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

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.

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.

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......

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. :p