Low or High Competition Keywords

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   Learning in Lifeposted 11 years ago

   I'm having an issue deciding what keywords to go after. Most of the lower competition words I'm not as interested in and it takes me longer to write since I'm not enjoying. But, most of the things I'm very interested in are harder to rank for but I can pump out hubs on those subjust easily. So, do I go for the articles I like writing but probably won't rank for or the ones I know I can rank for but don't enjoy as much?

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      wildernessposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      What is your ultimate goal?  To write, to be read or to earn?
      
      If it is to write, write what you enjoy.
      
      If it is to be read or to earn that requires traffic, which in turn requires being ranked on at least the first page.  Best write what you can rank for.

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         Learning in Lifeposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         My ultimate goal is to earn but I'd like to enjoy it too

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   2. 72

      chefmancaveposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      I have spent much energy and programming time to the endeavor of Keyword research for writing articles. I am by no means a expert but I have analyzed keywords with many different methods. I use the Adwords Competition rating to tell me how hard it will be to get an article in the top 5 of Google. I use KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) to determine the amount of traffic I can expect to receive over time. I like to keep my Keywords under 10,000 Global Searches. I then use an "Article Rating" (My own invention) to determine the best Keywords to use in my title of the article and what Keywords to focus on throughout the article. My two best examples are the "Best Golf GPS" and "Top 5 Animated Movies" articles. Both articles achieved a top 5 Google ranking in less than 1 month. They both average about 70 hits per day from Google. They both average about 5 orders from Amazon per month.

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      That Grrlposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Read about copywriting rather than shoving keywords in for the sake of making your reader gag on them. If you have done well in writing the post you should have enough keywords naturally in the content. If you write for Google you aren't writing for people who will actually read your post. At that point, what is the point of writing at all? Just stuff a ton of keywords together, they don't even have to be complete sentences or use punctuation. Google may rank your post high, but Google doesn't actually read it.

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2. 84

   Marisa Wrightposted 11 years ago

   How are you deciding what the competition is?
   
   The competition column in Google Adwords reflects competition by advertisers, not by writers, and isn't relevant.

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      Learning in Lifeposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      I was using the competition column of Google Adwords. I didn't realize that is what it referred to. So how can I find out the competition of writers?

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         wildernessposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         Search for your keyword and see how many results are returned.
         
         Then look at the first page results; are they from dot gov, retail sites, Youtube or other authoritative sites?  If so, you'll have trouble ranking.  Look to see how many have your exact keyword in the title - the more the harder to rank.

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   2. 72

      chefmancaveposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Google's Competition rating does have a small bit of relevancy. If you choose a keyword with a lot of advertising competition that usually means you will  be competing against websites that have a huge budget and resources devoted to SEO optimization. With that said, I still try occasionally to compete for a tough Keyword. My success has been poor.

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3. 55

   mcxniftycallsposted 11 years ago

   If you search and dig more you will find many low competition "Long Tail Keywords" which is easy to rank and get in search results. Try to find Long Tail Keywords ( A Sentence or Phrase of 6-10 words) related to your topic and write article about, you will definitely get hit from Google search.
   For me even High Competition keyword getting awesome traffic from Google as HubPages is already a high page rank website.

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      chefmancaveposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      You are absolutely right. That is why I created my "Article Rating Index" system. I have thousands of phrases in spreadsheets relating to different topics. Most of the terms or phrases have low ARI scores. I would estimate that less than 1.5% of Keyphrases have high ARI scores. If you are interested in opening a discussion on the ARI method, send me email to chef@chefmancave.com

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4. 67

   rfmoranposted 11 years ago

   Following HP guidelines in the Learning Center, I try to shoot for low competition keywords with 500 to 40,000 hits a month. That said, If I have an idea that I simply have to write about, I will sacrifice and go with it.

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      Marisa Wrightposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      I haven't read that article in the Learning Center.  How does it tell you to assess competition?  If it's using the competition column in Adwords, then I'm seriously worried at HubPages' staff's competence.

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         wildernessposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         Marisa, look at my earlier post.  That comes from the AP course, which I think comes from the learning center.  Add that we should look at videos; it's increasingly hard to compete.
         
         No numbers for what is a reasonable number of competitors: I try to keep it under a million, won't go over 10 million and am ecstatic at less than 100,000.

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         1. 84

            Marisa Wrightposted 11 years agoin reply to this

            If that's the case, then I'm relieved. I'd still like the OP to confirm what the article said - there's an awful lot of articles in the Learning Center and some of them are outdated.  I'd agree with you on the number of competitors, though I always find the numbers scarily big!

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               wildernessposted 11 years agoin reply to this

               The 500-40,000?  That was the figure we were given for searches, not competition.
               
               It is also with both "exact" and "broad" both checked.  I do find it useful to use both, but will take keywords down to 200 "exact".  It will never be great, but I'm already using keywords at less than that that do very well by using multiple keywords.
               
               The broad setting is, to me, more of a gut feeling type of thing.  More searches than that (on "broad") nearly always means huge competition so I generally try to stay considerably lower.  Big numbers there seem to me to mean that G is having a little trouble in limiting the number of results to what is actually being written about.  You probably need a longer "tail", and the result is that your competition is actually about many topics, but that's what you're going to be fighting.

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      2. 67

         rfmoranposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         It advises you to click on both broad and exact on match types. The Guidelines do not recommend the column for Competition but I couldn't figure out how it hurts. It only recommends the global monthly searches and the CPC columns be checked

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5. 94

   vespawoolfposted 11 years ago

   The HubPages LC article that talks about shooting for 500 to 50,000 global monthly searches is titled "How to Create Search-Friendly Titles (2)". After finding a low competition title I use "Google Page Rank Checker" to rate the competition. If my title will compete against the big boys, I choose another that doesn't have such stiff competition.

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      Car CharityDonateposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      What is the Google Page Rank Checker?

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         Learning in Lifeposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

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            Car CharityDonateposted 11 years agoin reply to this

            Thank you, Learning in Life! I'll go check it out!

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