keyword research: quotes check or strength of 1st page?

[Vanquish]

When doing keyword research i'm often confused because there seems to be two ways people go about doing it. For some the word in quotes needs to be < then 50 000 or < than 100 000 and the first page competition needs to be low.

I have found some high searched keywords but in quotes they generate around 715 000 and 946 000 each. However the top 2 spots are ezine articles with no back links.

Are these good keywords and would i rank as fast with them as I would for a keyword that has in quote competition of 50 000?

[Vincent Cheng]

Hi Vanquish,

I understand most may want to focus on SEO. Of course, from my humble experience, the lower the competition, the faster and easier you will be ranking.

Then again, how fast, would also require relevant incoming links to your website. The fastest incoming links to be generated, would be from the Social Media sites such as Facebook and Twitter yeah.

Hope my 2 cents helped.

[utproducts]

Originally Posted by Vanquish

When doing keyword research i'm often confused because there seems to be two ways people go about doing it. For some the word in quotes needs to be < then 50 000 or < than 100 000 and the first page competition needs to be low.

I have found some high searched keywords but in quotes they generate around 715 000 and 946 000 each. However the top 2 spots are ezine articles with no back links.

Are these good keywords and would i rank as fast with them as I would for a keyword that has in quote competition of 50 000?

Vanquish,

How many people search Google using quotes? Not many. Most people will just type in what they are looking for.

Type your keywords into Google and look at the results. The number of pages does not matter. The PageRank of the results does not matter either. PR0 pages can rank #1 for very competitive keywords.

You should look at the quality and amount of backlinks the pages have. PageRank does matter in this case. Sites that have huge keyword authority may be hard to beat, like about.com or forbes.com.

So if you found some good keywords that you want to target and you check out the results, that will tell you if you should go after it or not.

Good luck.

Edit - In regards to the above post, quality outweighs quantity. Social network links can work, but you need a ton of them. They are easy to get and therefore have very little juice. 100 quality, relevant links will outrank 1,000 lower quality links.

[TrafficGuy Claude]

The best way to get a better idea of the true nature of the SEO competition would be to run several queries in Google:

1st - Google search "keyword"

This will show you the number of pages that Google has in its website that use that EXACT word or phrase. Google is a smart search engine and it knows how to deal with people. If someone types in a obscure term without quotes and Google only has a few pages in its index with that term on it, Google will use its complex algorithm to find other sites that are related to that query.

For example:

If we go to Google and type in the term "extremely fast ferrari" Google serves us over 5 million results, which are indeed related to what we are searching for:

extremely fast ferrari - Google Search

However if we type it in quotes, we'll see that Google actually has just 4 pages whatsoever with that exact phrase on it:

"extremely fast ferrari" - Google Search

So if we just register ExtremelyFastFerrari.com and put up a single keyword targeted article on it, and put the term "Extremely Fast Ferrari" in the Title tag, meta description, and meta keywords, it will rank #1 out of 5,000,000+ for that term with no backlinks and a PR0, because Google always wants to show its users the most relevant websites.

Depending on how many searches this term gets it may or may not be worth it to do so, but this is just an example. Your job as a keyword researcher is to find keywords like this with a reasonable amount of monthly searches.

2nd - Google search allinurl:"keyword"

This will show us the amount of webpages that Google has in its index with the exact keyword or keyword phrase in the URL. This is where the importance of having SEO friendly URLs can be seen. One of the reasons why EZA ranks well is because they include the keyword in the URL structure of their article URLs.

3rd: Google search allintitle:"keyword"

This will show us the amount of webpages Google has in its index with the keyword in their title tags. This is very important because if there aren't many website that are titled with the keyword it will be quite easy to rank for

4th: Google search intitle:"keyword" inurl:"keyword"

This will show us webpages wth the keyword in both the title tag and in the URL, this # is really a better representation of true SEO competition than the exact match query alone.

After you've gotten this list I'd strongly recommend getting SEO Quake for Firefox so you can see at a glance how and why the search engine results you've just got are ranking the way they are.

As far as there only being 50,000 or 100,000 competing pages in Google with quotes on, that is just a ground rule # to go by to see how easy or hard it will be to rank in Google for any given keyword at a glance.

Doing your research the aforementioned way will give you a better picture than just putting the keyword in quotes.

[Yuds]

Awesome post Claude.

I've never seen all the different parameters for SEO competition laid out so clearly like that.

Thanks!

[mystarter]

hi,

just wanna add my opinion here..

in addition to all the tips about keyword research available on the net, i normally will add one more 'ingredient' to my keywords research decision either to GO or NO-GO.

it is the effort that u are willing to put to conquer your desired keyword/s.

this is the only 'factor' that differentiate u from others.

other factors such as number of searches and competitions will be same figures for all people.



cheers..

[AndyBlackSEO]

I'm in the process up writing a script that does all this. It will calculate everything and then display it all in a table for you. This is part of one of my products but I am thinking of making a free version available for people to use, even if it's for a short time.

I've been testing it and with just one click it will tell you exactly what the true competition is like for each phrase. It's all fun and games......

[BigDaddys101]

I use the keyword research tool in my sig. It has three major search engines and allows you to use operators to check out the competition for each search engine.

In the end backlinks and PR mean nothing but the quality of the page and keeping visitors there using your site will make you out rank even the toughest competition.

Andy Black SEO if you are looking for a partner or to do sort of a JV contact me, I am still a nub here at WF and not allowed to PM yet

[Chris Kent]

First page at least gives you a truer picture of what you are trying to achieve.

The quotes count and other things are just indicators. They are tools that seem to correlate with magnitude of competition.

Nothing wrong with them, I just prefer to see what is really happening.

[sanssecret]

There is way too much talk when it comes to keyword research. And all it does is confuse folks.

The only people who check out the results using different search parameters such as quotes/allintitle/allinurl etc are marketers. If you want to know how many people are competing for your keywords and who they are, that's fine. Go ahead and do all that work.

If you want to know who you're up against, you don't need to look any further than the first page without quotes. They're your competition. It doesn't matter if they're not competing for the keywords, they're the ones ranking for them. Can you beat them?

As for the number of searches, imo this comes down to what it is you're selling. If you're looking to sell an 'extremely fast Ferrari', you don't need as big a number as you do if you're looking to sell an 'extremely fast toaster'. Of course, if you're more into toast than Ferrari's you might be willing to pay more for the toaster. Might be something to test.

[adamcm]

Very good posts everyone, i've learned alot.

I've always wondered how one can know if they have a realiztic shot at beating those already ranking for the keyword. I do many sports websites using long tail keywords. Normally, if lets say i'm using baseball, MLB.com will rank #1. Following that there are a few more "big-boy" websites that are actual store fronts and generate good traffic. The rest of Page #1 is normally filled with other stores that I have never heard of or sites like kijiji, or message board posts offering to sell the item i'm optimizing for.

So I guess i'm wondering if there are some methods that other use when determining if they can beat the competition.

Thanks!