How to check for competition in google for a keyword or phraze

Ive been looking forward to writing this post because i can finally show you exactly how i check google for competition which is something i know many people get really stuck on. When i first started to build sites i too struggled to work out if a particular keyword or phraze was worth competing for but i now have a great system in place for checking every one of my keywords and phrazes that i go for and the best part is its dead simple and you can learn it very quickly.

I have tried using tools before and although some people still use them to determine competition i dont think they are a very good idea because they can sometimes give you too much data which will just end up confusing the hell out of you and also they are never usually that accurate. The most accurate way to check for competition is to go to google yourself in real time and see what google are ranking on the first page…..simple! No fancy tools, no paid subscriptions to keyword tools and nothing to pay out.

This is the only way that i check for competition now and my sites rank very high and attract lots and lots of traffic.

Before we go any further you will need to download this must have marketers tool called “seo quake” its a firefox plug in and you will need this in order to check for competition in google, download it then go to step 1

Step 1 – Once SEO quake  is installed you need to configure the settings. The only things that you want visible in google when you do a search is Google Page Rank, Google Index, Google Links, Yahoo Links and Yahoo Link Domain.

Step 2 – Go to google and type in your keyword making sure you are in google.com if you are not already in the US. Also make sure SEO quake icon has been enabled so you get the seo data come up in google when you do a search.

You now have the first page of google in front of you and at a glance you can now see how strong your competition is. Dont use any quotes just enter the keyword in as if you were a real person searching for something

The reason why your only concerned about the first page is because nothing else matters, i dont care how good or bad the results are on page 2 or 100 all i care about is page 1 because thats where the traffic and money is! If you can beat the sites on page 1 then you will rank high. The reason why all the sites on page are on page 1 is because they are the sites that google have deemed most relevant there for if you want to rank high you have to beat them and if they are not very well optimized then it will be easy.

Here is what the terms mean:

PR – the page rank of the page or site ranked

I – google index and how how many pages are indexed for the site with google, a good indication and shows you how much content a site has at a glance

L – Google Links – means how many links google has indexed how ever this is never accurate because google never shows any where near the real amount of links a site has therefor dont worry too much about this number but i still like to have it enabled anyway.

Yahoo L – Yahoo links is one of the most important ones as it shows you how many links yahoo has to the particular page ranked. Again yahoo dont always show a real accurate figure of links but are way way more accurate than google and you should always pay attention to these numbers.

Yahoo LD – Yahoo link domain means how many yahoo links there are for the entire site. For example the links to the page may only be 20 but the entire site could have thousands or more. This number is only ever important if a main url of a website is ranked.

How to determine for competition

I first look at the PR to see what sort of numbers are on the first page, obviously the lower the better. However if you have shopping sites like ebay, shopping.com and target etc that have a PR or 2,3,4 and even 5 then still dont worry to much because as long as its an internal page of there site whch is ranked (and 99.9% of the time it usually is then it still wont always be hard to outrank. You need to look at the yahoo links aswell, if the links are low and the PR is fairly high then it wont be that hard to outrank because the site has no links and its purely being ranked because of the authority of the main site. But of course if the PR is low and the links are non existent then it will be very easy to out rank them. Also pay attention to the title tags. If your main keyword is in the title tags then its usually a bit more difficult to rank above them but usually a lot of shopping sites dont always have your exact keyword in there title tag

If i see shopping review review sites or shops then thats usually a good sign but i do still of course check there pages because every so often you could find a page which has hundreds if not thousands of links. If thats the case then it will be fairly hard to outrank but remember your looking at an over all top ten results not just one site. If quite a few of the sites in top 10 have high PR and they have lots of links to the page and they have your keyword somewhere in there title tag and in the description then it could be a hard keyword to rank high for.

You need to look at all 10 results and see how many of them are well optimized for your keyword. If say 5 or 6 are well optimized then it only leaves a few sites that are not well optimized so you have less room to appear in the top 10 results. Im not saying you cant rank but remember you dont want to have to spend years just trying to get to the top 10 unless your building an authority site.

So you now know that shopping sites are generally not that hard to outrank. Some other good sites that are usually outranked fairly easily are web 2.0 sites like hubpages etc, ezine articles, forum posts. But of course you always still need to check there links, pr and title tags because some web 2.0 sites can be well optimized but most that i have ever come across usually are not.

So far we have taked about the yahoo links to the page. The LD – yahoo link domain only really comes into effect when you have a site ranked with the main url like “www.CheapLcdTv.com” if this site was ranked high then the yahoo link domain would play a bigger part because the LD links are relevant to the entire site and as the main url of the site is ranked it will be much harder to outrank.

So a good indication if a particular keyword or phraze is competitive or not is to look at how many main urls/sites are ranked in the top 10 in google. If there are a few then i would bet you that it will be much harder to rank your keyword or phraze.

Other sites to be aware of in the top 10 that can be tricky to outrank are about.com, wikipedia, sites with keyword rich domains with a fair few of back links, any .gov, edu sites as google deem these types of sites of high trust so you could have a problem outranking them.

So in summary:

• Shopping sites, ebay, target, by.com ,review sites, ezine, forum posts and other article directories, web 2.0 sites, sites with incorrect title tags or non relevant title tags, social bookmarking sites and sites that have an inner page ranked. As long as the inner page doesnt have too many back links and the PR is not really high then it wont be that hard to beat. These are all a good sign of weak competition but still always check

• authority sites with high pr with lots of back links, about.com, wikipedia, keyword rich domain name sites with plenty of back links, edu, gov sites, and mostly any main urls or sites ranked, these can always be a bit tricky most of the time but again always check to make sure

This has been a very long post but its very important that you understand how to do this step otherwise you will be trying to rank keywords and phrazes that have too much competition and it will end up taking you many months if not years.

This is in my opinion the best way to to do keyword research. You dont need to worry about all the other nonsense like quotes or all in url or checking back links etc. Remember keep things simple. Once you master this technique believe me you will have an understanding of what it will take to rank any keyword that you wish to compete for, saving you a tonne of time and effort.

hope this has helped

feel free to leave any comments

paul