Choosing Keywords with the Right Amount of Competition

Keyword competition can be scary, especially for newcomers in the SEO bandwagon. When looking for the right keywords to boost your ranking, you might be facing a junior intern at a marketing firm or an experienced marketing expert in an SEO company.

Thanks to technological advancements, you'll find a lot of tools to aid your SEO keywords research like Long Tail Pro, Market Samurai, or SEO Spyglass. What's important is to understand how to utilize them effectively.

The Importance of No Competition Analysis

Before we delve deeper, it's critical to understand the aspect of keyword competition analysis- it's not rocket science, but an estimate of the level of competition on a particular keyword phrase. Again, just because a keyword looks easier to rank for, it may not easily rank in every situation.

There are two factors that will affect the usefulness of your keyword completion analysis.

Google Changing Algorithms

First, no one knows the next ranking protocol Google will be employing. Even the smartest analysts have never managed to recreate the Google ranking algorithms. Meaning, your competition analysis can never be 100 percent accurate.

Additionally, Google frequently changes its algorithms, with more than 500 changes every year. Even if you manage to perfectly predict your keyword competition level today, it might fall off the radar in a few weeks or months.

There's a Trade Off

When carrying out keyword analysis, you will have to tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency. The more the number of ranking factors you incorporate in your strategy, the more monetary and time resources you must put in. If you consider 1 or 2 ranking factors, you can easily and quickly carry out your competition analysis, but the outcome may not be very accurate. As you incorporate more ranking factors to the equation, you begin to see more accurate results, but it takes time and money.

It's your choice to pick a proper balance between accuracy and efficiency that suits your situation as you carry out keyword research and implement keyword planning based on keyword competition analysis.

Keyword Research Tools

The Google Keyword Planner has dominated the list of top keyword research tools used by internet marketers. Since Google is still the leading search engine, it makes perfect sense to carry out your keyword research right from the source. However, there are numerous other effective tools you can use when choosing keywords with the right amount of competition:

Wikipedia Stats

Wikipedia always ranks among the top three searches for almost every head and body keyword. Getting an insight into their analytics will give useful data you can employ for your own content. Stats.Grok.se is a pretty unfamiliar resource that gives you a snapshot of how many views a certain Wikipedia article gets every day. By simply typing the article title in the search bar, you can generate a graphical display of the results.

Google Webmaster Tools

You can sign up for Google Webmaster Tools for free and enjoy an important tool in the console which allows you to view which keywords people are keying when your website shows up in the search results. It doesn't mean that people are clicking your link, but it means you're edging closer to the top of the search results.

With that insight, you can fine tune on-page SEO to improve your ranking on the keywords you're already registering some progress on, as opposed to creating a whole new content.

Google Trends

Google Trends will give you a list of useful keywords that are currently popular. If your website is about updating customers on latest news and events, this is a sure tool to have.

Yahoo! Answers

A huge percentage of online search queries are made in the form of questions. Yahoo! Answers enables you to find the most frequently asked questions and you can see how the questions are worded.

Market Samurai

Every inbound marketer adores the Market Samurai which is a paid tool similar to Google Keyword Planner, though it offers more advanced functionalities.

Long Tail Pro

This is another paid tool that is quickly gaining popularity and helps you to identify useful long tail keywords that will rank highly on search engines.

Summary

When you take your time to carry out a comprehensive keyword competition analysis, you may identify keywords that are not yet identified by the most skilled SEO experts in your niche. It might take long, but the results, in the long run, will be worth the effort.