Evaluating Competition of a Keyword

[EricVallee34]

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?

[Wasabii]

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!

[Partouter]

In order to identify true competition, I always add "allintitle" to my query to exclude 'less focused' competitors. Do you agree?

[Marcus_Miller]

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. :

[EGOL]

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.

[Marcus_Miller]

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

[BlinkWeb]

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.