There’s nothing like a competitive SERP. I mean that. Literally. There is nothing like a competitive SERP. Of course, every time you say something in an SEO forum, anyone who disagrees with you is more than likely to say, “You obviously don’t compete for competitive queries.”
Most people evaluate queries on the basis of:
- How many sites “optimize” for the query
- How many sites pay for advertising
- How many backlinks the number 1 site has
- How many people actually use the query
Although these may be useful things to know, the usefulness depends in large part on where you get your information. For example, anyone who relies on Yahoo! backlink data for Google competitive search analysis is looking at the wrond database. Let’s take a closer look at our metrics:
How many sites “optimize” for the query?
Truth be told, there is no standard for determining whether a site is optimized but you can look for a few hints:
- Query terms in title
- Meta description is used in the search listing snippet
- The query terms are used in the meta description
- The query terms are used in the page URL (anyway, not just the domain name)
And that’s just what you see in the SERP. If you look on the page do you find the keywords in the keywords meta tag, bolded in on-page copy, italicized in on-page copy, used as outbound anchor text, repeated at least 2-3 times on the page, used in large fonts or Hx tags, etc.?
You make your page relevant to a query by emphasizing the terms in the query in as many natural ways as you can: alt= text for related images, quoted expressions, underlined expressions, internal link navigation anchors, colored text, and other on-page factors all impact the relevance score for a page.
None of them are make-or-break factors. Plenty of pages rank well without titles, H1 headers, etc. But a lot of pages knock out the competition just by covering the basics. Before you start your link-buidling campaign, make sure your on-page copy is:
- Easy to read and understand
- Informative
- Compelling
- And relevant to the most important keywords
Relevance is not a magic link-based number. Links actually have nothing to do with natural relevance. Relevance begins with on-page copy and other on-page factors (including URLs). Each search engine scores for relevance a little differently, so there is no magic formula that is guaranteed to work every time.
For that query you want to invade, how many of the first ten results actually optimize for it? How many of them show up on all four major search engines (Ask, Google, Live, and Yahoo!)?
How many sites pay for advertising?
It seems like a no-brainer, but if no one is paying for ads on a query, you need to understand why. Is the query so new that the market is still forming? Is it so old that all the money has been sucked out of it? There are actually competitive queries for which people won’t buy ads because the competitors are not trying to make money. But you need to understand whether a query is monetizable before you start estimating how competitive it is.
Generally speaking, if there is a way to make money off a query, someone will usually buy ads for that query.
How many backlinks does the top site have?
All that really tells you is whether the top site has a lot of backlinks. But if you’re going to compete on links you need to understand what backlinks do for Web sites. 100,000 backlinks don’t guarantee success. Nor do they even promise a reasonable chance of taking the top spot. The odds are pretty good that someone with 100,000 backlinks pointing anchor text at a query has not optimized for the query.
Now, can you really compete with 100,000 anchors through on-page content? Not usually, but what if the query being targeted is not the right one? Query traffic changes over time, and someone people just attack the wrong query. If you cannot win the battle for “wiggims snowball crushing machines” you may be able to take the lead in “snowball crushing machinery by wiggims”. You won’t know until you do some analysis. The more popular a query is, the more alternatives to the query there will be.
So backlinks don’t tell you to stay out of a query. They may, in fact, tell you the query is wide open. Just don’t make the mistake of using Yahoo! to analyze Google backlinks. Yahoo! knows less about Google’s database than you should. You can, after all, run a URL query on Google to find out how many references to the top site there are. Those references generally include non-link references but they should give you a ceiling for how many links the site has.
You can refine your Google queries to get an idea of how many pages are actually pointing anchor text relevant to your query at the competition’s site. How do you do that? I’m not going to tell you. Study the command interface. Learn how those query operators work. But understand that many SEOs don’t understand the operators very well. You need to test each operator for yourself. Make assumptions and challenge those assumptions.
Remember the SEO Method: Experiment. Evaluate. Adjust.
The one query operator few SEOs actually define correctly is inanchor:. Do you really know what that query operator does? Can you prove it with a few test queries that challenge your understanding?
A Web site with many backlinks that point a wide selection of anchor keywords at the site is more likely to be a tough competitor than a site that has only tightly focused backlinks. Why? Because the guy who insists only only one anchor expression is engaged in link building and there are just not that many really good useful linking sources that will give you the same exact anchor text. So the guy whose anchors are nearly all the same usually has the most worthless (non-value passing) links.
A popular SEO link building tactic is to chase the links the other guy has. Sorry. That dog won’t hunt. If you’re going to compete on links, you need better links than the other guy has, not the same links. And you’ll never catch up to him anyway.
How many people actually use the query?
I’ve touched on this above. The popularity of a query helps you estimate how competitive it will be. The more people who use a query the more likely it is to be hyperoptimized. But some hyperoptimized queries actually drive people to use new query expressions because they get tired of seeing the same spammy sites over and over again.
If you have the time and the patience you can watch queries metamorphose into new queries. You may not be able to crack the top ten for the old query but you might get in for the next variation before the old guard reoptimize for it. Query timing is about as productive as market timing in the stock market. Most people will never do it well and you risk a great deal when you strive to time query changes.
You need to understand the industry very well because you have to base your timing strategy on a thorough knowledge of when people search for things, why they search for things, and why they change their query expressions. You’re not likely to take “coke” away from the Coca-Cola Company, for example. Then again, there are other uses for the word “coke”. You never know.
What works best
Your goals and resources determine what your best strategy will be. If you’re the outsider trying to break into an actively optimized query, however, you start out at a disadvantage. The time to create that overpowering content the other guys lack is before you enter the market, not after.
If your research shows that a query is seasonal or changes you may have a chance if you give yourself enough lead time. For example, if retail is your interest you should be planning your Autum 2007 campaign right now and you’ll need to be designing for the 2007 Holiday Season no later than June. And that’s cutting it close.
Do you chase financial news? When does the stock market hit its stride? Usually from October to May. You should be well on your way to setting up your 2007-2008 stock market content now because you’ve already missed the 2006-2007 season.
Of course, people are always traveling, buying real estate, etc. These types of queries are more affected by the quality of search results. You can capitalize on shifting query trends and sub-markets by finding queries that are dominated by spam and providing more relevant, more informative, more useful content. You may have to fight the spammers for name space but in the end you’ll get more natural links than they do.
You’re also less likely to be filtered if you fight spam with legitimate content. But since the spammers often rank on autospammed links, you may have a tough battle ahead of you. Make sure you have the time to build trust in your domain and that you don’t ignore other avenues of promoting your site.
Queries are invaded every day. People don’t need deep, dark SEO strategies to get the job done. Most people don’t have the resources to just pounce on any competitive query, but Google reports that 20-25% of each month’s queries have never been used (on their service) before. That is a lot of opportunity for those of you who have trouble breaking into competitive queries.
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