Help Please: Determine the Strength of Competing Pages

[shaggard]

Let's say I have a keyword. I do some research and find it gets 600 searches a month locally.

I then go look up the keyword in google and find the competing sites. How can I tell if I can bump the sites. I mean how do I determine if it is possible?

I hear people talk about strong pages and they will not try if the page is too difficult to bump. But how do you know the strength of the page?

If this makes sense please let me know.

Sherri

[carlos123]

Hi Sherri,

I am still learning myself so take what I say with a grain of salt but since no one else has yet said anything in answer to your question let me take a stab at it.

Here's something I learned today on another thread that might prove useful to you...

The number of sites returned by Google when searching for a given keyword phrase in quotes is a measure of how competitive the niche represented by that keyword phrase is. In a general sense the greater the number the greater the competition. The less the number the less the competition. The number itself however does not definitively say how tough it will be to achieve first page SERP ranking. It is a only a rough guide of how competitive a niche will be in that sites that are focused on that niche will be careful to optimize for the exact keyword phrase we are interested in. It is a guide to help us narrow the field of keywords down to those we might be interested in competing with others against.

While such a guide to competitiveness is useful to help us quickly gauge how competitive a niche will be it will not help us determine how difficult it will be to actually achieve a page one position. For that we must evaluate the sites that show up in a search for the keyword phrase without quotes. The sites that show up on the first page under such a search are our true competitors.

The number of sites that show up in a search without quotes is meaningless as a guide to the competitiveness of a niche since it is too general and includes in the number of sites returned those who have no interest in optimizing for a given key word phrase along with those who do.

There are quite a number of factors to help us determine the strength of a web site page in the rankings.

Among those are whether they have the keyword phrase in the page title that shows up in Google search results and whether they have lots of links and quality anchor text pointing to themselves through such links (you can find out this last one by going to yahoo and entering "link:" followed immediately by the URL of the site you are checking links for).

Aside from the above I personally look at the pagerank of each site in the top four positions. If there are any PR5 or above site pages within the top four I don't bother with that keyword phrase any more as it will likely be too tough for me to compete against. If there is a PR4 with the exact keyword in the page title I don't bother either.

If they are all PR3's or below I continue to consider that keyword phrase and if all else is good or shows promise (the local search volume, the estimated CPC cost to an advertiser for an ad through Adwords, etc..) I go for it.

Again take what I say with a grain of salt Sherri as I am relatively new to this but the above is generally what I have picked up while talking with others on this forum and through a lot of reading I have done.

I hope that helps.

Carlos

[Bruce Hearder]

Another way to test is to try:

intitle:your keyword

This will test how many pages out on the web actually have the term as part of their page title.

Easrly last year I wrote a blog post about this very topic, and it generated quite a bit of debate (until my blog got hacked and I host most of my comments), anyway.. you can find it here at :

How to Find the True number of competing sites for a given keyword or Niche | WebSiteSecrets101

Hope this helps

Bruce