Search Engine Optimisation
A guide to SEO for the small business owner
This site is maintained by Seggy T Segaran, author of the book “The battle to get traffic to your website”.
Keyword strategy - Keyword competition
Having chosen some keywords that are likely to be used by customers looking for our
products using Google, Yahoo and other search engines and checked how frequently
they are being used, we will now need to assess the amount of competition we now
face for each of our keyword choices. This information about the keyword competition
will allow us to gauge the amount of work required to come to first page of search
engine results in Google for that keyword or phrase.
There are quite a few different ways in which this keyword competition can be assessed. However it is important not to get too obsessed with analysis of the keyword competition. Understanding your market and your main competition on the web will give you an insight in how to proceed.
Keyword competition - using search engines
A quick way to assess keyword competition is to enter it in Google and see the amount of search engine results that Google brings up. For example, when the keyword cheap headsets is entered in the search box, the Google search engine brings up 1,150,000 search results. If “cheap headsets” in inverted commas are entered then Google brings up only 12600 that keyword.
Other ways of analysing keyword competition is to look at the number of sites that have the keyword that we want to use in their page title. The Google search engine allows you to find this out by using the search string allintitle:cheap headsets.
This shows that there are 9150 web pages where the keywords “cheap headsets” is in the title string, indication that the designers behind these sites have spent some time and effort on getting to the top of the Google search engine and a measure of the keyword competition we face.
Another detailed search command that Google supports is “allinanchor:cheap headsets” which returns the number of web pages that have this key phrase in the links back to their sites.
We can use any of these to see where the keyword competition is going to be highest or lowest for each of our target ones.
Summary: Keyword competition for search engines
We can use any of the methods above to see where the keyword competition is going to be highest or lowest for the ones we have chosen. This will allow us to focus on the ones where there is least competition.