Determining SERPs Competition – Day 24

August 19, 2008 by  

Better SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) are everyones ultimate goal. Everyone wants to achieve a higher positioning in search engines, but how are SERPs determined? They are determined by various SEO factors including on page content i.e title tags, original content; anchor text of links (both inbound and crossbound), and the search engines daily tweaks to their algorithms; and finally the competition of that keyword.

Determining SERPs Competition Correctly

Most people don’t understand how to properly search for the total number of competitors for a given keyword when they are in the preliminary keyword research stage. In order to view the total competition for a given keyword, you need to make sure that you are searching correctly. I always suggest using utilities for the keyword research stages, specifically either SEO Elite or Keyword Elite. Both software’s allow you to have the most up to date resources for gathering information on keywords, competitors, alternate keywords, etc.

Anyhow, if you don’t want to spend money and save a tremendous amount of time you can still do it manually. The first mistake most people make is looking at the total number of pages found for a given SERP. This is not how you want to correctly determine the competition, for example the results for the term HOME brings up (7,100,000,000 results!), not because all of those websites are targeting the keyword home but because their anchor text is. So we need to learn how to search for exact phrases, and found out exactly what our competition is.

Exact and Loose Phrase Searches

An exact phrase is when we tell Google that we are looking for that exact phrase only, and to remove all loose combination’s of that result. In order to achieve an exact result search put quotations around your keyword, for example for bass fishing enter it as “bass fishing” in Google. This will eliminate those loose results that you received when searching for the general keyword and give you the exact number of websites that are attempting to target that specific keyword. Those websites that are listed are your exact competitors, the loose results are not.

A SERP Competition Case Study

Let’s break down this example even further to make sure that you understand what I’m getting at with this article, as well as understanding how to implement it.

Let’s assume that your keyword that you were trying to target for this case study was Yahoo Live. As a result, initial searches indicate that there are 192,000,000 websites targeting the keyword Yahoo Live. Well, that is in correct! Remember that was searching for the loose term Yahoo Live and not making it an exact search phrase.

Now, searching for term Yahoo Live with an exact search phrase results in only 1,120,000. Only is a relative term considering there were originally 192,000,000 with some variations of the words Yahoo and Live. Although 1,120,000 sites are targeting the term Yahoo Live. This is a red flag to me though, 1,120,000 is alot targeting that specific keyword. Not to mention that fact that I didn’t choose a very easy term to begin with.

The ultimate goal is to take a look at the first page results for that exact search phrase, take a look at what they are doing to target that keyword. Hold old is the site? What is the page rank? Consider these factors before deciding that certain keyword. Try to find exact phrase results with around 100,000 or less results if possible. Your chances are obviously greater if you have significantly less competition.

So spend time researching the pages that come up for the exact search phrase, is it even possible to beat the competition? Don’t kid yourself at this point, you won’t beat out Yahoo’s pages and if competitors have PR 7 or even a PR 6 chances are you aren’t going to beat them either. Do a backlink check while you are at it to help determine the backlinks coming into the top 10 SERP sites.

Doing a backlink check isn’t very hard, but it is hard if you want to sift through the possible pages of backlink results. That’s up to you but I like to get an idea of where my competition is getting their backlinks from. For a backlink search enter the following; link:example.com. This will tell you the exact number of incoming links for a site. Also be sure to click through on some of the results and find out the pagerank of those sites.

Don’t hesitate when doing your keyword research, it won’t pay off in the long run. You want to make sure that you are targeting a keyword that will actually bring in results in search engines. You want to make sure that you have a chance to rank top 10 for that given keyword, and you want to make sure that you haven’t thought of a better alternative.

Keyword Elite BoxAgain you may think I’m throwing in a plug here, but so be it. I use the whole Elite software package, specifically Keyword Elite and SEO Elite. Both of these software allow for me to do in depth keyword/competition research on auto-pilot. When I try and target a specific keyword for my other websites I make sure I have a chance at the competition. By doing the research before hand and having the most up to date info, I can leverage myself to get top results. My number one suggestion for ANY serious webmaster is to purchase either Keyword Elite or SEO Elite. They are critical programs to any serious SEO, Webmaster, or internet marketer. Especially when you are determining SERPs competition.

[tags]serp competition, serps info, determining keyword competition, keyword competition[/tags]

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2 Responses to “Determining SERPs Competition – Day 24”

  1. linkingclever.info » Blog Archive » Determining SERPs Competition - Day 24 on August 19th, 2008 3:54 pm

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  2. Determining SERPs Competition - Day 24 on August 25th, 2008 11:27 am

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