Essential SEO Tools & Resources

Yesterday we discussed how when it comes to SEO you’re competing against your competitors and not against Google! This is a point some people miss. They believe they have to try and out smart Google to achieve top rankings. In reality, what you have to do is “out optimise” your competitors for each keyword phrase you want to rank for.

How do you “out optimise” them?

Well you need to optimise your pages better than them and then beat their linking strategy.

Today we’re going to discuss keyword competition and how basic search results can be misleading. Tomorrow, I will show you a real case study that analyses the real competition for a keyword phrase I am currently ranking very highly for.

In the third article in this series, I’ll show you a great piece of software designed specifically for analysing and replicating your competitors’ on page and off page optimisation.

So back to today, we’re going to discuss the importance of keyword competition and the factors that determine just how competitive a keyword really is when it comes to ranking high in the search engine results pages (serps).

I think you’ll be surprised by some of the answers, especially in tomorrow’s case study!

Firstly, lets make the following assumption: The fewer competitors you have for a keyword, the easier it will be to attain a top ranking position in the search engines. Agreed?

Low competition keywords may not attract as much traffic as those with lots of competition, but at least you’ll get “some” traffic quickly, and some traffic is better than none! Chasing highly competitive keywords may take you months or years of hard work to get a top ranking, and even then you may never achieve it! And even if you do, Google only have to make a small change to their ranking algorithms and you’ve literally lost everything.

It’s much less riskier to rank highly for lots of less competitive keywords than for just one high traffic keyword.

So with that said, what would we consider a low competitive keyword phrase to be?

Take a look at the screenshot above:

According to Google, there are 2,500,000 pages competing for the keyword phrase “how to become incorporated”.

Would you consider that to be a low competition keyword phrase?

Well at first glance most of us would say “no way”, but before that judgement can be made, a few more considerations need to be made …

For example, how many of the two and a half million pages include the specific keyword phrase “how to become incorporated” as opposed to just the word incorporated? Some of the pages will be specifically optimised for the “exact” phrase, whereas the majority won’t.

If you do a search in Google and enclose your search tern with “ “, only pages with the exact phrase in the page will be returned.

So let’s do just that, take a look at the screenshot below:

You will immediately see that the number of competing pages is massively reduced. We’re now getting down to the real pages competing against you (or me as it happens). Only 5249 pages to out rank!

Do you consider 5,249 pages to be low competition, given that they’ve all got the exact keyword phrase on their pages? It’s going to be tough, but certainly achievable.

In tomorrow’s case study post, I’ll show you another vital piece of analysis you need to do to establish the number of pages optimised for your keywords. I’ll also show you how to automatically analyse hundreds of keywords using this method in “minutes” … so whatever you do, don’t miss tomorrow’s post!!!

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