Which keywords might perform easier than others on search engines?
We are a Seo (Search engine optimizers) agency based in Europe and for the job we do our primary concern is the choice of keywords for our customers.
As you probably know there are many tools on line to search good keywords alternatives and to evaluate the traffic each keyword might have. All very nice, but once you have an idea of the keywords you want to perform on the organic search engine results you still remain with a big question: what is the difficulty of each keyword?
- If you are a do it yourself seo you might wonder if it is possible for you to achieve results on those keywords or it is better to hire a specialist.
- If you are a Seo specialist you might wonder if it is difficult for you to achieve results for that customer and What is the price you should ask for that job.
This tool is made to help you (and me of course!) to give a quick answer to this question and give a
keyword difficulty metrics
Our tool consists of a simple principle: we are in a competition and to make a keyword difficulty analysis we need to make an analysis of the top competitors for our keyword. Of course you could do it manually. Actually almost everything in the internet analysis world could be done manually, but with a tool you do it much faster! Anyway to explain what is the analysis beneath it is simpler to describe you what you should manually do to achieve the same results as our keyword difficulty analysis tool automatically does.
As for every competition analysis you need to provide two main values and group them:
- Measure the quantity of the competition
- Measure the quality of the competition
- Group quality and quantity to have a picture of the competition (keyword difficulty)
- Measure the quantity of the competition
First of all you have to understand how big the competition is for a given keyword. How many competitor you have on the web. When I ask this question to a typical customer he tells me his real world competitors, but we are on the web and very often the competing web sites are different from real word competitors!. How can you know then? Very simple use a search engine!
number of results
The first simple quantity measure is the number of results the search engine shows for your keyword. Just type your keyword in any search engine and it will show this number.
Actually the number of results varies a lot from one search engine and the other. There might be a lot of reasons to explain this, but it’s not really important for our analysis. Just be consistent: always use the same search engine. Usually we use google for our scope, but it’s not really important which one you will choose.
allintitle
Google has a very useful command: allintitle (if you want here is a list of google commands)
If you type on google search:
allintitle:your keyword
you will see all the web pages that contain in their title tag (the title tag is the tag that contains the text that is displayed on the top bar of the browser) your keyword.
Why is it important? Very simple: if you know the very simple basics of Search Engine Optimization you know that the first most important thing is to have in your page title (the title tag) your keyword. For this reason if a web site does not even have a page with the keyword in the title is not a real competitor. Even if a site like this appears in the search organic results for your keyword it will not be difficult at all to pass it.
Combining these two results you will have a quantity analysis of you keyword competition:
You will end up with a table of this style with as many rows as the number of keywords you are analysing:
Keywords |
# results |
# allintitle |
Keywords 1 |
1.000.000 |
30.000 |
Keyword 2 |
2.000.000 |
15.000 |
How you should read this results? Of course the numbers are not real, but they give you an immediate understanding of how the number of results the search engine shows might give a wrong understanding of a keyword difficulty. Of course the keyword 2 is much simpler than the keyword 1! Maybe will not be half as difficult because anyway there are more results appearing, but it’s still much easier.
In conclusion theses results must be read like this: Keyword 2 has more competition, but it’s not real competition. Might be that this keyword appears in the text of web many web sites, but only a small part of them are really targeting Keyword 2. Keyword 1 on the contrary is probably a more specific keyword. There are fewer web sites that have this keyword in their copy, but there is a higher number of web sites that are targeting this keyword.
- Measure the quality of the competition
Now that you know the quantity of the competition it’s time to analyse the strength of the competition. Well of course you can’t analyse all the results! You must take a sample as in every statistics. Which sample? Well let’s analyse our best competitors. In the end we want to achieve the first positions in the search engine results, right?. So let’s see how strong are the first 10 web pages (I’ll explain later why I’m talking about web pages and not web sites) that appear on the search engine. Again every search engine shows different SERP (Search engine report pages). But again we are making a statistics and for our keyword difficulty analysis it’s not really important. Just be consistent and use always the same search engine for your analysis. Also for this quality analysis we use google.
Now that you have the list of the first 10 web pages (the urls to be more precise) appearing in the search engine what’s next? We need a simple value to measure the quality, the power, of a web page. Well let’s use what google provides us: The google page rank:
Just open every single page in the search engine report page and check the google page rank shown on the google tool bar.
There is a little problem in this. It might be that a very strong web site appears in the search engine results with an apparently weak page (url). The reason is very simple. Google does not renew the displayed page rank every day. While it continuously updates its internal number, the number it shows is update once every 3-4 months. For this reason I think it’s also important or even more important to check the web site page rank. The page rank of the home page, the root (http://www.site.com).
So once you have finished checking the url’s page rank check also the web site root page ranks.
You will end up with a table of this kind:
Keyword 1:
Google results |
Url page rank |
Site page rank |
1 google result |
6 |
6 |
2 google result |
3 |
6 |
3 google result |
5 |
5 |
4 google result |
4 |
5 |
5 google result |
4 |
6 |
6 google result |
5 |
5 |
7 google result |
4 |
5 |
8 google result |
4 |
4 |
9 google result |
3 |
5 |
10 google result |
3 |
4 |
Repeat this operation for all the keywords you want to analyze (Probably you already understand that without a tool that makes this keyword difficulty analysis automatically you will send your life analysing keywords…)
Now we are doing an analysis so we have to group our result and make an arithmetic mean
In the end you will have a result like this
Keywords |
Url page rank |
Web site page rank |
Keyword 1 |
4,1 |
5,1 |
Keyword 2 |
3,7 |
4,4 |
Very clearly you will understand that keyword 1 is more difficult than keyword 2 because the top competing web site and the top competing web pages are stronger.
- Group quality and quantity to have a picture of the keyword difficulty
Once you have your quantity and quality results you must group them and very simply get this kind of table
Keywords |
# results |
# allintitle |
Url pr |
Site pr |
Keywors 1 |
1.000.000 |
30.000 |
4,1 |
5,1 |
Keyword 2 |
2.000.000 |
15.000 |
3,7 |
4,4 |
As you can conclude very clearly is that keyword 1 is much more difficult than keyword 2 despite the number of results.
Our Keyword difficulty analysis tool does all this automatically in a matter of minutes (the more keywords you want to analyse the longer it will take…). Try it! It’s free!
Without registration you can analyse maximum 3 keywords together. With registration you can analyse up to 50 keywords in one shot.
If you need we have an enhanced tool. It does all it, without limit and extends the keyword difficulty analysis with other deeper parameters. Contact us for details!
