Competitive Keywords- the Ultimate Guide to Keyword

Competition: Tips from 35 Experts on Competitive

Keyword Analysis

Before targeting a new keyword vertical, it's imperative to evaluate the difficulty of the market.

This is done by analyzing keyword competition. Search marketers estimate how much time and

effort it may take to achieve top rankings for particular keywords or search terms. But the

question is, how do you judge keyword competitiveness? What are the factors involved in

competitive keyword analysis? Is there a specific keyword tool or tools you can use to analyze

keyword competition effectively?

The following feedback for determining keyword competitiveness was provided by our panel of

35 search marketing experts. We asked them each a single question, “What is your best tip or

trick for determining keyword competition?” and aggregated their answers into one

comprehensive guide for competitive keyword analysis.

Competitive Keyword Analysis Experts

Aaron Wall

Rand

Fishkin

Michael

Gray

David

Harry

Ann

Smarty

Tom

Demers

Larry

Kim

Jill

Whalen

Adam

Audette

Todd

Malicoat

Marty

Weintraub

Ian Lurie

Michael

Martinez

Patrick

Altoft

Jordan

Kasteler

Jon

Henshaw

Lee

Odden

Todd

Mintz

Tad

Chef

Garrett

French

Ben Wills

Dana

Lookadoo

Danny

Dover

Gab

Goldenberg

Andrew

Shotland

Glen

Allsopp

Terry

Van

Horne

Manoj

Jasra

Sage

Lewis

Alex

Cohen

Amber

Speer

Federico

Munoa

Rising

Phoenix

Thomas

Fjordside

Monchito

Aaron Wall (SEO Book and PPC Blog)

When considering entering a new market with a new website: I look at the search results with

SEO for Firefox turned on. That gives me lots of data about site age, links to the ranking pages

and sites, if people are leveraging domain names, site traffic estimates, and if there is much

brand strength in the market. That last bit mostly comes from knowing the web pretty well and

understanding the markets you operate in well. And if an area is new and you are uncertain of

how strong it is then clicking on some of the background information links can help give you

more information and insights.

When considering a new keyword set for an established website: Sometimes it is easy to just

publish content and see how well you rank for it. Even better so long as you optimize page titles

to capture relevant longer tail keyword variations, then even if you don't rank for the core/root

keyword you can still make some good money by rankings for variations of the keyword. And

keep in mind the content does not have to be sales-oriented, perfect content just to test the

market...look at the crap eHow publishes profitably...you could just make a new blog post and

test. Then from there, for areas where you get good results, you could always chose to make

higher-quality, sales-oriented content targeting those keywords more from the conversion

perspective.

Rand Fishkin (SEOMoz)

We're actually in the process of designing a new version of our Keyword Difficulty Tool. I've

attached a screenshot of some wireframes.

Our process is to get the top ranking pages for a particular query (the top 10 is usually sufficient

since any results after that receive very little traffic), then run analysis on the domain and page

authority metrics. Since these numbers are directly tied to the ranking models for Google's

ordering of search results, we've found that the data is especially accurate in predicting the

relative difficulty of ranking on page 1 for a particular search.

We're also looking into the ability to detect and report vertical search results in the SERPs so we

can quantify the impact of image, local, video, business news, blog, real-time, etc. on the

rankings.

Historically, our tool used data like:

# of results for a given keyphrase

# of results in quotes

# of results using allintitle

PageRank of the top ranking pages/sites

# of links pointing to the top ranking pages/sites

Maximum bid price in the paid search results

# of ads showing for a given query

However, these were all poor proxies for the actual data of how competitive and difficult to

unseat the top results might be. We're pretty bullish on the new process and the new tool being a

significant upgrade to our previous second-order measurements.

Michael Gray (Graywolf's SEO Blog)

Take the top 5 results, do a whois for the domains and see when the original registration date is

for each of the domains. If all or most of the domains have been registered for more than 5 years,

you're going to need a trusted domain to rank. Domain age really isn't what you're looking for,

but the trusted links that have come from being around and publishing that long. If you're on a

new domain, you've got a 5 year link building hole to try and overcome.

