Google Keyword Competition: How to Do Competitive Keywords Analysis

By Mikael | 1,915 views

When you are doing your keyword research there are three key elements that you are looking for. In no prioritized order they are:

• How strong is your competition?
• How many searches are the keywords getting per month?
• Are the people searching for the keyword likely to buy?

Every online marketer has his or her own rules and guidelines when trying to target a new keyword phrase but I see many marketers doing one of the three key elements wrong in a different way than I would suggest.

That is why I am going to show you how I check how difficult it is going to be to rank for a specific keyword by doing a Google keyword competition analysis. But before I do that let me first show you how many online marketers are trying to sell you their ebooks and software that will help you get better search engine ranking.

Let us pick the keyword phrase “buy red roses” as an example. If I were a sneaky marketer that wanted to sell you a “how to get better ranking products” I would show you a picture like this (click picture for larger view):

And if we assumed that I had one of the top ranking sites I would tell you that my product is so awesome that it helped me beat 35,700,000 competitors.

Well you can’t argue with the fact that Google shows that there are more than 35 million pages indexed for that phrase but it is wrong to call them competitors. Because a site mentions something about buying red roses somewhere in its text it doesn’t mean that it is competing for that phrase. But it does sound good that you kicked 35 million butts right?

Here is how to do a keyword competition check

Since I have just argued that the way to do a competition check above is not the right way then what is?

Here is what I would do…

First we need to understand that if you want to rank for a keyword there are two main factors that plays a crucial part. They are:

• to have the exact phrase in your title
• to have incoming links using that phrase

So how do we go about testing what pages are matching these two criteria? Well to test whether a page is using the keyword phrase in the title we’ll want to do an intitle search in Google. This is what it looks like (click picture for larger view):

Did you see that? Now we have reduced the competition from 35 million pages to around 3,300 pages. That is a huge difference (and probably why the sneaky marketers are not showing you this).

Next we want to do an inanchor search which means that it will show us the pages that has another page linking to it using the exact phrase “buy red roses”. This looks like this (click picture for larger view):

Amazing!! Now we’re only seeing 45 pages that have other pages linking to them using the “buy red roses” phrase. Do you think you can compete in a market with 45 players? Even if you mess up you will still be able to get a page 5 rank…

But now for the magic trick!

Well it’s not magic but it sounds mysterious doesn’t it?

If we now combine the two intitle and inanchor searches we’re going to see who the REAL competition is. This is how it looks (click picture for larger view):

So what this shows you is that there are only two pages actually competing actively for this phrase and to let you in on a secret I don’t think that they are actually actively going for that phrase but rather that they show up on that picture by accident.

Doing proper keyword analysis shows it all

If you have just entered “buy red roses” into Google and had seen the 35 million pages indexed would you have guessed that only two sites did actually use the phrase in the title and had links pointing into it using that phrase? Well I wouldn’t…

But now you’re probably thinking that it is good and all… but what about the fact that people are not using “intitle” and “inanchor” when they are searching? You could clearly see that the site that actually ranked number one for that phrase were not one of the two sites “competing” for the phrase?

That is a valid point and let me just try to explain why that might be.

It is probably because the number one ranking page is “stronger” than the two “competing” pages. So even though it doesn’t have any pages linking to it using that specific phrase, its strength combined with the fact that it is using the phrase in the title is enough to get a number one ranking.

But what about our #1 ranking “true competitor”? Where is that page? Look here (click picture for larger view):

It is ranking at #12 which is on the second page. The reason for this (I believe) is simply that they are really not trying to rank for that phrase at all. After all it is a wiki site and not a florist.

Could you grab a number 1 ranking for “buy red roses” fairly easy? Well I believe that you could and especially because the site that are currently there are not even ranking with a root domain but rather with some category pages and the page only has a pagerank of 2. If you wanted to I am sure you could be in the top3 in less than a few months (even with a new site).

So now all you need to figure out is whether people would want to buy and whether the phrase gets any traffic.

I’ll not go into details on how to do this but just state that someone searching for “buy red roses” are READY TO BUY. As for traffic is looks like this (click picture for larger view):

So there you have it…

This is how I do REAL Google keyword competition analysis when I try to rank for something.

To Your Success,
Mikael

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