Karl Sultana has an article with a number of steps that he claims will allow you to beat a competitor who is in the number one position in Google for a certain keyword. However Karl writes you still need to find keywords that does not have too many competition if you do not have someone to help you doing optimization.

Karl concludes:
As you can see it is important to check out what your competitor does. You do the steps mentioned for each keyword you want to get number one position for. Your goal should be the number one so you analyze the competitor that is number one position.
Analyzing can be long but well worth it cause you have a faster chance to get ranked above your competitor. Nowadays it is very common that webmasters hire people to help them to in search engine optimization. You can hire someone to do the analyzation, link building or both. Outsourcing has become very effecient and effective nowadays so I suggest you take advantage of that.

I’m not too sure about this, but hey, it’s not an area I am expert in, so what do others think? See Karl’s complete article at promotionworld.com/marketing/online/article/071018HowTo.html