Analyze Keyword Competitiveness by Checking its Competition

Keyword competitiveness is one of the most important factors you need to put your focus on when it comes to search engine optimization. It is your job to search for the right keywords or key phrases that you can use on your website or blog in order for your own page to show up on the top list. But looking for good keywords for your site and choosing the better words you can put on your page content would be hard especially for those who just started. Almost all newbie kept on asking these types of questions: how will you know the competitiveness of a keyword or how will you know how competitive a keyword is?

In order to verify the competitiveness of a keyword, you need to do these simple steps.

First, open a web browser and go to Google homepage. We will use Google's search engine since it is currently the best source of organic traffic. Just type in your keyword in the search field and search for it. Let’s say your niche is about "shoes" and you are selling "basketball shoes". One of your pages could probably be about shoes for kiddies. Let's use - basketball shoes for kids - as our main key phrase. Then a list of web pages will return. The total number that will show up would be the total number of sites using the keyword that you searched.

We can see here that the estimated number of sites that are using this keyword is about 4.5 million. It means that this is the total number of your competitors using it. But don't think that way too much. It is possible that not more than 90% of these competitors might be using the keyword on broad or phrase type. It means that each word from your exact keyphrase is just scattered all over the page content and could be possible that the content itself is not delivering the exact information a visitor needs.

Let's skip to the next step. We also need to check the estimated number of websites competing for the exact keyword phrase. We have to search the same key phrase - "basketball shoes for kids" - including quotes. This way we can see the estimated number of websites competing for this exact phrase.

Same with the first result, we can see the estimated number of webpages using this same keyword. But this time, we can see the estimated number of competitors using the keyphrase in order and in exact match is about 171,000. That is a lot number of competitors to beat up. But this is just an example. If you are a pro, that range is just a piece of cake. But for starters, it would be a lot.

You could try to add another word to make it less competitive like - Nike basketball shoes for kids - which might cut your competitors by half. Try to research for it without and with quotes to determine the estimated number of competitors for broad and phrase match type against the exact match type.

For a less but decent competitive keyword, a maximum of at least 30,000 search results in quotes will do for starters. Just keep on brainstorming and do the steps over and over until you find the best keyword for your website or blog. Then once you have acquired some good keywords, another tip would be to search for it with - allintitle: - including the colon in the search box. You can type it like this - allintitle:nike basketball shoes for kids - to check the estimated number of sites competing for the given key phrase included in their post title or site title.

Applying your keyword on your title tags is one of the SEO tricks you need to learn when optimizing a website.

Well, there you have it. Once you have mastered the use of keywords to your website, you can then stand a chance to get into the top of SERP even on a much competitive keywords or key phrase.

Good luck with it!