Analyzing Keyword Competition

There’s so much competition for keywords these days that it can sometimes appear impossible to find a keyword to break into a niche. However, if you do a little digging, you might very well come up with a clearer picture of the competition you’re facing and discover it’s not quite as bad as you initially thought.

Let’s go through an example. Let’s say you’re in the acid reflux niche and you’ve found the longtail phrase “foods to avoid with acid reflux” that you think has some potential. When you enter the phrase into the search engines, though, it brings up over one million competing pages. That’s discouraging.

Remember though, this is a broad term search. That means that the results aren’t just for your phrase, but also for any combination of words that can be formed using the words in your phrase. For example, in those one million results, you’ll find that “acid reflux foods” are included, and “avoid acid reflux” and “avoid acid reflux foods” and countless other combinations.

But we’re just after the phrase “foods to avoid with acid reflux.” So the next step is to enter your keyword phrase into the search engine using quotes around the phrase. Now, you discover that the competition for that complete phrase is only 6,680! That’s wonderful! It makes it much easier to go after that phrase.

And there’s one more step you might want to look at and that’s how well these pages are optimized for the search engines. Particularly, we’re interested in knowing out of those 6,680 pages, how many include the keyword phrase “foods to avoid with acid reflux” in their page title. This is important, because the search engines rely on page titles to tell them what a page is all about.

So, this time you enter this into the search engine … allintitle:foods to avoid with acid reflux. What comes up? Only 93 pages have that keyword phrase included in their page title. That tells you that if you build a page around the phrase “foods to avoid with acid reflux” and you include the phrase in the title of your article and in the title of your page, you’ll have an excellent chance of ending up on page one of Google.

It’s a good phrase to go after.

Tag: Keyword Tools