Understanding Competition Analysis - For Beginners

bysteveo5770

6.2K followers

Updated 10 years ago

Understanding how to analyse your competition can be tricky when you're new. I know it took me a while to grasp how it really works.

Here's a scenario I'm sure many of us are familiar with:

You've entered a potential keyword phrase into Jaaxy or the free keyword tool here at WA.

It fits the recommended criteria for monthly searches and the competition is fairly low. Great! But then...... you type that same keyword phrase directly into the Google search bar and you see millions of competing pages!

What's up with that?!!!

To demonstrate how this works, I'll use a keyword phrase that I used on one of my own sites.

By doing a "Broad" search, Google shows over 59 million pages. Yikes!

Here's what you need to understand. This is the number of pages with those words somewhere on those pages. They are not even together in the same sentence in most cases.

This is why we use quotes. It gives us a much more accurate picture of our REAL competition.

I don't search with quotes you idiot!

I understand that, but we are getting much closer to finding the true number of optimized results.

Now, we need to scroll to the bottom of the results page and look for the total number of pages Google has listed.

You want to click on the last page and repeat the process until you reach the end of the results. In this case, clicking on page 8 was all I needed to do.

Here are the results:

Boom! Only 34 competing pages!

That's great, but can I trust those results?

This search shows my site in the #2 position in the organic results on the first of Google.

I went through this exercise to show you how to find your real competition manually. So, what does the WA keyword tool show for this keyword phrase?

As you can see, I get the same exact number of competing pages but in a fraction of the time it took to do it manually.

Hopefully this article will instill some confidence in the WA and Jaaxy keyword tools. They really do work!