Keyword Research - Finding Your Real Competition

When you are looking to optimize your website and you want to figure out what you're up against in terms of keyword competition; proper keyword research will go a long way in helping you to determine which phrases to optimize for. So, how to you go about keyword research?

There are a few paid keyword research options available today; probably the most popular solutions are wordtracker.com and keyworddiscovery.com. While each of them has their own set of advantages; not everybody is ready to invest $30 for a week of keyword research let alone hundreds of dollars per month for a paid keyword research solution.

While the benefits of using a paid solution will likely exceed any amount paid for keyword research in the long run, inexperienced website owners don't always see the expense as a viable solution, especially when sufficient keyword research can be performed for free; at least in terms of monetary investment.

Finding your keyword competition for free is pretty simple, and you only need access to a search engine and the knowledge that you're about to receive. For our example we will just use Google because they offer a few more tools that make the competition research and keyword popularity somewhat easier.

As an example, let's say that you want to check out the keyword competition for the phrase "keyword research tools" because you have a website that talks about free keyword tools and reviews several different keyword research methods. While that scenario would be ironic, we'll still use it as the example for this article. Many people who are looking to see how many competitors a keyword term has will simply enter the phase into a search engine; thus they will search for "keyword research tools", without the quotes.

Using this example, Google returns over 47 million results. Many inexperienced website owners would become frustrated at this point and look for another set of keywords. However, things are not as they appear. The results that Google returned are not the actual competitors for the term "keyword research tools"; rather, these are websites that are somewhat relevant to the phrase for any number of reasons.

Some website owners are familiar with "phrase matching" searches, and may employ the use of quotation marks when performing keyword research. This is a pretty popular keyword research method which has been brought into mainstream knowledge in part by the popularity of the "Bum Marketing" method.

Phrase matching does narrow down the results significantly in some cases; using our example, the keyword phrase "keyword research tools", with the quotes, only returns 115,000 results. However, phrase matching returns the number of websites that contain the phrase you are searching for; not necessarily the websites that are competing for the keyword phrase.

The question remains, then; how can you find your keyword competition?

It's really simple; by using the intitle: and inurl: functions of most major search engines, you will be able to more accurately determine who is actively optimizing their websites for the keywords you are researching.

intitle: search command

The intitle: command will return results for websites that have your keyword phrase within the title tag. For our example, you would enter intitle:"keyword research tools". In Google, the keyword competition has dwindled down to less than 2,000. This is a very low number of competitors, and it paints a much different picture than the initial search results of over 47 million; that is for certain.

Inurl: search command

Depending on how deep you want to take the keyword research, you can add the inurl: command to your keyword research. The inurl command returns results that have the keyword phrase within the domain name or a combination of the domain name and the page names. To use this command alone, you simply would use inurl:"your keyword phrase". However, to get the best idea of the keyword competition for your proposed keyword phrase; you should use the intitle: function with the inurl: function, as listed here using our example:

intitle:"keyword research tools" inurl:"keyword research tools"

Presently Google is returning less than 800 results for the above combination; meaning that there are less than 800 people that are taking significant steps to optimize their website for this particular keyword phrase. While there may be many more people that think they are optimizing for this term, they are ignoring the page title and the use of the phrase in their page name/domain name; which both hold significant weight in order to increase search engine rankings for any keywords or phrases.

The two search functions outlined here will help you to increase the accuracy of your keyword research when trying to determine existing keyword competition in a particular search engine. Google is not the only search engine that uses these functions; they work in all three major search engines as well.

Before you begin to optimize your website for any particular keywords, it's a good idea to start with keyword research, and the tips listed here will give you a much more accurate picture of the keyword competition than likely any of the free keyword research tools available online today.