[PanCorp]

Hey,
I'm starting a new website, and am doing some keyword research. What is considered competitive? I'm trying to get the keywords that are moderately competitive.. for I do not have the resources to optimize for very competitive keywords.

So would you consider search results with more than 2 million, 3 million, 5 million or.... ??? ... to be very competitive and just moderately competitive?

thanks!

[EGOL]

The number of pages that qualify for inclusion in a SERP has some bearing on how difficult it will be to earn top rankings. However a more important factor is how much money is changing hands. There are some search terms with few sites competing but fierce competition.

IMO, better measures of difficulty are the amount of bidding on ppc ads and the number of backlinks hitting the pages with top rankings.

[danielmar]

i think that 1 M is enough competition.

[SEO_AM]

One of the best indicators: how many Google AdWords are on the page? You can find keywords with millions of page with little to no
AdWords = not too competitive. You will find other keyword SERP results that have less than a hundred thousand pages with 5-10 AdWords advertisements = very competitive.

[sorvoja]

Good question.

For some terms I am seing hard competition on search terms with only a smaller number of potensial results. And sometimes there are search terms with millions of results with next to none real competition. It all depends on how many there are out there who wants to rank in the top ten, top 20, top 50 etc. and how much money they are willing to spend.

[earlpearl]

I agree totally with SEO AM and EGOL. I'm in a category with less than 100,000 phrases but there are many PPC ads and the top sites have dramatically more backlinks than those below. We are 6th in google for the main keyword phrase. We have significantly less bls than those above us. For the most part they have more sitewides and/or more internal pages. We have managed to get to where we are by allinurl, allinanchor, and slowly growing our overall backlinks while trying to add a good number of themed backlinks. We are marginally better than sites above us in total backlinks.


Of interest, and I don't know the impact of this, but our total of unique url backlinks is slowly approximating the number of backlinks of the sites above us for our main keywords. We will see if that moves us up slowly. We specifically focus on anchor text both for the main keyword phrase and variations. While the main kw phrase is reasonably competitive the lesser ones are dramatically less competitive, especially for anchor text. We are seeing excellent gains for the less competitive phrases by adding some bls with specific anchor text.

As you compete look hard at the # of backlinks for the sites at the top and also look at variations of the main keywords.

Dave