Don’t Forget The Most Important Aspect Of Keyword Research

July 27, 2009 | By Les In Keyword Research |

When most people do keyword research they consider such things as the number of monthly searches for a key phrase and the number of websites listed for that key phrase. They do some calculations and come up with a good idea of what keywords would be easy to rank for, but most people forget a very important aspect of keyword research - How much real competition you actually have for that keyword or phrase.

If you don’t look at the real competition for your keywords you will most certainly be choosing the wrong ones to try to rank for! Most keyword tools don’t give you this information. Real competition is the number of top ranking websites that are properly optimized for that keyword or phrase. Out of the top 20 sites if only a few are properly optimized you have a great chance of ranking well even if the competition stats from your keyword research says otherwise. If all of the top 20 sites are properly optimized you will have a harder time ranking even if your research says there is little competition.

So, if your keyword research is missing a major piece of the puzzle, how do you know what key phrases to try to rank for? Well, once you have selected some key phrases to optimize for, check to see how well optimized the top 20 ranking sites are in Google. Do a Google search for your keyword and look at the first 20 sites listed. Check them out one at a time and look for things such as: Is the keyword in their title tags? Is it in their URL? Do they have articles optimized for that keyword? Is their content fresh and do they have a lot of it? Do they have high quality content? Do they have a lot of high quality backlinks? Is it a blog or a static website?

All of these things can affect your ability to rank high for your terms in Google. Here is an example of this:

If you search for something like Redline Bicycles you will see that there are 21,900,000 sites ranked for that term, sounds like that may be hard to rank well for right? Well the truth is that in the top 20 results there are around 9 sites that aren’t properly optimized for that term! That means that you have a pretty good chance of getting into the top 20 if you properly optimize your site for that search term. Do you think you can make some money if you rank in the top 20 out of 21,900,000? You’re darn right you can!

Here’s another example on the other side of the coin. Say you are trying to rank for a search term like groomsman gifts. There are only 894,000 sites ranking for that keyword. Sounds like it may be easier to rank for that one right? Wrong! The top 20 sites, and many more I imagine, are optimized out the wazoo for that search term. That means you are gonna have a struggle to rank well for that term. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible but it does mean you will have to optimize your site better than the competition to rank in the top 20 for that keyword.

These are perfect examples of why doing normal keyword research without checking the real competition can lead you down a long and frustrating path. Most keyword tools are great for getting a general idea of keyword stats but they are not going to tell you how easy a key phrase is to rank for using all of the data needed to make an informed decision.

The only way you are going to get all of the info is to do the hard work yourself and check out every one of the top 20 ranking sites for each of your keyword terms, or use a keyword tool that actually gives you this information. There is only one keyword tool that I have found that gives you all of this information in an automated way. When you use this tool you can trust that the info you are given is looking at the entire picture including the actual real competition for your keywords. Go here to check it out..

Thanks for reading, Bye Now!

Share and Enjoy: