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Sizing Up the Competition

The Left Brain and Right Brain look at different perspectives on estimating competition levels for

keywords on your long list:

The Right Brain says,

“You know your business, so you know what aspects of your business have

more, or stronger,competitors. If you work for a bank, you don’t need the numbers to tell you that the

term ‘low mortgage rates’is going to be very competitive. But for terms that are less obvious,you can

do a competition gut check by searching for that term, and looking for the following indicators:

•

“Do most of the sites in the top several pages of results appear to have the same con-

version goals as you? Do you recognize some of your known competitors in there? Did

you just find new competitors that you hadn’t known about before? This is only one

part of the competition landscape, but it’s an important one.”

•

“Are most of the sites in the top several pages of results trying to sell something related

to your term? Even SEO newbies can see that the vast majority of sites that show up for

‘low mortgage rates’ are trying to sell mortgages. But search for ‘low literacy rates’ and

you can really see the difference—there’s much less of a feeling that the site owners

are jumping up and down, shouting,‘Over here!’”

•

“How many sponsored listings do you see for the term in question? Sites that are selling

something are likely to spend more time and money optimizing,so terms with a lot of

commercial results are likely to be more competitive.”

The Left Brain says,

“Industry insight is important, but quantitative values give you more solid

ground to stand on.Anyone estimating competition levels for a keyword should research these

numbers:

•

“How many pages on the Web are already optimized for the term? To estimate this

value, you can perform a specialized search on Google and find out how many sites have

that keyword in their HTML page title tag.Just type

allintitle:‘keyword’

into the

search box.For example, Jason would type

allintitle:‘baby clothes’

to find out how

many websites are using that term in their HTML title.(See our companion website at

www.yourseoplan.com

for other useful search tricks.)”

•

“What are the top bid prices for the term on PPC services? In Part III, we’ll explain how

to set up accounts and check these values.”

Here are the competition levels, and the thinking behind them, for a selection of

Jason’s picks:

Keyword: infants, Competition Level: Very High

On a gut level, most single-word

searches are going to rate as very competitive; there are just too many sites in the

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