David Harry (Huomah SEO Blog and SEO Dojo)

Well, as with most things I do it is a combination of data points. At the end of the day it is part of

the art -- being able to analyze the competition. Getting intimate with a query space is the way to

go, and there is nothing like digging in and looking through the top 10-20 listings to see where

there may be holes.

It is worth mentioning that it is also a balancing act. Just because a space isn't competitive

doesn't mean we want it. So it's not exactly seeking non-competitive spaces, but ones where we

can get a foot in the door or with the volume to chase the big dogs.

So, we can start with the usual suspects (tools mentioned already)

Then cross-reference some PPC data, always a reasonable gauge of

value/competitiveness

Juxtapose data from straight search, exact match, allintitle, allinurl

Just for fun have a peek at Trends/Insights...

Then, dig in, see what the competing sites have working for them and where there are

opportunities. What will be the estimated cost/time frame?

Ann Smarty (My Blog Guest)

The keyword competition tip is basically this: Check SERPs for [intitle:keyword],

[inanchor:keyword] and compare results. This is your exact competition, i.e., those who use SEO

(optimized titles and incoming links anchor text) to achieve rankings. Those phrases that have

the fewest results are the easiest to pursue. I described my tip in more detail here.

Tom Demers (Wordstream Pay-Per-Click Software and Keyword Analyzer)

For me all the best keyword competition data comes from SEO for Firefox. If I'm looking for a

really quick, high level analysis, I'll just run the query and pull the data into a CSV, then sum the

following columns:

Y! Links

Y! Page Links

Majestic SEO Link Domain

Page Rank

Age (for this I strip the months then just sum the numbers: lower is better for this one :))

Typically I find this to be a much better indicator than number of documents or even allintitle

(which is pretty good, and is a great link building query) simply because my intent is to crack

that top five/ten, so the strength of those pages is what I'm concerned with (and in most cases if

I'm doing this level of depth of analysis on a specific query, it's pretty unlikely the top five will

be omitting it from their document/title).

Larry Kim (WordStream PPC Software and SEO Tools)

I’ve never worked in a search vertical that wasn’t super competitive, nor have I ever had the

good fortune of inheriting an old, trusted domain. So I’ve always operated under the assumption

that every keyword I target is going to be hard. And rather than developing my own formulas for

measuring keyword competition, I take a slightly different, iterative approach to competitive

keyword research.

For organic search, it looks like this:

Publish something - It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just something quick to get an read on

how difficult it is for your site to rank on a particular term. Who knows? You might get

lucky and your content might rank well immediately. Or it may only require minor

optimization to rank better.

If you got lucky, then mission accomplished. Move on to next keyword targets.

If you can’t find your page in the SERPS, then try moving to an adjacent, longer-tail

variation of the word. At WordStream, we invented the Keyword Niche Finder for doing

exactly this: finding related, yet less competitive keywords so that you could avoid

hypercompetitive niches and uncover less competitive and potentially more profitable

keyword niches.

In paid search, it’s more or less the same idea:

Start by trying out bidding on head terms

If the ROI meets your target objective, mission accomplished – Move on to next keyword

targets.

If ROI is terrible, then adjust to target long tail keywords, which are likely to be less

competitive and better value, particularly if you do a good job at grouping together

relevant keywords and being relevant with your ad-text creation and landing page.

So in summary, I guess my tip for determining keyword competitiveness boils down to two key

points:

Don't get hung up in estimating keyword competition

Perform a quick test to ascertain true keyword competitiveness for your website or paid

search account, then iterate on those results

And a finally, a Bonus Tip: Stop thinking of keyword competitiveness as something to apply to

individual keywords. A site like WordStream generates millions of visits through search every

year through millions of different search queries. Trying to figure out keyword competitiveness

for each one is a path to madness. Instead, we’ve organized our keyword taxonomy into around

500 groupings of similar keywords, and look at the competitive landscape on a per-keyword

grouping basis.

