Keyword Research Concepts
Keyword Competition
Another important concept in Keyword Research is keyword competition. This information can help you assess the difficulty of being able to do well in a particular market, from both a search engine ranking perspective, as well as a business competition perspective.
There are a two common methods that Keyword Research tools use to give an indicator of competition. The first one is called the R/S ratio, which shows the ratio of searches to web pages containing that keyword or keyword phrase. So basically the tool compares how many times something is searched for against how many pages are found in the search engine with that keyword or phrase included in the page.
The second common indicator is KEI, which stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index. This is very similar to R/S. However, it's weighted so the higher the keyword volume, the more tolerance it has to lots of competing pages. So keywords or phrases with lots of searches will have a higher KEI compared with ones that have fewer searches, even though their R/S ratio may be exactly the same.
Both of these measures certainly are of some use. However, they are both fundamentally flawed because they assume that the number of pages on the Internet for a given keyword is a reliable measure of competition. I don’t believe it is. In general, I choose to ignore these indicators until other factors are put into the equation.
In reality, it doesn’t matter how many competing pages you are up against. All that matters is how good are the websites that appear on the first (and maybe second) page that a search engine returns for a query. So how good are the top 10 results? Are they well optimized? Are they already popular, high traffic sites? Do lots of people like those sites and consequently have lots of links pointing to them? If you want to get real competition analysis, you should include factors such as Incoming Links, Keyword Density, PageRank, and Alexa Rank to name just a few. These provide a better way of assessing competition in real terms.
Unfortunately, only one or two tools on the market actually use these measures. Most tools stick to R/S and KEI. However, I'm hoping that as these tools evolve, they will begin to use these more advanced methods to indicate competition.
Article Series
This article is part 1 of a 2 part series. Other articles in this series are shown below:
- Keyword Research Concepts
- Different Tools, Different Reasons
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