How do you measure Keyword competitiveness?

Within the realm of google searches, there seems to be two ways to measure the organic competitiveness of a keyword.

1. Using google's keyword tool, google gives you a measure of adwords competition. I think this can safely be assumed that if it competitive in the paid-for world its equally competitive in the organic world.

2. When you actually google a keyword phrase, the number of pages with that keyword can be a measure of competitiveness.

Searching through past threads I cannot come to any conclusions. Which of these metrics should be paid attention to for SEO purposes? Is one more meaningful than the other?

 

Pay attention to the exact phrase search in Google. Say your key phrase is dog beds, do a search with this keyphrase in quotes "" i.e. "dog beds" to see the number of pages containing that exact phrase. You also want to do a Google search with the modifier allintitle, like this>> allintitle:dog beds, this will give you the number of all pages with the title dog beds. With the two figures you can make a judgment. If your SEO skills are not very good, stay away from phrases with an exact match of more than 30,000 competing pages.

 

Using the AdWords competition levels is a quick way to see competitiveness, but it may not always be accurate. I personally don't think checking the number of results is useful. Are you really competing with those millions of pages? Of course not. You are really only competing with the top 10 - 20 websites who are actually targeting that keyword. So you really want to check how strong those top 10 websites are. If you want any decent traffic from that keyword you need to be on page 1. Try to get a gauge of what you need to do to pass those top 10 websites.

Try installing the seo for firefox addon. It will show you a lot of relevant info about those top 10 websites. You should be checking how many links those pages have, their PR, domain age, alexa rank, etc. You should also check how they use that keyword on their page and in their links. SEO Elite is a great paid tool to analyze a website's backlinks for things like PR and anchor text.

 

wow these two guys above me really nailed this question. as they mentioned, its important to do exact phrase searches. going into google and putting the term in quotes shows you how many other pages are competing for that term. If pages in the top ten have a page rank thats above a 6-7 its going to be hard to compete against them without significant quality inbound links being achieved.

 

Awesome guys. Thanks. These forums rock.

The big problem here is that the keywords I am am going after are in a super competitive space, specifically casual games. I am just looking for the softest keywords I can go after.

 

Thanks Steady. Years of SEO and I had not used the quotes in the search query to narrow exact results. So, it only tells us which sites have that exact phrase. Other sites still show up in our competition when bidding for clients. Right?

 

So, I've seen this technique used by a few peers in SEO research to bid on a job for a client. My question is ..."Why do we not count the other pages that have combinations of those words that are ranking?"

No, some don't have that exact phrase, but they do take up one of the 10 slots.

I understand that it is cleaner somehow, but a client's website is still competing against that website that shows without quotes. Which is how web users search.

Does that make sense?

 

When researching keywords for SEO, your most important competitors are the ten sites listed on the first SERP. For each keyword candidate, one way to judge the competition is to examine how many back-links the sites on the first page have. I recommend Yahoo Site Explorer for this purpose. If you still have trouble deciding, you may want to look at where the links are coming from to get a better sense of their value. If you do not think you can make it to the first SERP for your keywords, rethink your list. Consider using targeted long tail keywords for more promising results.

 

YSE is a great tool. The downside to it is that it shows no follow links without a distinction from follow links so it's still a guestimate.

 

Search in Google and found the count Sponsored links. and the web's type of top 30

 

is there any free tool in the market to check competition for a particular keyword?

 

Try market samurai great for measuring keyword competition plus it's free that's only a fraction of it can do you can also check how many links you got how much a keyword is worth etc.

 

I agree Market samurai is very useful.

 

I personally prefer gauging the competition by eye. I'll look for the "exact search volume", make sure it's less than 6 digits, then use the intitle: modifier to make sure there's not more than a few thousand pages optimized for that keyword.

AND then, as someone also mentioned, I'll spend some time checking out the first 10 or so results, watching out for authority websites or heavily linked websites. If there's too many of those, it's probably best looking for another keyword.

THEN, on top of that still, I will get a listing of the first 100 results at once, and skim through it. Ideally, there won't be more than a couple of dozen serious contenders in there. This is for setting up laser-targeted sniper sites, which is what i've been doing as of late. -- If it was about developing a bigger website, or a project with long-term range, the criteria would of course have to be different.

 

Thanks all this information is really helpfull

 

I just downloaded the free version of SEO Power Suite. I'll report back after some usage.

 

Market samurai is the all-in-one tool for keywords research to individual competition analysis. Still we need to pay but that really worth. Whatever, their keyword tool can be used freely.