Jill Whalen (High Rankings SEO Consulting)

My quick and dirty trick is to find the most relevant keyword phrases that have decent search

counts, then do an Allititle:"keyword phrase" check in Google on them. If you put them in a

spreadsheet with the number of searches and the AIT you get a clear picture of those with high

number of searches vs. low Allintitles and your "keyword gems" become clear.

Adam Audette (Audette Media Internet Marketing Boutique)

It's usually a combination of tools, but here's a quick rundown of a good process we employ at

Audette Media:

Look at search results, and total returns for intitle:[key phrase] and allintitle:[key phrase]

searches. The search volume numbers will show a rough idea of how many are

competing for these terms on their pages.

SEMRush has excellent data (for example, see the attached screenshot).

AdCenter's Ad Intelligence tool for Excel is excellent, and although looking at a smaller

sample of data on MSN's engine, will show a number of revealing competitive insights. I

especially like their Monetization segment for keywords. Here's more from Aaron Wall

on this.

AdWords data; SEMRush also shows CPC bid estimates for AdWords buys.

If I could only use one tool, it would be Google's awesome keyword research tool here. It

shows a number of interesting data points, including the top terms by category. You can

use this with the Google Traffic Estimator tool to find approximate keyword values, best

used alongside a tool like SEMRush.

Todd Malicoat (Business Management Consultant at Stuntdubl.com)

For a bird's eye keyword competitive analysis, I use a few things: two toolbars, two metrics, and

gut feel on four variables (which you should obviously back up with some hard data).

SEOMoz Total unique linking domains

SEMRush Value from the SEO Book Toolbar

Four variables specific to each site:

1. Content volume (do they have 10 pages or 10 million?)

2. User data (Alexa, others) and social graph metrics (are they actively participating in

social media?)

3. Anchor text and title tags (what are they targeting with these?)

4. Domain name keywords (do they have an exact match?)

As important as competition is the BENEFIT of ranking for a keyword. Pick your keywords

based on benefit to YOUR site, and look for the sweet spots with low competition.

Marty Weintraub (AimClear Search Marketing Blog)

Starting with the top 3 non-news and non-personalized results in the Google's organic SERPs

(permanent results), we look at ToolBar Page Rank, SEOmoz's mozRank (mR), mozTrust (mT),

domainRank (dR), domainTrust (dT) and inbound anchor text semantics using LinkScape. If any

given result is not the site's homepage, we have a look at the Google's toolbar PageRank of the

site's homepage as a very general indicator of inbound link strength. Also, it's reasonable to have

a gander at Yahoo Site Explorer for an additional view, albeit vague, at the inbound link-strength

spectrum.

Ian Lurie (Conversation Marketing and Portent Interactive Internet Marketing

Company)

Look at your own site stats! Find the keywords that generate traffic to your top site pages. Then

use WordStream to expand a keyword set around those core traffic generators. You'll build long-

tail traffic, fast, and grow quality traffic.

Michael Martinez (SEO Theory and Analysis Blog)

Assuming I need to make a quick review, I look at the advertising associated with the query

results. If it's substantial and promoting relevant domains (as opposed to "broad match"

advertisers), that's a signal a query is competitive. I also look at the first two pages of organic

results. If they all use the query in title tags and page URLs, that's a signal the query is

competitive. Finally, if a quick perusal of keyword activity in any major tool shows substantial

related queries (in addition to significant traffic for the primary query), that's a signal the query is

competitive.

Patrick Altoft (Blogstorm Search Engine Optimisation)

The way we would do it is to see how many sites are using that exact key phrase as a major part

of their homepage title tag. This lets us determine how many sites are what we class as "strong

competitors" rather than just sites who happen to have a page about a subject and therefore rank

for it.

