What makes a highly competitive keyword anyway?
-
Hello guys, so I'm still wet behind the ears and am currently reading SEO an Hour a Day, as well as going through the Moz tutorial. But I do have a question that's been confusing me a bit.
I've been doing keyword research here and there and I will get a "Highly Competitive" keyword (61%) at times. So then I try to go through each of the top 10 pages to see the anchors that they've used and how many backlinks there are to that page.
A lot of the times the page with have 0 backlinks and a very low page authority (like 1) but it will still rank in 2, or 3. So what exactly makes it competitive? I know I must be missing something super simple here! Maybe I'm not accurately assessing the anchor/backlinks to that specific keyword.
I use backlinkwatch, opensite explorer and the keyword difficulty report.
Thanks guys!
-
Thank you two for the answers but I didn't realize one simple thing. The google adword tool is mainly for well....Adwords. The keywords are probably highly competitive in terms of CPC and the number of people vying for them. I was doing organic ranking research. This is why I was confused as to why the keywords were "highly competitive" but an opensite analysis of the top 10 would show that they had very little page authority or good if at all backlinks. The sites that would show up would be the manufactorers or an ebay page or something like that!
-
I'm not exactly sure how you are defining "Highly Competitive", I think you are missing something critical here, if a keyword is truly competitive i.e. "cheap flights", "credit cards", "domain registration" or "business opportunities" then this would not be the case.
Typically I would look at these things in the following order:
- Look at how many people are searching for the keyword each month using a variety of tools (HitWise, Google Keyword Tool, SEMRush, Wordtracker etc)
- Looking at the number of advertisers and the bid price on the keyword
- Look at the PR, TrustRank, MozRank etc of the top ranking sites
- Looking at the site structure of on page factors
- Looking at backlink profile
By doing these five things I usually have a fairly good idea of how to compete i.e. on page relevancy or back link profile
-
Hi seochump,
There are 2 reasons I can think of the top of my head. First of all sofware such as OSE can take a while to crawl (and find) websites, before finding out what backlinks are pointing to it. Due to this, it may appear that some sites have 0 backlinks to it, while in reality it could have lots. You mentioned, that a lot of times the page has a page authority of 1, usually means (to me anyway) that OSE hasn't picked the site up yet.
Secondly, I have noticed while working for several clients, that whenever a new site comes up, it "could" shoot up to the top of the rankings, before it being dropped off to several pages. New sites come and go onto the first page rather quickly. So perhaps it could be that.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Related keywords as subjects or predicate ?
Hello, When writing my content do my related keyword need to be noun subject in my sentence or can they be predicate ?
Keyword Research | | seoanalytics0 -
Long tail keyword
Hi, What the the most useful long tail keyword tools you use for your adwords? Thanks for any insight.
Keyword Research | | LauraHT0 -
Keywords/URL
Greetings! I've read previous posts on this topic, but wondering if something has changed recently...On the on-page grading, the following was suggested:Use Keywords in your URL - high importance - easy fix _(In the past it has read difficult fix). _Could it be as easy as creating a new page with the name in the url, then redirecting to it? My site is www.enchantingquotes.com and the keyword that brings in virtually all of business is "wall quotes". I've read in the forum this isn't worth the trouble of trying to do, but the "easy fix" comment has me wondering...?Any help is much appreciated....I'm been trying to recover from a recent unexplained drop in rank. Ugh! (So feel free to analyze my site LOL!) :DA huge thanks for any advise!
Keyword Research | | eqgirl0 -
Include Location in Keywords?
I understand Google's local search automatically searches keywords with the location you are searching from. For example if I'm searching from Calgary and query "best shoe repair", Google knows I'm searching from Calgary and presents Calgary based results. I'm using Google's new Keyword Planner tool which allows for city based search results, meaning I don't have to include "Calgary" in the keywords I submit. The question I have is should I be attaching "Calgary" to my keywords for on-page optimization, and why or why not? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Keyword Research | | reidsteven750 -
Moz Keyword Competition Analysis Tool
Hi Just been having a play around with the Moz Keyword Competition Tool and noticed that the reuslts given in terms of exact match searches is different from the data in the actual Google Adwords keyword tool even though the Moz tool pulls its data form the Google Adwords index so technically should be the same right? Was just wondering if anyone else had noticed that or if I am missing something. All you help would be greatly appreciated! Cheers
Keyword Research | | PIXUS0 -
Google search not grouping keywords properly
When is a 'Repair' not a 'Repair'...? When it's a "Service" (... cue rapturous applause and laughter!) We run an air conditioning website and we have recently noticed that Google is assuming the keyword "Repair" also means "Service". For example if you type in (in the UK) "Air Conditioner Repair" the first page of Google it puts the word "Service" in bold. E.g: 1. Check this before calling for air conditioner service - YouTube 2. Halfords Autocentres| Air Conditioning Service for all car makes and 3. Service Your Air Conditioner for Summer Comfort « Sustainable Now... why do I find this annoying. I had a amicable dispute with a colleague last year before all of this happened. I noticed that our Google Adwords campaign was showing a high bounce rate for our /air_conditioning_service page. He explained to me that if someone wanted and 'air conditioning service' it was because they wanted their air conditioning fixed / cleaned etc. My argument was that a fair few of the people bouncing off were actually looking for a company to provide a service (of air conditioning) that they were looking for. We split the page in half (half linking through to a repair page and the other half to a page about the service that we offer) and ran a test against the original. I was only expecting a small percentage of people to click on the new option we had added to the page, however, the difference was far greater than ever expected. It was a 60/40% split in favour of the new option not people wanting their aircon repaired/serviced! So in conclusion... very annoyingly, Google is recognising my service page rather than my far more relevant repair page, and there seems to be nothing I can do about it (other than make my service page more relevant) Rant over... but has anyone else experienced anything similar? Is there anything you can do about it?
Keyword Research | | trickshotric0 -
Best keywords to go after..with a "twist"
I have a website where I target basic training recruits going into the military. But this dang trend going around where "civilians" are signing up for these boot camp classes are throwing off my thinking that most of the traffic for keywords like basic trianing and boot camp are meant for these civlians. How can i best find the keywords that will target military recruit? I am looking for some good anchor texting keywords.
Keyword Research | | StreetwiseReports0 -
Google Webmaster Keyword Significance.
In my google webmaster tools the most significant keyword google attaches to my site is word 'VAT' as in, Value Added Tax. Followed by Basket. I can see why this is, as the word VAT and Basket is on every product page, but it really is not a keyword I want to target. Does this have any negative effect on other keywords I am targeting? What should I do about this? Here is the site: https://www.loveelectronics.co.uk
Keyword Research | | jcarter0