If you are looking for a rough and ready way of measuring the competitiveness of a set of keywords, there's a number of methods you can user. You can use Google's Adwords keyword tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to give relative indications of how much competition there is for a particular search term. I always find the measure provided by the Adwords tool a little confusing though since you never know what the values displayed actually mean. If the competition bar is set at 75% blue what does this mean compared to a bar at 25%? Is it a linear scale for example meaning that 3 times as many sites are optimising for the 75% term compared to the 25% term?
Another way of gauging how much competition a keyword has is by using the Google allintitle: operator. The allintitle operator shows how many web pages have ALL the words in the keyword/ phrase in their title. Since a webpage's title is possibly the biggest SEO factor, this gives a rough measure of how many pages are competing for the term. Checking out some terms which I'd expect to be very commonly used on Google - allinttitle:web design - and - allinttitle:seo - I get the results:
titles containing web design: 10,300,000 results
titles containing seo: 13,600,000 results
Contrast these results with a term that we wouldn't expect to be very commonly used - harpenden decorators
titles containing harpenden decorators: 6 results
Or something middling common - software promotion
titles containing software promotion: 79,800
When looking for keywords for a new website, balancing the keywords to aim at against their competitiveness is tricky. The temptation is to aim for those that have the highest search volumes. However, this may be setting the target too high. Using tools like Google's Adwords Keyword research tool and the allintitle: operator, you can try and find a balance between keywords that have a reasonable search volume and those that are not too competitive.
by ML
Sorry to be late in replying, had a lot on.
ReplyDeleteThats a good idea.
I tend not to fully rely on the adwords tool, I take the competition indicator with a pince of salt.
I look at the google results for the keywords and have a quick scan of how the titles are made up, if the keywords aren't there or some are missing, I figure the page isn't optimized.
However, with your method, I guess it would be possible to knock up a little program which does this analysis for you.
Overall I don't think theres any point in spending a lot of SEO time on getting good placements against well optimized / linked pages. Although, worth a little effort.