There are a lot of things that go into how competitive a keyword is or isn’t and you should keep in mind that each page on the site should be focusing on ranking for a specific search term and you are not trying to rank the whole site for that search term.
The % below is just a guess but it is what I look at when I get ready to rank a page for a specific keyword. Check in Google and see how the competition looks in the below areas.
• 24% Trust/Authority and age of the domain name
• 22% Link Popularity of the Specific Page
• 18% Anchor Text of External Links
• 12% On-Page Keyword Usage
Now, when doing keyword research you want to find keywords that someone who is about to make a purchase would be searching for and that there is not a lot of competition for.
Let’s take a look at Joe, a guy from Georgia who’s looking for car insurance.
He starts off by going to Google and typing in “insurance”, (now insurance is a competitive keyword and one that could take years to rank for) Joe is immediately overwhelmed by all the types of insurances, home insurance, boat insurance, life insurance, flood insurance so Joe returns to Google.
This time he types in “car insurance”, ( a competitive keyword but not as competitive as insurance) this is more in line with what Joe is looking for but there is still too much information to digest, so he returns to Google again.
This time he does a search result for “best prices on car insurance” ( a lot less competitive and fairly easy to rank for) and he gets a really good idea on prices and what he’ll be spending, so he is now ready to make a purchase.
So…Joe returns to Google and does a search for “best prices on car insurance in Stockbridge Georgia” and he buys himself some car insurance. And the guy that ranked for the search result that sold Joe the car insurance was the less competitive out of all them.
Other words, the more specific a search term the easier it is to rank for and the better the conversion will be.
Build your site like a pyramid.
The main page being the most competitive search term and the inner pages breaking down into less competitive search terms. My main page might be trying to rank for website design, an inner page ranking for website designers and under website designers another page trying to rank for custom website designers.
Then we have affordable custom website designers. I’d start at the bottom of the pyramid trying to rank the less competitive pages first and working my way to the top of the pyramid trying to rank for the more competitive keywords.
