Keyword Research - Competition

Let's get back to main keyword process. Let's say we gathered 50 keywords related to website content. Personally, I prefer a "one page full of content optimized for one keyword".  Now we should check on our competition for certain content and keyword terms.

Keyword research

Analyze competition

Like I explained in previous post, you determined 50 or however keywords for your webpage. Next task is to check how many results Google offers for each one of them. You can find approximate number of results on right corner of search. Now you enter every term on Google with quotes "". When you enter phrase with quotes, Google will only give you phrase match. It means that only that commanded "keyword" will be searched for.

If you want to find more about "cheap bikes" you should enter that with quotes and Google will inform you about number of pages with this phrase on it. If there is "cheap favorable bikes" mentioned somewhere, it will not be counted in results since order of words is changed.

This kind of research (with quotes) will help you to discover pages that target exact term as their keyword. Also, there is search that include title of webpage, when entering "allintitle". Google operator allintitle will tell you how many pages use keyword in title. Title is best on-page utility for SEO and it is desirable to use keyword that is mentioned in title.

When searching with allintitle: it looks like this

allintitle:your keyword           example allintitle:best hammers

you enter this on Google, search and see a number of results.

Even it's not crucial, you should also try to enter desired phrase without quotes and allintitle command. It will help you find out how many thousands or millions of results is there for that phrase. For example if you have 2 keywords and everything else is same in results, you should look for term that gives 500000 results rather than 5000000results.

When checking on competition always look first page of results. If there are results from Wikipedia, Amazon etc, it will be harder to rank for that exact keyword.

How many Google results should I aim for?

So far I have not explained exact numbers because they are relative for users. Someone who knows to run good SEO can aim for bigger goals and use keywords with high competition. To see what am I talking about I'll give you an example.

I've been advised to look for results in the range of 2000 results with Google allintitle: and 4000 results for Google with quotes. Keyword needs to fulfill both norms.

Someone who just started and have no big knowledge about SEO and link building should perhaps target to a maximum of 1000 results with allintitle: and 1000 or 2000 results with quotes. Of course, it's very hard to find those terms that will be searched for but no one said it's easy task. This is just a recommendation, you need to define keywords yourself.

Go to part 3