by Mike Bradbury, 12/6/2006
Below is a method for thoroughly determining competition for various keywords:
- Do a search for one of your keywords
- On the first SERP find the last listing with the keyword in the title tag that is either a homepage of any kind or is a sub-page which is not associated with a domain whose Pagerank is greater than 6. (This is the page you will need to beat, if one does not exist, ranking will generally be easier)
- Find out how many unique links with the keyword in the anchor text whose linking page has a Pagerank of 1 or higher for the competitor (This is how many quality backlinks you'll need to acquire)
The aforementioned is a meticulous method for determining the competition for all of your keywords, and unless you're planning on building a tool that will automate this process, I would suggest taking a more general approach by using advanced search strings in the search engine of your choice.
The technique that I am about to demonstrate uses the following string: intitle:"Keyword Phrase" inanchor:"Keyword Phrase". This string will return the total number of pages with, largely, the two greatest factors contributing to ranking for a keyword:
- Having the keyword in the page title
- Having the keyword in anchor text pointing to the page
It's a down and dirty method for assessing competition. This is how it's done:
- Go to http://www.startlaunch.com/research/
- Copy your list of keywords into the box, click "submit"
- Click on each link
- Find and copy the number of pages that the search engine returns for this query from the top right of the SERP to a new column next to the corresponding keyword in your keyword list spreadsheet (this is your competition).
- In another new column, divide the number of competitors by the number of monthly searches for each keyword.
- Sort the table from low to high (ascending) using that column.