An Update to the Keyword Empire Series

In the past couple of months I've been intensely immersed in internet marketing and I've learned a lot of new things. One of the things I've learned is something that I now know is pretty basic, but hey I didn't know it and I was having success without it so I didn't realize there was a problem. But I'd like to share that update with readers of the Google Keyword Empire Series.

In the Keyword Research installment, I outlined the method of checking how much competition there is for a keyword phrase by searching for the phrase in brackets in Google and counting how many results there are. The fewer the results, the lower the competition. That is true, but there is more to it than that. We also have to look at the quality of the results that are at the top of the Google results for that phrase.

To test how much quality competition there is, it's best to search for the keyword phrase without brackets, and look at the results on page 1, particularly the top 4 or 5 results. What do those sites look like? Are they authority sites? Authority sites are well-known and trusted sites within a particular niche that have a lot of content and have built up a lot of backlinks over time. If you were searching for something related to internet marketing, and Joel Comm's site was on page 1 -- that's an authority site and you would be up against serious competition -- you won't outrank that site. If you saw this blog, however, there would be a good chance you'd outrank it. That's because this blog is new, it doesn't have a lot of content yet, and it doesn't have a big readership yet. It's definitely not an authority site.

In addition to quality, look at how optimized the top results are for your keyword phrase of choice. If you are checking competition for the keyword phrase "Monkeys are the coolest animals" (totally random idea), but top results don't contain that exact phrase, or they aren't very optimized for it (like it only appears once in the text content), there's a good chance you can outrank them for that phrase. Often you can not outrank an authority site, even when you are optimized for that exact phrase but they aren't. But if the top results are not authority sites, or they're kind of second rate authority sites, you can probably outrank them for that phrase if they are not well optimized for it.

While my original keyword research method brought me a lot of success, there were times when I did the keyword research but I still didn't get any search traffic for my target keywords. Those cases were because I neglected to look at the quality of the competition, both the authority of the site and the degree of optimization. If you incorporate a quality check into your keyword research, you will have even more power in determining how much competition there is.