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How do you judge SEO competition
tonyguitar
Posts: 152
Joined: 17 Jul 08
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18 Jul 10 4:10 pm

How do you judge SEO competition

Hi Guys:

I use to check SEO competition with Traffic Travis, and it's a good tool that it will score each difficulty levels. This gives a very clear idea about the SEO competition.

However, I'm just wondering about what are the other ways to evaluate the competition?
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faradina
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21 Jul 10 12:55 pm

 You can also check where your competition's backlinks are coming from and even see what keywords they are targeting.
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stargate66
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Joined: 24 Nov 09
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21 Jul 10 1:21 pm

 Hi Tonyguitar

I think most tools, including Traffictravis, use the same basic principals or checks to establish how strong the competition is for any given keyword phrase.

Firstly, how many results show for the phrased keyword. Go to Google and search exactly like this (eg):
"how to loose more weight". Any number of results under 50000 gives you a chance. Then search exactly like this in Google (eg): allintitle: "how to loose more weight". If the results are under 5000 you should be in with a chance to get to the first page, depending on the 3rd check here under.

Thirdly, download the nifty little "SEOquake" tool. With this you can establish the two most important things. What the page ranks are of the top results and how many backlinks they have to their sites. If the average pagerank of the top ten is 2,5 and the average backlinks are less than 20 (my criteria), you can beat them.

Of course, if you are prepared to spend some money, Mark Ling has done all the work for you with his new product Affilojetpack. Clue...just check my link :-)

Hope this helps
William
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sonitin
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21 Jul 10 3:47 pm

 I am not very confident about traffic travis competition analysis. It only gives you a relative score or how hard a keyword is. It doesn't tells you how hard that keyword is overall. You need to use your own ideas and experience there.
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jmpruitt
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21 Jul 10 3:56 pm

 You have to do that with any tool sonitin. The fact is there are so many factors involved and NO tools out ther cover them all. some are better than others but the people who make the tools work always use it along with their own brain.

I have had good success following TT myself. Its not a perfect system, but I have used it for over a year now, and have many keywords that at first I didn't think that i would ever rank for.
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cterao
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21 Jul 10 7:39 pm

 From what I understand TT currently uses mostly on-page factors. I believe they are currently updating it to consider more off-page factors.

Personally, I've found that you can judge overall SEO competition pretty well if you also look at the first page results on Google. I'll admit it's a bit like reading tea leaves--definitely not an exact science.

Are the sites on the first page results big monster sites like Wikipedia or are they small blogs? If you see a lot of web 2.0 sites like ezine articles, hubpages, yahoo answers ranking, there's probably a good chance you can beat them if they don't have many backlinks and their on-page optimization isn't good.
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tonyguitar
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22 Jul 10 1:11 am

 Yeah, I don't think TT or any other tools could cover every aspects of competition. I mostly use TT as a reference and then I will check manually with google + SEOquake.
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megachile
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Joined: 09 Nov 09
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22 Jul 10 9:11 am

 I use TT, checking the star rating, but also the actual competition matrix itself. I then make a judgement on whether I think I can realistically rank for that phrase or not.

My first few sites targeted very competitive 3 word terms (with huge search volume though) which I am struggling to rank for. Hopefully a year or so down the line I will start to rank and these sites will start pulling their weight. If you are building your first site I would recommend going for pretty easy terms, it keeps up morale in the early days.
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