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What is my competition?

by djn001
4 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I am working through a WSO that I have recentley purchased which entails using the tried and tested method of setting up niche sites, which are targetting specific keywords.

I must admit that I have always struggled with market / keyword research, and this time is no different. The Warrior that I bought the product from has been very helpful in trying to get me on track, but I would like to ask for other people's opinions regarding a particular question.

Part of the process with this course involves typing your keyword into Google and actually looking at the sites that appear on page one using SEO quake, or a similar tool, to assess the page rank, number of backlinks etc. I have been advised that by doing a phrase match search this way ,using my keyword, it will give me the best indication of what my cometition is like.

I do understand the logic in this because it is showing me the sites that are optimising for the exact same keyword phrase, but I still have trouble understanding why, because in reality, virtually everone will be searching without quotes - and will be given the sites that appear in a broad match search. Therefore, aren't these sites my real competition?

The reason that I ask this is that the main keyword that I plan to target has a large difference in the level of competition between the phrase and broad match searches.

Also, is it ever advisable (or even possible) to target a specific, english speaking, country rather than looking for a global audience?

Thanks in advance

Dave
#competition
  • Profile picture of the author kaiserthesage
    Try searching your keywords this way:

    "allintitle:your keywords" - it will give you a much refined result of your real competitors.

    Also, you can try using Traffic Travis in checking out your competitors, since it gives you a lot more info about your competitors (how they target the keywords such as inclusion in meta description, title, url, etc...)

    It's best to target global audience.
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    Co-founder and CEO of Grit and Xight Interactive. Author of Kaiserthesage. Follow me on Twitter @jasonacidre

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    • Profile picture of the author djn001
      Originally Posted by kaiserthesage View Post

      Try searching your keywords this way:

      "allintitle:your keywords" - it will give you a much refined result of your real competitors.

      Also, you can try using Traffic Travis in checking out your competitors, since it gives you a lot more info about your competitors (how they target the keywords such as inclusion in meta description, title, url, etc...)

      It's best to target global audience.
      Thanks kaiserthesage

      I'll try the allintitle method to see what it gives me. I have come across this method before, but never thought of it for this particular WSO, because it isn't mentioned in the course.

      It tells you to look for a keyword with a minimum of 2600 exact match searches using the google KW tool, then to asses your competition using a variety of methods - with Traffic Travis being one of them.

      The one problem I have with Traffic Travis is that sometimes I think that the difficulty rating is questionable because I have had some results that tell me that a KW is "relatively easiy" to rank for, yet there are many sites in the top ten results that have a page rank of 4 and above and also have thousands of backlinks.

      I know that different people may have different methods of assesing competition, but I just don't quite understand how you can ignore the broad match results when these are the very same results that the people who are using you search term will be presented with.
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  • Profile picture of the author kaiserthesage
    I mostly base the difficulty of the competition by seeing the first 4 pages of SERP results. If you see that all that are placed on the 2nd to the 4th page are heavily optimized, then it's a tough competition. But if you see pages from Ezinearticles or blog posts that only have a few links directing to it, then you'll see an opportunity on making it to the top page.
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    Co-founder and CEO of Grit and Xight Interactive. Author of Kaiserthesage. Follow me on Twitter @jasonacidre

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    • Profile picture of the author djn001
      Yes, we were also told to look for articles, You Tube videos, blogs, Web 2.0 properties etc., as an indicator on whether or not it is "doable" as a keyword to rank for.

      Even this can be confusing though, because you can sometimes get an article with few backlinks which is outranking more authoritative sites that have a higher page rank and a lot more backlinks in the broad match serach results.
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