(s) and include links to your organization.  (You could offer to prepare it for them).  They might also use that announcement as a press release to local newspapers, local other groups who like to publicize good works.

Also, some businesses are plagued by telephone and email solicitations from charities.  We used to get several per month.  They were time wasters because we can't spend time screening charities that we have never heard of.  Then we placed an obvious link in the footer of our website about our charitable giving.  That link goes straight to an article that says... lots of people contact us about contributions...  we want to let you know that our company gives 100% of charitable giving to [name of charity].  After that link and article went live, the number of calls dropped by at least 80%, and the ones that don't notice that link and call are handled gracefully..."[thanks for calling, 100% of our support goes to [name of charity]."  Charitable solicitation calls are no longer a problem because we don't get very many and the ones that we do get are easy to deal with.  And, our favorite charity got a great article with an obvious link.

Will it impact your quality score?

Yes, because it might be less relevant to the query.   Yes, because it might be clicked LESS.

But, if you can get clicked more often than your competitors your quality score might rise.

Keep in mind that in the adwords auction it is not the size of your bid that influences your position.  Instead it is the size of your bid x your CTR.  So a $1 per click ad that gets clicked 4x as much as a $3 per click ad can be in superior position.

That is what makes outrageous possible.  Make your ad say what ALL of your customers want.  Do you have a value proposition? do you have unique service, are you the best dentist, do you have the best location, do you have late evening service, do you have openings TODAY?   You can use these things if you have panache and can manage your ads actively through the day.

I would never recommend outsourcing the aggressive campaign. YOU know your business, your clients, where you have competitive advantage, where you can appeal, better than anyone.  And, with a small amount of training your receptionist might be able to weak your ads to say... appts today at 3 and 5.

PPC allows you to present entirely different offers to the searcher.

While the optimization of your webpage used to compete in the SERPs must be worded to win position, your adwords ad can be different - even outrageous.  Match it to your local offline advertising slogan, match it to an additional service that is profitable but not visible in your organic listing, use it to present a click-to-call, use it if you are aggressive and want to run the competition out of town or swamp them with your message.

in 2018 buying backlinks is still the most valueable way to achieve good rankings on google.

Use this method at your own (and considerable) risk.  Plenty of people have lost their business, their way of earning a living (and their family's estate) by purchasing backlinks.

Link buying is often used by SEOs who want to get paid for ranking a website and don't care about the long term sustainablity of the business who hired them.

My concern is that page 1 and page 2 are redundant.

They are only redundant if they are filled with identical content.  Content about brands can be sales information or information of many other types.. how to select amount their models, how to use, how to repair, accessories available, many, many other types of information - each different, each targeting a different searcher, each capable of stimulating conversion, each a candidate for producing links.

Entire websites can be made from one brand, one product line, one model... potential customers, new buyers, long-time owners, service providers, journalists, and many other types of people love this type of website.

Using cars as an example....  And here we are using CONSUMER language....

Brand:  Kia

Model: Sorento

Configuration:   Kia Sorento 2.4L LX

Year:  2017 Kia Sorento 2.4L LX

Category:  Sport Utility  or   Mid-Size

On a car dealer's website there might be multiple ways to arrange these, both on the pages, in the subfolders, in the navigational hierarchy.

Kia  >>  Sorento  >>  2017  >>  2.4L XL

2017  >>  Kia  >>  Sorento  >>  2.4L XL

Sport Utility  >>  Kia  >>  Sorento  >>  2017  >>  2.4L XL

There are many other ways... which method to use depends upon what products you have and how you want to present them to your customers.

2017, Kia, Sorento, Sport Utility, Mid Size, New/Used, Price Range, Mileage, etc can all be category pages.

Product pages are going to be either individual cars, or they could be pages farther up in the hierarchy with multiple products.

Amazon gives sellers five bullet points at the top of the product page, then a couple hundred words down below.

We changed many of our retail pages to 1) a two or three sentence sales pitch; 2) several bullets (as many as needed); 3) an article format description that might include additional photos, the most commonly asked questions about the product.

My first response to this type of problem is to check for duplicate content, such as when another person or bot grabs your content and posts it on another website.

