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:
| Evaluation Criteria / Tool | Nichewatch | Keyword difficulty tool | Compete.com |
| Term of use | free | for SEOmoz premium members | paid with several free searches |
| Domain backlinks | + | + | - |
| Page backlinks | + | + | - |
| Google PR | + | + | - |
| Domain age | - | + | - |
| Additional | Rankings for allinanchor: Google rank; rankings for allintitle: Google rank; rankings for allintext: Google rank. | Alexa Rank, internal link ratio; Delicious links; Technorati links; DMOZ links; Wiki. links; page strength | Site share – i.e. how much the site traffic relies on this keyword referral traffic; the site average monthly search referrals |
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:
That’s a nice way to summarise it Ann, good work.
Ben
Good article. Nichewatch is good stuff – Thanks.
Thanks for this piece. I was taught to do it this way and so many people, especially in house have no idea. I even know a lot of agencies that don’t do this. I guess quite often that’s because they don’t want to go to the hassle, which is understandable.
Nice when you have time to do it properly.
Awesome stuff Ann! I’d also recommend running them through a trustrank tool.
Well done. Nice article.