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Competition research starts with analyzing your web pages to determine
how competitive your site is both in general and for specific keywords.
This is sometimes referred to as page strength. I should note that
there are really two aspects to page strength, the general strength of
a site and the specific strength of a page within the site. For the
sake of simplicity, in this article I will use “web page” for both. The
next step is to examine the keywords themselves to see how competitive
they are. This is sometimes called keyword difficulty. Determining
keyword difficulty is done partially by examining how competitive the
pages are that rank well for this keyword, though other methods can be
helpful as well. This can be tricky for two reasons.1. No one
other than that search engine designers knows how each search engine
determines how competitive a site or page is and the search engine
folks aren’t talking. 2. Each search engine has a different way of
determining how competitive a site or page is. So, even if you could
figure out one, it wouldn’t necessarily be so with the other search
engines. Despite these difficulties the search engines do give
us some general information about what makes web pages competitive
(what determines page strength). The competitive strength of a web page
is determined by several factors including:• Age –
Generally speaking, the older a site is the more value the search
engines give it. New sites have a much harder time competing for
keywords. Similarly, new pages start off less competitive, but, if the
rest of your site is strong, new pages will quickly gain page strength.
• Traffic – The more popular a site is, the more value the
search engines give it. Getting more visitors (web traffic) to a
website increases page strength. • Internal Linking Structure
– The internal linking structure of a site is both a reference to the
navigation menus and other forms of linking from one page of your site
to another. This is an often-overlooked aspect of both site design and
SEO. Don’t underestimate the value of a good internal link structure. • Inbound Links
– The most prominent piece of the competition puzzle, inbound links
(also called back links and incoming links) are a key component in
determining a web page’s competitive strength. Generally, the more
inbound links you have the better, but quantity isn’t as important as
quality. Links from authoritative sites (Sites that are very
competitive) are worth far more than links from lesser sites, and links
from sites relevant to your keywords are worth more than links from
unrelated sites. Also, you do not only need to consider the inbound
links to the specific page you are optimizing, the links directed to
other pages of your website will increase the overall competitive
strength of the website and thus the individual pages of that site as
well. (We’ll talk more about this in a future article on link
building.) These are some of the key elements to determining a
page’s competitive strength. As you can see this is starting to get
complicated. There are some online tools available to help, but there
is a wide range of ideas about what is important and how important each
element is. Instead of using just one tool, you may want to use
several. It will take longer, but may give you a more accurate
assessment. In the end, if you keep track of your keyword research and
your results, you may find one tool is more accurate than the others
and be able to trust that tool over the others. This can help you
determine how competitive your page or site is and whether you have a
chance at ranking well for a particular keyword at this time. By
looking at how competitive the other web pages are that currently rank
well for a keyword, you can compare that to how competitive your page
is. If your page is about as competitive as the other sites, you should
be able to rank well for that keyword after targeting that keywords
with search engine optimization. If the other sites are stronger than
your site, then you should choose less competitive keywords until
you’ve improved the strength of your web page. If the other sites are
weaker, then the keyword is a sitting duck.Other Ways to Determine Keyword Difficulty:• Adwords:
In addition to evaluating the other web pages competing for the
keywords you want, it can be helpful when attempting to determine how
competitive a keyword is to look at other sources such as pay-per-click
search marketing stats. Google Adwords has a tool that will show you
the estimated cost per click to rank well in the paid search results
for a keyword. If that cost per click is high, that’s an indication the
keyword difficulty may be high as well (it’s also an indication that
the keyword is valuable).• Keyword Effectiveness Index:
Another way some people determine keyword difficulty is the Keyword
Effectiveness Index (KEI). KEI values are usually available with
keyword popularity tools. The KEI compares the number of searches a
keyword gets to the number of results that keyword brings up in a
search engine. If a keyword gets 100 searches a day and a search on
Google returns 1000 results, then the Google KEI will be high,
indicating the keyword is probably worth targeting. On the other hand
if a keyword gets 100 searches a day and a search on Google returns
1,000,000 results, the Google KEI will be much lower, indicating the
keyword may not be worth targeting. A lower search popularity will also
effect the KEI Keywords with the same number of results in Google will
have a higher or lower Google KEI depending on whether the keyword gets
searched for more or less, respectively.Tip: KEI can be
used as part of the keyword difficulty research; however, I don’t
recommend using solely this information as it isn’t necessarily an
accurate indication of how difficult ranking for a keyword will be.
After all, just because 100,000 pages are returned as results for a
keyword, it doesn’t mean they are strong pages and it doesn’t mean any
of the pages are well optimized for that keyword. A keyword could have
100,000 weak sites in the results. So, it could be easy to rank well
for that keyword. Similarly, a keyword could have only 1000 sites in
the results, but if 100 of them are very strong sites, then ranking
well for that keyword could be very difficultBy understanding
how competitive keywords are and how strong your website is, you will
be able to optimize for keywords that your site can compete for
immediately to get some immediate results. You will also be able to
properly devise what additional work (primarily targeted link building)
you will need to perform to be able to compete for more competitive
keywords.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kurt Steinbrueck is the author of the Church Marketing Online blog. He has been Director of Marketing Services with Ourchurch.Com for over 5 years providing Christian search engine optimization services including services specific for church marketing solutions and private school marketing. Kurt is also a Deacon at his church.