What's important when checking competition strength?

[Silla]

Hi everyone,

Could anyone explain to me which factors are important when checking competition strength for keywords? I am having some trouble picking a niche for an adsense site because I'm not sure if the keywords I've found are too difficult to rank for.

In the Adsense 100k Blueprint they say to check the PR and number of backlinks to the top 10 pages, and by doing that I found some keywords I had never found before. But when I did a complete SEOC analysis in Market Samurai, I found out why: these pages are very strong in other areas, like domain age (over 10 years), index count (over a million or two), backlinks to the domain (from thousands to millions), and listed in the Yahoo directory. Are these factors important? Would I be able to outrank websites like WebMD and Wikipedia for certain keyword phrases?

The reason I'm asking first and not just going with what is written in A100K is because when I did The Challenge last year they said other factors were important too, and now I'm not sure who to believe. I only have enough money to buy one domain name, and I can't spend a month working on a site only to realize I'm never going to rank for it.

Any insight is appreciated.

[livonian]

Hi Silla,

I suggest you look the video on this thread:

http://vitavee.com/forums/thread-329.html

Also I think A100K is teaching you a wrong approach. Why? Offical PR is updated only couple of times a year. But when a web page gets new backlinks its authority rises almost immediately to the level of PR it will receive in the future. What I'm trying to say is that, the PR might already be there, but it's not showing when you do the check.

So if you are checking the PRs of the competitors you may find PR0 webpages, but in reality they have built a ton of backlinks since the last update and they would be very hard to beat.
Also the number of backlinks is only general truth about backlinks, you have to also analyse where are they coming from. Are they coming from severeal domains or only from one domain (site wide links) and what's very improtant is the anchor text of the links coming in. Some sites may have a ton of links, but if there aren't many back links with exact keyword you want to rank for in the anchor text they will be easier to outrank.

Quite often you will find search results where you have mostly authority sites on page 1, though their on-page SEO for the keyword is quite poor. Most people get scared by the big name of a website(wikipedia) and the number of backlinks and leave the keyword, in my opinion these sites are ranking because nobody has optimized their websites or pages for these keywords. But search engines have to rank somebody, don't they?

Example:

If we search Google for: "i want to see if wikipedia's the killers page is first for this keyword" these are the results we get:



Now do you honestly think you couldn't outrank wikipedia and imdb for this keyword? If you search the same keyword in quotes you get zero results, because nobody has this exact keyword in their content. So it would be enough to make a post on any site and have this exact keyword in your content and you would probably be ranking first.

And to back up my claims I have decided to give it a try. I created a small article or pitch as they call it on a site pitchengine.com

And here are the results:




As you can see, I am ranking #1 for this keyword only 5 minutes and 57 seconds later. Actually it was even faster, because I didn't check it earlier and it took some time to take the snapshot again.

That's why I think guys from A100K are giving bad advice.

The other factors you talked about are important, but not as much as your content and the backlinks to your page. Vita is using Keyword Elite 2 in the video, I don't have Market Samurai, but I think you would be able to the same things with it.

Check out the video I referred to earlier

And the answer to your question: "Would I be able to outrank websites like WebMD and Wikipedia for certain keyword phrases?", is that you most certainly can.

[Silla]

Thank you very much for the effort you went to to help me with these questions, livonian! I just rewatched the video, and I think I have to go through that whole course again and take detailed notes this time. I just wish we knew what factors Keyword Elite uses when calculating competition strength, so that I could check the same things in Market Samurai!

I do think it might be quite a bit harder to rank for the phrases I'm talking about though, because my website won't be the only one with that exact phrase, and the top 10 ranking pages will be partially optimized for them (and WebMD is all about health, so Google will probably think it's highly relevant even if it's not only about the niche I choose, right?).

Quote:So if you are checking the PRs of the competitors you may find PR0 webpages, but in reality they have built a ton of backlinks since the last update and they would be very hard to beat.

So assuming my content is well optimized and I consistently build targeted backlinks every day (manually for now), what is the max PR that I could probably beat for a page that is partially optimized for the same keyword? A100k says to consider pages with max PR4, but after reading what you wrote I'm worried that some of my competition might actually be stronger than I think! Now is probably the best time to check though, because I read in this forum earlier that PR has just been updated.

Thank you for stressing the importance of analyzing the backlinks - I've only been doing it here and there because my internet connection is so slow and so it takes a very long time for Market Samurai to get all the data, but now I will try to do it for all the keywords.

[livonian]

You're welcome

Many keyword tools have some sort of indicator about the difficulty of keyword, but none of them is 100% right. You just have to use your common sense or if you are afraid to decide yourself then I believe Market Samurai has this feature as well, I don't think the results will vary too much between different tools.

Quote:(and WebMD is all about health, so Google will probably think it's highly relevant even if it's not only about the niche I choose, right?)

