Keyword research is arguably the most important part of the search engine optimization process. Without being able to select a group of highly qualified keywords to optimize your website, guide your off-site strategy, and measure results, you run the risk of not achieving your site’s full potential in organic search - or even worse, missing the mark entirely.
So, what makes for a good keyword research strategy? One of the most important factors when doing keyword research is to ensure that the numbers you use are as objective as possible, relying on real data rather than your own personal judgment. Next, it’s important that your strategy looks at more than just one factor when comparing keywords against each other. At Flying Point, we use a 3-tiered approach that looks at traffic, conversion potential, and “winnability.” What does this all mean?
Traffic looks at the overall number of searches per month generated by each keyword.There are a handful of SEO tools that can provide this information, but the most popular tool available is the Google Keyword Planner (which requires an AdWords account to be utilized).
Conversion potential calculates the projected value of keywords to the business by analyzing existing conversion rate, the current value of each conversion, and whether certain keyword groups are more valuable to the business than others.
Winnability is a way of measuring SEO competition. How exactly to measure SEO competition has been an ongoing dialogue among SEO professionals since the inception of the industry. Many SEOs rely on the Google Keyword Planner for keyword research, since its numbers come directly from Google’s data. Google’s Keyword Planner does indeed offer some data on keyword competition, but there are problems with using the numbers it provides for SEO keyword research.
Why AdWords Competitive Data Does Not Describe the Organic Landscape
The Google Keyword Planner is made to be used for AdWords (PPC) customers to do keyword research before setting up advertising campaigns.
There are two metrics displayed in the Keyword Planner that could possibly be viewed as a good starting point to understand SEO competition: firstly, the “Competition” score, and secondly, “Suggested Bid.” “Competition” looks at the number of advertisers displayed for each individual keyword relative to all keywords across Google AdWords. The suggested bid is a recommendation for how much AdWords customers should consider spending on that keyword’s Cost Per Click (CPC) value. While it may seem convenient to assume that these two metrics would give you a good idea of what is happening in the SEO realm, this is an invalid assumption.
There is one primary reason that this data is not directly applicable to SEO competition: just because a keyword isn’t a valuable investment for AdWords advertisers, it doesn’t mean that the keyword won’t add value to an SEO strategy. AdWords advertisers want to bid on keywords that will be likely to make them money as quickly as possible. In SEO, it’s important to rank for keywords that will increase exposure to your brand, offer authoritative content to your users, enhance their shopping experience, and more. The highest ranking pages in SEO are often ones that are not transactional, but rather, filled with informative and relevant content that will help educate your customers. By only targeting keywords that are valuable for PPC, your SEO strategy will miss out on earning necessary traffic from users searching for a variety of themes and topics related to your products and services.
So, How Should Keyword Competition Be Calculated?
This is a widely discussed question with no definitive answer. A good place to start would be an article by Wordstream offering an extremely comprehensive list of methods used by top SEOs to explain their approach to determining keyword competition. However, the problem with many of these approaches is simply that they are not scalable when measuring a large group of keywords side-by-side at the same time. In the initial stages of keyword research, you may be working with hundreds or even thousands of keywords and need a quantifiable way to narrow down your search that looks beyond just search volume data.
A Solution
Fortunately, a new tool has been introduced into the vast world of SEO tools and software meant to make your job as a professional SEO a little bit easier. This would be the new SEMRush Keyword Difficulty Tool, seemingly the first one on the market to allow you to analyze a large batch of keywords at a time and receive an actual numerical score for the competitiveness of each keyword in organic search. How does SEMRush calculate the score for keyword competition?
We take the list of domains that are ranking in Google or Bing top 20 organic search results for the given keyword. Based on each website’s SEMrush Rank, we calculate their domain strength, and define the average number range, from 1 to 100%. The higher the percentage, the more effort you’ll need to outrank your competition for targeted keywords. - SEMRush
This is highly useful if your research involves using statistics and equations to narrow down batches of keywords based on actual hard data. While SEMRush claims the tool can handle 100 keywords a time, from our own experience with the tool, it appears that the tool can only support about 50 queries at a time without breaking. However, there is no limit to how many times you can add in batches of keywords. This will greatly speed up the process of keyword research and help ensure that you are covering all your bases when narrowing down large preliminary lists of keywords.
Note: You must be a SEMRush Pro, Guru, or Enterprise user to take advantage of the tool.
Photo by M. Loke
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