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How To Analyze Your Keyword List
Basic Keyword Analysis
If you have finished our How to build a Keyword List Tutorials you should have in front of you a large list of relevant, targeted keywords. But, as you know, there is more to finding Valuable Keywords than having a list of relevant keywords. There are three other factors that we have to take into consideration: the type of keyword, the popularity of a keyword, and it’s competition (as we mentioned in our Basic Keyword Strategy Tutorials). As such, you now have to properly analyze your keyword list for all of these factors. Then, based on your analysis, you will want to prioritize your keywords. First and foremost, you will want to optimize your site for those keywords which you have a decent chance of ranking well (as we will explain below). As such, this tutorial will focus on how to determine the competitiveness of a keyword, and how to use that information to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of your search optimization efforts.
A keyword by any other name is not as competitive
What makes a keyword easy or difficult to optimize for? It all has to do with the quality of your competition. You can have a million sites competing for a particular keyword, but if none of them have properly optimized their site it will not be difficult to outrank them. On the other hand, if you go up against a thousand well optimized sites you may have a very difficult time ranking at all. Therefore, if you can make your site the most relevant site in the eyes of the search engine for a particular keyword then your site should rank #1. Now, what needs to be noted is that this is true for each and every keyword in your list. After all, the search engines want to show the most relevant results for each and every unique search term.
As such, in terms of analyzing your keyword list, your ultimate goal is to determine the quality of competition for each and every keyword. Nonetheless, when working with large keyword lists it is not practical to analyze the quality of competition for each and every search phrase (given the limits of today’s keyword analysis tools, it is just not possible). As such, we are forced to analyze the quantity of sites that you are competing against for any given keyword and to then infer from this number the quality of your competition. Later on, after you have analyzed your list as a whole, you can focus in on individual keywords and note the quality of the competition for that particular term or phrase.
Determining how many sites are you competing against
There is a rather easy way to get a sense of how many sites you are competing against. It involves two of the advanced search features of Google - intitle and inanchor. Intitle tells you how many sites have the keyword phrase in question in their header tag. Inanchor tells you how many sites have incoming links which include the keyword phrase within the anchor text of at least one link. Perhaps an example will help clarify what these search functions are and why they can be so helpful.
Let’s start with a normal online search, let’s say for golf balls. A search for that term on Google shows that there are some 20,400,000 sites which contain the words golf and balls within the text of their page, as shown below:
While this may sound like a tremendous number of sites, as we shall see the vast majority of those sites are not optimized for the search engine and as such are not really competing for this term.
Let’s take a look now at the number of sites which include the phrase "golf balls" in the title tag of their page:
Note that there are 276,000 sites which include this phrase in their header tag. This is a much lower number than the number of sites which include the two words somewhere (not necessarily together) on their webpage. Given that one of the most important steps in optimizing a website is to place relevant keywords in the title tag of one’s web pages (as we shall learn in our Web page optimization Tutorial), the number of sites that include the phrase in their title tag is a decent indication of the number of sites which are actively optimizing their sites for that particular keyword.
Now let’s take a look at the number of sites which have an incoming link with the keyword phrase Golf Balls included in the anchor text of the link:
There are 148,000 sites which contain the phrase "Golf Balls" in an incoming link. What this means is that each of these 148,000 sites have at least one incoming link with the phrase "golf balls" included in the anchor text. This statistic does not show us the quality of those links nor how many there are per each site. Still this figure is helpful in determining how many sites one is competing against for a given keyword. After all, incoming links are one of the most important factors in determining search engine rankings and the anchor text of a link is one of the most important elements of a quality incoming link.
Even more helpful, though, is combining the intitle and inanchor search function as follows:
Combining these two search functions let us know how many sites both contain the keyword phrase in the title tag and in the anchor text of at least one incoming link. Given that ranking well is a function of the successful combination of Web page optimization and link building, this figure best indicates how many sites one is actually competing against. From this figure we can then infer the quality of competition based on the assumption that if a lot of people are optimizing their site for a particular keyword then most likely some of them are doing it well.
The following chart helps illustrate this last point:
| Keyword phrase | Number of Competing Sites (based on intitle/inanchor analysis) | Number of backlinks for top rated site in Google |
| Golf | 15,400,000 | 44,000 |
| Golf balls | 113,000 | 26,500 |
| Used golf balls | 656 | 1,270 |
As we can see there seems to be a somewhat direct correlation between the number of sites competing for a particular keyword and the number of backlinks for the top site listed in Google related to that keyword (although it should be pointed out that this is not always the case). Of course, there are other factors besides link popularity to take into consideration when considering the quality of one’s competition (such as the quality of those links), but nonetheless it is an indication of the quality of competition.