Jordan Kasteler (Utah SEO Pro)

I use the Google query allintitle: “keyphrase” to get a rough estimate on how many people use

that keyphrase in their title tag. This will roughly let you know how many people have

deliberately or not have minimally optimized their page for that keyphrase. After using the query

look at the upper-right corner and see how many results were returned.

For example, simply searching for SEO Firm returns 1,990,000 sites but searching allintitle:

“SEO Firm” returns 70,900 sites. This provides a much clearer idea.

Jon Henshaw (Raven Internet Marketing Tools)

I look at keyword competitiveness from an organic SEO perspective. I want to know how hard

will it be for me to get my site to rank in the non-paid SERPs.

The main things I look at when determining keyword competitiveness are Google AdWords data

(especially search volume), and the quality of the sites that rank well organically for that

keyword phrase. I then do a direct comparison with the site I'm working with against the top

organically ranking sites to give me an idea of how far I have to go. I also like to look at related

long-tail keywords, because the competition and performance can vary greatly.

Ultimately though, it's really about the marketing strategy, not necessarily the keyword

competition (which many people can get mired in). If you have sufficient control and flexibility

over the website you're trying to rank with – including the ability to frequently publish very

high-quality content, create altruistic resources, and improve how the site is coded – you'll be

able to start improving your SERPs quickly. And over enough time, if the link building

techniques you use aren't too risky, and don't get your site penalized or banned, the site will rank

very well organically for most of the keyword phrases you're targeting.

Another thing to keep in mind is that short-tail keywords aren't always the best keywords for a

site. Going after highly competitive short-tail keywords will not only take you longer to rank for,

they may also be driving the wrong type of traffic. This is especially true if you're trying to sell a

niche widget. Instead of focusing on the competition related to the keyword "widget," consider

focusing on who your competition is for long-tail keywords that are more closely related to what

you're trying to sell. Then make your content, marketing, and link building strategies focus only

on those terms. That will improve your overall organic search referrals and conversions much

faster than a more competitive, broad, and short-tail term.

Lee Odden (TopRank Search Engine Marketing Services)

Initially, I keep it simple: Look at query volume and the overall number of SERPs for the phrase,

placement in title tags and anchor text links in ranking pages. After that, break out the tools.

Todd Mintz (Todd Mintz is with SEMpdx)

So, let’s say the term in question is “Green Widgets”:

1. Take the term and drop it into the WordStream Keyword Tool (or Google’s AdWords

Tool) and pull out the top 50/100/500 results.

2. Copy and paste these results into Notepad.

3. Do a global delete of all the “spaces between words.”

4. Drop all the “words” into your domain registrar’s “bulk search” tool and search the

availability of .com, .net and .org domains for each term.

5. The lower the available inventory, the more competitive the keyword niche.

Tadeusz Szewczyk "Tad Chef" (SEO 2.0 SEO Blog)

With keyword competition, always start with what you already know. As I often work on

Google.de in many cases I know most of the sites that rank well already. This way it takes

sometimes only a few seconds to determine how difficult a keyword is. I see where Wikipedia is,

I see where the strongest shopping search engine is, I see where the major newspaper is.

Also I look for the SEO'ed sites. When I see something like "Buy example, examples, cheap

examples" at #1, #2 and #3 I know that the competition is fierce. Then I start using the manifold

tools we have these days for keyword research.

I check against "similar sized" keywords I already know. Especially in Google Insights for

Search you can find out how competitive a keyword is by comparing it to other terms. Other

people use a matrix to determine keyword strength or difficulty in numbers, but I'm a very

intuitive non-technical person, so I judge based on my gut feeling and the above comparisons.

After I did that with one keyword, all other keyword difficulties for that market are easy to

determine as you can compare to the first keyword. Then I use a simple table where I rank the

keywords based on their difficulty.

