Search Engine Journal

Very often you just don’t have time (or don’t feel it’s necessary) to run a thorough competitive analysis. All you need is just do a quick key term “difficulty” evaluation (term invented at SEOmoz, I guess) to see if it’s worth digging deeper. Let’s see what can be done in this case.

1. Use a tool to evaluate your SEO competition. While I have already reviewed these tools previously, here’s only a short overview:

2. Rely on advertiser’s competition as shown by Google AdWords External Tool: I am not a huge fan of this method. Adwords advertiser’s competition is a better indicator of the term commercial potential than its organic search difficulty.

However, to some extent it can of course testify to the term popularity:

3. Rely on Google search: it is not right to measure competition by just the number of returned search results. What you can do to evaluate organic competition is either of the following (or both):

• Evaluate the top ten results with help of SEOquake or SEO for FireFox extensions (by looking at some important metrics like backlinks, domain age, Google PR, etc) and drive to conclusions as to how difficult it might be to get to the first page:

• The best way out is to compare [intitle:keyword1 inanchor:keyword1] and [intitle:keyword2 inanchor:keyword2] as I described previously in the first part of my competitive analysis series: