Evaluating Competition of a Keyword
-
I'm curious about how others evaluate the competition of keywords when putting together an SEO program:
-
Do you place any faith in the competition listing in the Google Keyword Tool?
-
Do you find value in SEOmoz's Keyword Difficulty tool?
-
What other tactics or processes do you perform?
-
-
I know that this is an old thread, but I must say that it's EXACTLY what I was looking for!!!
I too have been puzzled by the Competitiveness scores produced by different tools (Wordtracker, MOZ etc). Many of the keywords I've researched in my particular field (refurbished laptops and computers) show Low Competition in these tools, but when I perform a regular search on Google, the first two pages are often populated by big name brands (Amazon, Bestbuy, NewEgg,Walmart, Sears, Overstock etc.)... which I assume would be difficult to rank above.
The interesting thing here is that these big brand pages don't often score high on backlinks, In-Anchor-and-Title or other Competitiveness indicators, but yet, they rank high on the SERPs.
I'm definitely a newbie at this, but this article puts the missing pieces together for me.
THANKS!
-
In order to identify true competition, I always add "allintitle" to my query to exclude 'less focused' competitors. Do you agree?
-
Hey, I agree, none of these scores are a truly reliable indicator. What I try to do is aggregate lots of different values.
- Competition from adwords to get an idea of quality
- keyword difficult from Moz tool to get some metrics on competition
- exact match search volume to get an idea of traffic
Then, the real work is built on top of this with a manual review of the results for each term. If the results are garbage - be that the content or the competition then you can read into this. If the results are dominated by big brands with well optimised pages then you are going to struggle.
If the manual review you do (loads of big brands) ties up with a high difficult from the moz keyword tool then this should scare you off!
If the moz tool comes back with 30% and the content returned is a bit ropey and you know you can do better then... you should go after it.
As I say, it's a science more than an art and you have to manually review each keyword to really know what it's worth chasing.
If your keyword was 'seo software' and you had a keyword difficult of 79% and quality sites like SEOMoz.org at the bottom of page 2 - I would leave that one well alone. :
-
I don't think that the number of sites competitng or their pagerank or keyword tool scores are 100% reliable.
Instead look at WHO is competing and the content that they have on their pages.
If you can beat their content then you have a really good chance of defeating them.... but if you are going up against the manufacturer on their branded products they will be hard to beat... but then you can put a discount price in your title tag and steal their sales.
-
This is an art rather than an exact science but there are certainly things you can do to help decide which terms to go for.
1. Google Keyword Tool is for Adwords traffic & not organic search. This is not to say that it is not useful and the competitor information here can be used to gauge the quality of the keyword. That is, if there is a lot of paid search competition for this keyword, then it must convert well so it is usually worth pursuing.
2. The keyword difficulty tool is useful as it looks at the metrics involved in ranking for the search term. There is a post on SEOMoz that explains the values returned and what is needed to do to rank for a term scoring X% - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/keyword-difficulty-tool-upgrade
3. Other tactics
I tend to do it like this:
- Set up a table with the keywords in for each page
- Get the advertiser competition as a quality score
- Get the seomoz difficulty score
- Get the exact match search volume from google adwords
Then I search for the keyword and check out the competition to look for two things
- Quality of results in terms of content & relevance
- Who ranks & how optimised are the first ten results
I am generally looking for cracks. Are there a lack of quality results? Great, it's an opportunity to make something better and get it rank - compare the organic & paid content as these guys are paying for the clicks so these pages are more likely to be finely tuned. Is there a lack of well optimised pages? Groovy, that's a crack and we can likely fight our way up the ranks.
Obviously, there is so much too this. What is the standing of the site you are looking to optimise? Can you or the client create great content to help better fill the requirements of the search terms. Are there are opportunities with little competition, poorly optimised pages, bad landing page content etc.
By building a spreadsheet of keywords like this, I then highlight them as I go. Red is no good, orange is possible or a future term, green is worth a crack.
Then... if they are difficult keywords, you can further assess the quality of the keywords and content you are planning to land them on with a brief adwords campaign & some conversion tracking in Google Analytics.
After all of that, you have some intelligence on which to base your search campaign and organic optimisation efforts.
Hope it helps!
Marcus -
I hold VERY little faith that the numbers in Google's keyword tool are accurate. I think it is a good indicator of traffic levels, especially if you compare it against other sources, like WordTracker, but I try to normalize the numbers and look at them as relative values. I dont believe the actual search volumes.
The SEOmoz tool used to be difficult to use but I find it to be much improved. It is a good snapshot of what types of site/pages are ranking for a keyword and saves me a lot of legwork.
I really like Rands post here. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-steps-to-advanced-keyword-research
The process is pretty labor intensive, but I think well worth it if your client is willing to pay for it.
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
-
Country Wise Keyword difficulty
I want to know that how it is possible that global and country-wise keyword difficulty should be the same. Please help me out understand this confusion.
Keyword Research | | Daie80 -
How come when I create a keyword list, the volume of that keyword per month is not displayed? It is only displayed once the keyword is selected.
Why do we no longer have the ability to view keywords in a list with all of its data? VdhmGmQ
Keyword Research | | solitude15577990 -
Which keyword to use (plural / singular)
Hi guys. So I'm racking my brain with a question whether I should use plural or singular keyword as a focus keyphrase of my page. The page that I'm optimizing is basically a review page of different websites offering proofreading services. Considering the fact that this is a review and I mention a lot of websites on my page, I decided to rank for a plural keyword that ends with "services". However, this keyword is very unpopular (ahrefs doesn't show any volume for it), while singular "service" has about 100 searches per month. As far as I understand, Google sees both keywords as synonyms, because search results for both keywords are almost identical. Should I change my keyphrase to singular "service" (even though the page mentions a lot of services), or stick with "services" instead? Do I have a chance of ranking for "service" if I stick with "services" in this case? Thank you.
Keyword Research | | AslanBarselinov0 -
Keywords
i have found proper keywords for my site. The site is www.anavasis.gr what is the proper way to have them in my site? Make articles in my site and link them from the homepage like: www.anavasis.gr/keyword-article and put all those links in the footer of my homepage? Which is the best way? thanks in advance
Keyword Research | | anavasis0 -
Finding the best of 100's of keywords?
Have an online e-commerce store and need to start on keyword research. There is a round 1000 products, not very many all things considered but a very big job to do manually. Do you know any tools that could speed it up? or Process/method that could help? Thanks
Keyword Research | | seoman100 -
Website no.1 on Google for keyword but why?
Hi Guys, I'm trying to figure out why a site is ranking for a keyword. Keyword is "guitar strings" They have only implemented the following techniques: -Chosen keyword is within Meta title -Chosen keyword is used 8 times within content What else would make them rank so highly? Thanks, Dan
Keyword Research | | Sparkstone0 -
International Keyword Ranking
I want measure my ranking for keywords in various countries and search engines. If I use a tool such as rank checker to determine my rank for google.uk, google.au.com, etc... is that accurate, or does my IP still affect the rankings I see? If I use a VPS such as Hide My Ass (or another product you would recommend), would that make my ranking results more accurate? I also want to measure my ranking in Russia, where Yandex is very strong so a tool to measure my Yandex ranking + Google would be ideal. What method you would recommend to accurately determine my rankings in different countries? Thank you!
Keyword Research | | theLotter0 -
SerpIQ vs. Keyword Difficulty tool
http://imgur.com/6uidr Is this any good for keyword research? I see they use some weird metric and I'm not sure whether those are relevant at all, plus it's really hard to do a bulk research. Let me know what you think.
Keyword Research | | jest0