How much competition is too much?

[simo;]

Hi.

I've been going through the guides over the last few days, but I have yet to start up my first site.
I first watched the video on setting up a very first site using clickbank.

For my first site, I intend to use clickbank to select an affiliate program. I found a program very quickly.
So now I want to examine my chances of getting on the first page of google are.

My question is: how can I figure this out?
How can I tell if there is too much competition?

Here is how I've researched so far:
I look at the top page on google for this search term. Alexa tells me that has a PR of 4.
84,900 sites link to this site. Most of the on-page seo elements have taken care of.
I then used traffic travis to analyse the keyword phrase I want to target.
The top site has 4 links from .edu and .gov domains. Over 5000 backlinks total.

Then I analysed the link at the very bottom of the google page.
It has a PR of 4, over 1.2 million inbound links.

From what I know after watching the getting started video, I can tell that there is money to be made targetting this keyword phrase.
But how can tell if there is simply too much competition?

[jmpruitt]

i would sayy that was too much. if you are using TT the star rating is a good indicator, although not perfect. i look at 4 star ratings, and look at kw where there is at least 1 in the top 10 with age of 0. this means a new page has a chance. if all the pages are 4-5 years old, could be hard to knock them down because they have a lot of authority built up in that position.

[sonitin]

There are few more things you should look at:

• You should also check stats like number of ads being displayed for that search term, it will show you how profitable and competitive that term is.


• Other things to look for how does the competition dies out. For some terms there are only 3-4 highly competitive competitor and all guys below that are below average or sub par.


• Also see who your competitors are - Are they people who are pros into SEO or people who can spend BIG or just small players. E.g. if you try to get into poker.. you are going to compete with ultra competitive.


• Next step is to use a tool like Market Samurai & Majestic SEO. Both of them give a very good idea about how powerful the backlinks are. I don't really bother about 10K backlinks but if my competitor is being linked by Google or Apple then that is something to worry about.


• Other important thing is to see if you can find a linking strategy that your competitor is not using. E.g. a niche I am in has very few bloggers so I know I can hit it good with a high quality blog and free content.

There are a lot of other factor but those are the ones that come instantly to my mind.

[simo;]

Next step is to use a tool like Market Samurai & Majestic SEO. Both of them give a very good idea about how powerful the backlinks are. I don't really bother about 10K backlinks but if my competitor is being linked by Google or Apple then that is something to worry about."

I've been trying to figure out what this point means. I checked out both of these sites, and I can't quiet figure out how to use them as intelligence tools.

Market Samurai seems to be a commercial product. But there's no way to tell what it can actually do for me unless I download and test the free trial software (and unavoidably give them an email address).
Oh well, I'll give it a shot.

Majestic SEO: this looks like a service that indexes the web, and can produce reports about the index, via subscription, starting at £9.99 per month.
Ok, I guess that's a tool that I can think about investing in that in the future.

Thanks for the advice guys.

[jmpruitt]

personally I recommend Traffic travis over the others. for one it is free(not a trial) although it will cost you an email address, but it follows the training you will get here, and looks at the seo factors that Mark sees as being most critical for high rankings, not only for your own sites but your competition as well.

there is a premium version, but that is more for people with a lot of sites, or doing professional SEO services.

[sonitin]

Next step is to use a tool like Market Samurai & Majestic SEO. Both of them give a very good idea about how powerful the backlinks are. I don't really bother about 10K backlinks but if my competitor is being linked by Google or Apple then that is something to worry about."

I've been trying to figure out what this point means. I checked out both of these sites, and I can't quiet figure out how to use them as intelligence tools.

Ok, I will rephrase them for you.

Market Samurai has a keyword analysis feature which gives you how competitive and profitable a keyword is. As compared to other tools available, I have found this one to be quite good and comprehensive.

Majestic SEO gives you a lot more indepth link analysis then what any other tool can give you. The reason being they have their own personal crawlers. The only problem with the tool is that you get way too many links and most of them are useless. You need to see which are the important ones. If your competitor has some really powerful editorial links coming from trusted authority sites then it will be pretty hard to beat them and that is something you should always take care off.