Keyword Strategy For Beginners: Understanding Keyword Competition Levels

How Search Engine Ranking Competition Affects Visitor Traffic

Just the other day I received an email from someone complimenting one of my websites and saying that she was adding a link to it on her site. She also shared how she wanted to make money from her site, but was struggling to understand how in the heck to “get found” online in order to get lots of visitor traffic.

I clicked over to check it out and oh dear … it was pretty much what I expected to see.  Sadly, though I saw a website that was built around excellent efforts and perhaps a pretty good niche, I saw blunder after blunder in every aspect one could imagine IF INDEED one wishes to not only appear in the search engine results which brings the visitors, but more importantly wishes to make some serious money from that site.

So … why are some people smiling about their search engine rankings and the levels of traffic they receive, and others are bemoaning about trying to figure out how to get traffic? My best assumption is easy to make.  If anyone is wondering how to “get visitors”, then right there I know that the individual is unaware of even the most basic of SEO and keyword strategy fundamentals.

I’ve got lots of great posts about keyword research and such in the Keyword category, so please check it out and read the posts to educate yourself.  But today I want to touch upon a very important aspect that needs to be considered when doing your keyword research.

Keyword Strategy – Research the Competitiveness Level

Let’s define what competitiveness of a keyword phrase is.  It means how many other websites on the internet are using that exact keyword phrase – such as “vegetarian recipes” – that you want to target in the content of your web page.

There  are a number of ways to perform keyword phrase research, and this post isn’t attempting to tackle all of them, rather I want to easily show one way that beginners can use to help figure out what keywords they should target.

Remember now, I said this is but one of many ways to help determine keyword strategy. But it can give good insight to those of you starting out.

As a very general rule, when you type your search term into Google a page of results will be returned.  You will see this (click image for full size):

**Note the areas I’ve circled at the top of this image.  You see the SERP (search engine result pages) result for the keyword phrase.

On the following chart, let’s look at some numbers:

• If there are less than 100,000 SERPs returned for a keyword phrase that phrase can be considered low competition.
• If you find between 100,000 and 1,000,000 SERPs for a keyword phrase, that phrase is considered a medium level of competition.
• If you see SERPs over 1 million … I’d recommend you not try to go after that keyword phrase until you’ve got a good sized site that utilizes lots of medium to low competition phrases.

SERPs In Google	Competition Level
< 100,000	Low
100,000 – 1,000,000	Medium
1,000,000 >	High

 

However, if you’re entering into a highly competitive niche – such as “computer equipment”, a keyword phrase with 50,000 results can most likely be considered highly competitive. Much does hinge upon the niche and the other websites attention to SEO and other factors.

It is necessary to formulate keyword strategy on a site-by-site, niche-by-niche basis. Everyone wants their website to achieve top rankings for targeted traffic. One must come up with a well researched and thought-out list of keywords to target, whether you’re a beginner or expert. In the case of most online marketers who are just starting out, keyword strategy means they should start building content around slightly less competitive phrases, and then work their way up to including web page content on higher competition phrases.

Good traffic boils down to proper keyword research coupled with effective keyword strategy coupled with great content.