Competition Analysis

[Newff]

I'm kinda going crazy with trying to find out if the competition is low enough for me to move forward and build a niche adsense site and whether it will be easy to rank.

For example, people say you want to look for a keyword with the top 10 sites in google having really low backlins and pages with a low PR. I'll give an example of a keyword I was just looking at.

In the top 10 results, 5 of those sites has less than 10 backlinks. But a lot of the sites are PR4.

I'm ready to build sites but it's frustrating not knowing whether the keyword is worth it or not. Any tips would be great.

[Ace1337]

There are tools for that like Market Samurai or Traffic Travis.

[Newff]

I am using those tools, that's where I'm seeing the PR and # of backlinks. The thing is theres not really any pattern I'm seeing when it comes to PR. Low PR or HIGH PR sites are able to rank high..and the same goes with amount of backlinks.

[Newff]

Also I just found a site in Google (cannot post url's because of my post count)

He's basically saying PR of competitiors page does not matter, # of backlinks does not matter. What matters is the number of backlinks using the keyword in the anchor text.

[Michele Miller]

I have lots of high ranking sites, but PR is something I've never looked at or worried about. If you're using market samurai, you want to look at the amount of competing sites, as in allintitle and anchor, (or that search phrase in quotes to see how many sites are optimized for the phrase in that order), and the amount of searches and see the ratio of searches to
optimized pages.

The thing is, when you look at the first page of Google, regardless of all this information, you really have to just figure out if you can outbeat the weak competition that is on page one. Analyze the back links to the top sites. If you can match a domain name to the phrase you want to rank for all the better too. Despite all the controversy, all my hyphenated names rank really well.

I know it's a maze of info out there, but you can't consider every single factor, so it's best to take the important ones and not pay too much attention to things like PR, in my opinion.

[outwest]

PR of even 5 can easily be outranked, even old domain age of 10 yrs, can be catapulted past .....................IF............there are very few backlinks to the page

dont pay much attention to PR or site age.................backlinks to page is important though

[Michele Miller]

The keyword in the anchor text from incoming links to a site really counts with SEO. What you saw on that site is correct. I've heard so many people say it's the amount of links, but I totally disagree. If the anchor text in the links matches the phrase you want to rank for, it counts a LOT more, in my opinion and from my experience.

[Ace1337]

Nowadays it's seems like competition analysis is becoming more and more an issue of "can I make a better and more useful site than that one?"

[watson229]

Through competitor analysis we can make back links from those sites which are having high pr value. Google always gives more value to those sites which have high pr.

[Xeract]

Originally Posted by Michele Miller

The keyword in the anchor text from incoming links to a site really counts with SEO. What you saw on that site is correct. I've heard so many people say it's the amount of links, but I totally disagree. If the anchor text in the links matches the phrase you want to rank for, it counts a LOT more, in my opinion and from my experience.

Anchor text is important but you need more variation than you used to. "Brand" anchors (such as siteurl.com, "Site Name" etc) are good for diversity, as are generic anchors such as "click here".

For those saying ignore the PR of sites in the top 10, you're right to a certain extent (there are many other factors on page optimization, inbound backlinks, domain age, site structure etc) but it's still a useful metric for quickly judging the competition.

To OP, it's not just the competition that you need to look at, what's the potential profit from making a site in this niche? If there's a high potential reward I'd go for a keyword like the one you mentioned.