What is considered low competition when it comes to picking a keyword in Google

Hey gang,

I'm trying to narrow down some profitable keywords for a few articles I plan on writing, and I'm running into some confusion when it comes to picking a low competition keyword (I'm not talking about the "advertiser competition" column in Google keywords).

I'm talking about adding quotes around "keyword here" in a Google search, and the number of results that turn up.

As a relative noob saibot, severely lacking any sort of personal backlink network, what should I consider "low" competition - 100, 1000, 10000?


Thanks guys!

 

just typing your keyword inside quotes is not enough to estimate the competition, use the intitle command, like this:

intitle:"targeted keyword"

Less than 2000 is very easy

From 2000 to 10000 is relatively easy

From 10 000 to 50 000 is medium

Above 50 000 is tough

those figures depends on the results that you see in the top 10 too.. if a top 10 is filled with .EDU and .GOV websites you are not getting there easily even if you see only 2000 results.

good luck

 

Ahhhh...I did not know that.

Much appreciated!

 

Sorry to milk your knowledge, but regarding less than 2000 being easy - would that be easy for a pro like yourself, or a determined rookie like myself?

 

I agree w/ Funky. I use the external keyword tool from Google to get search volume for last month (local) and average monthly search volume for last 12 months (global) as well as synonomous search phrases for the ones I enters. I plug all of this into a spreadsheet.

Then I go to Google and do a search for each of those phrases without quotes to get total results (not really competition), with quotes like "phrase in quotes" (a decent judge of competition), and finally with quotes combined with intitle (so search for "phrase in quotes" intitle:"phrase in quotes") which shows REALLY how competitive they are...

Could probably just do the latter but for some reason like seeing all of the data before deciding.

 

And you should always look at the sites backlinks. Lets say you are going after "chrome bmx handle bars", and only 1000 sites show up using the intitle search function (I dont know if thats what it is, this is just hypothetical). If the first 3 sites have anchored links with the keyword "chrome bmx handle bars", and those links are coming from high PR sites, or if they just have a bunch of them, then you have some competition.

But lets say you are going after "pretty bmx handle bars", and the intitle search function shows 1,000,000 sites for that keyword. Then you look at the first few sites and see that they 0 anchored links using "pretty bmx handle bars". Those sites are ranking for that keyword out of authority for probably the keyword "bmx handle bars", or something like that, but it would be much simpler to go after this keyword then "chrome bmx handle bars".

When its all said and done, and all things being equal, links are the BIGGEST factor in ranking a site. Focus on your competitions link building skills to determine the difficulty of a keyword.

 

Any good backlink tools - crowd favorites? I've been using SEO Xray through the SEOtools Firefox extension, but it doesn't always seem accurate. Again, awesome information - I sincerely appreciate it!