Part of any search engine marketing strategy is finding out how competitive your keywords are. For niche pages, you can rank high quickly by choosing non-competitive keywords. How do you determine your keyword competition? Here are some keyword tools to help in your SEO strategy.

In this article, I'm assuming that you've already found some keyword phrases you'd like to rank for, and that you've found out that these keyword phrases have adequate search volume and pay a decent price per click. Now you need to find out whether there's too much competition for you to dominate your niche.

Google SEO tools

Google provides many free tools that can be used to analyze keyword competition. Let's take a look at a couple. The first is google itself. Suppose your keyword is "auto insurance." How many results do you get if you type in "auto insurance" (without quotes)? Here's your first proxy for keyword competitiveness. When I ran this query, I got 99 million results. This is an indication that this is a very competitive keyword and we might want to choose something else.

If you're still undeterred, query google with your keyword phrase in quotes. For "auto insurance" I get about 35 milion hits, which is still a whole bunch. The large number of results is another clue that this is a very competative keyword phrase. On the other hand, if you only get a few ten thousand hits, this might be a niche with less competition.

One way to tell if the pages you got in the last step are truly relevant to your keywords is to look at whether the keywords appear in the title of the page. We can check how many pages have your keywords (or keyword phrase) in the title using the google allintitle: modifier. For the example above, we would search for

allintitle: "auto insurance"

(with the quotes). Here we get more than a million hits, which is pretty much a deal breaker for a niche page. It would take a LOT of effort to rank highly for this keyword. Less competitive keywords would have at most a few ten thousand pages with your keyword in the title, and the best ones would only have a few hundred.

Other Keyword Tools

Another proxy for keyword competition is google's pagerank for the first few searches that appear in google for your keywords. Using the Firefox SEO toolbar, for example, you can search google for your keywords and examine the pagerank of the first ten results. If these have relatively low pagerank (0-3), you can probably move up easily. On the other hand, if the average pagerank is five or above, you'll probably have a difficult time.

Review

To check keyword competition:

• Run your query in google without quotes.
• Run your query in google with quotes. Here you should get less than a million hits unless you're willing to work hard for rankings.
• Run your query in google using the "allintitle:" modifier. Here, the best keywords will have only a few hundred or low thousands of hits.
• Optionally, check the pagerank of the first ten or so hits for your keywords. If the pageranks are low, you can probably rank high for those keywords.