I work for a web and graphic design company. We're not a huge shop but we do fairly well. We're starting to dig into SEO, especially for ourselves. Our biggest problem is our backlinks and competition. We need to be able to rank for keywords like "web design boston" and "graphic design boston". Yet our competition has those locked down and only because of their backlinks. Normally I would say well okay lets look at what they're doing and do it better. The problem is most of their backlinks come from their clients websites that they themselves have designed and put a link on the footer of each page. We do that too but because we're smaller we don't have anywhere near as many clients as they do.
I know I can try and rank for more "niche" keywords. But I want to know in all honesty what my options are for these same keywords. What realistic methods can I use to achieve the same kind of rankings they are?