Garrett French (Ontolo Link Building Company, Link Building Tools)

I always look at the number of paid advertisers to get a sense of keyword competitiveness, the

number of results in the top 10 that look "optimized" (keywords in the title, etc.), and the number

of homepages that rank for the term. Nothing scientific, just a quick way to gut-check a space.

Ben Wills (Ontolo Link Building Services)

I start at keyword demand in terms of how often it's searched. Once I collect "X" number of

keywords and search frequencies, I segment the keywords based on those search frequencies.

Once I have a set of those keywords, I use Aaron Wall's SEO for Firefox extension to view the

domain age for each of the competing results. As a general rule, I find that search results owned

by older domains (on average) are the most competitive due to Google's trust algorithms. That

said, whenever I find a young domain in a large set of older domains, I want to study that site to

see what they're doing to get a leg up on the rest of the competition.

Dana Lookadoo (Yo! Yo! SEO Search Marketing Optimization & Training)

Determining keyword competitiveness requires a study of a variety of factors, including a

understanding of the query space and using one's intuition. Insights are gained by looking at term

popularity, analysis of the search results and competing sites, and related trends and

conversations.

The tips below show how to determine keyword phrase popularity and a competition utilizing

free tools. This is part of a 101 framework for those who are beginner to intermediate in their

SEO efforts. The following screenshots display select columns from an Excel worksheet one can

create for evaluating two key insights, phrase demand and competition:

Term Popularity / Phrase Demand

Research keyword popularity across various databases.

1. Use Google AdWords Keyword Tool, and display results by "Match Type: Exact" &

"columns to display: Show All." Evaluate:

o Exact Match Local search volume count. (Use a formula to divide by 30 for an

estimated Daily Estimate.)

o Estimated Average CPC cost for positions 1-3 for PPC.

2. Use Wordtracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tool . Evaluate the number of searches for

the exact phrase.

3. Use WordStream Free Keyword Tool to acquire a CSV. Evaluate the number of searches.

4. Evaluate the average count for Google, Wordtracker and WordStream daily estimates.

5. Evaluate current CPC costs. Higher cost indicates highly competitive terms.

SERP Competition

Evaluate competition by looking at search engine results (SERPs) to determine how many sites

are competing for the exact keyword phrase and if these sites are well optimized and have link

authority.

1. In Google, search for the keyword phrase in quotes to find the number of indexed pages

for the exact phrase.

2. Use the allintitle: Google search operator to evaluate the number of competing pages

with the phrase in the title. (allintitle:"keyword phrase")

3. Divide the Competing Pages allintitle: results by the Google AdWords Exact Match

Local searches per month to return a competing SERP to Search Ratio.

4. Use Yahoo! Site Explorer to evaluate and average the number of incoming links for the

top 5 SERPs.

5. Keyword phrases that have the highest SERP to Search Ratios and largest number of

backlinks indicate most competitive keywords.

6. Proceed by evaluating keyword optimization efforts for the top 5 results.

7. Evaluate page 1 of the search results and note Google One Box listings that display in

universal search.

A keyword phrase is highly competitive if the term is popular, with a high SERP/Search Ratio

and if the competition has link authority is optimizing for that term. If the SERPs display more

than the standard 10 blue links and are filled with universal listings and numerous PPC ads, then

you have a ringer and a lot of work to compete in that query space.

Danny Dover (Danny from SEOMoz)

My first act is to view the SERP and see the types of domains that rank for the term. Are the

domains established and names I have heard of? Are they spammy looking (.biz, .info, excess of

hyphens, misspellings, etc.)? This usually gives me some indication of the competitiveness of the

keyword. If this doesn't answer it for me, I check the top 5 results in the mozBar to gauge how

many linking root domains these domains have. (This metric is highly correlated to good

rankings right now). Lastly, if I really need more data I use Google's AdWords Tool to see how

many searches there were for the term. This is not exactly the same as competitiveness of the

keywords but it usually correlates.

