For example "SEO" returns 262,000,000 competing
pages with the chronological order of the strongest sites first.
Then look to the right and determine the number of competing pages you are up against "for that keyword".
It will say results 1 of 10 of (the number of competing pages).
This allows you to assess the competitive landscape with one brief metric. The extent of what you consider
a competitive keyword depends on the website. For example, most websites can acquire a keyword under 50,000
competing pages with ease and competitive keywords start above 100,000 results and ascend into the millions
(pages in index / divided by the top 1,000 results).
The next few metrics will allow you to understand where your SEO ceiling is (what threshold your website
has for keyword benchmarks). Our blog for example can devour a keyword with up to 1,000,000 competing pages
just from one post of mentioning those keywords (without backlinks).
So, all the talk about building website authority does have a place when you understand the implications
to rank with less effort. Authority sites have the ability to zero in on a keyword and skip over hundreds
of other websites and reach the top 10 results by the merit of trust and internal link weight and dynamism
they possess. In keeping with the topic at hand, let's move to the next metric.
2. Evaluate your competitors domain and determine the amount
of pages they have by using this search command in Google. You can use the #1 site and the #10 site to
gauge an average of pages required to capture the keyword or, if you want you can use the #1st, 2nd and
3rd site that rank for the selected keyword to see which formulas they are entrenched in.
site:competitorsite.com (this shows you how many pages they have indexed in Google)
3. Next, determine how saturated their website is
with the keyword in question.
site:competitorsite.com keyword
This shows you how many pages are indexed that include the keyword within their website. If the site
in the top 10 is an authority domain, it can rank from one keyword alone in the title tag, description
tag or having the keyword in the body text (or any combination of these three metrics).
While most websites do not have that luxury, often dozens or hundreds of pages are required to cross
the tipping point of co-occurrence for that keyword within the website and acquire a top ranking.
However each keyword has a threshold which is going to vary depending on the unique metrics of each
website (which is why you need to look at more than one site for evaluation).
4. Now that you know that your competitor's site
contains Y amount of pages and X amount of those pages are dedicated to a specific keyword, you
can go the the most relevant listing returned from their site and look at the off page factors
(which means finding out how many backlinks are linking to that page). To do so, use
Yahoo Site Explorer and type the specific
URL in and look at the inlinks tab to see how many pages are linking to that page.
For example, if the homepage is returned as the top ranking result for the keyword using the
competitorsite.com keyword search command, ignore it and look for an actual page that has a
title, or relevant shingle with the keyword (in the title, URL or description).
If they targeted a keyword using a broad match method (which means it was not necessarily the
objective, but their site acquired the ranking based on ambient factors, then you will only see
a sparse mention of the keyword). The point being, the homepage is a catch all and will not
provide you with the same amount of depth when attempting to data mine deep links from your
competitors.
The idea is, you want to know (a) how many pages they have indexed (b) how many
pages contain the keyword (c) how many
deep links
(how many links just to that page) the top ranking page has (from outside the site) as well as
(d) how well the site in internally linked (for that keyword).
We can determine criteria a-c with simple search commands, and you can also determine if the
site is treated as an authority based on the keywords that appear in bold when using the site:
command, websites start transforming into authority sites through topical relevance after
200-300 pages are developed around a topic (if they are linked and optimized properly).
5. Crunch the numbers and assess the competitive
landscape of the keyword in question.
For example, if you know that the top 3 sites all have an average of 1000 pages and out of
those 1000 pages 50% or more of them contain the keyword in question and your site has 20
pages, then you are not being realistic with your ranking objectives.
I am not suggesting to go add 1000 pages overnight (as that would not be natural) but rather,
start chipping away at the keyword using a variety of
SEO tactics.
6. Check the allintitle, allintext and
allinanchor thresholds for the selected competitors' sites. This means finding where
they rank in Google (in the top 1,000 results before the results get obscured / redundant)
using the following search operators.
allintitle:keyword (who has the highest occurrence of keyword in title)
allintext:keyword (who has the highest occurrence of keyword in their body text)
allinanchor:keyword (who has the highest occurrence of anchor text / links with
this keyword)
Using Google again, you can look at the competitor's on page and off page metrics, instead
of breaking them out individually, you can just use NicheWatch
instead, or our Ultimate SEO Toolkit,
to perform this function.
The Conclusion
SEO is only limited by your imagination when it comes to determining the extent of how
you use tactics for discovery and analysis. We covered a few simple metrics using Google
search operators above that allow you to isolate co-occurrence and determine the global
keyword density for a site.
This does provide a preliminary analysis to at least let you know what your up against
(qualifying a competitor or your own domain to a keyword). If you reverse engineer the
averages, you can find the tipping point for essentially any keyword and craft a plan of
action to acquire it.
For example 1,000 pages indexed, 900 have the keyword in exact match and the main landing
page has 50 inbound links from Page Rank 4 pages. Now you have a threshold to exceed.
Although this is a preliminary method, sometimes looking at basic metrics such as these
can provide an immense amount of insight and determine the next competitive threshold you
target for analysis.
About The Author
Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the
founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Company.
He has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of
collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies to individuals involved in online business.
