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.