Web site marketing effective Internet marketing from Targetem

Keyword Competition Analysis:
What defines a competitive keyword?

This is very important, because a good SEO consultant will never quote you a price until the question of competitive difficulty has been fully answered. We have seen over the years, many so-called professionals who quote a price based on difficulty – and will point out “keyword competition” factors such as the number of pages competing to be found, the number of results returned for the keyword search, and other apparently useful metrics.

Some explain that it’s like finding a needle in a haystack. It’s a popular thought - determining the difficulty of scoring the top position for a keyword (phrase) is often thought of in terms of the old “needle in a haystack” analogy, i.e., the difficulty of ranking the targeted needle is directly related to the size of the haystack. Is this a smart way to look at it? Does the size of the haystack matter? Or, could the important factor be the quality or aggressiveness of the other needles?

Here we will look at some common misconceptions, and try to separate fact from fiction. There are many factors that affect the true competitiveness of a keyword, and some seemingly important factors that, at the end of the day, are totally irrelevant for this purpose. Let’s review a couple of the metrics that some professionals consider (or claim) to be effective indicators of competitiveness.

First, let’s take a commonly used approach and look at the size of the “haystack” when searching for two terms. For this example, we will compare the following two keywords; “mortgage loan” and “auto loan”. Here we will look at a metric commonly used to describe the level of competition for a keyword - the number or results returned for a query at Google for the above keywords:

Results 1 - 10 of about 46,700,000 for mortgage loan. (0.30 seconds) 

Results 1 - 10 of about 21,500,000 for auto loan. (0.12 seconds)

This approach makes it looks like the “mortgage loan” keyword is more competitive; after all, there are more than twice as many pages competing to be found at the top. To some it might appear that ‘mortgage loan” is at about twice as competitive because the size of the haystack is more than twice as large.

Another approach - some people believe that the more searches a particular term receives, the more competitive it is. There are several ways to look at this, for this example we used the Overture Keyword Selector Tool (Feb 2005 data) http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

mortgage loan 110,740

auto loan 553,339

The above clearly shows that more than 4 times as many searches were performed for “auto loan” than were performed for “mortgage loan”. Does this mean that “auto loan” is actually more competitive that “mortgage loan” ?

In terms of measuring the difficulty of getting a particular site to rank for a given keyword, this data means nothing. Absolutely nothing. Keyword competition is a misnomer, and a misconception. Keywords do not compete with each other. The proper way to view it: web pages compete with each other for specific keywords.

In terms of competitive difficulty, the only thing that really matters is how difficult it will be to rank a specific web page for a specific keyword. Proper analysis begins with a website competition study for specific keywords. The properly defined task is to understand how difficult it will be to rank a page for a keyword in the context of that web page vs. its top competitors.

This is where it gets interesting. Here’s our take on it:

The level of difficulty, and therefore the cost, of obtaining top rankings for a given page for a given keyword is a function of what the current top sites have done in order to be ranked at the top. Once this is understood, doing these things better, and doing more of them, are major components of what it will take to get top rankings. In other words, what matters is one-upping the top competition. The cost or difficulty is therefore based only on the amount of resources and expense that will be required to beat the competitor’s page for a specific keyword.

Before you can beat the competition, you must first understand the competition.

At Targetem, we have developed an extensive and proprietary suite of sophisticated software tools, intelligent spiders and internal (human) procedures that allow us to accurately determine the difficulty index for a keyword, within the context of the other pages that currently have the top rankings for the keyword.

Our tools allow us to examine and compare over 47 different factors as they apply to each of the top pages for a given keyword. As an example, we have listed 5 of the more obvious factors we examine here:

1. On-page relevancy of competitor pages (title, Hx, copy, in/out anchors)
2. Gross inbound link popularity of competitors pages
3. Inbound % keyword link anchor of competitors pages
4. Avg. link popularity of the pages linking to competitors/links per page
5. Relevance of the linking pages (title, Hx, copy, in/out link anchors)

For example, one of our tools simply measures the quantity and quality of inbound anchor text links for the top competitors sites, for each listed keyword. It starts by performing backlinks searches at 4 separate search engines, and then removes the duplicates. Then it spiders each of the linking sites to gather data on the link anchor text, topical relevance of the page and other factors affecting the credibility of the linking page. Other tools perform various other functions.

When we use our various tools and then combine and analyze the output, we gain a detailed understanding of the competitive issues – at this point we know the true level of keyword difficulty, and have a clear picture of what needs to be done to win. With this detailed information in hand, we can inform our client as to the amount resources (and expense) that will be required to obtain top rankings for each specific keyword.

Conclusion:

Competitive difficulty is defined by the amount of resources that must be allocated in order to cause a specific web page to score at the top, for a specific keyword. The competitive difficulty of obtaining top ranking for a specific page for a specific keyword is the primary driver of the cost to do so. Guessing at the competitive issues or using non-relevant data leads to false conclusions. None of the typical off-the-cuff metrics can compare with the accuracy of deep research and analysis of meaningful metrics. Using irrelevant information in a sales presentation or to prepare an analysis or price quote is often a deceptive sales tactic that bears no relationship to what it will take to get the job done, causes client overcharges (at best) or leads to a lack of desired results. Targetem takes a highly analytical and empirical approach towards analyzing relevant information, as well as in the presenting, quoting and performing of our professional search engine optimization and internet marketing services.

*Footnote. There are many factors that can affect the cost and effectiveness of a proper SEO campaign including the need for the addition of quality original content, needed changes to copy, tags, headlines, site architecture or navigation, existing use of java script or Flash, removal of existing search engine barriers or penalty items, the use of shopping cart, database or content management systems, requirements to increase the quantity or quality of existing content, server or hosting issues, and other factors.

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