Keyword Competition
By David Golding
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I’ve noticed power in using the competition ratio approach to optimizing sites for search engines. In theory, the more relevant a site is for keywords, the higher it will be placed in the results, right? But, there’s immense monetary value for high placement in results. This fact alone distrupts the purity of search engines. And so it befalls us to accept that and work against competition.
Pure Relevance is a fallacy on the net
As an example of what I mean, take libraries. When I do a search, my searching at a library is out of a basis for research. The publisher, at least directly, gains no money from the fact that I pored over several of their texts in the library. You’ll notice in that setting that relevance is somewhat pure. If you run into issues and brick walls, you go grab a librarian or a research specialist, and they will sift through the mountains of information and pull for you what’s most relevant to your queries. I’ve never noticed a librarian make a recommendation to me knowing that publishers were competing for my consumption of their material. Or that the librarian is somehow getting a commission kickback from publishers for helping me. At least, there doesn’t seem to ever be a tug or pull, moneywise, to get me to view material in a pure setting.
On the net, this doesn’t exist. There is not only a tug and pull for business, but a multi-billion dollar one. We can’t expect search engines to give 100% unbiased results. There’s too much money at stake.
It will always require money
That being said, getting a site to show up in the top is going to require money, one way or the other. You have two options: advertising or campaigning to get higher in search results. To get higher, most of the time, you will need more exposure on the net than the no. 2 guy. To get higher in advertising, you gotta pay more bucks than the no. 2 guy. Take your pick. But remember, it will cost you time and money for the first option and it will simply cost you money for the second.
I like to review competition ratios for keywords before trying to make that decision. A competition ratio for a key phrase is found by taking the number of searches made in a given amount of time and dividing it by the number of results that turn up for that phrase in a given search engine. Of course, it’s an estimate. But it’s valuable for comparing phrases.
“Monkeys” and “Pet Monkeys”
Take the keyword “monkey” for example. Last month, it had somewhere around 242,880 searches. The results are around 75 million. The ratio then is 310-ish. Compared to “pet monkeys,” whose ratio is 0.86, you can see that I could significantly fare better creating a page on “pet monkeys” than for a “monkey” in general.
I like NicheBot for that. It gives me competition ratios for whatever keywords I’m interested in. If money is on the line, I can tell that getting a no. 1 spot for my pet monkey site will be cheaper than going for no. 1 under just monkey.
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