If the niche you choose is a subniche of health then yes, but you should check the exact page for on-page SEO that is ranking the way Vita did in a video.

I am not sure about the max PR, cause I have never given so much attention to the PR. And the question is in which time frame you want to beat your competitors, all keywords are rankable, if you have enough time.

Checking backlinks is important, but I don't want you to get stuck to things that aren't making you any money(checking backlinks won't make you any money, unless you offer it as a service) because of me, so if your competitors are pages from high authority websites(lots of indexed pages) with thousands of backlinks to the page you are trying to outrank and they have done their basic seo, keyword term in page title, description, and H1 title, then don't bother with checking the backlinks. First of all it would take too much time to crawl these links and second it would take a lot of time to go through the data.
If you are beginning I would stay away from niches like that...you would have to wait for results too long and it's discouraging to work without seeing results and I think by doing everything manually it would be too big effort.

---

One more thing I would like to add about PR. I believe there are many other examples like this one, but I took time to check "make money online" and there are several PR3 pages outranking PR5 site, though they are all optimized. So as you read about the PR update on this forum you know that PR4 is very achievable and with that I believe it's safe to say that you can outrank PR6. But again, you have to think how much time you have to see the results. If you have money only for one domain then I think it's important to make this one a success story

[Jack]

Hey livonian, you made the news!

http://news.yahoo.com/topics/wikipedia

[livonian]

Hey Jack,

Eh that's funny I actually now own three first results for this term, first is pitchengine, second is this forum and third is yahoo news.

[Silla]

(01-25-2011 03:13 AM)livonian Wrote:  Many keyword tools have some sort of indicator about the difficulty of keyword, but none of them is 100% right. You just have to use your common sense or if you are afraid to decide yourself then I believe Market Samurai has this feature as well, I don't think the results will vary too much between different tools.

Yes, MS has a similar function but it rates each factor, not the overall difficulty. This is why I was asking which factors are important to consider.

(01-25-2011 03:13 AM)livonian Wrote:  I am not sure about the max PR, cause I have never given so much attention to the PR. And the question is in which time frame you want to beat your competitors, all keywords are rankable, if you have enough time.

I am hoping to create a website that will start earning in about a month if possible.

(01-25-2011 03:13 AM)livonian Wrote:  Checking backlinks is important, but I don't want you to get stuck to things that aren't making you any money(checking backlinks won't make you any money, unless you offer it as a service) because of me, so if your competitors are pages from high authority websites(lots of indexed pages) with thousands of backlinks to the page you are trying to outrank and they have done their basic seo, keyword term in page title, description, and H1 title, then don't bother with checking the backlinks.

The keywords I am considering are ones in which there are competitors in the top 5 that have PR4 or less, and less than 300 backlinks to that specific page (these are the parameters A100K suggests, the thousands of backlinks I was referring to are to the whole domain). I will check if the keyword terms are in H1 tags and a few times in the article, thanks for pointing that out. And don't worry about causing me to get stuck checking backlinks, I'll only do it for keywords that seem rankable. I'm currently letting Market Samurai churn away at them while I rewatch Vita's videos, so I'm not wasting any time

(01-25-2011 03:13 AM)livonian Wrote:  But again, you have to think how much time you have to see the results. If you have money only for one domain then I think it's important to make this one a success story

You're exactly right, if I choose the wrong niche and my site flops it's going to be a disaster for me. On the one hand I'm not very confident I can beat PR4 sites since I have never had one go above PR0, (though maybe I'll be able to do better now that I know more about keyword research and backlinking - I don't think I did very much of either on my previous blogs). On the other hand it has already been very difficult to find keywords with low enough competition to meet the A100K parameters, so I don't know how long it will take me to find easier ones.

I will do the things you suggested and go over the videos again, and try to get a clearer idea whether I can rank for these keywords or not. Already I have seen some promising things from checking the backlinks of a few of the keywords - it seems some of the top ranking pages are actually targeting phrases that are slightly different to the ones I'm considering (eg. 1 word in the phrase is the same, and the other is different).

[vij]

IMO every internet marketer MUST get Market samurai. Its just one time payment. The tutorials that come with the software are by itself worth twice the money. The definitive market analysis tool.

[rjsocial]

Hi liv, This is really a very interesting discussion here. So much so that I had to join this forum (which I don't do usually).

I watched the video and am motivated by it and want to throw my top dollar in it. So I did some research and locked on to this keyword that has approx 33000 searches per month according to GAW. It has 159 results to allintitle but approx 74000 to "keyphrase". There are no pages with more than pr0 on "keyphrase" results page.

How difficult or easy do you think it would be to rank this page. and yes .com is available for this KW.

previously (about more than a year ago) I tried to do something with summercrafts.info but eventually even couldn't renew it. But then I hadn't read this discussion. This time I want to take chances again. Please help.