Keyword Competition Analysis & Ranking #1 in Google

Getting your best web pages to rank #1 in Google or even on the first page of Google requires effective keyword competition analysis.

It sounds complicated but really it’s not. In fact it’s fast and simple. Don’t let analyzing the competition, or even the numbers of competing websites you may have, scare you.

In fact, one thing you’ll find out through this exercise is that you don’t really have very many competitors to worry about at all.  Really

Let’s take for example the search term “ADHD in children”.  If we enter that term (with quotes) into the Google search box, we see that it has over 200,000 search results.

That may seem like a lot of competing web pages but the only web pages you need to worry about are those on the first page, that’s it!

Remember, the search engines rank web pages, not websites, so it’s only the first 5-10 listings that really mean anything in terms of helping your page rank #1; the rest don’t matter.

The keyword competition analysis and Improving rank

I think we can all agree that how well your page ranks for a specific keyword phrase depends largely on the amount of high value backlinks you can get for that specific page.

If you can increase the quality and number of backlinks to your web page and have them be as good or better than the web pages listed on the first page of Google, you have a very good chance of getting your page to rank in the top 10 or even #1 Google position.

Let’s look again at our example keyword phrase “ADHD in children”.

Doing a quick once over

Before doing anything, it’s a good idea to take a quick glance at the sites that come up for your keyword phrase.

If you type “ADHD in children” in the Google search bar you can see right away that sites like About.com, WebMd, Mayo Clinic and CHADD come up.   These are high profile sites and will be hard to compete against.

This automatically tells me that I will want to find a more specific keyword phrase.

Using Wordtracker I found a few more specific terms like ‘what causes ADHD in children’ or ‘dealing with ADHD in children’.

For the keyword phrase “dealing with ADHD in children”, I can see that the sites listed are looking more like sites we can compete with, meaning they’re not super high profile sites that will be hard to compete against.

Our keyword competition analysis is about evaluating the number of inbound links to these sites that rank on the first page of Google.

Keep in mind that your search engine ranking is not only determined by inbound links.  Your web page optimization, the quality of the links you receive, how relevant your content is and your own internal linking strategy all play key roles in ranking, but all things being equal, you can help your most important pages rank on the first page of Google by improving the number and quality of your inbound links.

How to analyze the Links of the top ranking pages

In this example we’ll start by looking at the number of links for each of the pages listed above.

Step 1. Go to Google.com and type in your keyword phrase in quotes just as we did above.  For this example we’ll use  “dealing with ADHD in children”

Step 2. Open a new window for Yahoo.com.

Step 3. Click on the first listing from step 1 and copy the web page address to your clipboard.

Step 4. Paste the link from your clipboard to the search bar of Yahoo using this command:

link:http://womanmagz.com/natural-ways-for-dealing-with-adhd-in-children/

The Yahoo search will return the following:

Where it says ‘show inlinks’  select ‘except from this domain’.  That will give you the sites that are linking in.  As you can see this web page has only 5 incoming links from other sites.

Repeat this process for the first 5-10 sites that come up on Google for your keyword phrase. If you’ve chosen  a good keyword niche phrase you’re likely to find out that your chances of competing against these pages won’t take long at at all.

For this example, I noticed that for each of the pages listed on Google, not one of them had more than 15 inbound links.  That means if you can get anywhere from 6-15 inbound links to your page, you’ll have a good chance of ranking higher than those sites on Google for that term.

This may be more work than you’ll want to do for every one of your web pages, however for your best site pages or blog posts that you want to rank well for, this type of keyword competition analysis has the potential to improve your search engine ranking quickly.

More Good Stuff...

1. Improving Your Google Keyword Ranking
2. Google Ranking: Factors that Influence Your Web Pages
3. Keyword Research & The Long Tail
4. Analyzing The Competition – Who Are They?
5. Building Inbound Links Using Keyword Rich Anchor Text

Tagged as: seo/sem