Ranking first is not always the best:

1. It's not necessary to get as many visitors as possible

Many people optimize their web pages because they want to get more website visitors. This usually is a good idea. However, it's likely that won't double your sales if you get twice as many visitors as now.
The additional visitors must come through keywords that convert to sales. It depends on what the searcher is looking for. If you are booking hotel rooms in Miami Beach, then people who enter "book miami beach hotel room" in Google's search box are exactly the people you're looking for.
But that's the best case. Depending on the intention of the searcher, the search terms can be different: "hotel" (general interest in hotels), "miami beach" (interested in general information about the place), "miami beach hotel" (looking for different offerings), etc. Getting high rankings for "miami beach" will get you many new visitors, but few new customers.

✔ Time-saving conclusion:

When you optimize your web pages, optimize them for keywords with a high conversion rate. Avoid vanity keywords that just look good. The more targeted the keywords are, the better. A small traffic increase for good keywords is much better than a big traffic increase for low quality keywords.

2. It's not always necessary to rank higher than your competitors

For some keywords, it doesn't matter if your website is listed on position 2 or position 7. Searchers will check multiple results on the first results page before they make a decision. If your website is listed in the top 3 results, it is possible that the time and effort that is necessary to move your website to position 1 is better used to get high rankings for new keywords.
The number of targeted visitors that you get through the new keywords might be more than the additional visitors that you get by increasing the position for a single keyword.

✔ Time-saving conclusion:

It's sometimes better to optimize for new keywords than to optimize for keywords for which you already have good rankings.

Keywords have been mentioned often in this article by Axandra and it makes me continue to tell people that keywords are important still very important. Many people I have talked to do not think they need keywords anymore, I say bull, you still need them and we can provide them for you!

More to come soon.

Joe Rossini