OK, so now you have a list of keywords and the search volume for those keywords.

Now it’s time to find out a little more about your competition.

So let’s start finding out which keywords have only a small amount of competition, but lots of searches.

The first thing we want to do is take the spreadsheet that we have created with all of our keywords in it and insert 2 extra columns. One column is for the competition numbers that we will be getting shortly and the other is for the competition/search ratio (more on this later). I like to add these 2 columns right after the column for local search volume.

Now we want to start running our keywords through Google to find out how many competing websites show up for each keyword.

Go to Google and copy the first keyword, including the quotes, and paste it in the search box and hit the  ’Google Search’ button. You will get a page back with the first 10 competing pages for this keyword. The main thing we are looking for at this time is the number of total pages that Google shows for this keyword. In this case the competing websites would be 170.

 

Now if only this keyword had some decent search volume.

:-(

In any case you would want to do this for each keyword in your list and put the result that you get from Google in the competition column next to the corresponding keyword in our spreadsheet.

Now lets take that second column that we added called Comp/Search ratio and we are going to add a formula to this column. We want to create a formula that takes the competition number and divides it by the search volume. Depending on how you set your spreadsheet up this could be different and I am not here to teach Excel so I will leave this to you. If you have questions please leave a comment below.

What you will end up with in this column is a number that is a good indication of the keywords that you will want to look at first. Once you are done you can sort by the Comp/Search ratio column in ascending order. This will put the smallest numbers towards the top of the list and these are the ones you want to dig a little deeper into.

Now, not all of these will have good search volume, but the ones that do are the definite keepers. I personally like to look for keywords with a search volume of over 500 or so to start out with. Again this is personal preference and yours may be higher or lower.

So at his point we are looking for keywords with more than 500 for a search volume that are close to the top of our list.

Now I want to dig a little deeper into my competition.

The next thing I normally do is to go back to Google and do a search for one of the keywords that I have picked out as being interested in.  Again, we want to do this search with quotes.

I usually take the top five websites and browse to the pages that come up in the Google search. Once on their site you can do a ‘view source’ from your browser which opens up a copy of the HTML as your browser sees it. What you are looking for are the occurences of your keyword in the title tag, the meta description tag, and the meta keyword tag. As you can see in this example the keyword ‘jetsons’ is only listed in the title tag and not in either of the meta tags. This one should be fairly easy to outrank in Google over time.

 

  One other thing you should look for is backlinks. This is the number of sites/pages that are linked back to the site we are spying on. This gives us another good idea of how much offsite SEO we will have to work on to outrank this website for our keyword.

On this one I skip Google and go to Yahoo. Yahoo will give you a much better idea of how many incoming links a website has. Just go to http://yahoo.com and in the search bar you will type in link:websitename.com (or whatever the the top level doamin is.  I.E. .net, .info, .co.uk).

OK, so I think that is enough to digest for now. Take your keywords that you have gathered and run them through the steps above and let me know what you think.