DAY 5: Evaluating Your Keyword Difficulty

by Tyrone on March 10, 2010 - 21 comments

If you haven’t completed day 4 of the SEO course, you can review: DAY 4: Grouping Your Keywords before starting this post.

“Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.”

- Oscar Wilde -


Don’t bite more than you can chew!

This week, we have been working very hard on our keywords, from assessing our niche, building a keyword list, refining this list, grouping and classifying our keywords, there’s one last thing to do with our keywords, and that’s evaluating their difficulty.

Before you start, you want to make sure that you are going to optimize for the right keywords in the right order, or you may just fall into the swarm of sites that are never found on internet.

The truth is that 99% of those pages are no competition whatsoever to you, especially considering how well we already have prepared our keywords already!

Your competition lies with the other people with the same knowledge as you, the people in the “know” about SEO.

Forget about KEI

One of the most popular way people use to evaluate a keyword potential is the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI). That’s a huge mistake.

If the core theory of the KEI is correct, its real life application demonstrates that this index is very flawed.

Your “real” competition is not the number of result pages returned by Google during a search query, that’s only the “virtual” competition volume.

SEO 101

Anybody with basic knowledge of SEO is a potential threat to you, so you need to identify those people quickly.

In SEO it’s widely known that having your keyword in your page title is crucial and dramatically increase your chances to rank well in the search engines.

Your first task is then to identify those people, and for this, Google has a command line that makes this task a breeze: allintitle.

Since having your keyword in your page title is one of the most important on-page SEO factor, we must know who are doing so.

In the search field of Google, type the following command:

allintitle: “your keyword”

The number of results returned this time is the number of pages that have your keyword (in this example “nail polish”) in their page title.

Re-open your basic keyword list and add 3 columns:

  • All In Title
  • All In Anchor
  • Difficulty

Your keyword spreadsheet should now looks like this:

Repeat the process for each of your keywords.

Good job, you know already a much more realistic number as too what your real competition is, we are not done yet!

Remember, SEO is a combination of Onsite Optimization and Offsite Optimization.

Obviously, the page title is an important component of on-site
optimization, and we have covered this area with the command “allintitle”.

It’s now time to check the competition level at the off-site optimization level, and luckily for us, Google also has a command line for this: allinanchor.

In the search field of Google, type the command:

The number of results returned this time is the one of all the pages which are linked to by backlinks with your keyword in their anchor text. This is where the real competition lies!

Repeat the process for each of your keywords and update your spreadsheet accordingly.

Evaluating Keyword Difficulty

Aware of the information we just collected, here’s the formula I came up with and use myself to evaluate keyword difficulty; some of you may want to adjust or not this formula to their own flavor, personally, I ‘m satisfied with the results returned.

Here are the three elements we must keep in check with this formula:

  1. How many pages have your keywords in the page title.
  2. How many pages have your keywords as anchor text of their
    backlinks.
  3. How many pages have both keywords in the page title, and
    keywords as anchor text     of their backlinks.

Since someone who uses their keywords both in the page title and as anchor text for their backlinks is obviously somebody literate in SEO, I decided to attribute them double value.

Since the raw number is quite big, I decided to divide it by 1,000 to simplify the results.

So here’s the formula:

Keyword Difficulty = (([#allintitle] + [#allinanchor]) + ([#combo]*2)) / 1,000

Here’s how I rate the difficulty scale:

  • Less than 1 – Extremely Easy
  • Between 1 and 10 – Easy
  • Between 11 and 100 – Medium
  • Between 101 and 1,000 – Challenging
  • Between 1,001 and 10,000 – Very Hard
  • Over 10,000 – Extremely Hard

Calculating the Value of [combo]

Here’s the method I use to calculate the value of [combo], that is how many pages have the keyword in anchor and title.

I’m not aware of any real accurate way to know such thing for sure, so I’ll just go with the difference between the allinanchor and allintitle (if you have one to share, you’re welcome!).

