If search was a game like tennis, keyword research will just help you identify a tournament with 10 million prize money. Great. But then do you know who are the opponents? Do you have it in you to play in the wimbeldon of search?This is where keyword difficulty analysis comes in.
I will continue with the same example about sample resumes. So I have done my keyword research and found out that enough people search for it everyday. I also know how to write a page best suited for the term. But how long will it take for me to outrank the existing results on google’s result page? Keyword Difficulty analysis is the process of finding an answer to the question of whether to pick up the fight or not.
How to do keyword difficulty analysis?
- Find out the competition: Before you can start the analysis, you need to identify them. Well a simple google search result will get you the list of top 10 sites for the keywords. For our existing example keyword of “sample resume” the #1 position is with the site bestsampleresume.com. So I need to figure out how easy or difficult it will be to beat the site.
- Keywords in URL: The site bestsampleresume.com has got the keywords in its url. My site jhingalala.com does not have them. The main advatage of having keywords in the url is that many people tend to link to the site with those keywords. Are there sites in the top 10 that do not have the key words in the url? If there is a site like that you can easily trump it on this parameter.
- Sitelinks: Does the #1 site have sitelinks for the keyword?
- Are they targetting the keyword? Soometimes you will be able to find pages on the SERP that are not directly targetting the keyword but still rank because of domain strength alone. This is normally an indication that there is less competition for the keyword. Look at my earlier post about how to use keywords for maximum impact to see what are the elements you should target.
- Do they target for variations of the keyword? Strong authority sites will rank for both sample resume as well as resume sample. However if there are 2-3 sites that rank for sample resume but are not present in top 30 for resume sample, then I have a good chance.
- Pagerank If the 10th guy on the results page has a PR of 6, then you have little chance of succeeding ever. On the other hand if the third guy has a PR 2, then you can be more hopeful.
- Backlinks ( Number and quality): Use the yahoo linkdomain search to find out the number of links. If you want to do a good job then extract all the links to a csv file and then check the quality of these links. For determining quality I normally look at the PR of the page, the PR of the site, how many are nofollow and the anchor text used for linking. Remove the nofollow links. Then do a count of how many PR6 links, how many PR5 links are there. I suggest that you write a php script for this.
- Age of the site: Most of the time I find this as the most difficult task to compete against. If all the top 10 sites are 6 years old then you have a really difficult task on your hand. Make use of the domain age tool for this purpose. The only possible solution is to make your site age faster.
- Social Media Power of the author: Very often I will try to locate the webmaster and see on which all social media sites he is present. Does he have 1000 or 2 friends on digg? how many favorties he has on SU. Has he dicovered many popular articles, number of followers on twitter etc.
At the end of it I normally have a table like following. Looking at the table generally I can make up my mind whether to get in or not. Expand it to 20 sites if you think you will be happy at the 21st position.
| Parameter | Site 1 | Site 2 | Site 3 | Site 4 | Site 5 | My Site |
| Keyword in URL | Y | Y | Y | N | Y | Y |
| Sitelinks | Y | N | ||||
| Keyword In Title | Y | Y | N | N | Y | Y |
| Keyword In meta description | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Use H1, H2, Bold tag | Y | Y | Y | Y | N | Y |
| Use images | N | N | N | Y | N | Y |
| Ranks for similar keywords | Y | Y | N | Y | Y | |
| Number of backlinks | 1000 | 700 | 999 | 3000 | 5000 | |
| Number of dofollow backlinks | 500 | 300 | 900 | 400 | 200 | |
| PR6,PR5,PR4 backlinks count | ||||||
| Pagerank | 6 | 5 | 7 | 5 | 5 | 0 |
| Age | 6 | 4 | 2 | 7 | 5 |
Good TryKeyword difficulty analysis642|just some value|4