Keyword Competition Research Methods

The foundation for any effective keyword competition research method must start with the following truism: “We only go after keyword phrases that are already getting traffic…”

No traffic equals little to no potential for making money from your website. O.K. That’s a D-U-H moment and a half.

Conversely, proof of traffic almost always breeds competition for the keyword phrase and within the niche the keyword phrases are associated with.

Put in another way: wherever there’s traffic, there’s probably established businesses already selling to the people driving the traffic. So the question is, can we wiggle our way into that traffic stream?

While there can’t be a definitive answer, methodical keyword competition research methods could help us decide whether to try. Or not…

We can use free online tools like Google’s Adword research tools, Spyfu’s CPC tool, SEOBooks toolbar, SEOQuake’s shake & bake tools and a host of others. (See the ‘Resources’ links at the end.)

These are mostly labor intensive, hands on solutions.

Before get serious, you may want to watch this video showing how you could use Google Keyword Suggestion Tool to do keyword research & competitive keyword research. Although I can’t endorse anything in the video, it’s great for niche research beginners. (I’ll be back with you after the vid

There is a long list of paid products & paid software which supposedly do keyword competition research methods for you. I’ve used many and don’t care to highlight them at this time. So I won’t…

The data many of the paid tools return to the user are scraped from the free tools we’ve already mentioned. They just take much of the manual labor out of the process.

Plus, they should save us time.

The trick here is, of course, pick a promising set of related keywords with traffic and start testing methods to get our links into the top spot of SERP’s. (Search Engine Results Page)

So speedy research coupled with speedy tests is key at this stage of starting an online business. Which brings us full circle to keyword competitiveness.

For the sake of illustration, we’ll list the usual competition benchmarks new marketers are advised to use during their decision making process:

• Number of monthly searches: 1,000 monthly minimum
• Average Google Adword CPC: Proof of money being made
• Number of web pages returned for the keyword phrase: your direct competition
• The average page rank (PR) for the top 10 sites: competitors strength
• The number of backlinks: your target to beat

Any process, or method, has to start somewhere. Yet, there’s no point in limiting ourselves to fit other people’s expectations or biased history. Basing our decision strictly upon the above data would keep us from niches we could possibility profit from targeting.

Which would mean more research for us, of course. Better to investigate now than build a web business upon false assumptions later.

An example of benefiting from more research could be backlinks. A SERP showing 6,588 backlinks looks like a 2,000 pound gorilla to the average new marketer. Not necessarily an accurate image though.

Perhaps 5,776 of those links are from link farms and web pages with over 50 outgoing links? Eventually, most likely sooner, search engine software will discount, or penalize, such links.

Which leaves fewer than a thousand backlinks. Suppose 600 of those 1,000 are links from web pages with PR’s of 1? Or even zero?

How quickly a gorilla can become easy pickings, huh?

All because we didn’t let other people scare us off with their simplistic solutions. Here’s another list of keyword competition research benchmarks that dig deeper:

• Number of web pages returned for the keyword phrase
• Keyword phrase searched within “quotes”
• Keyword phrase searched as intitle:”YourKeyWordPhrase” (KWP)
• Is the keyword used in the title?
• Does meta description include the KWP?
• Main site’s URL: does it include the KWP?
• Is the ranked page’s content optimized for the KWP?
• Are title tags used on the SERP’s content page? <h1> <h2>, etc.
• Are LSI phrases used within the linked page’s content & links?
• How old is the site?
• SERP’s page rank? (PR)
• Number of backlinks for the SERP
• Quality of the web pages back linked to the SERP we’re studying
• Are the keyword phrases used as backlink anchor text?
• Number of backlinks for the main website & their quality
• And so on…

We’re not saying new online marketers are being bamboozled about the nature of, and the rules of judging potential competitor’s power Vs. their vulnerability.

We are saying that commonsense indicates competitors with high PR, lots of relevant anchor text backlinks from web pages also carrying high PR, are formidable competition.

On the other hand, highly ranked SERP’s with low PR and only a few hundred low-quality, non-targeted backlinks, are easy prey for us.

And “Oh Mama, we are looking so diligently for the latter!”

The above is merely an example of my keyword competition research methods. I don’t always use the exact same process each time. Different business models are better used for different target markets. Which often calls for different research qualifications.

Stay casual,
Edward ‘Mr Ed’ Thorpe “He who helps the most people Wins!”

Selected Resources:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
http://spyfu.com/ What different advertisers are paying for CPC
http://seoquake.com Add on for either Firefox or Google Chrome (I prefer Chrome)
http://Seobook.com Extension/add on for Firefox. Get PR, back links & much more
http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/ Unobtrusive rankings for a site’s Alexa traffic & Google Page Rank: Firefox and SeaMonkey