Checking Keyword Competition

Checking Keyword Competition

Many people will look at the number of pages listed for a phrase and think that that is a fair estimate of competition level. It is not. That is just a measure of how many pages have those words somewhere in the content or in links that are pointing to their pages.

A better measure of competition is to search for keyword A keyword B, as that will at least give you the number of pages that have that phrase on it. You also can further target your competition estimation by searching Google for “allintitle: keyword” “allinanchor: keyword”. Pages that have your keyword phrases in their title may be optimized and pages that have them in their inbound links stand a good chance of being fairly well optimized.

SEO for Firefox

The best way to know what your competition level is to look at the quality of the top few sites and their link profiles. Are their sites .edu sites, old well branded sites, or other highly useful sites? Do they have many editorial links pointing at their site?

Google primarily relies upon site age and link reputation to determine relevancy for competitive terms. Links from government or educational sites are more likely to be well-trusted in search results since, typically, it is harder to influence them than the average .com website.

SEO for Firefox allows you to view many data points from directly within the search results to see how competitive a marketplace is. It will help you answer questions such as the following:

•       How old are these sites?

•       Do they have quality inbound links?

•       Are they listed in the major web directories?

•       Are bloggers mentioning their site?

•       Are people saving their site on social bookmarking sites?

Other Rough Indications of Perceived Value & Competition: Top Bid Prices & Search Volume

Other signs of a competitive marketplace are when you notice many lead-generation type websites, many exceptionally smooth user-centric highly converting websites, educational institutions, government agencies, large corporations, or high bid prices on those keywords in the top pay-per-click search engines.

You can get an extremely rough approximation of the value of a top listing on major search engines for a keyword by looking at the top listings using the Google Traffic Estimator tool.

The Tail of Search

Many people feel the need to rank for a broad generic term and optimize exclusively for that term. The problem with this is that around half of all search queries are unique each day. On May 16^th, 2007 Udi Manber said that 20 to 25% of the queries Google sees are queries they had never seen before.

If you were trying to rank well for used books you should cater to a variety of terms around that idea such as: used book store, buy used books, used book search, etc. By writing naturally and answering questions, you will also include many common terms and phrases people search for.

Need Help with Keyword Selection?

If you still need more help understanding keywords, feel free to ask me. In addition, Dan Thies of SEO Research Labs specializes in doing keyword research reports for SEOs, web designers, and webmasters.