How to find out how hard a keywd. is to rank?

RuthSam

RuthSam

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Hi,

During the many years I have doing SEO for own sites I have never really found out how to test and check how difficiult a keyword is to rank.

So I know I can see the CPC rate for each keyw. in Google AdWords, I also no I can check how many searches there is for a particular keyw. but what else do I need to know?

I have a keyw. which has only 100 monthly searches but costs aprox 25$ in Adwords to get listed at page one and it took me almost 2 years to get it just close to rank no.10, that's why I'm asking the above question.

Hope someone can help.
 
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I look at the total index count of the main competitor sites, domain authority, page authority, total number of links to domain and total number of links to page. If you think you can beat these metrics either with better links, more links, or more content theb you're good to go i always find. I used to manually check these, but market samurai is the best.
 
To be able to rank a website with a 1-3 low competition keywords.

It takes 6-12 months, how essential can be done by purchasing a high-quality backlinks bookmarking every day.

Or you build manually.

It depends on your luck with the search engines
 
Keywordrevealer.com works very well.

But analyze the top 10 on the first page and analyze their backlinks, you can pull them with ahrefs or majestic to see their power of the links.

If you feel you can beat the authority of their links then go for it and make sure your on-page is spot on.
 
Doing SEO for many years? That's a bit contradictionary. You can use certain tools to get some basic insights but in the end of day it all comes to a common sense and a good research. I guess you should go back to basics. Adwords and CPC have barely anything to do with organic rankings competition.
 
There's a few things that I do when I'm judging competitiveness. Firstly, does the page title match the keyword/key-phrase? Competition can look tough sometimes in other ways that I'll talk about later but if the titles don't match the key-phrase you can often slip in there because Google decides your page is the perfect match due to your perfectly constructed on page content with some decent back-links.

Next I take the top ranked website and put the root domain into Majestic. I look at the number of referring domains, anchor text (exact match done correctly percentage-wise is a strong indicator of active SEO and therefore difficult competition) and how Majestic rates those links in terms of trust and citation flow. I know people love to tell you to forget metrics and look at the back-links but metrics do provide a strong indication of link quality, if you wanted to go a step further and look at the pages beyond the metrics, look for things like outbound link numbers, because a link from a link farm with 200 back-links on the page is significantly less powerful than a homepage link for example.

If the top result is strong, check the second, third, forth all the way down to the bottom. Depending on the search numbers involved, even if you can take the last position on page 1 it may still mean a lot of money to you. That's pretty much it for me, on page optimisation can sometimes be used too but if they're up there ranking already with strong back-links, it's a good indicator that their on-page is at least decent.
 
Jobdollarr said:
To be able to rank a website with a 1-3 low competition keywords.

It takes 6-12 months, how essential can be done by purchasing a high-quality backlinks bookmarking every day.

Or you build manually.

It depends on your luck with the search engines
Click to expand...


How much do you charge your clients?
 
Only $ 5 for baclink services, some $ 20 for premium backlinks. It depends on the hours needed and quality of backlinks. Some people think of fast, unfortunately freelancers can work fast, but very slow in google to index your pages.
 
myopic1 said:
There's a few things that I do when I'm judging competitiveness. Firstly, does the page title match the keyword/key-phrase? Competition can look tough sometimes in other ways that I'll talk about later but if the titles don't match the key-phrase you can often slip in there because Google decides your page is the perfect match due to your perfectly constructed on page content with some decent back-links.

Next I take the top ranked website and put the root domain into Majestic. I look at the number of referring domains, anchor text (exact match done correctly percentage-wise is a strong indicator of active SEO and therefore difficult competition) and how Majestic rates those links in terms of trust and citation flow. I know people love to tell you to forget metrics and look at the back-links but metrics do provide a strong indication of link quality, if you wanted to go a step further and look at the pages beyond the metrics, look for things like outbound link numbers, because a link from a link farm with 200 back-links on the page is significantly less powerful than a homepage link for example.

If the top result is strong, check the second, third, forth all the way down to the bottom. Depending on the search numbers involved, even if you can take the last position on page 1 it may still mean a lot of money to you. That's pretty much it for me, on page optimisation can sometimes be used too but if they're up there ranking already with strong back-links, it's a good indicator that their on-page is at least decent.
Click to expand...

Only one problem with that .. Genuine authority sites don't need to have the exact keyword in their title or description or have their on page set up to target that keyword.

Say the keyword is "blue widgets for sale". All they need to be targeting is "blue widgets" which they more than likely are, and if they even have the word "sale" or "sales" on the page Big G seems to pick it up and add it to the description. And if they don't, they still tend to rank.

I think relying on that advice alone is a little outdated since it hasn't been as simple as this in a long time. But that's not to say it's not an advantage to have your keyword in your title, description etc.. just not as influential as before when it comes to the top 2 or 3 positions anyway.
 
Rua999 said:
Only one problem with that .. Genuine authority sites don't need to have the exact keyword in their title or description or have their on page set up to target that keyword.

Say the keyword is "blue widgets for sale". All they need to be targeting is "blue widgets" which they more than likely are, and if they even have the word "sale" or "sales" on the page Big G seems to pick it up and add it to the description. And if they don't, they still tend to rank.

I think relying on that advice alone is a little outdated since it hasn't been as simple as this in a long time. But that's not to say it's not an advantage to have your keyword in your title, description etc.. just not as influential as before when it comes to the top 2 or 3 positions anyway.
Click to expand...

I agree with you to a point, genuine authority sites do rank well for non-exact keywords, however I have direct experience of outranking authority sites with relative ease that way. For example lets say the desired term is 'cheap cotton' and the page they have ranking for it is titled 'discount cotton', synonyms I've found are generally easy to beat even if they are an authority site. I guess I should have been clearer and specified synonyms in my original post.
 
SEO only for own sites out of experience reading BHW. So don't be smart here, I'm asking to learn not to get some dump answers.

Resolution10 said:
Doing SEO for many years? That's a bit contradictionary. You can use certain tools to get some basic insights but in the end of day it all comes to a common sense and a good research. I guess you should go back to basics. Adwords and CPC have barely anything to do with organic rankings competition.
Click to expand...
 
If the competition for that keyword is high then you should avoid using of it. You can't beat the sites which is already on top with that keyword.
 
rashedhns said:
If the competition for that keyword is high then you should avoid using of it. You can't beat the sites which is already on top with that keyword.
Click to expand...

That's the spirit, good luck with making money online.
 
Last edited:
There's really no perfect method to test how difficult a keyword is. You'll have to try to find out.
 
Are you talking about organic results or adwords? If you are looking to rank organically, you need to look at top ten results. The information you have provided is irrelevant for organic results.
 
Please open your own thread :offtopic:

Jobdollarr said:
Only $ 5 for baclink services, some $ 20 for premium backlinks. It depends on the hours needed and quality of backlinks. Some people think of fast, unfortunately freelancers can work fast, but very slow in google to index your pages.
Click to expand...
 
There have been some very interesting suggestions which I modified a little.. waiting to see if it gave any result.

From Keyword Revealer it looks like this... my site is no 10 here:

screen.jpg

So it seems it is not much I need to outperform number one.. I bought some expired domains I found which a listed same places as the one that link to these 9 :D and made some onsite SEO.. so it should be doable or what you think?
 
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