Hi everyone, I've recently started my training for this fascinanting SEO world. I think the very first and most important step is performing a good keyword research before starting a niche site or whatever we would like to do over the internet. I got my first approach for this in the Smart Passive Income and The Challenge Training program and both recommend using Market Samurai (MS) for doing KW research. At the very beginning it was really nice until I realized that things like the SEOC (competition) value is less accurate since they're pulled from Bing index (not from Google anymore). So I've some the following questions: 1) If SEOC value is now irrelevant... Is it better to focus on how strong the competition is the Google's Top 10 for the keyword we are targeting for? (rather than the volume) 2) In the 2 sources I mentioned earlier they recommend to ignore the monthly global searches and focus on something called SEOT (which stands for how many potential clicks does a #1 rank site would have). I've also noticed that a lot of people over here don't even use Market Samurai but instead uses GAKT and use the global and local searches as a guideline (no SEOT thing there) Is this value irrelevant as well? What about the PBR (phrase to broad ratio) value? Is this really useful or not? 3) It seems that there are many tools for checking how strong the competition is on Google's Top 10 like Traffic Travis, SEO Quake and so on. In my case I use the specific module in Market Samurai (paid version) but... is it really reliable? What things do you recommend looking for? (such as PR, backlinks, KW in URL & Title, Domain age, etc)
Well, I've doing some research since yesterday so I'll answer myself in order to help someone that could have the same doubts: SOLVED 1) According to what I found, the SEOC value is irrelevant. The most important thing to look for is the strength of the Top 10 competitors in Google. If they are weak, it doesn't matter if there are 10,000 or 10 trillion competing pages. SOLVED 2) In Market Samurai both SEOT and the number of global/local searches make sense since the information is pulled from GAKT. The SEOT value is a calculation of the number of potential clics a #1 site gets for the keyword. This value matches the 42% of the traffic that Google says the #1 site gets. PENDING 3) So far, it seems that the SEO Competition module in MS is accurate but my only remaining question is regarding the backlinks data: How reliable is Majestic SEO for this? Is there any other trusted source for backlinking data?
Funny, nobody was willing to help with this thread. But I'll provide the last answer just in case of future visits. #3 Answer would be that no source is completely reliable as this data is just an approximation but it seems that Majestic SEO and SEOMoz backlinks are the most used sources.
I think because this section of the forum is less visited About the tools I can just say three things: Do not put all your eggs in one basket. Do not be afraid to do some manual research. Some free tools (sometimes combined together) might be as powerful as a paid tool also good common sense is very valuable.
So what I'm hearing is that there is a market need for a way to determine the competitiveness of the top 10 results for a keyword? At what scale? Hundreds of keywords checked, or just your final shortlist?