Looking for ideas or need advice in a new market? Keyword research, market competition, size of the market - can all be discussed here.

How do you know whether you can rank in the top 10?

kurt
Posts: 361
Joined: 10 May 11
Trust:

How do you know whether you can rank in the top 10?

I can not figure out how to tell if I can rank in the top 10 or not for a keyword. I can take that keyword and check the top 10 competition for it in Traffic Travis (version 4.1), but that doesn't really tell me anything. Traffic Travis might say that it is "relatively easy" or whatever but I don't know how it determined that.

I have seen PR 0 sites that have a 0 page authority, not in the DMOZ, no keywords in their h1 tags or meta description, no edu/gov links, not many backlinks and yet some how they've managed to rank above people that have some of these things. It just doesn't make sense.

The only thing I can think of is that they must have higher quality backlinks. And maybe it has something to do with their anchor text. Not sure how you would check all of that, seems like it would be time consuming.

How do you guys determine whether you can rank in the top ten for a keyword or not?

Thanks
  • 0
Site Admin
maryt
Posts: 3224
Joined: 16 Apr 12
Trust:
Hi Kurt,

Traffic Travis and other SEO tools are there to help you figure out if a certain keyword is easy to rank for. Basically these keyword tools base their reports from two factors: number of searches and competition.

When searching for good keywords for your website/niche, you have to balance the number of searches from the number of competitors for that keyword. You do not want to waste time ranking for high volume keyword when you also got high competition for it. Thus, the need for these tools like Traffic Travis or Google Keyword Tool.

The reason why TT is only giving you simple descriptions as "relatively easy" or "easy" is because this tool "simplifies" everything for you. Because honestly, you do not have to over think this. :) If you ask how easy is easy, you can't figure that out not until you do SEO and backlinking.

But just to give you an idea, "easy" may mean you can do little effort on getting backlinks for this keyword. Mostly, you can rank for this keyword within less a month or a month of continuous backlinking and SEO. Again, this depends on how much effort you exert here. What I mean with continuous backlinking is you do backlinks everyday. At least an hour or two everyday.

I advise you prioritize choosing the right keywords from the "easy" selection. Then it is also a good idea to pick a few ones from medium and high competition keywords list. This way, you are guaranteed that you will be getting a good number of traffic for your website.

Of course, do not forget to track all your backlinking efforts. I suggest record everything on excel file. Then after a moth, check your keywords for their ranking on search engines. From there, you will know how easy is easy. :)

I hope that makes sense.

Mary
  • 0
Not sure which Affilorama tool you need? Take the quiz! https://www.affilorama.com/redirect/quiz

Web: https://www.affilorama.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/affilorama
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/affilorama

***
"Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment." ~Sidhhartha Guatama
 
kurt
Posts: 361
Joined: 10 May 11
Trust:
Yeah, I know I over think things. People have told me that my whole life. :) I am very analytical. But, the thing is, I'm also lazy and I don't want to have to work any more then I have to. And I certainly don't want to do backlinking everyday.

It just seems to me that there has got to be a way to know for sure if you can rank in the top 10 for a keyword. I really don't want to guess at that, because if I don't make it on the first page with a keyword then I'm not likely to get much traffic with that keyword since most people don't usually go past the first page. I know there are other ways to get traffic, but like I said I'm lazy.

Also, since I'm trying to do a small sniper like site instead of an authority site, I'm not going to have as many keywords in the first place, so I feel like I should choose them wisely.
  • 0
Site Admin
maryt
Posts: 3224
Joined: 16 Apr 12
Trust:
Hi Kurt,

I know you are just trying to make things easier for you. I hate to say this but there are things that you can do easy and there are things you can't. You can build a website the easy way and you can also produce content easier. That is what our AffiloBlueprint course is about.

However, when it comes to marketing and SEO- this (I personally think) is where most of your efforts should be. Ever since the release of the new Google algo changes, you should be very mindful of your SEO efforts.

For the sniper site you are talking about- with all content and keywords in one page, I don't recommend you doing this. Like I have said, the new Google algo wants a website that is pretty much or at least a good candidate of an authority site. This means, you should have multiple pages wherein all content are valuable and useful.

You may be planning to create a homepage where there are plenty of content in it, but still, having everything on one page will make it seemed to be an "over optimized" page or "spammy" website- since there are too many keywords, too many links, and too many infos on one page.

Going back to your keywords and ranking, I am afraid there is no right formula or tool in knowing for sure how you can easily rank for your chosen keywords. With SEO and back linking, everything is a trial and error process. And like I have said, the tools are there to help us and make good suggestions on the right keywords to promote but still, everything boils down to how we do our SEO campaign for those keywords.

I hope that helps.

Regards,

Mary
  • 0
Not sure which Affilorama tool you need? Take the quiz! https://www.affilorama.com/redirect/quiz

Web: https://www.affilorama.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/affilorama
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/affilorama

***
"Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment." ~Sidhhartha Guatama
 

This topic was started on Jul 19, 2012 and has been closed due to inactivity. If you want to discuss this topic further, please create a new forum topic.

cron