How to estimate competition in SEO?

There are tools that show you whether competition is "low" or "high" etc. but they are not very good. If you are looking for a "no-brain use" rating, then check out something like "Traffic Travis" which has a keyword rating system you are looking for (it is not very good though).

To determine competition, you're going to have to do an indepth backlink analysis. For this check out something like Majestic SEO or SEO Spyglass. Ahrefs is ok as well, but I prefer Majestic and Spyglass over it.

Also if you want a great keyword research tool that will help your analysis, I would check out SE Cockpit. It is a monthly subscription though ($99/mo) so just be aware of that.

I use SEMRush. It will suffice all your needs. Go for a paid version. It costs $19.95 only.

Tools will not tell you anything here is a snippet from a post for my blog I'm making:

How To Identify Super Sucky Competition
Did you find some Mega Awesome Keywords for your Adsense site? I’m sure you did, but there is one more thing to do before you can go making the actual site. That is making sure that we can rank for this keyword quick and easy. You will need a plugin for this called mozbar here. This is where most will tell to grab your calculator and find a bunch of numbers to add but for our keywords we will stick to a better approach that works more times than not.

First thing we must do is get a feel for the competition on google. So go over there and type your word into the search box. Now since google has gotten smarter and better it alters the results to tailor to your likings. To prevent this from happening you can type &pws=0 at the end of the url after you search in the address bar at the top.

Now that you have the top ten results up for your keyword, look over the results and see if you can answer these questions:
Are they targeting the keyword?
Meaning is the keyword in the title, url and the description. So for my keyword the dark knight rises online there are sites in the top ten do have it in the title, and description but only a few have it in the url and most of the urls are long and not very optimized.

Are the URLs optimized?
We want to see urls that are long and have numbers in them as well don’t have the keyword in them. For example if you see sitedomain.com/reviews/reviewcomplete.asp?FID=137000 then you can be sure you will beat this site quickly.What types of sites are ranking?
What types of sites are ranking?

Sites that are easy to beat are going to be:
Forums
Blogspot or keyword.something.com(subdomains)
Answer sites like Yahoo or Ask
Download pages
Untargeted EMDs
And Videos

not so easy:
The actual company sites
Wikipedia in some cases
Huge Authority Sites
Sometimes other EMD sites

Hope this helps

What you're asking for basically is a Keyword Research.

Well it's divided into two parts:

1. Broad
2. Top Ten

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Broad one consist of looking at your competition from higher height

In this part you can check things like:

"keyword"

This search represents how many pages in Google contain the keyword exactly as is for your particular query. It can be located in title, meta description and content.

Click Here for an example (I used keyword chocolate banana as an example)


intitle:"keyword"

This search represents how many pages in Google contain the keyword exactly as is in title (meta title) for your particular query.

Click Here for an example


inurl:"keyword"

This search represents how many pages in Google contain the keyword exactly as is in the URL for your particular query.

Click Here for an example

These could give you an idea of your overall competition

-------------

Top Ten part is about analyzing your competitors on the first page. You can jump straight into this part if you want to. The Broad part is not always necessary.

This part is much harder to perform because you have to use various tools and most importantly - common sense.

You would be checking:

1. Keyword in Title and Description
2. Keyword density
3. Backlink profile and anchor text optimization
4. Presence of all time authority sites (.edu, .gov, Wikipedia)
5. Presence of non-seo pages (deep forum pages, torrent sites pages, yahoo answer pages etc..)
6. Availability of major TLDs for your keyword (.com, .org, .net)

...and a few other things.


Hope this helps a bit.



Tibor

Mrmontegomery,

I just wanted to point out that most members responding here have legitimate ways of determining competition for a give keyword phrase as it relates to SEO. You can see that there are some tools out there that will give you valuable information but ultimately it is up to you to find data in a lot of different places and then put it together to determine where a keyword phrase falls on the spectrum of being competitive.

Another tool you could check out is rank tracker,

Rank Tracker - Track Your Search Engine Rankings Easily!

Hope that helps,

Shawn