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Third Golden Rule on Keyword Research: Competition

By Elmar Sandyck

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 23Feb2011 Word count: 519 Viewed: 252 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

This is the third part of a four-part series on the golden rules on keyword research.

To recap, we learned that relevant keywords and high traffic keywords are important in searching for that ultimate keyword or keyword phrase that holds the key to targeted marketing.

In the first two golden rules, it was just all about the keywords. It is interesting to know, then, that in this third golden rule; you are now looking beyond the keyword and involving a third party in the picture. Yes, nobody but your keyword competition.

Third golden rule on keyword research is:

Assessing your competition.

Do you know the concept behind the franchised TV program, Survivor? Pitted together in one island are different people from all sorts of backgrounds trying to outwit, outplay, and outlast one another from the competition, which involves show of strength, perseverance, and endurance. Initially, everybody is grouped according to tribes and they battle it out against the other groups. But every week, someone gets booted out of the island narrowing down the number of competitors until everybody eventually gets to compete with a fellow tribe member.

Following the Survivor analogy, the third golden rule on keyword research involves trying to outpage, outrank, and outlist your keyword competition in Google and other search engines. Your goal is to hit a page one and be in the top ten spots.

There are two major points to consider in choosing your keyword based on competition: (1) amount of competition and (2) strength of competition.

How Market Samurai Helps

Amount of Competition

Market samurai has an SEO competition checkbox feature that allows you to analyze the keywords that you are competing for. Instead of you scouring the entire gamut of the Internet for these keywords, it does the work for you by gathering data. Results will then show you the total number of webpages that mention the keyword phrase in the same word order as you would write it.

Next is for you to use the competition filter. It sifts the high competition phrases from the more accessible keywords. The recommended competition filter value of 30,000 (meaning that the identified keywords have less than 30,000 competing webpages) is a good start in identifying keywords that have acceptable levels of competition.

Strength of Competition

Market Samurai has the SEO Competition Module. To generate an SEO competition matrix, all you have to do is just click the 'Generate Results' button. Afterwhich, Market Samurai conducts a real time analysis of the top ten websites in Google for the keyword phrase that you have chosen to check.

A good thing about this matrix is that it's color-coded to give you a quick view of the keyword competition's strength. You could almost always conclude that if there are more green squares appearing in the matrix, it means that the competition is not strong and the keyword is accessible. If there are more orange squares, it means that there is a higher strength of competition. Red squares mean the strongest level of keyword competition.

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