Competitive Keyword Analysis, how do YOU do it?

[aspiringentrep]

Great tips! For me, I view possible keywords using adwords. or use other keyword tracker tool.

After I chose the right keywords, I will then type it to google to know the "density" of the keyword. I look for less dense keywords to avoid too much competition with other websites or bloggers.

[jgand]

Interesting method of finding keywords. It sounds very effective

Everyone has their own method finding keywords. I search google first myself to find the most searched phrases.

[michaelblit]

Hi all,

Still would be good to know what is the best proportion between a number of searchers and a number of webpages using that keyword.

Warm wishes and thanks,
Michael.

[kodeexii]

Salam n Hola

Firstly, thank you JJ for bringing up this topic. It's been almost a year since you started this and it's still going strong. There's even a warning informing me that this thread is old. Hahaha..

It's interesting to see that you've got your own version of KEI formula of sorts.

I pretty much just use the KEI where I just modify the power level which is used with the total number of search.

I basically use allintitle:keyword phrase when researching competitions.

After reading this, I think I'll add allinurl into the mix as well.

Once again, thank you JJ for bringing this up.

To Your Online Success
Hadee Roslan

[searchlight]

Your post is very informative. Thanks for all the details. We sometimes use WEB CEO also to automate the process.

[piyushkotadiya]

Doing keyword analysis is important and that too competitive keyword analysis. I use google keyword tool to find out relevant keyword to my service offering. Then i try to find out how many searches are being made for those keywords.

Once i know search volumes, then i try to do searches for those selected keyword manually. By doing that, i try to make note of my competitors and what services they are offering. Then i try to find out, what mistakes they are making.\

Once i know that my competitors are doing something wrong, which is making them less competitive then my services, I would target my strength and then promote my business for those keywords.

I do regular analysis of the results i am getting on my website. what keywords are working for me and what keywords are not...based on that i try to make improvement.

[michaelblit]

Thank you for your input. I would still appreciate if our friends can share an idea or KEI formula in simple terms for any amateur to use the right keyword in their SEO process. Thank you all!

So warmly,

Michael.

[EC23]

I don't do, or buy into, the idea that volume of results returned is an indicator of competition.

The fact is some common words might not be competitive at all, but they're common words and so appear on many pages.

Allintitle and allinachor are better.

Personally, I just look at the top ten or so listings, their backlinks, their pagerank, my own opinion as to their on page optimizations, and then decide if I can beat them. Not everyone could do this of course, you need to understand SEO enough to make good judgement calls, but it works for me.

I don't care so much about how many sites there are on the topic, 99% of them are easily beat, it is the top ones that will either hold me down or allow me to be successful. So those are the ones I worry about.

Agreed, I myself use all intitle, and sometimes inurl as well.

When I analyse a keyword phrase, I usually check the first ten listings, see how well they are optimized, that is onpage SEO, but onpage SEO do not contribute much to your ranking until you have thousands of pages,hence thousands of internenal links.

Then I will check their PR, if most are more than 6, I usually give up.

If I decide to continue, I will check their back links, and quality of their backlinks. If they have too many good backlinks such as DMOZ listed,Yahoo listed, and many relevant quanlity backlinks, I give up.

[mebarclay]

use the google keyword tool and make sure to look at exact match to see how much volume (estimated of course) that a keyword gets

google tool is good to search Competitive But they don't show exact Results ... i like to use Web CEO And its doing fine for me ,

[tcwtitan]

I am more of a rookie and yet I did not see discussion on the site index and lack of broken links on pages. Maybe I missed it. The ranking goes down when links are out of date, too. I look at lots of related pages and score them on my Keyword algorithm but you definitely took it and knocked it out of the park. How low of ranking have you gotten a page on Alexa?

[Lee Norman]

Hi,

To excel in search engine optimization with a niche strategy, you need to pick out your keywords (i.e. those keywords that potential clients are inputting into search engines like Google and Yahoo) and make sure your website, blog, etc. content caters to those keywords. This will make you rank high on Google.

[besteast]

The very first thing is to perform an exact phrase search in Google to know how many competitors we have and to see if we have the chance to beat these pages with properly optimized articles.
Now that we know whether we have a chance with this keyword, we can check out our competitors and see if we can make it to the first page. First, we'll look at the results on the first page and see how highly optimized they are for our keyword.
If all the results on the first page were completely optimized, meaning the keyword phrase appears in the title, URL, and description, it may be hard to get on the front page. If only very few are completely optimized, you can beat out the slackers.
The next thing you want to check for is the rank of the competing pages. How do you do this? With a simple plug-in. Many of you may be familar with Search Status for Firefox. If not, download and install it now! It is a great help when doing competition analysis.

[JJMcClure]

If all the results on the first page were completely optimized, meaning the keyword phrase appears in the title, URL, and description, it may be hard to get on the front page. If only very few are completely optimized, you can beat out the slackers.

Suppose the page is ranking without any on-page optimisation, how do you judge it then?

I see a lot of pages that have no backlinks and very little on-page optimisation but the rest of the site that they're part of has thousands of links and is passing that Authority to the ranking page.

[mobilehomelender]

To find key words I'm using IBP Professional web site promotion. Axandra Axandra dot com

[Joseph06]

Well,

Something you may consider when developing a strategy for attracting traffic to your website would be through a blog. Blogs are getting really famous nowadays not only because they are entertaining but because of the various things people learn when they read. Considering the number of people who read blogs per day, you may consider wanting all of them attracted to your website. While that would seem right, the using a blog is indeed very effective in generating traffic.