Organizing your keyword list
Based on the above, we recommend that you purchase Keyword Elite and get in the habit of analyzing your keyword lists using the intitle and inanchor features (Keyword Elite seems to be the only commercially available software program which allows you to analyze large lists of keywords using the intitle and inanchor search feature).
Once you have done that, you can organize your keyword list according to the number of competing sites. For instance, you can group together every keyword which has no competing sites (i.e., for which no other site includes the keyword in both the title tag and the link text of at least one incoming link). These keywords should be rather easy to rank well for as there seems to be almost no competition for them. You can then group together all those keywords which have 1 - 10 sites competing against them, and then those keywords which have 10 - 100 sites competing against them, and so on.
You can then look for the most popular, relevant keywords in your first group of keywords and optimize your site for those keyword phrases. Once you have used up all the quality keywords in the first group you can then proceed to the next group, again optimizing your site for the most popular, relevant keywords within that group.
This method ensures that you are always competing for those keywords which are the easiest for you to rank well for. At the same time, it helps to build link momentum which will help you to compete later on for the more competitive keywords. This is an extremely powerful way to maximize your optimization efforts. It helps ensure that you rank for the maximum number of keywords possible with the least of amount of effort necessary!
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5 Comments so far
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I have a question. I have one top keyword I am looking to show well in the SERPs for.
For [intitle:key word] I rank in the 150 range. For [inanchor:key word] I rank in the 180 range. For both [intitle:key word] and [inanchor:key word] I hit in the 170 range, but when I query for just [key word] I land out at about 450. Though, for some reason today I am not in the to 1000. Do you think this is most likely because of the weak PR of most of my backlinks? Any thoughts?
There are many factors which determine one’s ranking for any particular keyword, most of which are not covered by doing an intitle, inanchor search. For instance, a site may not include a keyword in it’s title tag, but may be an old site with large numbers of high-quality backlinks. As such, doing an inanchor, intitle search only gives one a rough sense of the competition for a keyword and is beneficial in that it can be applied to large keyword lists. Other factors, though, such as the quality and diversity of one’s backlinks, the age of the site, etc. are not covered by that search. This is why I don’t bother to look at the actual search results for an inanchor/intitle search, just the number of sites which show up. I am interested in knowing how many sites have taken the time to do the minimal optimization for a particular keyword.
In terms of your particular site, I can’t say anything definitive. However, you should know that there are other factors besides PR which determine the value of your back-links (such as the thematic relationship between the page which links to you and the page which they link to, the ranking of the sites which link to you in the search engines, and more). In the (hopefully) near future I plan to write another tutorial about how the various factors which help determine the quality of competition for a keyword as well as linking strategies based on the new algorithmic changes at Google (those changes might explain why your site no longer shows up in the top 1000). In short, though, I would recommend doing a regular search for your keyword and noting the sites which come up in the top 10 - 20 slots. See which of those sites you can get to link to you. Also, check out which sites link to those sites and try and get links from them. Finally, do a similar search on the Google directory (dir.google.com) and note which categories the top sites are from. Go to those categories and see which sites you can get links from. Indeed, I would do that for every keyword that you want to rank well for. It takes time, but it is worth it.
Hope this is helpful.
All the best,
Moshe Morris
>>Hope this is helpful.
Yes it is, and thanks for the reply.
>>I would recommend doing a regular search for your keyword and noting the sites which come up in the top 10 - 20 slots. See which of those sites you can get to link to you. Also, check out which sites link to those sites and try and get links from them.
I think you are right. This is one area I have been totally negligent in, and I am putting this on the top on my list of things to do!
Thanks!
[…] In terms of analysis, I like Keyword Elite because it can analyze large keyword lists using Google’s intitle and inanchor search features (to learn more about the importance of this, see our How To Analyze Your Keyword List Tutorial. Even so, there is still room for improvement on this front, as intitle and inanchor only give one an approximate sense of the competitiveness for any given keyword. It seems that WordZe may improve upon the intitle, inanchor search, but it’s hard to know without actually using the product. I like the fact that it analyzes the top sites for a keyword, but I would like to know more about how it analyzes those sites. Also, does it analyze each keyword one at a time, or is it able to analyze large lists of keywords all at once. Both are valuable, but there is much greater value in being able to analyze large lists all at once. […]
[…] There are three different types of analysis that you can perform on keywords with WordZe. The first is KEI (which compares the number of sites that show up in the search results to the popularity of a keyword. This is basically useless since the number of sites that show up in the search results indicates nothing about the number of sites that one is competing against (let alone the quality of that competition). I imagine that the only reason that WordZe includes these figures is because it is customary to include these stats. What would be much better than KEI would be to perform an intitle/inanchor search for each keyword on Google (to learn about the advantages of an intitle/inanchor search see our How To Analyze Your Keyword List Tutorial). […]