What Is Keyword Competition? - How To Improve Your Ranking Chances

What are keywords?

Keywords are words or phrases that search engines, such as Google, use to help rank your web pages. The higher rank your page is given, the higher up in the Search Engine Response Pages (SERPs) that your site will appear. Your aim is to be ranked to the first page.

There are two types of keywords:

Short-Tail Keyword: Words or phrases that are less than 4 words

Long-Tail Keywords: Phrases that are 5 words or more in length

What Are Search Engines?

Search Engines are automated software programs that roam the web building databases of the content. The content that is collected is added to the engine index. When a query is input at an engine's site your input is checked against the search index. URL's that are selected are then displayed on the SERP, based on their ranking.

Search engines use the content of your web page to calculate the ranking. Note that it is the PAGE that is ranked and not the total website itself.

What is Keyword competition?

Keyword competition is an indication of the difficulty of obtaining a high ranking for your website in the market based on your keyword. A simple measurement is how many other web pages will you need to beat for that first page listing.

Choosing your keywords?

The golden rule for keyword selection is to discover keywords that get a High amount of Searches (number of people using your keyword in their search) and Low Competition (number of entries in the SERP when your keyword is used) i.e. number of other pages satisfying your keyword.

When selecting your keyword, you should always consider looking for long-tail keywords. These will give you more directed traffic and will provide you with less competition.

Therefore there are 2 steps to Choosing Keywords:

Use a keyword tool, e.g. Google AdWords, to discover how many Searches there are for a particular keyword - you want something over 2,000 searches per month. Then discover how much Competition there is for this keyword. Use your chosen keyword in a search engine to see how many pages are generated (competition). - You want search results of something less than about 60,000 pages. When using your phrase in the search engine, put it in quotation marks so that you will be returned an exact match. E.g. "keyword phrase".

So remember - High Searches - Low Competition.