My second response would be a check for a canonical problem, such as when your page can be identified by multiple URLs.

Those are the two best things to check for.  However, I also know of a site that has this exact problem.  The content is  high quality, has been on the web for a few years, yet the pages can be in the top ten for good keywords, then disappear out of the top 100 only to return to the top ten.  This has been repeating for a couple of months.

Totally serious... probably because they are not among the world's leading digital agencies.

Bet on  yourself.  You can see that mimicking others is not the way to go.

I agree.  Lots of people like registration for those reasons.

The method that you use should be determined by costs, business goals, and the level of security that you are able to provide.

All three methods are good options.  Select the one that works best for your business.

No registration:  This is what we do.  Some customers complain because they have to enter their address and credit card information every time.  We don't offer registration because we want a simple and low cost shopping cart.

Optional registration:  If you offer this, only a fraction of your customers will use it, but they will be happy about it.  I like this option myself.  I register on sites that I trust and use repeatedly, and check out as a guest on other sites.  Registration will give you customer data that can be used to learn about the customers and offer them items that they are likely to purchase.

Required registration:  Lots of people really hate this.  I hate this.  Some potential customers will not buy from you if they must register.  I leave some sites that require registration.  I want to check out as a guest on most of the sites that I use.  Customer data as mentioned above will be useful.

There is a long history of SEOs not liking the work of designers and designers not meeting the expectations of SEOs.

I come from a content and SEO background, not a designer background.  I spent lots of money on design work and didn't like it.  And, I would not like the work of SEOs or content writers because they do not meet my standards.

The best advice that I have ever received was... do your own design.  Keep it simple, simple simple, but do your own design.  I didn't like that advice but I did some design, threw it away,  redid it and threw it away, redid it yet again and threw it away.  Then, finally I came up with a simple, simple, simple design.  Live has been good ever since.  My design will not win awards, but that design does not compete with my content, it works great with my SEO and it looks simply good.

Two things that you do not mention in your question - which are of jugular importance.

1. the website must also meet the needs of the visitor

2. the website must also meet the needs of the business

These two are the intersection of content and design and SEO.  They are neglected in most websites.  And that is why most websites only make money for the designer and the SEO and the hosting company.  The needs of the visitor and the owner are not planned or not understood.

The most important benefit of accepting this person's advice is... I no longer have to pull teeth from designers to try to get them to do things my way.  I know what I want and I make it... and sometimes I need a special graphic and I pay for that element.  But now, I start with A) business goals and objectives, B) needs of the visitor, C) a content plan that will meet the needs of SEO (along with the needs of my visitors and the goals and objectives of my business).

Your website needs SEO in my opinion.  And, if I was going to work on the SEO of this website, I would start from the beginning.  I would start by planning the needs of the visitor and the needs of the business.  Then I would plan where in the search engines the website must be visible and how that can be accomplished (which includes link-worthy content).   Then I would plan the content to meet all of those needs.  Finally, would come the design.

So, my suggestion to you is ... Learn SEO.  If you learn SEO, I am betting that you will change the way you design and you will change the way that you do content.  You will serve your customers better and you will produce greater demand for your services.

A person who understands SEO, content, business objectives, user needs and design will have the most success.  Because they will not need to build a highly competitive automobile with parts made by many different people who do not have the specifications or care about them.  They just wanted to be paid for their part of the job.

How to gain or build high authority backlinks without content?

High authority websites usually link to websites that are superior to them in some way.  They often link to single articles that are better than anything on their own site.  They link to websites that offer an exemplary service that they do not offer.

So, if you are looking to acquire high authority backlinks without content.  I don't think you will be successful.   Why would a high authority site link a site with nothing important?  That is your question.

I would be afraid of 82 pages with a sentence or two.  I would take one of two routes if this was my site...

A) Beef up each of these pages to one or two photos and one or two paragraphs, at least 100 words total.

B) Place all 82 of the definitions on a single big page that has on-page anchors so that links from other parts of your site can point straight to the definition.

We have an industry glossary on one of our sites with a few thousand terms.  Most terms are accompanied by one photo and 50 to 200 words of text.  We don't have individual pages for each term.  Instead we have 26 pages, one for each letter of the alphabet.  Some of these pages have over 100 terms.   For several hundred of these terms we also have a substantive article with 500 to 5000 words and numerous photos.  So, the bold term in the glossary links to the substantive article page.

