keyword competitiveness

Can you guys give me an idea of keyword competitiveness? What is determine "very competitive" "moderate" like how many sites trying to rank for those keywords, 1.000.000 is light? 10,000,000 is high??

 

First, you can't determine competition by looking at the number of pages returned by Google when you do a simple search. I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about.

If you were to search for something liiiiike "mobile satellite communications" you would find that google tells you there are 36,100,000 competitors.

"Wow. That's a lot" you say.

But to say that the page which you are optimizing for "mobile satellite communications" is competing with 36 million other pages is like saying that Ozzy Smith is competing with my 9 year old Cousin for "best short stop ever" because they play the same position.

The fact is, if you optimize a page for a keyword, many times, 99% of the pages out there won't have a chance to rank ahead of you.

Here is a good method for finding ACTUAL competitors for a keyword. Search in google like this:

intitle:"keyword phrase" inanchor:"keyword phrase"​

This will return pages with the 2 most important SEO factors:

1. Keyword in Title Tag
2. Keyword in Anchor Text

Granted, its not fool proof, but it brings "mobile satellite communications" down to 87 competitors instead of 36 million. And i'll say, those are your true competitors, and the fewer of them google returns, the better your chances of ranking.

I'd say anything under 1000 you should look further into.

You can find a tool that will run this search on a bulk number of keywords here:

• Most accurate tool
• Semi Accurate tool

And I wrote an article about how to find low competition keywords that covers my keyword selection technique in the depth.

 

amazing post, points to you! and I am checking your article now

 

go to digitalpoint.com and choose keyword suggestion tool and easily find more keyword related to your site according to region, and then type this keyword to google find competition of all keyword

 

you can also look up "KEI tools" on google and find stats, although almost all the tools I've used online SO far have some margin of error, ie....advised me to forget even pursuing a certain difficulty rating on certain keyword phrases, but went for it anyway and ultimately ranked #1 for it ( due to a compensating factor), if that makes sense....I like to use an seo checklist......if you're in this for mfa, that's a different ballgame

 

very nice and generous post mtb167.....kudos

 

LOL, that's blown it.


Nice post, will keep some people on their toes for ages now. I can literally here them all typing frantically!

James.

 

it is also important the number of searches for that keyword..
it doesn't really matter if you are first for a keyword no one searches for:
it will just prove you made e good SEO..but you won't have visitors for that word
better to be on the 4-5 page for a well searched keyword..than first for something no one searches
cheers

 

mtb167 this is great !
i was doing it manually for intitle and inachor

I enjoyed the article

Good work done !

 

that's can be achieved through digitalpoint keyword suggestion tools

 

mtb I would feel bad if I didn't rep you for that one - nice post.

 

You might also want to take a look at this free keyword research tool This tool will give you:

1. Upto 100 most searched keywords on Yahoo (Overture) for the previous month,
2. Number of searches for those keywords,
3. Number of sites targeting the keyword string (i.e. keyword phrase without brackets). Remember, many users search without putting brackets. These are sites that contain all the single keywords both in the title and anchor,
4. Number of competing sites for the exact phrase.

BlogMaster, the owner of the tool has also promised to add Yahoo and MSN soon

 

Can you advice me some ways on how to get a good keywords? i tried your tool and i find it useful but takes long to download.

CARS * AUTOMOBILES

 

See this post

 

thanks guys those tips would really help!!!

 

mtb167,

Thank you SO MUCH for your post! This has been amazingly helpful, especially in my planning and preparation phase!!!

 

mtb167, has great point,

i made a site be number 1 in 12,100,000 for google in 5 days from not ranking at all, was it hard? no as the term was rather specific as it was , "product, location"

when you use the intitle:keyword phrase inanchor:keyword phrase it brings it down to 268,000

when you use intitle:"keyword phrase" inanchor:"keyword phrase", it brings it to 0.

 

Many SEOs/SEMs in the industry have defined the competitiveness of a keyword in many different ways. Depending on who you ask, keyword competitiveness means different things for different people. For instance,

1. Some have stated that search results is a measure of keyword competitiveness (KC).

2. Others argue whether or not the search volume from Overture or WordTracker is a fair indicator of keyword competitiveness.

3. Many claim that the search results from Google combined with the keyword volume from Overture provides a better estimate of the competitiveness of a term or phrase(s).

4. Even others use a composite metric from keyword tracking tools coming from dissimilar meta engines. This is equivalent to combining dissimilar analytics and business intelligence metrics from dissimilar media outlets.

In 3 and 4, combining two different or more metrics, some representing document counts and others representing query volume from dissimilar databases (Google with Overture or several meta engines), seem to be an exercise in futility: e.g., two dissimilar analytics from two different stores are combined and taken for a fair metric. Surprisingly, many SEOs/SEMs use and defend this approach, even when the arguments are based on formulas made out of thin air. Purely and simply: based on speculations.

Building a mathematical model that account for document counts, query counts and other variables seem a formidable task.

 

Outstanding post MTB. Also some really good follow-up here from others as well. Thanks for the information.

 

Look for the "long tail" keywords too - hardly anybody ever actually trys to rank for them. For example, the big dogs will try to rank for the hard words like "gift ideas" but nobody trys to rank for "unique baby shower gift ideas". Granted there isn't much traffic for that phrase BUT - it's far easier to rank high quickly for it than the primary keyword of "gift ideas". I find that the quick wins help to motivate me - otherwise it's easy to get discouraged. Remeber that you won't rank well in Google for some time - that's just the way it is but you will rank sooner in Yahoo and MSN Live.

best of luck