Using Keyword Research to Gauge Your Competition

By  |  June 27, 2019  |  Uncategorized  |  No Comments

Using Keyword Research to Gauge Your Competition

Keyword research is an essential tool to find a profitable niche market to build your business around. For example, if you type the phrase “weight loss” into Google’s search engine, you’ll have roughly 100 million links returned to you. Even if you search the longer phrase “how to lose weight”, you’ll still come up with well over 20 million web links.

On one level, this is great news; you’ve begun your research and planning by selecting an area plenty of people are writing about. We can infer that there are a lot of people interested in this particular topic.

Yet on another level, with so many other web pages out there competing for attention, you’re going to have a difficult time getting a prospective customer to visit your page.

What you’ll need to do is identify those keyword terms and phrases, which are still related to your website, but for which there is much less competition. This is a bit of a balancing act, of course, because these keyword terms and phrases still need to be terms and phrases people actually use when they are searching for relevant information.

If your website gets lost amongst all the competing websites, then your well-prepared website and articles aren’t going to get much of an audience. For your first web business concept (and any future businesses, too) you’ll need to get in the habit of always asking yourself “what’s my competition?” A decent business idea with marginal competition is almost always better than a great idea with an overwhelming amount of competition.

Your initial way of researching competition individual keywords is the search engines themselves. Simply type the keyword phrase you’re interested in into Google or Bing or Yahoo and see how many pages come up. Keep track of the numbers each search engine returns, and work to refine your keyword phrases toward those which have much less competition.

Keyword research also provides you as a business owner the foundation for a strategy. You can focus on optimizing your website for the relevant keywords with less competition, fewer competing websites optimizing for the same word. As your business and website grow and you climb the pages towards number one, you can begin to optimize your website for those more competitive keywords.

Keyword research is a powerful tool, use it to build your business, to attract prospects and customers, and to position yourself above your competition, now and ten years from now when your business is still thriving and growing strong.