[zaizaices]

Suppose the page is ranking without any on-page optimisation, how do you judge it then?

I see a lot of pages that have no backlinks and very little on-page optimisation but the rest of the site that they're part of has thousands of links and is passing that Authority to the ranking page.

Yup there are pages that ranks even without backlinks or on-page optimization. It may be because of the content or it's already branded.

[dtm32236]

So I've been searching around looking for how other people have done their Keyword Research, and I came across one that took "keyword relevance" into consideration.

This person would add an 'importance' factor and this would affect how their keywords were weighed. This factor is how important the user thinks the keyword is - how relevant they are to the page they're optimizing.

The person I came across would assign each keyword an 'importance' of 1, 2 or 3. One being most important and three being least.

It sounded like a good idea to me, so I thought I'd try to get opinions on this.

[besteast]

Keyword phrases research is an important work in SEO services.You can use some free keyword research tools to find and test your keywords.
1.Google Keyword Tool. It features a very high quality, clean and frequently updated keyword database, with estimated search volume. It is regarded as one of the best keyword research tools.
2.Wordtracker. Their free tool has a limit of 100 results. If you want to see all keywords, you must pay. Its free database is very detailed, so mostly 100 results is enough.
3.Keyword Discovery. This tool has a noisy database, so use it with doubt.
4.SEO Book Keyword Research Tool. This tool gives exactly the same results as Wordtracker. What you will like about the SEO Book tool is all the extras that come on top of regular keyword research.

[iPhoneTeacher]

Here’s a quick secret method to finding the exact number of current searches for any term on Google. The common methods that everyone will share with you will help you find only the number of searches for the previous month on Google - or the general bar graph on approximate search popularity of the past. These techniques wont help you in trying to evaluate any daily, live and new search trends.

Below is a secret that not many experts will share with you. I suggest you memorize it or print it out and file it - as you won’t find this little gem anywhere around the net.

Now, here’s the Secret -

1. List out all the keywords you would like to find the live current search statistics for.

2. Make sure you add [ ] around each of the keyword sets. This is because we only want to find “exact match” search data.

3. Open your Google Adwords Account, and Create a New Campaign and a New Ad group within the Campaign.

4. Add all your Keywords into this Ad Group. Again, make sure you have [ ] around each Keyword / Keyword Phrase.

5. Define and insert a Pay-Per-Click bid for all these keywords that is really really very high… Something like $3 to $5. I will tell you why shortly.

6. Write a totally unrelated Advertisement for these keywords. For example - if you want to find out the search statistics for the Keyword [dog training book] , make an advertisement on the subject - How To Program in C++.

7. Now, Activate Your Campaign! … and wait for 24 hours to get the statistics!

Thats it!

Explanation: By bidding high for the keywords (point 5 above), you are assured that your ad shows up whenever anyone does a search for your keyword. Google uses Quality Score formula to display the Ads (which is a factor of the bid amount, click-through-rate and landing page quality) - and now since you insert a very high CPC, you will be assured that your ad shows up on the first page - even if your CTR is zero. Google likes you a lot because you are willing to pay such a high CPC in the live ad auction Adwords resutls. This way, since your ad is displayed on each search perofrmed for that keyword - you get to know the exact number of searches performed for your keyword. Google displays these numbers in your Ad Campaign pages inside Adwords. Agian - the search number accuracy is maintained since you have bid so high - that you are probably be on top if not within the first 8 ads that show up on the first search result page.

Now, by displaying a totally irrelevant advertisement(point 6 above), you are assured that nobody really clicks on your ad! Since the ad is totally irrelevant and not related to what the searcher is looking for - they just move on and are not interested at all. Thus you don’t pay a single penny!

Note: Some people will argue that this will reduce your Quality Score in the eyes of Google Adwords. My suggestion is that if you create a new separate Campaign you might not get affected much, but if you are still paranoid - just open a fresh Google Adwords account to carry out all your keyword experiments.

[shawkylotfy]

IBP Professional is the best solution as it will automatically grab the important keywords for you !

[JZ Design]

are these tools (like google's keyword volume tool) free to use? i'm trying to comprehend how to start keyword research

[zaizaices]

are these tools (like google's keyword volume tool) free to use? i'm trying to comprehend how to start keyword research

There's a lot of online resources if you Google it. Like Besteast said in his post. Google's Keyword Tool is free here check it out
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Goodluck!

[seo-neon]

One thing you must know in reasearching for competitive KWs are how good your competitors use theirs, a good keyword means a lot as you link build.
Here's some tools that can help you - KeyWordTools

[crawler]

For most site that is newly build and just starting a promotion or link building process, you need to set up a long tail keyword using a minimum of 3 words. In this way you can target 2 specific plus a major keyword. Don't attempt to go on a major one because your far beyond other old sites that gain higher rankings. Increase your backlinks and if you being crawled, that's the time for you to go for a short tail keywords.

[bermuda]

When there is a high quality and really powerful website running online which is also enjoying an older domain, addition of newer terms and then targeting them through internal pages could be easier than launching a new site.

Web pages of the sites are connected to each other like chains and they help each other in many cases.