How to interpret market samurai seo competion

[reptile]

By the way... love this forum. You have to search a bit..but there are real gems in these threads.

Anyways,

So i've been using market samurai for a bit and I think its great. The only thing is I've often been surprised by 1) how tough some serps I thought would be easy to crack the top ten turn out to be and 2) how easy other serps some I thought would be hard to crack are.

I didn't really think much of this until I asked a friend thats been at this IM thing much longer than myself what he thought of a niche I was thinking about jumping into. I thought it would take some work, but was doable...but he responded back to me with "impossible".

Which leads me to think I'm missing something.

Since I couldn't find a thread on this exact topic... and I'm confident many of us could benefit from a discussion on this topic... i wanted to pose this question to the forum.

What are the main factors you use when analyzing serp competition for a particular niche?

I know you should look at backlinks... do a PR analysis on the backlinks, anchor text analysis etc. Is there more to it than that? Better yet, do you use a 1-2-3 formula for deciding whether you stand a chance to rank?

 

[TermsB]

For Market Sam you can do a quick search of who already is ranking for the niche you're interested in. From there you can look at the data and see if there is any patterns for all of the top sites. For example if they all have a very high domain age without exception than the niche will be very hard to get ranked high within.

You might want to check out the how to use Market Samurai videos in The 30 Day Challenge videos, which are free of course.

 

[topsytips]

I've had similar experiences with Market Samurai also, although I still think it's a great little tool.

I guess a lot of it comes down to the way Google is constantly changing and updating it's alogorithims and MS can only give an indication as to SEO strength. I have one niche which should have been an easy hit based on paper and yet I'm struggling to get to page 1 with it.

One other issue I've had with MS is the traffic volume also...which, in reality, has been a lot lower than what they predicted.

 

[older_guy]

I have had same experience with MS. I use same formula to evaluate any niche. I have gotten to page 1 in 2 weeks and had niches I can't even find my site in the first 200. I have gone back and compared the sites but can not identify what in MS would give me better indication.

Did the original poster's friend give any indication what made them say "impossible'?

 

[reptile]

Thanks for all the feedback guys. I'm just happy to know I'm not the only one. Now if only we could get to the bottom of this. I see SERPs analysis as being a critical skill in this IM game...

@older_guy: My friend didn't give me that info. I've followed up with him and he says he'll dig in more tomorrow and let me know.

 

[fear91]

You must rely on your intuition ; )

 

[reptile]

@topsytips Traffic #s haven't really been an issue for me from MS. I used to get burned by that, but I think the trick is to only look at exact match traffic numbers when considering keywords. Broad or even phrase match can kill you

 

[huggybear_dk]

I use MS and I agree with the observation that their results can be quite high for the daily search volumes ( make sure you switch from the default view of broad to exact ). I also think it's pretty spot that if you see 10 results with a DA of 10 years or in around that you can be sure it'll be tough to crack. Also a lot of search results are ecommerce style sites like amazon, nextag, etc, this is google interpreting the intentions of the searcher and offering shopping style sites. Product type searches get a lot of thse results.

To be honest the more I use tools like MS and Micro Niche Finder the more I find them a bit useless. What I look for when doing SEO competition is is there sites like mine in the top 10, normal niche type wordpress or static html sites. If there are 2/3/4 or more of these type of sites then I'm pretty sure I can get on page 1 with some work. Only then will I look at how optimized these sites are.

D

 

[essares1]

nothing wrong with market samurai. it's just a tool that shows the numbers given by google. and sometimes it makes approximations which may turn out to be wrong.

As for me what worked without fail till now is to look for the no. of competing exact search results first. The lower they are the better. Then if you have exact domain then look for 4 onpage optimization factors. If no page is optimized there then you have already claimed the market there. Don't look at the domain age of the sites if you have exact domain but look what type of sites they are. If they are like ezine, amazon, wikipedia, youtube etc type general sites not targeting your particular market then you are good. just go for it. However, if the domains are old and built for particularly your keyword niche you will have difficulties. Next look for backlinks. If you think you can build more backlinks with a better PR in your required timeframe then u will be on the first page for your kw.

 

[topsytips]

@topsytips Traffic #s haven't really been an issue for me from MS. I used to get burned by that, but I think the trick is to only look at exact match traffic numbers when considering keywords. Broad or even phrase match can kill you

Yeah, to be honest Reptile, I've now started looking at exact matches. However, they do actually have a video on their site explaining why it's ok to use broad match!!

 

[goingreen]

this particular topic has been huge problem for me lately. i keep searching for niches but (due to bad analysis) im buying urls and promoting in actual markets. ive watched every one of the ms videos and it makes searching for niches alot easier that in reality. i found a post where a guy more or less shows you whats important whats important both in the long term and short term evaluation. hope this helps

hxxp://vincesamios.com/internetmarketing/reading-the-market-samurai-seo-competition-matrix

 

[elgato49]

I wanna thank guys and the OP especially as this thread is quite helpful for me. I'm getting MS after this...

 

[fab145]

goingreen, thanks for the link. quite helpful.

