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Competition research

As with everything, competition has a big influence on your strategy. Are you unique with what you deliver or are there millions of web sites that deliver similar things? This article describes briefly how competition research works.

A search engine shows in its Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) how many web pages are found that are related. This number is the competition that is described here. A search that results in millions of web sites being found is done with a very competitive keyword phrase. A search that shows just a couple of thousand results is done with a keyword phrase that is not very competitive.

Obviously it is easier to get good rankings for the keywords that have less competition, but as you will find out, they generally are also much less searched for. In competition research you need to investigate 3 properties:

1) How often is a keyword phrase used?
2) How many web sites are competing for that phrase?
3) What is your web site’s own link popularity?

These 3 factors will determine your decision.

You need to find the right combination. After knowing the answers to the 3 questions above for each keyword phrase (question 3 is not related to the keyword phrase) you have to do a search with those keyword phrases and for each phrase you have to take a look at the top 10 or 20 web sites that show up for those phrases. Take a look at the link popularity of each of those sites and determine if your web site’s own link popularity is similar or better. If this is the case you can go for that phrase and let the popularity of that phrase determine your decision. If your web site’s link popularity is much lower then it will be very difficult to get high rankings for that phrase.

However, link popularity can be increased as well, so if you are planning and expecting similar or better link popularity in the future you can still go for that keyword phrase.

In case you are starting a new web site try to go for the less competitive keyword phrases. Still check out the top 10-20 web sites, but don’t let this guide you too much. In Google I generally try to find good keyword phrases that have a competition of less than 500.000 web sites. For other search engines these numbers are different. Very important will be building a href="link-popularity.html">link popularity.

The answers to the 3 questions can be found using some free and paid keyword suggestion tools.