That is if 10 results have the keyword in their title and 23 have the keyword in their anchor text, I will assume that 10 of them have both keywords in anchor and title, and 13 only in anchor.

Alternatively if there were 23 results with keywords in their title and only 10 with keyword in their anchor text, I will assume that 10 of them have both keywords in the anchor text and title, and only 13 with the keyword in title only.

Do not waste your time trying to get exact numbers as the results are ever changing, go with the best
guesses and what makes sense for you.

Apply the formula and fill in the difficulty score for each of your keywords.

Optimizing for low difficulty keywords will allow you to rank quickly and easily in the search engines.

Current Example

The best way for me to demonstrate this to you is to share an example with one of my recent post: Google Keyword Density SEO Tutorial.

After researching the keywords about Keywords density, I found 2 different categories:

  • Keywords Density Tools
  • Keywords Density Information

I chose to go with the Keyword density information selection, and got to select 7 different keywords, all complementary to the main keyword “Keyword Density”

Here are the search engine results I got in a bit more than a week:

As you can see, it works, and that’s in Google alone, in fact I already have several #1 ranking in other search engines for those terms too, and yes they do bring me traffic from the search engines already!

That was easy!

Going after “Keyword Density” directly would have been a very foolish move, so instead I went on with optimizing for 7 other super easy complementary keywords, which resulted in not only having me rank well for those, but also highly increase my ranking for the competitive “Keyword Density“.

Exercise

Today’s exercise is the last part of the SEO keywords research topic and your graduation day as Keywords Master!

For each of your keywords within the keywords groups your created, research the competition using the commands “allintitle” and “allinanchor” and evaluate your keyword difficulty.

Re-organize your keywords within each keyword group based on their difficulty as this will make it clearer for you to know which keyword you should optimize for first.

In the next part of this SEO course, we will be looking at the importance of site structures and more of the technical aspects.

21 Comments

  1. cam_cam

    Hi tyrone, great article i love it but i was wondering could you work out a problem useing your method [Keyword Difficulty = (([#allintitle] + [#allinanchor]) + ([#combo]*2)) / 1,000] so i can see what you are doing visually to get the diffculty score….. im ok at math but as you can see im sureley not the best, but a brake down and visual of a worked out problem would be a big help.

  2. Avatar Creator

    Agreed =)

  3. ultrasound technician

    What a great resource!

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  5. emt training

    Wow this is a great resource.. I’m enjoying it.. good article

  6. Midnight Jim

    Thanks Tyrone!

    Just one thing. Ok, maybe two.

    allinanchor:”personalized sippy cups” returns 103,000 results, yet there is hardly any competition. This means that there are 103,000 webpages that are are linked to using the term “personalized sippy cups” right?

    Then,
    [allintitle:personalized napkins] 7,500 results
    [allintitle:personalized wedding napkins] 15,200 results
    Since the words personalized + napkins are found within the search phrase personalized wedding napkins, doesn’t this mean that it should show at least 15,200 results using the allintitle: operator?

    I am pretty good at logic, and do not see how this can make sense if I understand the operators correctly.

  7. Midnight Jim

    Also Tyrone, if you don’t mind addressing this question as well.
    [allintitle:personalized napkins] 7,500 results
    [allintitle:personalized wedding napkins] 15,200 results

    The first keyword query is also within the second, yet the second has over twice as many results. How can this be?

    • Tyrone

      Hi Jim,

      Great question. Sure, the second one seems to be very highly optimized and therefore more people would search for this over the generalized “personalized napkins”. Don’t forget Weddings are a very big market and when you search for something in this market you are going to get higher results.

      Hope this helps.

      Thanks.

  8. Midnight Jim

    Hi Tyrone, let me first say that I enjoy your posts very much and have learned a lot from you. I look forward to reading more in your newsletter.

    My question is about allinanchor. While using this operator, I’ve found that there are often 100,000+ results my lower competition keywords.

