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When you are choosing a niche/keywords...

by fr33flow
7 replies
  • SEO
    • |
When do you say "yeah I can compete with that!" or "hell no, next idea!"? I was picking keywords that were under 1 million pages, and some as low as 30,000. Even with that small amount of competition there are still authority sites, but sure enough I am moving up in rank and am getting search engine traffic.

I have some niche ideas I would really like to pursue, but there are way more pages for the keywords 5-50 million or more. This just doesn't seem feasible to compete with and of course there are long tail keywords, but they either aren't getting many searches or it is so popular that even long tail keywords turn up millions of pages.

When coming up with keyword ideas do you factor in what the google price and competition (low, med, high)? Because I found that those two things are irrelevant to the number of pages I am competing with or number searches a month.

I know a lot of people say they can just get a gut feeling based on the current first page rankings, and yeah I get that, but how do you analyze the numbers? How would you compete with 5 million other people? And of course the flip side is that the more competition the more hits you can get if you actually do rank.
#choosing #niche or keywords
  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    You should stop looking at how many pages are in the index. That is a waste of time. It tells you NOTHING of the competition.

    Your competition is the top 3 websites. That's it. Doesn't matter if there are 3 million webpages or 300 webpages in the index.. If you can outrank #3, who cares about #4,548,987?
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    • Profile picture of the author fr33flow
      Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

      You should stop looking at how many pages are in the index. That is a waste of time. It tells you NOTHING of the competition.

      Your competition is the top 3 websites. That's it. Doesn't matter if there are 3 million webpages or 300 webpages in the index.. If you can outrank #3, who cares about #4,548,987?
      Nice, so simple, don't know why I was overcomplicating it. Any rules of thumb for determining what you can or can't compete with? What I've read on this seems to point towards a perfect scenario where you find keywords that have no directly matching sites, but in real life this seems to seldom be the case.
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      • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
        Originally Posted by fr33flow View Post

        Nice, so simple, don't know why I was overcomplicating it. Any rules of thumb for determining what you can or can't compete with? What I've read on this seems to point towards a perfect scenario where you find keywords that have no directly matching sites, but in real life this seems to seldom be the case.
        I don't really have any checklist to look for this or look for that. I've been doing it so long it is just a feeling.

        Some of what you want to look at though is the amount of quality links pointing at the main domain and at the internal page (if it is an internal page ranking), the internal linking structure of the website, as well as the onpage factors of the ranking page.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Here's a couple of obvious signs of authority:
    • Double/triple SERP listings per keyword
    • Sitelinks

    BTW, regardless of SERP competition, still target the keyword like your trying to rank, it builds up overall niche authority & helps later on when targeting long tail keywords.
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  • Profile picture of the author SEO Power
    The number of results displayed is not indicative of the level of competition for a keyword. To find out how competitive a keyword is, analyse the top 10 ranking sites; analyse their link profiles and the on-page SEO methods in use.

    I do not factor in average CPC and competition unless I want to build a site I plan on monetizing with Adsense. Those would usually give you an idea of how profitable the keyword will be.
    Signature
    ONE HOUR INDEXING - STOP WASTING MONEY ON LINKS GOOGLE NEVER FINDS
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  • Profile picture of the author clevelandslim
    There can be 3 basic ways to find keywords,

    i) Competitor's best performing keywords
    ii) Keywords from Google Keyword tool and other Keyword tools
    iii) Brainstorming

    Later on you can sort these three lists, remove duplicates and generate a unique list for your PPC campaign.
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  • Profile picture of the author sreejanniyogi
    Easiest process :
    I use long tail pro which gives me a keyword competition number. It has an inbuilt algorithm which takes in all the metrics and tells me if I should go for that keyword or not. This is how I do and 90% of the times it gives the correct info.
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