Keyword Research and SEO – Determining Competition

Keyword Research – no one is going to argue that it is an incredibly important part of Seach Engine Marketing but how seriously do you really take it? Do you regularly check your keyword strategy against current demand? Do you analyse the keyword data to determine what positions you can realistically obtain and still maintain a good ROI for your efforts? This week we’re going to go back to basics and address the subject of keyword research with particular relation to your SEO strategy.

What do Search Engines Want

When conducting your keyword research always keep in mind what the ultimate goal of search engines is. To survive search engines needs extremely high volumes of traffic which they secure by providing their visitors with links to the most useful online content for their given query. In other words there must be solid content available before a search engine will grant you a position. From a targeting standpoint this means you should only ever target those keywords for which you can provide useful relevant content.

Conducting Research

There are innumerable tools for obtaining an understanding of the relative search volumes of various search terms related to your industry. Of the freely available tools perhaps the best is Google’s own keyword research tool found at https://adwords.google.com.au/select/KeywordToolExternal

It is important to note that no matter what tool you use that you use the data provided purely as a reference for comparative demand for various search terms. Due to a number of factors, such as the prolific use of search engine ranking reporting software, search term numbers are only estimates.

At this point many people simply select those popular search terms they want to appear under and then start devising their keyword strategy around that. This is not the most effective means of defining your keyword strategy. You need to be aware that for the most popular keyterms it can require a significant investment of resources to even rank on the first page for a particular search term. For this reason your strategy needs to be realistic and target those words that you have a real chance of obtaining a position under.

Determining Competition

This is the step that most strategies ignore or pay only the most cursory regard to. Determining your chances are obtaining a top ranking spot is one of the most important things you can do when assessing which keywords to target.

Assessing competition on a keyword is not a simple task and requires a solid understanding of what makes a strong search engine competitor. However the following will help you get a basic understanding of what you should be paying attention to.

Off Page Factors

When assessing your search engine competition one of the easiest things to do is get an understanding of their link popularity. The most popular tool for getting a quick snapshot of this information is the Google Toolbar (found at toolbar.google.com) which has functionality to show the current page rank of a web page you are looking at. Page Rank is simply a measure of link popularity where 0 means no link popularity and 10 means an extremely large amount of link popularity. The general rule is the higher the Page Rakn of a site the harder it will be to beat them in search engine positions. Comparing your page rank against your competitors can give you a good indication of how much effort you will need to put in to beat your competitors in this area.

Just as important as the number of links coming into a website are the text of those links is also a key tool search engines use to assess the relevance of a page to a particular search term. A useful tool in this regard is to do a search in Google with the term ‘inanchor:’. This function allows you to see how sites are being linked to using a link with that particular text. For instance if you typed ‘inanchor:”computers”’ you would see how many pages are being linked to where the link text includes the word ‘computers’.

Assuming you can obtain links under the terms being targeted a lower number of results means you should have an easier time ranking.

On Page Factors

Understanding the on page competition you have for search engine terms requires a lot more effort and a good understanding of how to rank for various terms.

Considering the importance of the presence of search terms in the title tag when it comes to search engine rankings there is actually one useful tool you can use to get a very basic idea of the competition you are facing on a particular search term.

To do this simply type ‘intitle:”searchterm”’ to see how many web pages have the search term in their title. Just as with the ‘inanchor:’ search the fewer results you return the less competition you have on this particular term.

In Conclusion

Keyword research may be easier than conducting the SEO itself but that doesn’t change its significance as the foundation of your SEO strategy. Far too many websites have spent thousands and thousands of dollars chasing search terms they never had the resources to properly achieve results on. So many wasted marketing dollars can be saved by just taking this one extra step of assessing competition on your targeted keywords. It will save you in the long run.