A Complete Guide on How to Assess the Competition

Whether you're building a site for ad-share (Adsense) or affilaite promotion, it's important to be able to assess the competition to figure out how much effort it will take to get ranked for your keyword.

You've got your keyword and confirmed an exact match (or match with suffix) TLD is available. Don't buy the domain yet; now it's time for the competitive analysis.

You've probably read about searching for broad and phrase match and seeing how many results there are. I'm of the opinion that the number of results doesn't matter.

The only results that matter are the pages in Google's top 10. Pay special attention to the top 5, because, in most cases, if you can't break into the top 5, you aren't going to see much traffic unless the volume is considerably higher than 3,000 a month.

The estimate is that about 90% of all clicks go to first page results. About 42% go to number 1, with around 63% going to the top 3, and 74% going to the top 5. That 3 out of every 4 clicks going to the top 5, and 6 out of every 10 going to the top 3. That means if you're in position 8 for a 3,000 a month word (100 searches a day), don't expect much.



Percent of Clicks by Position (from SEOBook.com):

1. 42.13%
2. 11.90%
3. 8.50%
4. 6.06%
5. 4.92%
6. 4.05%
7. 3.41%
8. 3.01%
9. 2.85%
10. 2.99%

I have a site that sits around position 7 for a keyword that shows 12,000 exact match searches a month according to GAKT (about 400 a day). It gets between 15-20 clicks a day. Every now and then the site pops up into position 2 or 3 for a few days. When that happens, my clicks go up to 100 - 150 a day. That's a big jump. That's why you want to aim for the top 3.



When I assess at the competition, I look at the following:

• Google PageRank of the page
• Google inbound links to the page
• Yahoo inbound links to the page
• Google AllInTitle and AllInURL for the keyword
• Google PageRank of the domain
• Google/Yahoo links to the domain

The easiest way to check this information is to get the SEOQuake plugin, which will show you all the above numbers.

Google PageRank of the page



I look at the PR for each page in the top 10. I want:

• Nothing higher than a PR 4
• At least half the results (5) are PR 1 or PR 0
• At least 1 of the pages in the top 3 is a PR 1 or PR 0

Google inbound links to the page

Google doesn't show all inbound links. I have sites that rank well that don't show any inbound links in Google. Nevertheless, I check this for the top 5. If I see any inbound links, I'll check out the sites the links are from to see how strong they are (I want < PR 5) and how old the domain is (the younger, the better).

If I see too many inbound links (say 5 or more), or links from higher PR sites (higher than PR 4), and links from old domains (older than 3 years), chances are I'll toss the keyword.

Yahoo inbound links to the page

To check a site in Yahoo, go to Yahoo Site Explorer. Don't be surprised when you find pages with zero Google inbounds, yet hundreds or even thousands of Yahoo inbound links. Although Yahoo doesn't show all links either, it usually shows a lot more than Google.

When it comes to Yahoo inbound links, the fewer the better. I like see less than 250 although I'll go up to 1,000 for a good keyword. Make sure you check how many different sites the links come from. It's not uncommon to run into a page with a few hundred inbound links, yet when you dig into it you see 90% of them come from one domain.

Tip: If you have SEO Quake installed, you can order the Yahoo Inbound Links results by PageRank!

Google's AllInTitle and AllInURL

AllInTitle and AllInURL are special search operators you use in Google.

AllInTitle returns how many results there are with your keyword in the page title.

AllInURL returns how many results there are with your keyword in the URL.

Search like this: allintitle: KEYWORD

Both of these are good measures to gauge if other sites are optimized for the keyword. Low numbers probably means people like you and I aren't opimizing for it. Like a regular search, if you enclose it in quotes, it searches for a phrase match.

Google PageRank of the domain

Just because a page is PR 0 doesn't mean the domain is. I find PR 0 pages inside sites with PR 5 or higher home pages. I look for domains with a PR 4 or lower. My feeling is that even though page PR is low, site PR isn't, which might make the page harder to beat.

Also, depending on who's running the site, if they get wise and do some internal linking, they could easily make the page stronger, thus nullifying all your hard work.

Google/Yahoo links to the domain

I look at this for the same reason I look at domain PR; I want to get more of a complete picture of the strength of the site. The fewer the number of inbound links to the domain, the better. As with inbound page links, Google doesn't show all, so I check both Google and Yahoo.

To check a site in Yahoo, go to Yahoo Site Explorer.

I ran into a domain the other day that showed 800+ links, but when I started looking at it, I saw they all came from different pages on one domain. When I counted the actual number of different domains, the result was only 7.

I like to see no more than 5 - 10 for Google, and 1,000 or lower for Yahoo.

Summary



In the top 10 you want:

• Nothing higher than a PR 4
• At least half the results (5) are PR 1 or PR 0
• At least 1 of the pages in the top 3 is a PR 1 or PR 0
• No more than 5-10 Google inbound links
• 250 or less Yahoo inbound links
• AllInTitle < 10,000
• AllInURL < 10,000
• PageRank of the domain < 5
• Google inbound links to the domain < 10
• Yahoo inbound links to the domain < 1,000

Good luck!