In my last article ”How to Optimize a Blog for SEO – Make it Viral” We discussed keyword research and some of the basics of keyword selection. Obviously – you won’t identify your targets completely until you understand what kind of competition you’re going up against. All the keyword research in the world can’t help you rank for the phrase “windows” in 6 months with a brand new site. Just not going to happen. The key to understanding how to look at your competitors to cop a feel for who and what you can compete with. If we can compete in a reasonable period of time, yup that is half the battle. It is tantamount to creating a solid web and site building strategy.
In the last article we touched on some potential keyword phrases, with the idea that we needed to categorize our keyword phrases into three types of phrases, high competition, medium competition, and low competition. You have those, so what now?
Generally we should start at the top. From the highest competition phrases to the lowest. We will do a quick analysis of the major phrases to define our goals. I also tend to look carefully at “gaps”. These are specific phrases that have lower competition than one would expect to see when looking at search volume. So let’s use an example of a site I am building centered around hair loss products and care. Let’s begin with the major targets.
The phrases we’ll examine for the purposes of this article are the top 10 phrases as ordered by search volume. They are:
hair loss
causes of hair loss in women
dog hair loss
cat hair loss
hair restoration cost
thyroid hair loss
best shampoo for hair loss
chemotherapy hair loss
hair loss after pregnancy
hair loss in children
So what are we looking for? It’s fairly obvious that it’s not feasible to do a thorough competition analysis at this point. I’ve listed 10 phrases here but in all actuality there are hundreds to consider. First, let’s install a couple tools to help you make some quick decisions. You’ll need to install Market Samurai. Market Samurai takes all of the guess work out of competitive analysis. Get Markey Samurai Now when you run keyword research you’ll be able to instantly review your competitions stats.
Here are the stats for the top 10 ranking sites across the 10 top phrases (I’ll leave out the URLs so there’s no promotion):
Phrase: hair loss
Site 1 – PR4, 203,255 page links, 12,511,331 domain links
Site 2 – PR5, 38,607 page links, 4,487,445,668 domain links == Wikipedia
Site 3 – PR0, 1011 page links, 307,883,549 domain links
Site 4 – PR0, 1,920 page links, 307,883,549 domain links
Site 5 – PR5, 2141 page links, 60,622,286 domain links
Phrase: sudden hair loss
Site 1 – PR3, 7,131 page links, 12,511,331 domain links
Site 2 – PR2, 25 page links, 14,461 domain links
Site 3 – PR1, 216 page links, 42,847 domain links
Site 4 – PR1, 123 page links, 874 domain links
Site 5 – PR1, 103 page links, 11,020domain links
Phrase: hair loss surgery
Site 1 – PR2, 12 page links, 10,297,864 domain links
Site 2 – PR4, 519,524 page links, 10,297,864 domain links
Site 3 – PR6, 376 page links, 865,909 domain links
Site 4 – PR5, 9,612 page links, 4,487,445,668 domain links
Site 5 – PR4, 116 page links, 65,352 domain links
As you can see from looking at the SERP’s I have displayed that the phrase sudden hair loss is far less competitive than hair loss. We have a spread of Page Rank, a multitude of links and a wide variety of sites. Basically – we’re not up against a huge wall of highly entrenched competition and the search volume is strong.
So now let’s look at whether there are any good long tail phrases. In this industry we’ll be looking for specific products. Since going through all the different types of products would be a impossible, instead we will focus on a couple of products that have great reviews. Rogaine and Nioxin. To keep things simple we will focus on these two brands in the research. However, in reality we would spend the extra time to thoroughly research all of the product types we could sell on our site.
So for products, here’s the long and short of the numbers and competition:
Brands researched – Rogaine and Nioxin
“Rogaine” with 120,000 estimated searches/mth with high competition outside of the manufacturer is a start. When we build our site we obviously want to build a structure and hierarchy that pull in to longtail rankings. What we’re looking for here are ideas as to where to put our energies when it comes to content creation and link building and ideally turning a profit.
Until then – get your campaigns sorted out for potential keywords and keep reading … this is where it gets really interesting.