 

[blackmamba456]

Judging whether a keyword is easy or not is pretty difficult and is something that just comes with experience, everytime you decide to take a project on board take a screenshot of all your research beforehand and store it in a folder. If you win by getting a top 10 keep doing projects that look similar and every so often do ones that seem a little harder and see if your SEO skills can be extended.

With time you will learn what to expect and even then you will get some suprises and perhaps learn more.

So far I use SEO for firefox to analyse SERP's for a keyword I'm interested in, I tend to feel confident about a keyword where the top 3 results have around 4,000 links or less each, PR doesn't bother me too much because I see other low PR sites ranking above high PR sites all the time and most of my sites are PR 0 and maybe PR 2 and they still rank above people with PR 4. I don't pay much attention to age but one day I'm sure my SEO strategy will be totally flawed and I'll be forced to take a closer look at other variables.

I used to batter away at niches that seemed viable but now I prefer to put in the extra hours finding a niche that doesn't just seem viable but looks almost piss easy and still has good search volume and monetisation potential, takes a lot longer to find these niches but its definately worth it.

So in a nutshell my rules are in order of importance

1) Do the top 3 sites for my keyword have below 4,000 links, the less the better

2) Is there an exact match domain available for my keyword, I'm using .co.uk and .org.uk so I can still find some good exact match domains, I'm not tempted by anything that isn't an exact match, for me it has to be exact match. It's just the best if you want easy street rankings, but the oppurtunities for this are being snapped up all the time.

3) Can I make money off this keyword, there's nearly always a way but I prefer really tight niches, like a keyword that is literally a search for a product, you can't go wrong with that, and you need it to be an expensive product preferably... there aren't many, you can go for low price stuff but if you can just be patient enough to find that once in a lifetime gem its really worth it (actually I lie, its not once in a life time, they happen quite often if you've been SEO'ing long enough)

And that's it I go for it and do my SEO tactic, which is pretty easy right now. I buy an exact match domain, get a wordpress site up and slap it into my favourite link building service (linxboss) and within 2 months its in the top 10, leave it in linxboss, change the backlink anchors once in a while and build out links to the other pages on your site too, and up it goes in the ranks further still. A bit of Unique article wizard on a slow drip over 3 months is a nice addtion too and you probably should look for sites in the same niche you can get a link from.

Thats it for me.

 

[kiwigunner1979]

When doing the initial k/w research in the Keyword Research module, I tend to disregard the SEOC value - can be massively misleading. A big SEOC number can actually be easy to dominate if the SEOT isn't so tough.

 

[kiwigunner1979]

But really, you need to get down and dirty in the data - actually take the time to examine each of the top 10 competitors, look at their links, use your intuition to figure out "could I beat this?"

KG

 

[kiwigunner1979]

Judging whether a keyword is easy or not is pretty difficult and is something that just comes with experience, everytime you decide to take a project on board take a screenshot of all your research beforehand and store it in a folder. If you win by getting a top 10 keep doing projects that look similar and every so often do ones that seem a little harder and see if your SEO skills can be extended.

With time you will learn what to expect and even then you will get some suprises and perhaps learn more.

So far I use SEO for firefox to analyse SERP's for a keyword I'm interested in, I tend to feel confident about a keyword where the top 3 results have around 4,000 links or less each, PR doesn't bother me too much because I see other low PR sites ranking above high PR sites all the time and most of my sites are PR 0 and maybe PR 2 and they still rank above people with PR 4. I don't pay much attention to age but one day I'm sure my SEO strategy will be totally flawed and I'll be forced to take a closer look at other variables.

I used to batter away at niches that seemed viable but now I prefer to put in the extra hours finding a niche that doesn't just seem viable but looks almost piss easy and still has good search volume and monetisation potential, takes a lot longer to find these niches but its definately worth it.

So in a nutshell my rules are in order of importance

1) Do the top 3 sites for my keyword have below 4,000 links, the less the better

2) Is there an exact match domain available for my keyword, I'm using .co.uk and .org.uk so I can still find some good exact match domains, I'm not tempted by anything that isn't an exact match, for me it has to be exact match. It's just the best if you want easy street rankings, but the oppurtunities for this are being snapped up all the time.

3) Can I make money off this keyword, there's nearly always a way but I prefer really tight niches, like a keyword that is literally a search for a product, you can't go wrong with that, and you need it to be an expensive product preferably... there aren't many, you can go for low price stuff but if you can just be patient enough to find that once in a lifetime gem its really worth it (actually I lie, its not once in a life time, they happen quite often if you've been SEO'ing long enough)

And that's it I go for it and do my SEO tactic, which is pretty easy right now. I buy an exact match domain, get a wordpress site up and slap it into my favourite link building service (linxboss) and within 2 months its in the top 10, leave it in linxboss, change the backlink anchors once in a while and build out links to the other pages on your site too, and up it goes in the ranks further still. A bit of Unique article wizard on a slow drip over 3 months is a nice addtion too and you probably should look for sites in the same niche you can get a link from.

Thats it for me.

Hugely helpful post! Interesting about the .uk domains, might try that. Locally-biased search volumes for the UK must be worthwhile in the right niche.

 

[humvee9]

I believe there is whole set of course regarding your question...!

 

[blackmamba456]