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The level of competition your chosen keyword has can play an important part in your success. While some completely ignore competition if you target low competition keywords it can certainly make your life a lot easier. How do you find these low competition products and keyword phrases? There’s two parts to the process.

1. Keyword research

One key ingredient to finding lower competition products and keywords is to go more specific when choosing what to promote. While there may be a ton of people searching for words like “back pain” or “diet” the chances of ranking for those keywords is slim. It will take tons and tons of time and effort. Instead of going so broad and general look for specific solutions to that problem. Then find keywords that are particular to those products to use.

For example you might find an inversion table helps with back pain. You can go in and look for keywords about inversion tables. The more specific you can get the better. You may find there are quite a few people searching for a specific make/model of inversion table. This is ideal. Instead of targeting “back pain” you can then target the specific model inversion table people are looking for. This does a couple of things. It gives you a keyword with less competition, but it also gives you a keyword to target that is much farther along in the buying cycle and will most likely result in more sales.

2. Identifying the level of competition

No matter what keyword you choose to target it’s important to be able to identify how much competition you are likely to have. There are a many different ways to do this. Every internet marketer has his/her favorite way. I’ll show you a couple here, and with some testing you’ll be able to figure out which is your favorite as well.

Average PR:

While Google continually tells us that PR is an obsolete measure, it does still give you a relatively good estimate of competition. You’ll want to go to Google and put in the keyword you’ve chosen to target. Then you’ll want to check the PR (page rank) of each site on the first page (10 sites). When you get all the PRs for the first page you want to add them together. If they equal 30 or less it’s a decent keyword. This is a down and dirty way to check competition, but it is fairly accurate.

Competing pages:

Many people use this one, although it’s my least favorite and I feel the least accurate, but it will give you a starting place and an idea of the competition. This one entails going to Google and putting the keyword or keyword phrase you want to target in quotes. Then you check on the number of other sites that are targeting your keyword. Now depending on what you’re going to do with this keyword you will be looking for different numbers.

Software:

The easiest and probably most accurate way is to use a piece of keyword research software. I personally use micro niche finder. It has a column you can click and see the level of competition for each keyword. This measure is based on a variety of different things so it gives you a pretty good idea what the actual competition is going to be.

As you can see there are many ways to determine the level of competition you may be facing with any given keyword you decide to target. It’s important to at least have an idea of the level of competition before you start building a site. If your competition is too high you won’t be able to get search engine ranking and it will be hard to get traffic, unless you decide to pay for it.

Source: Ezinearticles

Filed under: Internet Marketing