Posts Tagged ‘keyword research’
When it comes to determining keyword competition – backlinks are king. You can only do so much with on-page SEO and the site owners who are really competing for search engine ranking will probably have fairly well optimized pages. That means that analyzing keyword competition really comes down to analyzing backlinks.
Remember that backlinks, especially keyword anchored backlinks, account for the most weight in the way the search engines rank pages. That is why you need to analyze backlinks if you really want to know if you can compete for a particular keyword phrase.
The “traditional” way to estimate competition is to search for the phrase in quotes, but that is just a quick and dirty way to get some kind of idea of how much competition you have. It doesn’t really tell you how hard it will be to take a top spot in the SERPs (search engine result pages).
The best way to gauge your competition for a top position is to do backlinks analysis on the pages that are currently in the positions you want to overtake. You do that by using Yahoo Site Explorer.
So, how do you go about determining keyword competition with Yahoo Site Explorer?
Please note: I would only do this for your primary keyword unless you have backlinks analysis software to make it less time consuming. The method that follows works very well, but it does take a lot of time to do right.
First you want to be clear on what you are looking for.
You want to know how many backlinks your top ranked competition has and ultimately how many keyword anchored backlinks they have — that is the time consuming part.
Here is what you do step by step assuming it is Google rankings that you are targeting:
Search for your keyword phrase (without quotes) on Google. We are checking for Google ranking, but we will actually use Yahoo to analyze backlinks. Google is very stingy on backlinks information and only shows you a fraction of the results. Yahoo Site Explorer gives you most of the backlinks in their database.
Either copy and paste the URLs of the top pages into notepad or just keep this browser window open and open a new one to use Yahoo site explorer.
I would start with the number 10 result. It will be the easiest to research because it will probably have the smallest number of backlinks. This will also tell you if you have a good chance of getting on to page one.
Copy and paste the URL of the site into Yahoo site explorer. When Yahoo displays the results click on the “inlinks” button and then select “except from this domain” from the show inlinks drop-down. This will tell you how many backlinks that page has. If it is just a few you are done checking that site and you can be pretty sure you can beat it.
If the site has a thousands of backlinks you don’t know if you can beat it (easily) or not but if the domain, folder or file name does not contain the keyword phrase you probably can. The way to know for sure is to analyze the links to the page for anchor text which no one in their right mind would do manually for thousands of links.
There are some free tools on the Web that try to automate the above process, but the ones I have tried have too many drawbacks to really be useful.
The only tool I’ve tried for analyzing backlinks that can recommend is not free, but the cost is minimal for the time it can save you. You not only save time in checking backlinks, you also save the time you would have spent building sites that you will never be able to get ranked well because they have thousands of keyword anchored backlinks.
You will also be amazed at how many sites with thousands of backlinks only have a few, and sometimes, no keyword anchored backlinks. These sites are easy to beat, but you would never know it without good analysis of their backlinks. I have found some real profitable keywords this way that everyone else ignored.
My keyword competition analysis took of choice is WebComp Analyst by Jonathan Leger. The software lets you do in minutes what would take you hours, if not days to do manually. WebComp Analyst is also a very good keyword research and suggestion tool.
I’ve used subscription based tools and I own a couple other big name keyword tools, but WebComp Analyst it the only one I continue to use and the only one that effectively analyzes backlinks. It is easy and it works to save me time and make me money.
