Checking Competition Strength

Kaedus

Kaedus

Active member
Jan 25, 2011
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I've been trying to decide how difficult it will be for me to rank in certain niches, for certain keywords, and I feel like I don't have a good grasp on what I need to be doing to measure the competition.

Generally, I will look at the top 10, check number of backlinks in YSE and see where some of those are coming from, how many are sitewide, etc.

Next I will go to the site itself and check actual keyword optimization for the keywords that I am attempting to target.

Finally, I will check the age of the domain.

Is there anything else I should be doing? Are my current methods sufficient? What are some other tools that you guys are using to check your competition when doing research for a niche? I would love to hear what some of the more experienced guys have to say about this stuff.
 


Personally, when I'm doing research for a niche/keyword, I'm doing the following:


  1. Check the back links on the top 10 websites ranking for that keyword
  2. See if the ranking sites for that keyword are 'one pagers' like wikipedia and other similar to it.
  3. Check the back links (your already doing that)
  4. Look at the Titles for the ranking sites. For example, if I typed, "male pheromone spray" and the titles of the search results came up with, "How Powerful is Male Pheromone Cologne?". I would notice that it doesn't have one of my keywords, "spray" in the title so I would consider trying to rank for that keyword.
  5. Check the competition in Google (the amount of results that show in Google for the keyword)
I also do a few other things but these are the main 5 for researching a niche
 
Kaedus said:
What are some other tools that you guys are using to check your competition when doing research for a niche? I would love to hear what some of the more experienced guys have to say about this stuff.
Click to expand...

Do you use Market Samurai? Their SEO Competition section pretty much pulls up all the data you require.

Apart from just looking at links its pretty useful to look at the exact anchor text for links as well, Market samurai allows you to do that.

Apart from that, I'll enter selected domains in Open Site Explorer to check out some of the numbers there as well.
 
I haven't used Market Samurai. I'll have to check out the free trial.
 
What I do to check competition strength is the following:

1) Check how many links they have in Yahoo site explorer.
2) Check their page rank
3) Check their Alexa rank
4) Check their domain age
5) Check to see how many PPC ads are on Google. If I don't see many PPC ads, then I don't try to rank for that keyword because that keyword isn't too profitable if people are not willing to pay PPC for it.

There are some other things you can do but this is a pretty good list to start off on :)

Sincerely,
BacklinkProdigy
 
Can anyone give me a general guide on what would be easy medium and hard in terms of seo competition for,

-number of backlinks
-page rank
-the amount of results that show in Google for the keyword.

Thanks
 
Definitely grab Market Samurai if you haven't already, make sure to sign up for the trial first to get the discount.
 
Ocean86 said:
Can anyone give me a general guide on what would be easy medium and hard in terms of seo competition for,

-number of backlinks
-page rank
-the amount of results that show in Google for the keyword.

Thanks
Click to expand...

My idea of hard keywords include:

- Number of backlinks - over 100,000
- Page rank - Over 4
- Over 10 million
 
I dont really care how many competitors I find when i type in the keyword in phrase marks like this "keyword"... it says absolutely nothing about shit to be honest!
The only thing you want to care about is the competiton strength and thats it... the first reply from bobschmuck is some quality info
 
Market Samurai is the best in this area. So definitely get that. But even without it, I could care less about the # of competing pages or their page rank. Some sites with high PR actually suck when it comes to being optimized for a specific keyword term so dont worry about that either. Focus on how optimized the first 10 are using some of the suggestions above like age of the domain, # and quality of backlinks, and whether they have the term you are targeting in the title, description, and url. I think 1000 or more backlinks is hard for the new person to rank for. So to me, if the average # of backlinks in the top 10 all have around a 1000+ backlinks each, even if all the other criteria look good, then Id still stay away from that. Most of these usually have nice ages to them too. But if average backlinks are around 300 or less, then Id go for it, if all the other measures look good too.
Also look for if they are fairly new domains, are not using the main keyword in the TLD, and there are atleast a few web 2.0 sites listed in the top 10. I really only use PR to see if I want to keep looking as a low PR average could mean that the sites are fairly new and less optimized but not always the case. Its just a quick indicator but nothing more until I finish doing my other research. For example, if all the sites in the first 10 are all PR 5 but none of them are optimized for the keyword term I'm targeting, I would still beat them all out. So PR would be irrelevant in that example. Its all about the QUALITY of the competition on the first page, not the number of competing sites or their pagerank.
 
Another thing is to look for pages rather than top-level domains that are being ranked. Perfect example is Amazon, obviously very high PR and an authority site, yet I consistently outrank its PAGES because those aren't ranked as high as its main domain. Youre not trying to beat out "amazon.com", youre trying to beat "amazon.com/somecrap/337586/dyrt967606/thisthatandtheothering/BSEWRQ". Thats a lot different.

So if you see mainly top level domains with no sub-pages and high PR in the top 10 listings, then its safe to say STAY AWAY without even doing anymore competition research. You'll get better and faster at this the more you do it.
 
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