How to analyse the SEO keyword competition

You should have several good and relevant keywords on you list by now. Remember, they should bring enough traffic and be relevant to your business and website to be worth targeting. Now we need to know if it will be easy or too hard to rank well for these chosen keywords. This will depend on the competition.

Checking the SEO keyword competition – method 1 – Google Search Engine

This method is pretty simple and should always be done. Simply type the chosen keyword in Google and check:

  • who is occupying the first page
  • how big are they
  • how good is their website
  • check for other keywords they may be using

Always check at least the first and the last on the first page. If you think you have what it takes to beat at least the last on the page, then you can move on.

seo competition

Checking the SEO keyword competition – method 2 – Google Adwords

On Google Adword, keyword Tool, check what Google say about the competition: High, low or medium. Usually keywords with high competition will be harder to rank than low. But sometimes it is the quality of the competition and not number of competitors that is important.

keyword competition

Checking the SEO keyword competition – method 3 – Market Samurai

This is a great free tool. Market Samurai http://www.marketsamurai.com/. Whilst you will need to sign in, there are several free modules and lots of videos and help.

This information will tell you who are the 10 page one results for a specific keyword and will also tell you how strong the competition is.

You must always check:

  • how old is the domain age,
  • what it the page rank and,
  • how many back links pointing to the domain.

seo keyword competition

I have analysed the SEO keyword competition

After analysing the competition for your chosen SEO keywords, you will know which ones are easier to rank for and with those you will have a better chance of achieving page 1 of Google.

A couple of rules:

    • if your website is new or newish (under 2 years) go for less competitive keywords as it might take a bit longer to rank for competitive ones
    • choose really relevant keywords, this is more important than choosing really high traffic keywords
    • if your page rank is low, try to increase it by getting relevant links pointing to your site. But initially go for weak competition keywords

With all this research done, you should be able to pick FIVE MAIN SEO keywords to optimise your website. Choose those carefully and on my next post I will talk about “What is meta data” and “how to Optimise Meta Data”.

Recapping: the Basics SEO Keyword Research