Ranking For Keywords and Keyword Competition Stuff
A reader emailed me a few days back asking various questions about keyword research, ranking for keywords and keyword competition stuff.
I answered his question, but in a typical fashion I started exhaustively listing various arbitrary thoughts on ranking for keywords before stopping myself and planning it for a later article.
This is that article, folks. Here are my thoughts on keyword research and keyword competition.
Disclaimer: I don’t really like keyword research and I’m not an expert on it. There are guys who churn through keyword competition data for hours and they’re not me. Do your own research!
How To Assess Keyword Competition
Keyword competition according to Jamie McSloy mostly consists of two things:
- The number of competing pages
- How targeted your competitors are.
For the first, you can use Google keyword tool or Market Samurai.
For the second, you can use tools like Market Samurai or the various toolbars, but I don’t. The reason I don’t is because generally, people game the metrics pretty hard thinking they’re going to fool Google… it doesn’t work like that.
Anyway, it’s a loose guide. I eyeball the results when I search the keyword. If there are a lot of sites that do everything right, I might think twice. If I look and see loads of little niche sites or better yet optimised spam-sites, I go in anyway.
If you look and there are pages which aren’t optimised in the first ten results, then it’s a green light automatically.
Keyword Competition: It’s About More Than The Keywords
Your site does matter.
Google indexes by page and not by site. So, you can write an article about one product and it’ll rank easily, and have no luck with a different page on a different product.
That said, Google takes into account other things regarding the quality of your site. The more you post to your site, the better it’ll do generally.
So, with the exercise I’m about to give you, bear in mind that the more articles you write and the better your site, the easier it’ll be to succeed.
Take heart though – an added nice surprise for this is that articles you write that you think have failed may well gain traction at a later stage. That said, the following exercise will help you and you should see some benefits almost immediately.
Ranking For Keywords: The Obvious Hidden Stuff
You can rank for more than one keyword on a page.
Keyword density doesn’t really matter all that much.
Here’s an easy test to see where your ranking skills are at:
- Pick three keywords in order of competing pages/level of competition
- So, they might be “[book] review,” “[book] by [author] review” and [book title]”
The important point is that there’s a range of competitiveness. Usually, if we’re talking books, you’ll have high, medium and low competitiveness in those three terms which is why I used those examples.
“Book” on its own might have 100,000+ competing pages in the search index.
“Book review” might have 10,000 competing pages.
Finally, “book by author review” will have a lot less – maybe 1,000 maximum. (Sometimes it’s in the 10’s to 100’s level.)
Now, for this experiment we don’t need high search volumes. You’re just seeing how easy it is to rank for terms with different competition.
- Write a product review with all three terms in. As there’s overlap, you should get a reasonable yet natural density.
- Publish it on your site with the standard SEO stuff – headline, a couple of images, a decent word count etc.
If you do this, you’ll gauge pretty quickly how hard it is to rank for specific terms – and you’ll do it all with a single article that might take you an hour to write.
This exercise is worth more than most SEO guru courses. It’s even more valuable when you take the next step and improve that base article to get your page ranking from the easy term to the hard term.
More Pages, More Keywords
People who’ve read the endless niche site challenge updates will know that I don’t just write product reviews for my niche sites.
I also write how-to’s, compilation posts, information and resource pages and the like.
Whilst this is obviously noble of me and it’s for the greater good of giving my readers a good user experience, behind all the hippy-love stuff is a basic fact:
The more pages you create, the more keywords you can target.
Let’s take an easy example: I write a treadmill review. In it, I use the structure from above. I target the following keywords:
- [manufacturer] [treadmill name]
- [treadmill name]
- [treadmill name][review]
- [manufacturer][treadmill][review]
Or something similar. Obviously, the keywords are going to have a range of difficulty. We’ve discussed this. Let’s move on.
Now, if I’m using a handful of instances of each of those keywords and my letter is 1,000 words long, I can’t stuff many more words in the article without compromising the quality.
This is why you create other pages.
There are millions of possible search combinations for people who might want a treadmill. From grannies who need to exercise their arthritic legs to mums looking to lose the baby weight and bodybuilders that need to cut weight for a competition, there are tons of different keywords to target.
A how-to for each of those groups pointing towards your affiliate link and your review (which just so handily happens to be a click away on your very own site) means that you can target a lot more keywords. This cleans up the long-tail searches (best treadmill for arthritic legs probably doesn’t have much competition) and also over time your accumulated articles will help you rank for the higher-competition phrases.
Final Thoughts
The above is a pretty easy exercise, and like I wrote above – it’ll teach you more than most SEO courses. If you do it, you’ll see how well you can rank for an easy term, medium term and hard term.
From there, you can experiment. You can do the same process on multiple sites and then you’ll learn how to gauge niche competitiveness.
You can add to your site and watch how multiple pages and internal linking alter your search results.
You can alter your article to see how much little things like keyword density and image tags affect your standing.
This article is an idea for building a base level of SEO skill. Do it and see where it takes you!