How do you "really" determine KW competitiveness?

I have a potential client that is running a regional Insurance agency. I know from working with other very competitive industries that they are just that.. competitive. (such as mortgage brokers, banks, hosting companies, etc.)

But, how do you actually identify that the potential client needs more "heat" to get them ranked higher? In other words, the keyword "health insurance" is listed at Adwords as being "Medium" competition (although you would pay $73,000 per DAY for this). Whereas something like "health insurance texas" is identified as being "High" competition and about 4x PPC value (but with lower search volume of course)

In general, I have a standard configuration for standard clients that works well, but when I have client that is theoretically in a competitive market, I need to bump up the link-building .. but by how much and how do I determine this? I need to justify this to the client.

Thanks,
CM

Run a Market Samurai or Traffic Travis competion analysis. Look at the incoming links to the competitors, use SEO Spyglass to see the anchor text of the incoming links to competitors. You have to at least build that many quality links with anchor texts from similar authority sites to beat them.

If new site, of course harder. If they are in DMOZ, Yahoo Dir, of course, harder. If they many more pages, of course harder. PR does matter too.

You simply have to create a chart and first come up with the links you need, and guesstimate the variance based on the domain age, dmoz, etc. factors.

1:age
2:Link building profile
3omains linking
4age rank
5:link velocity
6:Client domain age/link building/etc.

It is a crapshoot I think. I JUST used TT on a "buy" keyword and indeed was listed as difficult, BUT on page 1 was a site with about 4 pages and 400 links to the site amongst sites with xx,xxx links and Pr's of 4+, so I dont think it is a perfect science. Of course looking at how optimized the site is regarding title, H1, description etc... is important too.

Nothing beats a manual analysis of the top 10.

The first place I go to when I want to analyze the competition is Google.

You should manually check the 1st and 10th websites for this keyword.

If they are both solid, competition is rather high. Personally I pay attention to domain age, on-page seo and links that open site explorer shows

Justify by analysing the top 10 ranking sites in your search. Show the client an analysis of another search with less competition and compare the difference of need of backlinks and general SEO. The comparison will usually make the client understand the your needs.

Or well that's just how I use to do it

pirondi said:

1:age
2:Link building profile
3omains linking
4age rank
5:link velocity
6:Client domain age/link building/etc.

Click to expand...

Like how you pointed out about link building profile, a must-know.