Back in the early 2000s, the glossary was a good source of links and it got a lot of traffic.  The value of the glossary for attracting links and traffic has declined over time.  The value of the article collection has grown.

By resetting your DNS to CF, your server is no longer used.  All traffic is routed to one of CF's data centers and there are over 100 of them distributed throughout the world.

Also, in the CF settings, you want to "challenge" the visitors from problem countries.  This will give them a captcha to complete.  When they complete that captcha one time, you can then give them long term access without the challenge.  CF will progressively become better at filtering the bots and allowing more trusted visitors in without a challenge.

If you don't use Firewall, Cloudflare in your situation will have almost no effect.

We used our analytics to determine the countries where the traffic was coming from.  Then went into CF FW.

Click the blue Help link for each tool to decide upon the settings that you want to try.

Here is what we used....

Security Level... Medium

Challenge Passage... one day

Access rules....  country name, challenge, this website

Impact of the above....  Many bots already recognized by CF will be blocked.  Access rules will present each visitor from those countries a form similar to a captcha.  They must pass the captcha to get in.

After you turn this on, watch your short term stats.  You should see an increase in blocking.

We ran the above for a few weeks without any obvious SEO impact.  Then switched our DNS back to normal, moving away from CF.... but kept the $20/month account and our settings in place.   CF was time-consuming to set up.

One morning, a few months ago we saw lots of mobile phone traffic building.   All was hitting our homepage which is very resource intensive.  All of this traffic generated one page view.  All of the traffic was coming from a few countries in Asia and Africa.  No referrer.  Looked like a DDOS attack.

We go to Cloudflare, got a $20/month account, switched DNS to CF, forced untrusted visits from those countries to verify before allowing entry.  Squeezed this traffic down to almost nothing within a few hours.  Left CF run for a few weeks.  Rouge traffic disappeared.

Now we have CF ready to go with all settings in place.  Can turn it on in two minutes and have the shield in place as DNS propagates.

"Mr X flew back to the United States last week"

In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with your sentence.  I understand it.  I think that Google will understand it.

Most of the writing that I do is very formal writing.  Other people write in a relaxed manner, as though they are speaking.  That type of speaking and writing is known as **colloquial. **

I believe that much of your writing is colloquial and Google will accept it without a problem.

The only thing that I might add to your writing is some periods and commas.   You might do that when you write for a website as forum writing is not given as much time.

I always pick the sentence structure that is the most interesting to the reader and easiest to understand.

The job of writing is not easy.  Don't complicate it by trying to please google.  Please the reader and you will please google directly or indirectly.

I believe that your related keywords are important to have on the page, but that there is very little benefit to contriving sentence structures to present them to Google in a certain way.

I believe that it is more important to have natural writing in which the writer's only focus is to communicate clearly and in an interesting way.

I spend zero time "writing sentences to please Google".   I spend massive amounts of time trying to write in a way that my visitors will find interesting and easily understand.

Rand covered rel=canonical used cross-domain as today's WhiteBoard Friday topic.

https://moz.com/blog/cross-domain-rel-canonical-seo-value-cross-posted-content

Internal links are extremely valuable for making money.

If you make money from ads they can get you additional pageviews.  We ad internal links to every article that we write - very similar to what Wikipedia does.

Internal links can help visitors discover more of your content, which can result in links, shares, and more.

Internal links can improve the engagement metrics that Google collects about your website.

Internal links can drive sales.  Linking from article pages to retail pages can be a driver of sales.  Lots of websites make their money  by attracting visitors to article pages and then funneling them to retail pages.

I'd go to the SEMrush dashboard and copy/paste the URL in the search box.  Then press the orange search button.

You will get a report that shows the keywords that the page ranks for and the rankings that they currently hold.

The keywords that they are targeting can, and usually are, very different from the keywords that they are ranking for  -- and the keywords that they are targeting is less valuable information than the keywords that they are ranking for.

And, on that I hold that the intentions of other people who own a website can not be divined, nor is their smarts anything that I would be willing to bet my money on.

