How To Measure Keyword Competition

There are people who use # of competing pages or # of times the keyword occurs in the URLs to judge competition. Now here’s the question: Is it the number of competitors or the strength of the competition that determines your success?

As people rarely click on the second or third page results, the number of competitors is completely unimportant and irrelevant. The only thing that counts is if you can get onto the first page of Google. Therefore in order to judge competition, you only need to analyze the top 10 results and you can disregard everything else.

How do you analyze these results?

The most important Google ranking factors are

links,
content and
user behavior.

Links

To complicate things, it is not just the number of the links, but also their quality, the number of referring domains and their anchor texts matter.

As per an Ahrefs analysis, page level ranking factors are stronger than domain level ranking factors. The strongest ranking factor is actually NOT number of backlinks, but the number of referring domains to a certain page. So it is possible to beat a high DA site by optimizing a single page and linking to it.

Opportunities come where big companies are ranking because of their domains and not because of competing on the specific page level. If you look at the page metrics and they are competitive, forget about it.

Content

You can beat a page with lots of links if you have more relevant content. Putting your exact-match keyword in the Title/URL/Headline of your page used to give a strong competitive advantage. This now has less importance, as Google is better able to tell what your page is about, based on LSI keywords.

So in order to rank better than the pages with lots of links, you need to make your page more relevant than those in the top 10 results. A deeper, more complete blog post, for example.

The purpose is that when your visitor reads your content, the buck stops there, in other words, he should have no more desire to look for another answer, because all his questions have been answered.

User Behavior

There is one more thing that needs to be added to this, searcher intent. Content may be relevant to the search phrase, however the intention of the person may be completely different…

As an example, if you enter “fruit”, you get all kinds of listings relating to the definition of fruit, Wikipedia articles, etc.

However if you enter “silence”, you don’t get a definition. You get listings related to the movie called “Silence”.

Why is this difference? It is searcher intent. Even though the definition of silence would be relevant to the search phrase, experience shows that this isn’t what the users are searching for.

And you need to take this into consideration in your keyword research, because it may make it impossible for your content to rank for certain terms.

Google's RankBrain algorithm decides this based on user interaction with the search results – time spent on page, going back to the search results and checking another one. Searcher intent can be different in different countries and can also change as time goes by.

This is why you can't rely on keyword tools alone, you need to take a look at the actual search results and use your power of observation.

Keyword Competition

It’s important to know that competition scores should only be used as a filter to find possible keywords. After you got the keywords, you need to look at the top 10 search results to determine if it’s really worth targeting that keyword in a blog post.

This is in order to see actual competition, but also to filter out common sense points. As an example, I was considering to target the phrase “Google Keyword Planner” in a keyword research post. However I found out that several specific keywords containing this phrase are part of some kind of a Google test, and people search for it 350 times per month only to find the answer to the test question. That is not the kind of traffic you are looking for. The search intent is totally different and will not convert well.

If Google ranks e-commerce stores for a keyword, that means it’s a shopping keyword and your review or affiliate post has no chance of ranking even if the domain authorities of the search results appear to be weak.

In order to determine competition, it’s enough to look at the top 10 results, as those are the pages you are competing with.

How To Do Manual Keyword Research

Below are the points to consider when you try to determine whether you are able to rank for a certain keyword.

Target keywords where not all the results are using the exact keyword in the title.
Are the sites on page 1 e-commerce sites? How many? – You want the majority to be not eCommerce sites, such as Amazon or a Shopify-type store.
Are the sites huge magazine/authority sites? The same rule applies as to eCommerce sites. Is there room for an affiliate site on page 1? Big authority sites have massive amounts of content, huge amounts of backlinks, have a variety of different writers (sometimes), and blog on a number of different, but related, topics. They also usually have very high Domain Authority, 50 or above.
What kind of Domain Authority and Majestic Trust Flow do these sites have? If the majority have a DA of 30 or higher, you want to look elsewhere.
Zero links to the page are preferred.
Ranking pages are NOT root domains.
Do you see the same sites appearing for many different keywords? If there are a couple of small niche sites that are appearing for lots of keywords, and are near the top, then there’s no reason you couldn’t do the same. If you keep seeing the same huge authority sites occupying the top 3 or 5 spots though, you may not have space.
Do you see weak results – Quora, Pinterest pin, forum, directories, Twitter profiles? That’s an excellent indicator that you can rank for the keyword.
If you see affiliate sites (monetized with Adsense, Amazon Associates, CPA offers, Clickbank offers, and more) in the top 10, that means Google is willing to rank them for the keyword.
If you see the SERPs dominated by one type of site, you should consider that perhaps Google is doing this for a reason.E. g. Only local providers are listed for the keyword
Short, low quality blog posts that you can easily beat

Determining Competition from Top 10 SERP Results