top 5 tips for assessing your SEO competition
In this week’s show I take you through some keyword & competitive analysis prompted by someone I met on a plane this week.
Knowing how competitive a key phrase is to rank for can help you set real goals and manage your own expectations and save you some frustration. Here’s what I look at.
Know the real SEO competition
When you type “costa rica hotel” into Google it tells you there are “About 231,000,000 results”. That does not mean that you are competing with that many pages though. That number is made up of pages that may have some or all of the words you typed into Google and the majority of them may only have one of the words. Those pages are not your competition. For most businesses your competition for ranking will be in the first 30 results or first 3 pages of results. That is all you need to concern yourself with.
Google Page Rank
The Google PageRank or PR of any page, is primarily a measure of the PR of other pages that are linking to that page. Basically don’t worry about it. It is a calculation of the quantity & quality of pages that are linking to the target page. Only with very competitive phrases will it be an issue and even then maybe for only the first 5 results. You can see the PR of a page by installing the Google toolbar in your browser. I use the tool by Aaron Wall SEO for Firefox which is an excellent free tool that helps me find the PR of a page quickly. If the first page of results for a search is ordered by descending PR, you know you have some serious competition for that phrase. Google uses PR like a tie breaker. If it has 2 pages that are equally important for a phrase, it will use PR to decide which one should rank higher.
Backlinks
Some sites may have thousands of backlinks but it doesn’t mean they are all relevant for the page you are targeting. Remember Google ranks pages not sites, so it’s important to know about the backlinks to the page you are trying to beat, not the entire site. If a site is a large directory, it may have very little content related to your target phrase but it may have one page that ranks well for it. You are competing against that page, not the directory.
Page Titles
Have a look at the first page of results. Look for a result that does not have your phrase in it. That is the site you are going to try to rank higher than. If you don’t see your phrase in any of the results, great! It’s an easy phrase to rank for.
Content breadth & depth
How big is the site that has the page you are trying to rank higher than. If it is a very focussed site on one particular topic, it’s other pages maybe linking to the ranking page giving it more authority. If however, it’s just one page in a site with thousands of other unrelated pages, it should be easy to beat. Examples of this would be a yellowpages.com.au page, a truelocal.com.au page or a news site page in the results. As the rest ofthe pages on those sites are probably unrelated to the phrase you are targeting, they will be adding little value to the target page. If anything, they will be diluting the importance of that ranking page as opposed to a site that has say only 50 pages but they all relate to the same basic topic.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