The amount of time that it takes to rank has a lot of variables...  the variables that you have some control over area....

A)  the quality of your content

B)  the strength of your website

C)  your ability to get links into the new page

The actions of your visitors are also important.  They can share, they can engage, or they can do one of these or neither.

The actions of your competitors are also important.  They can be working on content for similar keywords, they can be working on links to their competing page, or working on links to their entire website.

All of this is why SEOs can't guarantee rankings or "time to rank".  But mainly, they don't have control over their competitors.

I really like Stpehan's idea of "indexed collections of complaints".

"they'll often let a site with a stronger link profile win when there are two sites with the same piece of content"

I agree with Kristina that the stronger site is usually the one that Google ranks better.

Your question is one of copyright infringement.  A few days ago I gave a detailed response to a similar question here.  My response is "what we do"... the process might work for you or you might want to modify or develop your own method..

https://moz.com/community/q/competitor-using-our-product-descriptions

Just stating a couple of facts and a couple of things that I believe about those facts.....  I'll be clear to state the parts that are beliefs below.

1. If you have a lot of thin content pages on a website then you run the risk of Google seeing those thin content pages and slapping the domain with a Panda problem.  I believe that can cause reduced rankings across the entire domain.

2. Google recently said that they are going to stop following the links on noindex pages.  From that, I believe that some pagerank will be lost from every link that enters them.  I believe that can result in lower rankings for the entire domain.

If I owned the site above.  I would place all of these pages where they can be safely noindexed without causing a loss of pagerank and not produce a Panda problem.  That would require them to be in a subdomain that is noindexed or on another domain that is no indexed.

That's what I would do with these pages.

The new URLs seem pretty verbose.

If this was my site, I would consider...

https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide/Inline-Skates/
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide/Kids-Inline-Skates/
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide/Inline-Hockey-Skates/
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide/Aggressive-Skates/

My breadcrumbs would look similar....

Home >> Buying Guide >> Inline Skates

Check for yourself.

Pick a sentence, then copy/paste it into a google search box between quotation marks and search.

You will probably find that same sentence on other websites.

Ross Hudgens has a good article that describes what it takes to be competitive.

https://www.siegemedia.com/creation/content-marketing-cost

What exactly did you mean by 'ability to compete' though?

Ability to compete is the ability to create spectacular content, promote it with titles and headlines that people will respond to and spontaneously share, and have a tribe that will do that for you, or an ability to ask for and get valuable links.

Most people can't do this.

Most who can do this only achieve it with a fraction of their articles - even though they work hard at every one of them.

A lot of people think that they have "good content".  Perhaps an English professor would have given the writing and the presentation a "good grade" but that isn't enough.  You need writing and images that people see and say... Wow!... then they share it because they want their friends to know what they have found.  For that to happen you must have content that is at least one clear step above all other competition.

I believe that the strategy is better determined by 1) the type of site you are working on (transactional vs informational); 2) the quality of content that you are best able to produce; 3) the investment that you are willing to put into the content; and, 4) the strength of your tribe.

For informational, you can pick and choose the keywords to where you have the ability and resources to defeat the best content on the web, or at least compete with it.  If you don't have the content-producing ability or the ability to pay for it, your chances of success are greatly diminished.  If you can compete with the best content of the difficult keywords then you should attack the biggest keywords where you have the ability to compete.  Don't fear competition because where there is a lot of competition, there is usually a lot of traffic and a lot of money changing hands.

If you don't have the ability to produce or pay for highest quality content and intend to attack with prattle, then your chances of success are greatly diminished.  Just sayin'.

In transactional, a good method is to publish content that is highly useful for the people who are about to make a transaction or have made a transaction and now need information.  How to select the product, how to use it, how to fix it, how to enjoy it are very good fields for transactional websites.  They earn respect of shoppers and earn respect of people with an interest in the products you are offering.  They pull links, traffic, social engagement and make your site a "go to place" on the web.

Your tribal resource might be current traffic who will share your content or current social strength that will enable you to share and that sharing be spread.   Here, again is where highest quality content succeeds and prattle is not worth much.

It's not about the authority that you have today... its the authority where your content can take you.