10 Tips to Use Google For Your Keyword Competition Analysis

The most important factor in any seo project is the keyword research, you need to do keyword research to choose some high searched keywords for your project. It is also very important to analyze the competition of your keyword to be able to do some estimate about the effort and the money those the project might cost, so if you are  seo company it is good to know that before quoting the customer.

You may ask yourself why do I need that, is not the highest searched keyword is the most competitive one ? And the answer is; not all the times.
So let us assume that you have done your keyword research using Overture and chosen your main keyword (I will assume that it is “search engine optimization“) and it is time to measure the competition of this keyword using Google, I will use this convention; I will ask you a quesiotn and when the answer is yes from your side so it means the keyword is more competitive:

1- Search this keyword in Google and check if you can see Google Adwords on the result page, if yes are they a lot ? Is there “more sponsored ads” link at the bottom of the ad column ? Can you see horizontal ads above the results ?
2- Scan the first two pages quickly, are most pages those shown on the results  home pages ?
3- Check Google PR for the results on the first page, is there a lot of them +5 ?
4- Use Google allintitle operator. allintitle:”search engine optimization“, big numbers (i.e. +10 000) is high competition indication
5- Use Google allinanchor operator. allinanchor:”search engine optimization“, when you see a big number it means there are a lot of seo practices being done for this key phrase, since anchor text is SEOs preferred technic
6- Use Google allinurl operator. allinanchor:”search engine optimization“, this also SEOs preferred technic when you see a lot of results then the guys there for you
7- Use Google allintext operator. allintext:”search engine optimization“, this is good to check how many websites have this key phrase in the body of the page
8- Check the number of results that Google returns are they a lot ?
9- Can you see results from Wikipedia ? this is another indication about competitive keywords since Google tend to show results from WikIpEdia for high searched broad keywords.
10- I am still looking for one, but as you know for promotional reasons you can’t say 9 tips