How to Research Keyword Competition for Online Article Writers

Are you researching your keyword competition for your article titles? It's true you need to write for the reader, but you can write for Google too, at the same time. Your goal should be to word your title in such a way that a listing to your article will appear on the first page of Google results when your readers search for your keyword phrase. If your article listing is not within the first page of search results, chances are most people will not look beyond it and you will lose multiple potential readers. Here's how to make sure that doesn't happen.

Your Competition

Your competition is not as great as you may think. Try this example. Go to Google and type in the words "keyword competition", without quotes. You will notice the number of search results listed in the upper right hand corner. As of this writing, there are 2,610,000 listings. Wow, that's a lot. You are thinking, how am I ever going to compete with all those results for the first page?

Now, go to the bottom of the page and scroll through to the end of all 80 pages of results. You will see that Google has really only indexed 795 of those results. The rest are not listed and live in what's termed Google's "sandbox", the place where duplicate and irrelevant content lives. Notice Google's explanation: "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 795 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included". Now how many people do you think are going to do that? Right, no one I know and this applies to any keyword phrase. So we've just eliminated over two million entries of the competition and we're not done yet.

Keyword Quotes

Click back in the search box and type quotes around "keyword competition" and search again. This is the exact phrase your reader types in when searching for information on your topic. Notice the 121,000 results listed in the upper right hand of the screen. According to Travis Sago of bum marketing fame, that number should be between 5,000 to 10,000 to get on the first page of Google results. Our number tells us our keyword phrase is significantly competitive. However, not all those listings contain the keyword phrase in the title. Let's pare it down some more.

Allintitle:

Go back to the search box and type in the word allintitle: with the colon and no space before "keyword competition". We want results below 1000. Click search and notice there are only 327 listings with our keyword in the title. We stand an excellent chance of getting on the front page of Google results using our keyword phrase.

After you have chosen your article topic, choose your main keywords and type them into the Google search box using allintitle:"Your keyword phrase". If your results are above 1000, add another relevant word to your keyword phrase. Such as "research keyword competition" used in the example above. This is known as a "long tail keyword" or keyword phrase that is three or more words. Using long tail keywords eliminates even more competition for the first page, yet relevant enough that your readers will find your articles.