Gab Goldenberg (SEO ROI SEO Services)

For keyword competition, I basically have a feel for SERPs based on:

1. Yahoo! SE linkdomain numbers (via SEO for Firefox)

2. Whether there are exact match domains

3. Whether deep pages are ranking (domain authority + a few links) or homepages

4. Digging around the top ranking sites' backlinks to get a view to quality

5. Any brands in the results

Andrew Shotland (Local SEO Guide)

Achieve #1 ranking for it and reflect on how much of a pain in the ass it was to get there. :)

Glen Allsopp (Viper Chill Viral Marketing)

There are a number of ways to determine keyword competitiveness such as how many links the

top sites have or how many results there are (though this is less accurate). One good way to

determine competitiveness that most people don't look at is how many sites on the first page are

homepages, and how many are communities. Generally, search engines follow people so if there

are a number of large social sites like forums ranking around your keyphrase, it's going to be

hard to rank above them.

On top of that, I find it far harder to outrank homepages with my affiliate sites than article pages.

If a lot of the results are homepages, i.e., they end in .com and are not a file name like

/blog/keyphrase-here/, then that could be a sign the phrase is going to be tough to rank for.

Terry Van Horne (Toronto Ecommerce Website Design & Marketing)

Well, in the old days I would review the SERP for the obvious and "learn the query space"

players, then do G searches using allititle syntax to ascertain overall title strength, then do all in

anchor to see the amount of linkage. Another recent addition was using exact match with the

terms, which is the most competitive. This basically indicates the degree of "professional grade

optimization" in the query space.

Currently, I take that a step further with universal search. IMO, you also have to add a "content"

review, i.e., can we use video and other UNI components like news to fill in spots. IMO, all

SEO's should be taking care when adding video. I was early into that and found the 300 vids we

added often blew out the text position and in that case ... no indented listing just a demotion from

above the fold to below the fold of the SERP since that seems to be where vid ends up. So be

sure that when optimizing vids you do not knock the higher text-based position out of the SERP.

Manoj Jasra (Jasra Inc. Internet Marketing and Web Analytics World)

For keyword competition, I have often relied on the Google Keyword Tool (which shows

competitiveness from a paid search perspective). However, since it doesn't provide exact

numbers and generates additional keywords, I find it useful for high-level estimates only. I am a

big fan of technology and APIs so I developed a web app in C# which uses Google's AJAX API

and the Yahoo API to return the actual number of competitors you'd see on the search engine

results page. It has a batch-mode available so running dozens of keywords for competitiveness is

not a big issue.

Sage Lewis (SageRock Digital Marketing Agency)

The first thing that comes to mind with keyword competition is to use the "intitle" search

operator. So, if you do a search for: intitle:"craft supplies." The search results will only show

pages that have the exact phrase "craft supplies" in the title. That means that those people have

either optimized intentionally or probably optimized the page naturally for your target phrase.

That search returns over 1.9 million results. So, chances are, it's going to be pretty tricky to break

into the "craft supplies" results.

Alex Cohen (Alex Cohen of Click Equations Pay-Per-Click Software)

I’m going to tackle this question from the PPC side. First, let’s get one thing straight: the

Estimated Average CPC that Google reports in their keyword tool is so fictional that it should be

on the New York Times’ Bestseller list. Ignore it.

Instead, it’s more useful to focus on the Advertiser Competition column of their reports:

Like many things in determining levels of competition, these data are meant to be relative. In

fact, Google creates those bar charts on a scale of 0.00 to 1.00. It’s easier to see this if you export

the data. Look at the bottom of their keyword list:

Now you can see the (completely useless) Estimated Avg. CPC column and the more useful

Advertiser Competition column on a numerical scale, instead of a graph:

Chances are that you’re going to pay more for keywords at the top of the list vs. those lower,

though this isn’t always the case. Your bid actually plays an indirect role in determining your

CPC and your Quality Score is just as important. Depending on your Quality Score, you could

pay a penalty or get a discount that increases or decreases your CPC.