Hi there guys, my questions is how do i know how hard it is to compete for a keyword? Is there a tool i can use? Because sometimes i have got into no#1 position for a keyword with 2,000,000 results and its much easier than getting in no#1 position for a specifics keyword with 700,000 Results! Please could someone help thanks!
Hi HydroJohn, Take a look at these three keyword tools: Keyword Discovery WordTracker Free Keyword Tool Google Adwords Keyword Tool External They will give you competitive scores for keywords as well as suggestions for other keywords. Bear in mind that the "number of searches" in Keyword Discovery and WordTracker are not completely accurate as they do not pull search data from G and Yahoo. I use these to do comparative analysis with keywords. Also, do a Google search for your keyword phrase and look at the number of pages returned, i.e. "1 to 10 of 480,000". This can give you a good idea for how tough the competition may be for a word. In my experience, these ranges of results correlate to difficulty to gain organic rankings: 1 - 100,000 pages - easy keyword phrase 100K - 500K pages - moderate keyword phrase 500K - 1M pages - moderately difficult > 1 M difficult Again, take these ranges with a grain of salt as they are not always true. In a few exceptional cases, I have worked for months to rank well on popular phased that habr less than 500K results and likewise have shot to the top with minimal effort on less competitive phrases that have much greater than 1M results. Good Luck!
Thanks for the help! are there any specific tools for just how hard it is to rank for a keyword though?
also interested. atm I have everything in excel and run my own calculations based on multiple factors but it's time consuming
I dont' really concern myself with the number of search results. Instead, I simply analyze the on-page and off-page seo of the top 10 results. The more you know about on-page SEO, the easier it is to judge. Look for sitemaps, analytics code, anchor text used in their navigation/links, etc. For off-page, look at the back links they have (use yahoo site explorer for this). After doing these steps, you should have a pretty good idea of whether or not you can compete.
Use quotes (" ") to see how many sites target the exact same phrase. Check the first 10-20 sites that rank for that keyword and see if they are old, established sites with many backlinks or not.
The number of results is a very poor indicator of seo competitiveness. Regardless of how many results show up, the first 10 - 20 are your only real competition. Just examine those websites for things like pagerank, number of backlinks, keyword usage in link anchor text, keyword usage onpage,etc. Try using the 'seo for firefox' addon to be able to view some of that information right on the Google results page.
start with number of searches which will give you a primary indication. however, there are lot more to it. some keywords are more profitable than others so the competition will not be the same for all based on just search results. next thing you can do is to use the adwords external keyword tool to see how many times a specific term gets searched in a month. a keyword showing 5.6 million search result might get searched only 1100 times a month meaning not many people search for it. on the other hand, a keyword having only half million search results might get searched 14,000 times in a month meaning this keyword is more competitive than the previous one even tho it has lot less search results.
Some are using seo book for long tail keywords,..its easy to get rank on long tail but not easy to get traffic since you are targeting competitive start on less competitive keywords..
I dont think pagerank effects your ranking. For example, you can have inbound links from high PR sites which give you a high PR, but if those sites are unrelated, then it wouldnt affect your SERPs. I am not sure about this, just my thoughts...
High PR explains why you're ranking high - because you have a lot of backlinks. Oh, they will, believe me Give it a try if you wish.
you can either know this by google tools which let you know the difference between the different keywords traffic...........it will show you all the results for any keywords you opt for with the traffic graphs.... with this you can know the highest and the lowest keyword traffic data