How do you determine how competetive a keyword is. I know i can do eg "designer handbags" and see the number of results but i dont quite know how to figure the competitiveness eg if i do "keywords" and there are 30 000 pages is that competetive? I know the less the better but i have some keywords with 30 000 competive pages and others with 200 000. For a keyword with 30 000 competive pages how much work do you think there is to do? For example if i get anchor text keyword 10times then i might rank well. I am just trying to get to know how to use the data i have for seo purposes. I have researched and know the number of competing pages for certail keywords but just dont know to use this data
Searching for the term in Google (or other SEs) is a good place to start. You have to keep in mind though, that these are all your competitors in some way, but not all of them will actually be targeting your keywords. If I use designer handbags as your example, Results 1 - 10 of about 4,390,000. These are all your competitors - all ~4million. Some people will disagree with me on that, but I stand by it. They are your competitors to some extent, as they currently rank in the search engine, while you do not. Many of the lower-end 'competitors' can be beaten simply by being indexed and using onpage optimization. Cracking the top 10, of course, takes a lot more work.
Use the Google Keyword tool. Search for Google Keyword Tool in google. This tools shows the break down of different keywords, based on your website or the word you enter into the tool. It shows how competitive each word is and also traffic volumes per month etc. This is related to Google adwords but is a good indication of what people search for, how competitive the phrases are and ultimately, what keywords you have a chance of ranking with
If the number of pages showed up more than 1 million, it's quite competitive. Try to find around 300K - 500K. That's agood start to do SEO. Make your keywords as your blog page title. Build quality link with your keywords as anchor text and you'll be going up. You can see my blog. My keywords is "profit blogging", "profit blogging tips", "profit blogging tools" and "profit blogging guides". My blog comes on page 1 for those all keywords.
If you are really serious about estimating the competitiveness of a query, you have to do some manual work. One query might have 30,000 competing pages and another 200,000 competing pages, but that's not really your concern here. Your concern should be, how difficult it is to be ranked on page 1 (or top-3 or whatever goals you have). If the top-10 ranked pages of a query with 30,000 are all strong SEO-wise, then it is a competitive term, regardless of the total amount of competitive pages. So if you really want to know, how competitive a query is, you need to look at the top-10 pages in the SERPS. It all of these have decent onpage SEO and strong backlinks, it indicates that the site owners care about SEO and rankings.
Ok i have checked sites ranking for radley bags. Maybe if you can help me analyse this. One of the terms i need to target is radley bags and its showing 215 000 and with quotes ie "radley bags" its showing 84 000. I have analysed the pages and on first page 1. Official site - PR4 - 400 backlinks 2. PR3 - 5900 backlinks 3. PR3 - 1900 backlinks 4. PR4 - 350 backlinks 5. PR2 - 1500 backlinks 6. PR2 - 155 backlinks 7. PR3 - 27 backlinks 8. PR0 - 4 backlinks 9. PR3 - 330 backlinks 10. PR2 - 11 backlinks Ok i have looked at the 10site - I am in the UK so you may see diff results and the above are the top 10 site on first page for the term. i used yahoo site explorer to check backlinks. in this case what would you say. Is it something I can work on. So far my site has 60 backlinks. What sort of work would i need to put and how long can it take to do some work for first page. I have put the above example so its a bit more practical for me to learn
What I do - is open the first Google SERP and see how many sites on the first page include the keyword in the Title - if a lot - you are in trouble....
I think it varies per niche and can surprise you. For one niche, there is like maybe 20k searches per month for my key word but my site gets tons of traffic from repeat visits. Unfortunately this is not good for advertising but it does hold value and is the site with the most traffic. In general, I try to go for sites with at least 100k searches per month and under a million search results for keywords. The less search results for the keyword, the less competitive and diluted the niche.
Hi Sherry, That's a start. Now, in addition to PR and number of backlinks, do a quick check of the Title tags. Do they all have "Radley Bags" in the title? For those at number 6 to 10 with quite few backlinks, do check the quality of the actual backlinks and the anchor texts. If rather few of their backlink anchors include phrases related to radley bags, it should be possible to enter the top-10 rather quickly. If you decide to target this keyword, check all backlinks for the top-20 rankings for inspiration on where to acquire links and start your work.
You can also check how many sites use the exact same phrase in the title. If the first 4-5 pages of Google are full of sites with similar title (your main keyword / phrase) then you can bet the competition is high.
And not only that of course! It depends on the links age, authority, placement, etc. Just because you can easily get 500 links with the same anchor text doesn't means you will rank number 1 for that keyword.
I agree with the people above who mention analyzing the top 5 - 10 results. Those are your important competition that you want to catch up to. At a glance you can see whether these websites are well known companies or not. If you are competing with manufacturers and big chain stores, it may be a difficult keyword to rank well on. If you don't recognize any of the website names, do some manual checking as to how many links they have, how high the PR is of those links, the link anchor text used and so on. When I start to do seo for a new website I like to make a competitors spreadsheet and record all of this info. Although a lot of the info will change over time, it can still be useful to refer back to this spreadsheet when you're examining other keywords. It is not necessarily useful to see how many websites show up in total for a certain keyword. Out of those thousands or millions of pages, usually only 10 - 20 will actually be competing for that phrase.
OK i have dug down a bit more. 8 out of those 10site have the radley bags in their title bags. I have checked the backlinks and most of the site have their own backlinks from their other pages and 1 or 2 other external sources. The other one with over 6000 links i only managed to see the first 1000 and they are all coming from the same source a directory. I would say 8 of the 10 site have links from a few directories and then the rest are internal links. The only thing i noticed is some of the sites have a lot of pages as ecommerce sites. i wonder if that bears an impact on serps. It didnt seem like the sites were active in backlinkings as the bulk of them are ecommerce shops. the only notable one was the official site which had 400 links - these were really good quality links some from the main newspapers. It seems i am getting there. Your input is greatly appreciated, I am learning