Keyword Research Question - Competition Analysis

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   DCnewsposted 15 years ago

   How do you evaluate the competition when doing keyword research?
   
   I would love to hear some of the criteria people use.

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2. 70

   brakel2posted 15 years ago

   I try to pick the areas where the green color is not filling the whole box, as that is too much competition. I go with those that are about half full or a little over. I am new, but I have tried to learn a lot about keywords.

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3. 67

   easyspeakposted 15 years ago

   I think those green boxes are advertiser competition not publisher competition.

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      N. Ramiusposted 15 years agoin reply to this

      That's what I always thought. All other things being equal, I always assumed that if the bar was full you had a better chance of earning higher clicks as advertisers are bidding more with each other.

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         sunforgedposted 15 years agoin reply to this

         that is true - you are more likley to earn 50-75% of the listed cpc

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            travelespressoposted 15 years agoin reply to this

            Thanks for that information.  That will help to to clarify some decisions for me.  Previously I'd avoided keywords if the green bar was full.

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      Peter Hogganposted 15 years agoin reply to this

      That’s correct easyspeak, also the numbers of page impressions and cpc are meaningless metrics for publishers.
      
      CPC will be altered by smart pricing and quality score and if you are targeting B2B terms most of the high paying ads will be turned off outside working business hours and at weekends. This can happen to some B2C terms as well.
      
      The number of page impressions shown by the Google Adwords keyword tool will never be achieved by an organic ranking even if you have a number one position, analytics will prove that.
      
      The tool is useful for gaining keyword ideas but will tell you nothing about how competitive a keyword is organically or anything about how much you will earn for an Adsense click.
      
      As sunforged says, you need to look at the first 4 or 5 organic results that are returned for your term and reverse engineer how they have managed it in order to evaluate how competitive an keyword is.

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   sunforgedposted 15 years ago

   correct, the advertiser competition bar means very little to you as a publisher
   
   You must examine your first page competition, backlinks, age, overall quality - maybe PR

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   sunforgedposted 15 years ago

   I dont know why I said 50-75% ..i only found one reference ever to how much google shares with its publishers.
   
   In an article from 2004ish in the new york times they claimed to share 60% of all revenue with publishers. You could make less..I dont think you can make more.

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      easyspeakposted 15 years agoin reply to this

      what's your favorite tool for this?  I use SEO for Firefox.  It's not good at giving me age or backlinks of a page, just the domain unfortunately.

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         sunforgedposted 15 years agoin reply to this

         seo for firefox gives you both of those metrics.
         
         backlinks are via yahoo site explorer and domain age is also displayed - check your plug -in options, Im imagining you just dont have the feature enabled.
         
         But, I use seo quake on my main machine

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   brakel2posted 15 years ago

   I read that if there is a lot of advertiser competition, your chance of making money with the keyword went down. I  guess that I do not understand. It was an article by a very reputable  person who is an SEO specialist.So explain it a little more. Thanks.

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7. 69

   Peter Hogganposted 15 years ago

   As a publisher on HubPages it is organic traffic from search engines that drives page views and Adsense clicks. The level of competition reflected in the Google Adwords tool reflects how many advertisers are targeting keywords via Adwords which has nothing to do with how difficult a term will be to rank for organically.

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