( Image courteous of: Christian Ferrari )

SEO Competitive Analysis – Discover Your Competition

Categories: Ecommerce, Website Basics

One of the most essential pieces of the search engine optimization/internet marketing process involves figuring out exactly who you would be in direct competition with when it comes to specific keywords related to your product or idea.

The simplest tool that we can use to determine your competition is the search engine Google.  Being the most widely used search engine on the internet, Google is the best tool to use to find websites that you will be in direct competition with when marketing.

First, head over to http://www.google.com

In the search bar,  type the following:

allintitle: “your keyword here”

Replace the phrase “your keyword here” and input a keyword phrase associated with your product, business, or idea..  You need to follow this format word for word.   If you add spaces in incorrect places, or fail to include quotations or a colon, this will not work correctly.

After you have entered this into the search bar,  click the Search button.  You will be taken to the search results page, which will list any sites using the keyword phrase that you are researching.

In the top right corner, you will see some text that will say something like, “Results 1-10 of about 10,000″.  The number 10,000 is the number of sites that Google has found which your website would be  in direct competition with if you were to use that keyword phrase to market your website.  In this example, this means that there are 10,000 websites out there on the internet that are using that same keyword phrase you are researching, in some cases there will be millions.  A good rule of thumb is that this number should be 20,000 or less.  This is the ideal number, if you are having trouble finding phrases that work, or if the demand for the phrase is very high (covered in another article), you can make an exception of 30,000 or less.  The lower this number is, the easier it will be to market your product, idea, or business, and it will be much more likely that your site will gain traffic much faster.

In the example above, my keyword phrase “cheap watches” came up with 34,300 results, which is a bit too high for me to use.  As I mentioned before, if the demand is high enough, we may be able to make an exception of around 30,000.  In this case, the demand was far too low.

This should give you an idea of what you would be up against when it comes to the internet and selling your product or service online.  It will also provide you with some essential pieces to the internet marketing puzzle.

*Any images displaying the Google logo or search engine content are property of their creators