Competitiveness of Keywords for SEO
Your keyword research has provided a great insight into the search language that people use via a variety of channels, not necessarily just the the search engine query boxes.
What is now needed is an understanding of the competitiveness of these keywords. This means that you learn about which keywords / terms have a great deal of websites competing for them*, and those that you think are realistic can be competed for in time-scales that suit you.
Ranking Factors
When looking at the competitiveness of the search engine results page (SERPs) for your designated keywords. it involves looking at ranking factors of which are naturally held quite secretively by search engines. From experiential learning though and other that have been explicitly suggested by search engine engineers, we know of some factors that are regarded positively by the search engine algorithms.
Depth of Competitiveness Analysis
Competitive analysis can be carried out to a number of different depths, considering between a handful factors and 100-200, depending on the competitiveness of keywords in your industry. Understanding the importance of a handful of factors can go a long way though:
-
Presence in prominent directories such as Yahoo, Best of the Web (BOTW) and DMOZ
- The quality of the links to the domain (read more about the perfect links for SEO)
- The quality of the links to the page
- On-site optimisation factors, such as:
- domain age
- domain relevancy to the keyword in question
- appropriate keyword usage in title tags, h1 heading, keywords in appropriate parts of the site
- number and quality of social media bookmarks
- the recency of the last crawl and the authority of the content
To run through each of these characteristics for each keyword and each domain would be incredibly time-consuming but there is plenty of tools out there to help.
Keyword Competitiveness Tools
There are number of tools that can help you measure the competitiveness of the SERPs at a glance, but one of the best (that is also free) is SEO for Firefox. You will need to use Firefox browser (free) to take advantage of this tool, but is certainly worth looking into.
Be Realistic!
The more realistic you are with regards to the keywords you think you can rank for, the further your efforts will go. For sites that have little online presence to start with, it is worth considering less competitive terms such as long-tail keywords, that may not get the level of traffic that short-tail keywords do, but they can be even more converting...and that, I guess, is the name of the game!
Be patient...be Patient...websites may have been operating in that sector for years, accidentally or purposefully making decisions that help them rank well. This means that you cannot always get the ranking that you want right away - only 10 websites can rank in the top 10 of the SERPs...sound obvious but seriously worth bearing in mind when developing your search marketing plans!
Other Marketing Channels
Remember though, search engines aren't the only marketing channel that drive traffic to competitors' websites. Maybe they're receiving traffic from pay-per-click advertising, social media, or offline marketing channels too / instead? Research is needed here too!
*Please note when you see: "Results 1 - 10 of about 5,130,000 for Keyword-A", this is an arbitrary figure that doesn't have any real impact on the actual competitiveness of the SERPs.
Posted By: Ben
17 November 2008