How to analyze competitors?

[mandos123]

Hello, I'm planning to set up niche site.
I have some questions about keyword research and analyzing competitors.

Please tell me if I'm right or wrong

- If you are not ranking with buying keyword, then the exact match should be over 3000, when buying keyword, then it can be lower

- When I put my keyword to google, then how much ALLINTITLE: my keyword, or "About xxxx results" should there be to rank in 2-3 months?

-Any other tips for checking WEAK competition?

And my last question would be how do you analyze your competitors. I know that when you have ebay,amazon,ask.com or smth like that in top 5, then it's pretty hard to rank, although their onpage SEO is basically nothing. Do you suggest me some tool, or you check by visually (PR,ALEXELA RANK, DOMAIN AGE?)

At the moment I'm just a rookie in IM, but my plan is to build niche site with buying keyword. For example: cheap movies, buy movies online, BUT I think it takes too much time to rank decently, or am I wrong?

Any suggestions/recommendations would be more than great

[Droopy Dawg]

You're going to get plenty of advice here... some feel that the "total" number of competitors matters... I'm not in that number.

I don't care if there 2.5 million competitors "in quotes"... or "allintitle" or whatever.

I'm only competing with the top 10 websites for any keyword. That's how I measure how competitive a keyword is... not by how many are competing for it.

A few tools could help you analyze those sites (some free-some not), and I'd recommend you check out Market Samurai (be sure you're running Adobe Air 3), and Link Assistant's website Auditor. You could also use their SEOSpyglass program as well to analyze the comp's backlinks.

These programs have free versions as well as paid, and of course you'll get more from the paid versions.

Hope that helps.

[Dev!l]

In my opinion, one of the key factors is the amount of resources (Money, tools, etc...) you have at hand while targeting a particular keyword.

As for weak competition, a good way of finding keywords with weak competition is being on the lookout for new niches being carved out everyday that you think will sustain for at least a few years to come. You can find such keywords through new product releases, news and other such similar resources. Some of these keywords can turn out to be gold mines and by starting early you'll probably have an edge over the competitors that eventually crop up.

[outwest]

"allintitle" "allinurl" mean nothing

all you care about is top 10 competition on Google

Go to Youtube
Enter
"analyze top 10 competition on Google "

watch the video tutorials that come up
takes a few hours
many will be Market Samurai
Some will be
Traffic Travis

Some guys say you can do this analysis for free
Thats true however

If you try to do it with free tools it will take you 20 times longer for each kw
for example
analyzing backlinks

People say oh hey use SEO spyglass for that
yes Spyglass works way better for analyzing backliinks
but
you have to enter the urls one at a time

so to analyze the backlinks of the top 10? would take about 30 minutes for one kw
I can get a snapshot of the competition of the top 10 on Google in Market Samurai in 30 SECONDS

which one would you pick?
Time is money

The top 10 on Google competition is all that matters

[Raitei_Ericko]

For me it's better to use buying keywords. The amount in exact match is not fixed for me. What I do is to calculate the possible amount of profit for that keyword and judge whether it is worthwhile to rank for it.

[yukon]

I still use inurl: & intitle: when researching the top ranking exact URLs in Google SERPs for my keyword. I don't care how many show up in the overall SERPs, just the exact ranking URLs.

The goal is to see how serious the competition is about my new keyword.

Example:

inurl:"silo" intitle:"silo" site:www.warriorforum.com

If WF was ranking #1 in Google SERPs for my keyword silo & the search returned 40 pages for inurl: + intitle, I would at the very least double that page count for my own site (80 pages). Something that high of a page count I would break it down into 8 landing pages that I want to rank + 10 supporting pages per landing page, plus internal/external backlinks, most external links pointing at the landing pages.

[razorico]

I use semrush option "see your competitors" where i can see domains, common and SE keywords, traffic and prices, keywords using in Ads. Comprehensive information for me.
Another important thing is to check competitors backlinks. Here's interesting article how to do this with seoquake. How to Replicate Your Competition’s Links with SeoQuake | Court's Internet Marketing School - How To Make Money Online

[marktaylor001]

For me, it's best to use the purchase of keywords. Number of exact match is not confirmed for me. What should I do, is to calculate the maximum profit, the key word, and to evaluate it's worth it list.

[PromoDirect]

First do the keyword research. When you have your keywords shortlisted then make a search with quotes in search engines eg. "Buy iPhone 4". The websites that you see in the top 10 or 15 of the result are likely to be your competitors.

[MikeFriedman]

Originally Posted by Daniel Wilson

With traffic travis you can analyze top 20 competition on one keyword!

Not really. Traffic Travis does not give you any very useful metrics.

[KylieSweet]

It is important to analyze your competitors in order to stay in the competition or outranked them and with the help of other tools like Google analytic it will show you how the website performs in the search engine.

[Crank]

The best soft for me to analyze competitors is Website Auditor (haven't tried Samurai yet). It provides huge amount of info about their backlinks (pr, domain age, do- or nofollow etc.) for you to pick those you like.
Another thing, it's usually worth trying to add some less competitive keywords to rank for, you'll get first results much sooner by doing so.

[dofollow]

After reading your question and some of the replies, I say you should go with what Outwest has to say. No need to make it more complex than it already is. Sometimes common sense and simplicity will also produce results.

[MikeTheBuilder]

I use semrush for keyword, comp research. You'll find tools like nichewatch, backlinkwatch that can help you out as well. I mostly just research the top ten and go from there.

[Buum]

Don't you guy use Market Samurai? It's great if you need information quickly. However it's slow for me, since it uses Flash.

[sekhar203]

Originally Posted by mandos123

Hello, I'm planning to set up niche site.
I have some questions about keyword research and analyzing competitors.

Please tell me if I'm right or wrong

- If you are not ranking with buying keyword, then the exact match should be over 3000, when buying keyword, then it can be lower

- When I put my keyword to google, then how much ALLINTITLE: my keyword, or "About xxxx results" should there be to rank in 2-3 months?

-Any other tips for checking WEAK competition?

And my last question would be how do you analyze your competitors. I know that when you have ebay,amazon,ask.com or smth like that in top 5, then it's pretty hard to rank, although their onpage SEO is basically nothing. Do you suggest me some tool, or you check by visually (PR,ALEXELA RANK, DOMAIN AGE?)

At the moment I'm just a rookie in IM, but my plan is to build niche site with buying keyword. For example: cheap movies, buy movies online, BUT I think it takes too much time to rank decently, or am I wrong?

Any suggestions/recommendations would be more than great

its better to go Market Samurai and do the required task through it....it will clear all your doubts and get you a detailed data...its a great software for such purpose..and to analyze your competitors use SEO Competition feature in Market Samurai you will get all the details at a glance...

[outwest]

Yes but its also important to know whats important in Market Samurai data and what is not
They spit out
Domain Age
PR
Backlinks to Page
Backlinks to Domain
Indexed In Dmoz or Yahoo
Index Pages (total)
Onpage SEO (kw in title, url, header, description)
SEOC (google competiting sites )
Etc
some of those are way more important than others

some are of relatively no importance