Market Samurai SEO Competition
There are volumes of material written about niche market research. In this report, though, you’ll walk through a quick process that helps you weed out keyword phrases for which you cannot compete. Market Samurai’s SEO Competition module is a key differentiator between the Market Samurai keyword research tool and all other products.
Assessing the competition is perhaps the most important of the four Golden Rules. In fact the number one reason why people fail online is because they break this rule. Just like a boxer preparing for a fight, you need to have some idea what effort you’ll need to put forth to beat the competition. Remember, you are competing for front page ranking in Google. Typically, there are only 10 positions listed on the front page for your keyword phrase. There are many other websites competing for those same slots.
There at two aspects of Assessing the Competition.
1. How much competition is there for that keyword phrase?
2. What are the strengths of your competitors?
You used the Keyword Research filter SEOC to limit you keyword phrases to those with less than 100,000 (or 30,000) competing pages. That gives you some idea of the volume of competition for your word, but how do you evaluate the strength of your competition? This is where the SEO Competition module becomes your best competition spy buddy.
When you run an SEO Competition analysis for your keyword, you’ll be presented with a matrix that represents the level of competition there is for this keyword phrase from other websites currently in the top 10 positions. This is where you determine whether you can get into the first page of Google. You’ll also gain insight as to what you’ll have to do to get to beat your competition. This matrix gives you a neat and concise view of what you’ll compete against for both on page and off page SEO.
Here’s what the Off Page Data columns show you:
DA Domain Age: The age of a domain, according to the first registered date in WHOIS records.
PR PageRank: An indicator of the overall quantity and quality of links to a web-page, as determined by Google’s PageRank algorithm.
BLP Page Backlinks: The total number of links pointing to a web-page from outside of that web-site itself.
BLD Domain Backlinks: The total number of links pointing to an entire domain (whole web-site) from outside of that web-site itself.
BLEG Government / Education Page Backlinks: The total number of links pointing to a web-page from Government (.gov) and Educational (.edu) sources that are external to the web-site itself.
DMZ DMOZ Listing: Whether the site is listed in the Open Directory Project’s Directory.
YAH Yahoo! Listing: Whether the site is listed in the Yahoo! Directory.
Here’s what the On Page Data columns show you:
Title Keyword in Title Tags: Whether the web-page tag contains the keyword.
URL Keyword in URL: Whether the web-page URL contains the keyword.
Desc Keyword in META Description: Whether the keyword appears in the “description” tag.
Head Keyword in Header Tags: Whether the keyword appears in <H1>, <H2>, <H3>etc. tags within the page content itself.
CA Google Cache Age: The number of days since Google last re-indexed the page listed.
The On Page SEO results are flagged with a Y Means Yes’ or N Means No.’ Next, there are the color cues. The more red that appears in the columns means that this area will be much harder to rank highly. Yellow is a warning’ and the more green that is displayed means that you have a good shot at winning the fight for the top 10 positions. If your keyword phrase shows Green for the On Page SEO values, then you need to review the OFF Page values to see how many internal pages you need to create, page and domain backlinks as well as page ranking. Domain age may also need consideration, but don’t drop your keyword if you can compete in ON Page SEO and backlinking.
This is when experienced marketers and SEO gurus get excited because they fully recognize that assessing competition is a weak point in keyword analysis. The SEO Competition module does all the grunt work for you and presents it in a format that is easy to grasp. Now that you’ve got an idea how Market Samurai’s SEO Competition module works, fire up your own keyword analysis and see what shakes out for your own niche keywords.