IsaGeeks

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Something you should know about what you’re about to learn is that it is very easy to do – but the explanation is vicious and long.

All you are doing in this step is finding out how many other web pages have a phrase, and whether or not you want to spend time trying to beat them all out for a front page rank on Google.

Understanding Competitive Research – A Metaphor

Let me try to make what we’re going to be doing easier to understand: You race in marathons to win prize money. There’s one in Los Angeles this weekend, with 10,000 other runners expected to show up. The prize for coming in first is $1 million, which is great! But you’d have to be faster than 10,000 other people to get it.

In New York there’s another Marathon, and that one has a prize of $500,000 – but you’ll have to beat exactly 2 million other runners to win it. So you’ll have to run even harder here, with even less reward for doing so. It’s hardly even worth considering, is it?

Finally, in Enid, Oklahoma, there’s a race with only a $5,000 prize. There’s also only three other people entered. So the prize for winning is a lot less than in New York or Los Angeles, but your odds are great! So you might win a lot of money in LA or NY, or definitely win a little money in Enid.

Hopefully we’ll be finding keywords that fall somewhere in the middle. They should have enough people searching for them, people you want coming to your site. But they should also be phrases you have a chance of getting a top ranking for.

Editing your Keyword List

If you created a keyword list based on what you learned from the previous post on keyword research, you should have a list that looks something like this:

These are the phrases you may or may not want to get higher search engine ranking for. The “search volume” is the approximate number of searches performed globally for these phrases each month.

The next step is to decide which of the phrases you’ve put together are worth optimizing for. Remember, all SEO requires work and time – so you don’t want to bother trying to rank higher for phrases that either have nothing to do with what you’re trying to sell, or are so competitive you’ll never succeed.

Scraping off the unrelated keywords is easy. Look at the sample list again. Which ones don’t relate to your Isagenix business?

The ones in red don’t exactly describe where you’re coming from, so we’ll eliminate these right off the bat.

How many competitors are on Google?

What you’re left with looks good, but you still need to see how hard it will be to rank for these. This can easily be done by looking them up on Google.

When you perform any search, Google gives you an approximate number of other pages that were also found.

Before you do, make sure you’ve logged out of your Google or Gmail accounts first. Google likes to show you results it thinks you will be interested in seeing. But you’re trying to see how these keywords turn up for most everybody else. As an Isagenix associate, Google probably has a good idea of what you want to see in a search for “natural cleanse.”  However, it can only do this for you if you are logged in.

Once you’re logged out, do a search for the phrase in quotes – that is, search for “natural cleanse” instead of just natural cleanse.

If you don’t use quotes around it, Google will look for any page that has the words “natural” or “cleanse” in it. You don’t want that. What you want to do is see how many other pages on Google were specifically indexed with the phrase, “natural cleanse.”

Do that for all of the keywords in your list. Going back to that sample list, you should now have information that looks something like this:

It isn’t hard to see that “natural cleanse” is a great keyword to rank for. 74000 people a month are using the phrase worldwide, but there are only 39100 pages using it.

On the other hand, “cleanse your body” has 27100 searches per month – which is still nothing to sneeze at. However, getting to the front page of Google will mean you will have to beat out the other 2.4 million other pages Google found with that same phrase.

Keyword Efficiency Index

To make things easier to look at, you’ll want to look at each phrase’s KEI – or, “Keyword Efficiency Index.” This is a relationship between the amount of search traffic a phrase gets, and the number of other pages competing for that traffic.

The KEI itself is only important for showing a relationship – so any mathematical formula for looking at this is acceptable, as long as it makes sense to you. In this case, I’ve used this:

KEI = 1000*(Search Volume/Competition²)

I know, it looks like a messy pile of math. But plug your numbers in, and what you get is a clean-looking percentage for each phrase:

You could use a simpler formula, like KEI = Search Volume/Competition if that’s simpler for you to grasp. The only reason I get so tricky with this is to create a clean percentage that I can easily view in the KEI column.

Now you get a clearer picture of these keywords, and which ones may be better to chase. “Natural cleansing” does a little better than “body toxins,” but “natural cleanse” does a LOT better than anything else, and “internal cleansing” is hardly worth trying for. It doesn’t necessarily matter which phrases you want to do better for, only which ones are worth your time to do better for.

What I’ve done here is to take a simple list of 10 keyword phrases, reduce it down to 6, then down to 1 absolute winner worth optimizing for. That’s why when you do your initial keyword research, collect as many possible phrases as you can – because you’re going to be getting rid of a LOT of them before you’re done.

We have a winner!

As for our example, we’ve now got this phrase, “natural cleansing” to optimize with. What does that entail? I’ll talk more about that in the next post.

In the meantime, put together your keyword list, look up how many competitors each one has, and figure out a KEI for all of them. (Go ahead and use the Search Volume/Competitors formula for now if you’d like. I swear I’m not trying to make this more complex than it needs to be!)