Finding A Niche Keyword With Weak Competition
When you are doing keyword research and trying to find phrases for which you might
be able to rank in the search engine results, one of the most important considerations is the level of competition you'll face. Although it won't guarantee that you can make it to the first page, finding a low competition keyword phrase is definitely a good start. But how can you determine the strength of competition for a given keyword phrase?
Some keyword tools, such as Micro Niche Finder, offer a rating system by which they use certain factors to determine how strong the competition is for a given niche keyword. This can definitely be helpful, especially as a quick way to determine if further research is warranted. Of course, you may want to go beyond the mechanical calculation of a computer program to give you a greater level of confidence that you can truly compete.
Many marketers and webmasters rely on a more manual method of determining competition. They will go to the search engine they are targeting and type the keyword into the search box, usually in quotation marks. By doing this, they will see a raw number of results, which gives an indication of the number of competitors. Although this method has some definite limitations, for keywords that show a very small number of competitors it can be very reliable. For many niches, keywords with less than 5000 competing pages are considered easy targets.
Going beyond the number of competitors, a savvy marketer will analyze the pages that are on at least the first page, if not the first two or three. Since the object is usually to get your content to appear in the first ten results, and if possible at number one, these are often the only ones you need to scrutinize.
Either manually or by using a tool, such as Market Samurai, you can analyze the on-page and off-page factors that are understood to be responsible for getting a page into the top results. On-page factors that are important include the use of the keyword in the title tag, in a heading tag (usually H1), and a number of times in the text on the page.
These on-page factors help the search engines to understand what the page is about. Some other factors, such as latent semantic keywords, will give the search engine the right context. These are the words, other than the targeted keyword, that put the information into context.
The off-page factors that most influence your ranking are the number of links to your content and the anchor text used for those links. Search engines consider most links that point to your page to be like a vote for that page, helping move the content higher in the search rankings. Anchor text is the word or phrase that is used in the link, and the search engines usually consider this as a vote for that page relative to the word or phrase used.
When analyzing your competition for a given keyword, analyzing the on-page factors can tell you if the owner of that page was directly targeting your keyword. If they are, that makes them a stronger competitor. Analyzing the links coming into a page can tell you how many links it can take for you to get ahead of the competition.
In reality, there are almost endless factors which can be analyzed when looking at competition. If you find yourself spending too much time on this, step back and simplify. Almost no amount of research can guarantee success, so sometimes it is best to simply decide a keyword is good enough and just go for it. No matter how many different aspects you analyze, you'll never get ranked in the search engines if you don't get the page up and start getting some links.
Finding A Niche Keyword With Weak Competition
By: Chris Steiner
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