Is it feasible to figure out how to rank on page 1 of Google for a competitive search term as a single person working on my SEO strategy?

I don't know what your business is, so I won't attempt to give any specific advice here on strategy. But I will share a few thoughts on broad strategy that are essential. Dislodging an authoritative site from the top results is not something you accomplish with blogging, link building or proper use of heading tags (with rare exceptions). Dislodging an authority means becoming the new authority. Your product can't be as good as the #1 ranked site. It can't be a little bit better. It needs to be the best. You need to do a comprehensive review of what all of your competitors are offering, and make damn sure that what you've got crushes them. Remember, Google's job is to give the best results. If your site is the best, things have a way of naturally working themselves out from there. The second thing to understand is that your goal is not to do all the hard work yourself. Give people incentives to share, discuss and promote your brand, and remove all the obstacles. This is the key to so-called "organic" growth. That being said, there is still plenty of work involved. "I don't have time" has never been an adequate excuse in business. Make the time. Don't waste it on inconsequential short-term gains; instead, nurture your product and pay attention to the basics. If you don't have a great website, streamlined content delivery strategy, an open line of communication with your customers, a presence on social media and a plan for seeding viral growth, there is just no sense in spending your time on anything else. Yes, I'm oversimplifying a very complex subject. But at the end of the day, if your site doesn't fully deserve to get ranked on top, you will simply never be able to prop up an undeserved ranking on non-existent resources. Hopefully I've given you something to think about at the very least. :) Good luck.

I think I'm qualified to answer this question as I was the online marketing manager (mainly focussing on Social Media, Content Marketing and SEO).I worked with a start-up which was into professional training for designers. They had 7 courses related to UX. When I joined them they were just about on the first page (10th link on the page). Eventually this position was lost and it was pushed to second page.Now the first 8 links were firmly in grip of established brands (who also gave training in the same domain) and competitors. I took time to understand the competitors and their rankings. Once done, I created a strategy which would propel my company among top 6 or 7 links on the first page (the immediate goal was to get back on the first page).Did lot of link building, content marketing, blogging. Not much wasn't happening on ranking front. But somewhere I knew my strategy will deliver the results. And boy didn't it.I was serving my notice period and had two weeks remaining. As usual I decided to check on the ranking and boom! my company was straight up on 4th position for for its primary keyword (which had a PPC cost of 445 INR). Can you imagine that?Two days later I again check, the company moved two position up and it was on second position (the first position was acquired by Quora thread).And just a day before I was to complete my notice period, as you may have guessed it, it was (and still is) ranking number position. Finally I did it.You know what's even better? For all the local SEO queries for all the courses, my company ranked (and is still ranking number one). Still better, there was another major keyword we were trying to rank for and we achieved number spot for it too.What makes this crazy is that for 3 variations of 5 different major keywords of 5 different courses we rank among top 6. Trust me it was the best way to sign off from a job. Taking your company to number position in a competitive and tough domain.So trust me when I say that you can certainly deliver the result and figure it out how to rank as the top result on Google. BTW, I was the one man show for handling online marketing for the company.Still if you want to check out just Google "UX Design Course" and the very first link you see (not the paid advertising) is the company. I have already moved out of the company and longer work with them.If you (or anyone reading this) needs guidance on how to achieve this can PM me. I'm open to freelancing. I love helping start-ups.

Google actually now (October 2013), makes it easier than ever for small businesses to rank number one in both local and national searches without even having to tangle in the cesspool of douche bag, self anointed digital marketing and SEO "experts". Google+ easily (well not so easily for some businesses)  gets your business listed locally on the first page of local searches (either people searching that are physically in your location or that type in the name of your location, as part of their search) and by using WordPress as a platform and by leveraging SEO plugins, some small businesses are quickly ranking past established competitors, that have not switched to platforms that allow easy and quick addition of SEO optimized "fresh" content on their websites. If you want more info on this feel free to contact me