    For example, the query allinanchor:”personalized sippy cups” returns 103,000 results. However, competition for this keyword is substantially low. There is even a website that has NO backlinks on the first page.

    Can you tell me why there are so many results for this allinanchor query?

    Any help is greatly appreciated much.

    • Tyrone

      Thanks Jim for your compliment.

      What it looks like is that there are lots of posts about ”personalized sippy cups” and Google picks this up from all websites across the Internet. With these kind of results I can see there’s a demand for this market and with competition this low, you may be possible to rank well. Have you applied the formula? What is your result?

      Thanks.

  9. promotional gifts

    Hi Emiel the difference is allinanchor search for all those keywords in the inbound anchor text to the page. inanchor searches for the word you specify not a phrase. When you put quotes in an inanchor search then it will search for that phrase similiar to allinanchor with quotes.

  10. beginner

    Hello guys,
    Can you please explain to me how to calculate that combo value?
    It is hard for me to understand. The author says :”difference between the allinanchor and allintitle”.. so should I use the following ([allinanchor] – [allintitle])*2 to find the combo?

    • Tyrone

      Hi Adam,

      What you have asked is correct. Simply apply the allinanchor and allintitle formula into the combo and you will be given a number that will help you determine how many of your pages have the keyword located.

      • Claudiu

        “That is if 10 results have the keyword in their title and 23 have the keyword in their anchor text, I will assume that 10 of them have both keywords in anchor and title, and 13 only in anchor.”

        The difference is 13, or i should use the smallest number between the 2 values?

        • Tyrone

          Hi Claudiu,

          Yes that is correct. I would suggest using the smallest number between the two.

          Thanks.

  11. Security Installer

    The first step in the keyword generation process is to
    strategically select keywords that you want your Web site to rank for on the major search engines. There are two kinds of keyword terms, head terms and tail terms. Head terms refer to short keywords, usually one to two words in length that tend to have very high search volume. Tail terms are the longer keyword terms, typically three or more words
    that tend to have a much lower search volume than head terms. An effectively executed SEO strategy sets out to generate large amounts of quality Web site traffic by targeting a blend of head terms and tail terms.
    When you select keywords to incorporate into your Web site, remember that your goal is not to optimize your Web site all at once, but to optimize each page of your Web site. You should never optimize for more than one or two target keywords per Web page, because doing so dilutes your optimization in too many directions and decreases your overall effectiveness and ranking potential.
    The approach you take to optimizing each page of your Web site is different depending on whether you are optimizing existing Web page content or building new content. If you are optimizing existing Web page content, you should select one or two keywords that best summarize that page. In addition, you may need to manipulate the content a bit to make sure that your target keywords are emphasized and stand out from the rest of the content. If you are building new
    content, you should have one or two target keywords in mind before you start writing. For example, if your target keyword is “Extra Double Aged Gouda,” your Web page content should focus specifically on gaining ranking for that keyword.

  12. Mike Demko

    Tyrone,

    Is your “calculating the combo”methodology a part of marketsamurai.com?

    Great post

    thanks,

    • Tyrone

      Hi Mike,

      No it’s not. You have to do it manually with a spreadsheet.

      Market Samurai is good for finding keywords and determining if the keywords are viable in the market.

      Thanks.

  13. online shopping deals

    I’m having difficulty finding profitable key words. I’m currently using word tracker and Google’s keyword tool, but i still can’t seem to find any good low competition, high profitability key words. does anyone have any techniques or ideas for me to better research keywords?

    • Tyrone

      Hi Online Shopping Ideas,

      I would recommend also checking out Market Samurai at http://www.marketsamurai.com/c/Tyrone.

      This is a really good software to help you as well and if you follow the videos at http://thirtydaychallenge.com/ there are some excellent videos on how to find good keywords very quickly. It does take time.

      One last thing to mention look at some of the hobbies and personal interests you are currently doing in your life and see if there are potential niche markets there.

      Thanks