Box Clever & Choose Your SEO Fights Well

If you have read a handful of my previous posts, you will no doubt be aware of my belief that the most important part of SEO is the initial keyword research. Keyword research is a two fold process – not only do you need to know exactly what keywords attract regular traffic each month, you also need to know whether targeting a specific keyword is realistic in terms of cost, time and work involved.

There are many keywords which have such ferocious competition online that ranking page 1 with a new website would take such huge resource that any investor would be unlikely to see breakeven, let alone profit for some considerable time. In such instances, it is often cheaper and easier for a wealthy investor to look at buying one of the high ranking businesses/domain names.

However, no matter how competitive a niche maybe, there are always gaps. Uncovering these gaps is truly what separates successful online marketeers from the rest.  Following on from our last post which looked at ways of uncovering the most ‘profitable’ keywords from your research, today we’re going to look at how to gauge what competition exists online for your chosen ‘profitable’ keywords.

To make this task much easier, I highly recommend the excellent SEO plugin for Firefox. This is a free application that simply involves signing up to the SEOBook website. Once installed, open up google.co.uk (or .com) and search for one of your chosen keywords. You’ll notice that as page 1 of your results appear, the SEO plugin gives you a number of useful values on the website’s listed, including PageRank, no of incoming links, any listings in DMOZ or the Yahoo directory and more.

In an ideal world, the page 1 results for your chosen keyword would have:

1. URL’s with Low Numbers of Links. At the very least, one website with a low number (less than 250) links – as reported by Yahoo/SEO for Firefox – appearing within the top 5 listings is a good sign.
2. No Meta Title Keyword Targeting. No, or only 1 or 2, websites with the actual keyword written directly into the title. For example, if you were targeting ‘buy cheap shoes’ you would hope to see a  Google Results page as below (click to enlarge).
3. Web 2.0 Pages Ranking. Additionally, you would also hope to see a web 2.0 page (most likely an article) ranking within the top 10 results. Look out for listings from EzineArticles, ArticleBase and GoArticles which tend to rank highly for lower competition keywords.
4. New / Young Domains. Ideally, at least two of the listed page 1 domains will be 3 or less years old.

If you can uncover a keyword that reflects all of the above, you have a real hot SEO opportunity! Usually, your keyword target will have page 1 Google competition that reflects one or two points form the above, but not all four.  At this point it is more useful to look at your keyword competition in terms of what you should avoid competing against.

Here are the competition factors that are very hard to outrank with a new website:

1. Keyword Rich Domains. If all of the possible keyword rich domains for your target keyword (eg buycheapshoes.co.uk/.com/.net etc) have been snapped up and you see them ranking page 1 for your keyword, your in for a very tough SEO fight.
2. Aged Domains. If all of your page 1 competition have domains that are over 5 years in age, your shiny new website is going to have big problems persuading the mighty G that your just as trustworthy.
3. High Page Rank. Whilst PageRank may not be as key a factor as it used to be, it’s still very tough to push your new website past websites with PR of 4 and above . Ideally, for your target keyword you would hope to see a website with PR 2 or below ranking well.
4. Lots of Links. If every website on page 1 has over 2K links then you have some serious link building to do. If this high link number comes in combination with no 3 (ie high PR), then your battle is harder still.

Overall, most keyword choices comes down to thinking over the gaps that a keyword may have and balancing this against the beefier sites you see listed on page 1. Sometimes you may find that the top 3 listings are taken up by aged domains with high PR and lots of incoming links. There may however be opportunity to push into the page1 listings beneath these online giants. For high traffic keywords, such a  strategy can be worth pursuing. The important factor is to know what kind of fight your getting into before you step into the SEO ring.

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Related posts:

1. When It Comes To Keyword Research, Let Google Do The Hard Work.
2. Why Is Blogging Great For SEO?
3. Kick Your Keywords Into Profit
4. Six Steps For Slick On Page SEO
5. Digging Deeper For Good Google Keywords