Hey folks, Hope all in US had a good thanksgiving break! I'm somewhat confused about the idea of keyword competition and I'm wondering if anyone can help clear things up for me. I am interested in targeting long tail keywords for my SEO campaign, i.e, those with a low competition. I am NOT engaging in any paid ads, adsense etc. Now, there are tools out there to assist with finding out competition, i.e: the Google Adwords Keyword Tool - but this is for adwords, not SEO. So here's my question: Are there TWO types of competition? eg: 1. Competition for keywords for SEO purposes (<title>, <h1> tags, links etc) 2. Competition for adwords. OR is there just 'ONE' competition, the adwords one, and SEO people use this as a metric to assist with estimating keyword competition for their SEO campaigns. I hope that question makes sense. Thanks in advance. Spock
Ok - thanks for the info selectsplat. Do you have any recommendations for good sites that illustrate organic competition? Thanks
There are two types of competion... But Google.com is all you need to see how competitive a keyword phrase is for organic. The Google external Adwords keyword tool is NOT for measuring competition. It can be used for keyword suggestion and to get estimated (at least relative) search query volume for certain keyword phrases. This is VERY useful for both organic and PPC keyword analysis. But this has nothing to do with competiion. Use the Adwords tool to find out what phrases are being searched for on a topic and how often they are searched relative to one another... Be sure to set the Match Type to EXACT. Then go to Google.com and perform several searches for each and note the results: 1) Search for intitle:"my keyword phrase" to find out how many URLs have that exact keyword phrase ("my keyword phrase") in the <title>. Note the number of results returned. 2) Search for inurl:"my keyword phrase" to find out how many URLs have that exact keyword phrase in their URL. Note the number of results. 3) Search for intitle:"my keyword phrase" inurl:"my keyword phrase" and note the number of results. 4) search for inanchor:"my keyword phrase" and note the number of results. You may also want to try searching: allintitle:my keyword phrase, allinurl:my keyword phrase, and allinanchor:my keyword phrase. I don't like these as much because they show URLs that have "my", "keyword", and "phrase" in the title, URL, and anchor text, respectively, regardless of the ordering of the words. Using the intitle, inurl, and inanchor operators with double quoted keyword phrases will return those pages with EXACT matches to the phrase (same word ordering within the phrase) in the page's title, url, and inbound link text. You'll quickly get a feel for the competitiveness of each phrase. If someone included that exact phrase in their title and/or URL then they are likely specifically targeting that phrase and are therefore a "real" competitor. If not then they likely just happen to have the words someplace on the page which is causing them to show up if you do a broad search for my keyword phrase without any quotes or operators.
Canonical gives a pretty good summary of the most effective way to do that. You can also use some tools like SEMRush.com
Consider both, advords competiton can tell whether or not your keyword is profitable, and seo competation can tell whether or not it is easy for you to rank for this keyword.
Awesome reply Canonical! Really valuable info. I'm suprised no-ones coded this up into a neat little package yet. Hmmm....so I'm using SEM rush to look at the keywords of a competitor, and want to target my competitors long tail keywords. Unfortunately SEM rush only provides the adwords competition value, and my competitor has several thousand keywords, so the way above would take a long time if I did each keyword. I guess I could filter down the keywords first by sorting by average search volume? Thanks again - love this answer.