Mikael Rieck is the author of more than hundred articles on topics of how to make money both online and offline. He has been online since 1999 and has always had a passion for money making opportunities and teaching others how to make a profit.Keyword Competition: What about Competitive High Paying Keywords?
Yesterday I wrote a post about Keyword Competition in Google and I gave an example on how little actual competition there is for a keyword phrase example like “buy red roses”.
Now I also showed you that even though the phrase weren’t very competitive (at all!!) it didn’t get that many searches per month. I was about 140 (exact match) and if we assume that a number #1 ranking in Google will give you about 30% of the clicks then you would get about 42 clicks per month. Not really something that would make you jump with joy.
Let’s try to find another example that might be a little more competitive and for the sake of it let us try to make money solely from Adsense.
An ever popular topic is weight loss and from the Google Keyword tool we find that the keyword phrase “weight loss system” might be an interesting phrase.
Just as a warning I am doing this while typing so I have no clue what will be the outcome of this but I am doing it to show you my process (click picture for larger view):
From the picture above we can see that there are 2,900 searches per month (exact match) and that you can expect about $1-$2 per click (about 25-50%) of the Avg. CPC price. If you get a number #1 ranking you will get around 800-900 visitors per month from that phrase.
Let us assume that you can get $1.5 per click and have 10% click your ads (that is indeed possible) then that would generate around $130 per month.
It is not a fortune but it is okay for just that one phrase and you’re probably going to rank for a lot of other weight loss terms at the same time so you would expect your traffic to be a lot higher.
But let’s look at the competition…
First let’s try the inanchor:”weight loss system” intitle:”weight loss system” search and see what we get (click picture for larger view):
As you can see we have 859 direct competitors as opposed to the 2 we saw in the example yesterday. Now we can already see that there will be more competition but that was expected.
Next thing I like to look at is the pagerank and the links that goes to the page (according to Google). As you can see these first 4 pages have a pagerank of either 2 or 3 but have only a few incoming links (look at my red markers).
Now you can definitely beat a pagerank of 2 or 3 but if you have a brand new site it will definitely take you a while (expect 6-12 months).
From just looking at the pages above I would say that the site you would want to beat is the one ranking at #2 (www.instinctiveweightloss.com). It has a never domain, few incoming links and few indexed pages. But since the site is where it is you can probably expect them to want to compete for that phrase (I can’t explain why I think so but experience is part of it I guess).
Finally we’ll want to look at what actually shows up when we just search for “weight loss systems” in Google (click picture for larger view):
As you can see we now have a few other sites at the top but our “true competitor” is at #4.
I don’t know what the #1 ranking site has done to be at that position but having a #2 ranking site (public company) with a PR5 will probably be rather difficult to beat.
So would I go for this keyword?
Well I would say that “it depends”. If I had a brand new site then definitely “no”. It would not be worth the effort as there are a lot easier phrases to get ranked for first.
But if I had an aged site with a PR3 or PR4 then I would definitely consider it as my chances of beating the competition would be greatly increased.
I hope that this example in combination with the one I did yesterday has given you an idea of how you can test what your true competition is.
If you have any questions please let me know.
To Your Success,
Mikael
10 Responses so far
Yan
May 29th, 2009
2:35 am
Awesome tips, Mikael. You could easily wrap it up into an ebook and sell it..;)
Few would have gone to such a great length to show exactly how to study the “virtual environment” we are competing against.
And it’s true. Experience do plays apart when it comes to choosing the right keyword(s).
Yan
Sire
May 29th, 2009
5:22 am
When going for a particular keyword or phrases, would you recommend misspelling the them, perhaps in the tags or meta, as I’ve found I get a few hits from people’s misspellings in the comments.
Mikael
May 29th, 2009
6:09 am
Thank you Yan. I might put that in as part of the ebook I am working on. I’m glad you liked it.
Sire, I don’t know if I would RECOMMEND it but I wouldn’t say not to do it either. I think the key element would be that you’re already getting searches from the misspelled term.
So what I would do is to not upfront specifically target anything misspelled but if you’re getting visitors from misspellings of the word then by all means add it to both the meta tags as well as the normal tags.
But keep from misspellings in the title and the text as that would look unprofessional.
Sire
May 29th, 2009
6:19 am
There is no way I would intentionally misspell words in the title or text, and I wouldn’t worry about the meta, too much hassle, but I may be tempted to use it in the tags.
Manshu
May 30th, 2009
1:57 am
10% is a bit high. I think that would really be closer to 1% and that would change the equation quite a bit.
Mikael
May 30th, 2009
7:36 am
Hi Manshu, no 10% is not high at all. But if you don’t know how to get that you might be right
There are people getting as high as 25% CTR but I personally haven’t been able to get that consistently (only once in a while).
Geoff@nanny jobs
July 11th, 2009
7:31 am
Thanks Mikael, this info is golden! Using this example, are you suggesting a good strategy be to register a domain like “www.weightlosssystem.com” (assuming it’s available) but not go for the phrase “weight loss system” until your site has aged and gained some good PR and instead go for a less competitive keyword phrase in the mean time? Or is it better to just forget that phrase altogether, find a less competitive keyword phrase and register a domain with that phrase in it instead?
Mikael
July 11th, 2009
9:16 am
Hi Geoff,
yes you got it right. I would still suggest that you target the competitive keyword at some point down the road but only once you have gained enough strength to the site and have started seeing traffic from the less competitive phrases.
As for the weight loss industry I believe that there is room for more people as it is HUUUGE so I wouldn’t necessarily pick another niche but when that is said, there are easier niches out there
Geoff@nanny jobs
July 11th, 2009
11:12 pm
Thanks Mikael. So often it is better to register a domain name that contains your “future keywords” (i.e. 6-18 months from now) not necessarily the keywords you would target at the beginning. That way your site can grow over time and you will have the extra leverage of these domain keywords once the time is right to target them. Is that a fair statement?
Mikael
July 12th, 2009
5:18 pm
Geoff, well you could put it like that but normally you’ll also have your main keyword in the long tail phrases but the reason why you don’t want to use long domain names is that it will not only limit what you’re site can be about but it also looks crappy when the url is very long.
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