Assessing keyword competitiveness
Given enough time, personnel, and money it is theoretically possible to improve rankings on just about any keyword. However, few us have the luxury of unlimited resources. Under ordinary circumstances, we have to choose what keywords are likely to provide the most benefit for the least effort. This is where assessing competitiveness is so critical: if many competing websites are well optimized for a given keyword, it will be much harder to rank well.
The right way to assess keyword competitiveness is not the fast way, but it’s important to understand what goes into a deeper analysis in order to understand the assumptions in the must faster and easier metrics.
Elements of Keyword Competitiveness
A thorough examination of keyword competitiveness requires examination of the top 5-10 search results for that keyword. You would then think like a search engine, looking at the following elements to see how well the competitors are doing:
- Keyword right page titles
- Keywords in URLs
- Keyword-rich and topical content
- High page-count for the keyword topic
- Navigation and internal linking within the site
- Use of keywords within other on-page elements
- Frequency of updates / freshness of content
- Number of back-links with keywords in the anchor text
- Nature and number of sites that link back to the competitor’s site
This usually takes quite a long time, particularly as you work further down the list of bullets. In cases where the top competitors perform weakly on the first few bullets, you’re in luck because this usually means they haven’t done that much to achieve their ranking. For such rare circumstances, on-site factors may be enough to move into high search engine placement. Most of the time we aren’t so lucky. The easy and lucrative stuff has largely been done and is now quite competitive.
Is it worth investing a lot of time and effort into such an analysis? Usually not, particularly if there are easier ways to estimate the competitiveness. In our next couple of posts, we’ll look at some shortcuts and how effective they are.
Read more in Part II.
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March 16th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
[…] a previous post on keyword competitiveness, we described a long list of factors that help determine how difficult it would be to achieve top […]