competitive keyword?

what would you say the number of listings would be for a low, medium and high competitive keyword?

ie. 0 - 1,000,000 low
1,000,001 - 10,000,000 medium
10,000,001 - inf high

love to know your ideas...

thanks,

juls

 

I would say a better measure of competitiveness would be the number of backlinks of the top three results in Google. If you see huge numbers, and you can't match them, better to start targetting smaller phrases.

The number of results shown can be misleading. Doesn't mean people actually search the words. For e.g. I rank number three in msn of "clothing" and "clothes" but traffic is not more than a couple of dozen daily from these two words. btw, I never tried to rank for these two. It just happened, and I would say that it shows how flawed the msn algo is.. that a links page of mine ended up ranking for a very generic term like "clothes".

 

What I do:

1- Think of keywords I want to use
2- Go to overture and check how much they are searched for
3- If the number of searches is greater than 100,000 it qualifies as a good keyword.
4- I do that with all my keywords, get rid of the low searches and take note of the good ones
5- Go over to the search engine you are targeting
6- Type your keyword and check out the number of results. For me, a keyword with 3 million results or less is low competitive, 3 to 6 million is competitive, 6 million and above is hard.

Of course, you can always make engines happy and end up with a keyword at the #1 spot with 12 million results, but you need a lot of experience to get to that

 

Competitive terms are all relative. Some high traffic terms are very competitive because there are a ton of sites out there that contain the term, but not so competitive because nobody seems to be doing any SEO work. When analyzing whether or not a term is too competitive, analyze the top 10-20 sites. Look at what they've done and ask yourself if it can easily be replicated.

 

heh ok thanks... lots of help for me to think about...

appreciate your support

 

Find the phrase, run an intitle:keyword search, run an inanchor:keyword search, go to adwords and see what the maximum bid is, if these are high, then you an bet your bottom dollar it is competitive.

A straight volume check is no good, do a search for 'the' billions of returns, but not one of those sites is optimised for it.

 

Searches at Overture for keyword "the"= 0

Come on, it takes a bit of common sense. Straight volume check does work if you do it well.

 

if it is a commercial term the overture bid tool is the quickest way to judge the level of competition. Overture is better than Adwords because it tells you explictly the highest bid on a term.

 

Or you can just use this tool by Randfish:

http://www.socengine.com/seo/tools/keyword-difficulty-tool.php

and take all the work out of it

It uses:
Times Searched Last Month (Overture)
# of Results for Search @ Google in "Quotes"
# of results for search allintitle:keyword phrase @ Google
# of results for search intitle:term1 intitle
inanchor:term1 inanchor:term2, etc. @ Google
Top 3 Bids @ Overture
Strength of Competitors' Site's Backlinks
Strength of Competitors' Internal Backlinks
Strength of Competitors' Page's Backlinks
Strength of Competitors' Pages PR
Strength of Competitors' Site's PR
Strength of Competitors' Size
Percentage of TLDs in top 10 Results

 

that Randfish tool is nice...thank you very much for sharing it.

 

Something else that I do to get a better idea of my competition:

1. Pick your keywords
2. Check them out in Overture -- if they're getting over 300 hits per month, it's worth looking further.
3. Do an "allintitle" in Google -- might give you a better idea of your competition who is ALSO making SEO efforts.
4. Checkout backlinks for the top couple of sites -- see if it's something you can manage.

 

I agree, thats a nice tool.

 

Fryman I was pointing out that sometimes if you have generic words then the results can throw a curve. While there are loads of pages returned, they are not all chasing that particular phrase. Ok so 'the' was a bit extreme, but I like extreme lol

 

Sure. You can try to optimize for "clothes", and will end up with loads of untargeted traffic wasting your bandwidth. Many results doesn't mean the best, you need to use your head, and that is the problem with people. I see coop ads on my site that make me laugh...

 

wow great tool and excellent tips... even more for my arsenal to improve my seo analytical skills...

thanks guys I appreciate it.

that tool goes straight into my bookmarks.. ;-)

 

I try to go for alot of smaller keywords rather then 1 big one. Makes for much more traffic short term and can help you go for that 1 big word later on.

 

I have been using the randfish tool for sometime, and its really good. Keep up the good work Randfish.

 

saintdw,

Ya i go for as many related keywords/phrases as i can. ;-) They all add up.

 

hmm, that randfish is an interesting tool

 

yeap. Great tool. thanks