Market Research and Analysis
Usually when doing market research, there will be profits where there is competition. But when doing search engine optimization for your website, fierce competition is not a good thing. First, you need to know how many competitors there are and how many opportunities you have to get a higher ranking.
In this lesson, we will discuss the SEO competition strength analysis and assess whether a keyword is worth your time to optimize.
How many competitors are there?
The most common method used by most people is to put the keywords directly in the search engine to see how many results are displayed. When you see 47,800,000 search results, you must be very disappointed and frustrated, and then change to a seemingly simpler Keyword re-search.
In fact, the number of search results is not a real number, it is only an estimate. There are no more than 47,800,000 pages, and most of them have not been search engine optimized, and we can easily exceed them.
However, the number of search results can be an indicator of whether a market is active. If the number of search results is low (less than 1 million), you can determine that the keyword is not active, or the search interest value is not high. At this time, use the keyword tool to see if the search volume meets this theory.
The following two methods can help you judge the competitive strength of the keyword SEO. Are they ranked because of luck? Or is it because their website structure is better designed?
Allintitle:
The inclusion of keywords in the title content is one of the key factors in search engine optimization. It appears in the Title tab of each HTML page and is displayed at the top of each browser and appears as a line of anchor text in the search results column. If a keyword appears in the title tag of a web page, it shows that it does some simple search engine optimization for this keyword.
If you type allintitle: “your keyword” in Google, it means that there will be a number of pages with the keyword in the Title tab. The lower the number, the better. Below 5000 indicates that the competition intensity is not high; if it is higher than 5000, consider several factors that will be introduced next.
Allinanchor:
Similar to allintitle, it indicates how many pages contain these keywords in the link anchor text. In SEO, link anchor text is an important ranking factor. Link anchor text can be easily understood as a link containing keywords. If many pages contain keyword anchor text, then your website is difficult to get a good ranking. Ideally, the more “low” the value of Allinanchor’s search results, the better, but the more “low” is appropriate, depending on the theme and market you choose. You need to continually tap the market segment until the value is “low” until you are satisfied.
Technical notes on using “allintitle” and “allinanchor” in Google
Keywords with double quotes are very important in practical use, such as searching for allintitle: “cooking how-to”, the result shows that each word is strictly in the order of double quotes.
If you do not enclose the double quotes, the order of each word will be disrupted.
For example:
searching for allintitle:cooking how-to, the order of “how to” and “cooking” in the results page is disrupted.
In addition, the “all-in” part of allintitle and allinanchor can be omitted. Searching for “intitle” or “inanchor” means that no words are guaranteed to appear in the search results. For example, search intitle: paleo diet meat, it is obvious that the word “meat” is missing from the first two titles, and the third title lacks the word “diet”.
When analyzing the intensity of SEO competition, whether you use allintitle, allinanchor, intitle or inanchor, double quotes should be added to ensure the integrity of the keyword.
View website PageRank value
PageRank reflects the strength of a website’s external chain. Since the external chain is an important factor in determining the ranking of a web page, it is also an indicator for judging competition.
However, it should be noted that sites with high PR values may also be ranked lower than sites with low PR values, either because their pages do not have optimized keywords, or if the link anchor text does not contain keywords.
Use the keyword tool to analyze the outer chain of a particular website: if there are many PR5+ websites and .edu domain websites in its outer chain, it means that the SEO competition is high; if they add keywords to the link anchor text , indicating that SEO competition is very strong.
Looking at the Google search results page, if all sites have a PR value greater than 6, and there are a large number of links, then the keyword ranking will be very difficult.
View competitor’s domain name
Another SEO competitive strength indicator is the age of the competitor’s domain name . The domain registration date can be viewed through the WHOIS tool. Search engines usually have a higher weight on old domain names, and if competitors are new domain names, you can easily beat them.
Focus on search volume
When conducting keyword research, keep in mind an important indicator: keyword search volume.
Often, keywords with a large search volume are highly competitive, but not always. High search volume keywords don’t necessarily mean you spend a lot of time and effort. On the contrary, some keywords have a small amount of search, but the competition is fierce.
Why is that?
Another important concept for screening keywords: whether there is profit potential. If you find a keyword that is not competitive and easy to rank, then ask yourself: Is this keyword never found? Or does it have no profit potential? Here’s a good metric: check to see if there’s a Google ad on the right side of the search engine — if someone pays for it, it’s a profitable potential.
Optimize multiple keywords
When you do a website SEO, don’t just optimize a keyword, you can try to optimize several related keywords at the same time – the main keyword is no longer the focus of SEO work.
When doing market and keyword research, you can try some high-search keywords. The search volume of related keywords can be viewed at freekeywords.wordtracker.com.
Looking for synonyms
Since the keyword tools are based on the keywords you enter, it is easy to miss some relevant keywords with great profit potential. For example, when you use the keyword “dog training” to extend the long tail keyword, you will miss keywords like “stop german shepherd aggression”.
Google has helped us solve this problem very well. It is very convenient to find related synonyms by the tilde “~”.
For example, to search for “garbage can”, you can type ~ garbage ~can like this.
When Google returns a result, it will display the synonyms in bold font.
These words are synonymous. For example, the synonyms of “~garbage ~can” are “waste”, “recycle”, “containers”, “recycle cans”.
Use creative keywords
If your keyword competition is fierce, don’t give up this opportunity right away. You can do some horizontal thinking to see if there are any related synonyms to replace. For example, the keyword “trash cans” is fiercely competitive, but “garbage cans” has similar meaning to it, and the competition intensity is not high.
Optimizing synonyms not only makes it easier to get rankings to bring traffic, but these synonyms are often more profitable. For example, “stop german shepherd aggression” is not only easier to get a better ranking than “dog training”, but also the person who searches for this keyword has a willingness to buy, and also a solution for their search. If your site targets the user’s point of interest, it will be a win-win result.
Course summary
Don’t just type keywords into Google and check the number of search results to determine the intensity of competition. The methods described in this lesson can be used to determine whether keywords are worth your time and effort:
“allintitle”
If most of the competitors don’t put the keywords in the title, it means that they can easily get the ranking without SEO.
“allinanchor”
If the competitor’s link anchor text does not contain keywords, we can easily beat it.
View PageRank
If competitors’ websites have PR values greater than 6, most of them are difficult to exceed their rankings. Don’t waste time and change keywords.
View domain age
Use the WHOIS tool to view the domain ages of the top sites.
View search volume
do not forget! If a keyword is easy to rank, it is likely that no one is searching for it.
Optimize multiple keywords
Don’t just optimize a keyword, try optimizing several related keywords at the same time.
Looking for synonyms
You will find that synonyms are easier to get good rankings and have the same profit potential.
Use creative keywords
Using more specific or creative keywords can not only achieve good rankings, but also higher conversion rates and better target users’ interests.