The First 30 Results

An accurate measure of keyword competition is to see how well optimised the first 30 websites are. Indications of optimisation for a keyword or key phrase are when it:

• Is used at least once in the page title
• Is used in the Meta description (found by viewing the source of the HTML page e.g. in Internet Explorer, look at the top of the page and click view, then source and look for meta name="description" The keywords and phrases will be listed after this.
• Is used in the headings of the page content
• Is used several times in the content (typically 3%-9% of the words)
• Shown in the navigation structure as a link
• Is used in the anchor text of a link pointing to that site

Goggle provides a couple of excellent search tools to gauge competition for your keywords and phrases. These are:

• Allintitle. If you start a search with allintitle: Google will restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the page title. For instance, allintitle: Internet Consultant will return only documents that have both Internet and Consultant in the title. Using speech marks around your search keywords will provide a further focused result e.g. allintitle:”Internet Consultant” will show only websites that have the exact phrase in the page title.
• Intitle. If you use intitle: in your query, Google will restrict the results to websites containing that word in the title but consider other places in the document too. For instance, intitle:Internet Consultant will return documents that mention the word Internet in their title, and mention the word consultant anywhere else in the document. This may sound the same as the previous tool but is not. The allintitle: looks only at page titles but the Intitle: works by considering page titles and page content.
• Inanchor. The inanchor: command will tell you which websites have the keyword or phrase contained within incoming links to their website e.g. inanchor:keyword shows all websites that have a link pointing to them using your keywords. Using the three search tools together can provide an accurate figure of competing websites e.g. allintitle:keyword inanchor:keyword as this shows websites with the keywords and phrases in the page title and contained within the incoming links.

The curved glass manufacturer we mentioned earlier is an excellent example of using less competitive keywords and phrases to give the new website a kick-start. A check of Google reveals that the term glass returns nearly 5,000,000 results with big companies and organisations such as Pilkington and the British Glass website coming in the top 30 results. These are large corporate sites that are well established and have been around for a long time in Internet terms. All the websites in the top 10 were highly optimised for the same keyword so trying to drive traffic to the curved glass manufacturer website for the term glass in the short term would have been very difficult. Instead, we suggested going after less competitive terms to start with.

Checking PPC pricing

PPC (pay per click) is another good indication of competition level for your keywords and phrases. Go to http://www.google.co.uk/ads/ and sign up for the Goggle adwords program (free to sign up and use the tools). The more you have to pay to be on the first page of results the more competitive your keywords and phrases are.

A mixture of checking the first 30 results for a given keyword and phrase and PPC costs will give you an idea of what you are up against.