6 replies to this topic

[jackc007]

When i do keyword research i use googles tool to find keywords and find out how many times they are searched per month, i then export this to excel and filter out any keywords with a low search number.

To analyse the competitivesness of the keywords i look at the page ranked number 1 in google and find the amount of links (to domain aswell), page age, whether the keyword is in the url, title, header, meta description/keywords, how many pages they have indexed and whether they are in yahoo or dmoz directory.

Can you think of any more variables that will let me see how competitive a keyword is?

[Jill]

I think you need to look beyond the #1 page in Google. At least the top 20 pages.

In addition, you might want to watch the Dan Theis video pinned at the top of this keyword research forum.

[caneman]

Jill, is there a way efficiently look at the first 20 pages in Google as part of an analysis of competitors? All I have ever read was that all that is needed is to look at page 1 of the SERP and do your analysis there... then I started to think about it some and I realized there are probably a lot of people out there like me with new websites that haven't aged yet and are building backlinks and tyring to push their websites up in the SERPS, so maybe I need to start looking at more than the first page? What is your experience with this type of analysis? Thanks.

[nuttakorn]

When you do the keyword research, you may look into your website analytics as well, to see which keyword generated good conversion rate (goal) and what keywords are potential growth to your website that you may need to develop more. For link analysis, you may need to analyze the anchor text used by your competitors as well.

[Jill]

Jill, is there a way efficiently look at the first 20 pages in Google as part of an analysis of competitors?

After the first 2 or 3 pages of search results, they're not very relevant anymore so it wouldn't do you much good to look past that many, imo.

[PatrickGer]

@Jill:

What you said read somewhat confusing to me. I was surprised to read you suggested not only looking at the first page, but at the top 20 pages (when really only the first page matters, as people should aim to be on the first page, not anywhere else).

And then you say (which I agree with) that after the second or third page the results become irrelevant.

Isn't this a contradiction? I'm (almost) sure there must be some kind of misunderstanding.

@jack007:

You shouldnt only look at the number of links, but at how competitive they are...at the very least you should look at...how many different websites they're from, because many people tend to have lots of links from one and the same website, but SEs are believed to not count 1,000 links from the same website as nearly as important as 1,000 links from 1,000 different websites ("all else being equal").

If you dabble a bit in it, you should start seeing patterns - like some people have lots of links but theyre mostly from crappy pages (as they probably believe it's about the number of links pointing to their website, not knowing that 1 link from the right website might help more with the search engines than 100 links from websites that aren't worth much).

PS:

Do you people on here agree with looking at how many different domains/websites link to a a certain website? Or would the number of different IP addresses linking to a website be a better indicator? (reminds me of that one post I made a while ago about the whole class C IP thing that someone said didnt even exist anymore...sorry if I got some detail wrong about this)

[Jill]

Isn't this a contradiction? I'm (almost) sure there must be some kind of misunderstanding.

Yeah you're right! I'm not sure what I was thinking in the first post. I think I meant to say top 20 results, not pages.