Keyword Research Understanding The Competition
Keyword research is the foundation on which you build your internet marketing. As such, as in a building, the foundation must be solid. It must involve competition research as getting ahead of the competition is the goal. Each page potential for competition must be evaluated independently of the domain strength. This does not mean that you should ignore the competition domain strength, only that for a particular keyword an individual page might rank well in spite of the competition’s domain prominence. But it does mean that determining the difficulty of a word placement could be tricky.
As I have stated before no one knows (aside from search engine technicians) the intricate workings of the algorithm that the different search engines are using. Fortunately we do not have to travel blindly to qualify keywords.
One tool that can be used to determine the strength of a keyword is its competitiveness in the adwords market. Google Adwords has a tool that sill show you the estimated cost per click to rank well for any keyword. It the cost per click is high (it means that the keyword is valuable) we can then conclude that the keyword difficulty will be equally high.
Another yard stick used by SEO specialists is the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI). That is also provided by Googles’ free keyword tools. The KEI is the ratio of the number of searches for a keyword with the number of pages in the search results for that number. If a keyword has 5 searches and 100 pages return this keyword (or phrase) then the KEI is 5/100 = 0.05, this ratio would remain the same if the number of searches were 50 and the number of pages had increased to 1000.
Ideally you would want to choose keywords with a high KEI. That is not always easy to find. But the KEI is not always a good indicator as it does not take the quality of the competition into consideration. Just because there are 1 000 000 or more pages that have this word does not mean that they are competitive pages.
Some things that might enhance your chances to a good keyword is to think regional. Are you targeting your services to a particular area, put it in you keyword. For example you repair driveways instead of targeting the “keyword driveway repair” you would choose “driveway repair Topeka”.
Understanding how competitive yours keywords are is the first step in making a strong site and a visible presence on the net. This first step will give you the direction you need to properly design you campaign and see what additional work you need (link building) to compete in your given market.
Should you want some assistance in evaluating your site’s keywords I would be happy to assist. You can learn to do your own optimization and I can help.
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