Keyword Research – Competition, Demand & Relevance Calculation

Once you have a list of keywords closely related to your niche and your audience’s search habits, it’s time to find out which of these keywords will be most valuable to you.

There is no ‘set’ way to evaluate the value of a keyword by a certain method or keyword. But this below listed process works well for any niche or audience, but also leaves room for customization in case you have some mitigating factors that are not discussed here.

There are three main levels you can judge keywords on:

1. Competition

The number of web pages you will be competing with for a particular keyword, as well as the ranking ‘strength’ of the top websites in this niche.

2. Demand

The number of estimated searches carried out for this term

3. Relevance

How relevant is this keyword to your site goals?

Estimating Demand:

There are several ways to estimate demand, but the core problem is that you cannot get an accurate number of searches conducted from any search engine. So we rely on keyword research tool such as KEYWORD ELITE in getting a clear picture.

One big problem when dealing with search popularity data is that because the data is taken from a smaller data set than what you would usually get when you took the same data from Google, you will get lower numbers.

The easy method to deal with this is to use Keyword Elite and simply multiply the number of monthly searches shown in Keyword Elite by 8, which will give you a rough estimate of the total Google searches for that keyword, for the specific month.

However, keep in mind that these are just predictions and not hard numbers. It’s not a perfect system, but it is good enough for our purposes.

Estimating Competition:

There are several metrics that you can use to measure the competition for a particular keyword. Basically, you are looking at the number of web pages that your website will compete with for that keyword. You can get this number by searching for that term in Google – so, for example, let’s take “home based business” as our target keyword.

If we search for this term in Google, we see that there are x million results for this phrase – that’s a LOT of competing web pages.

However, here is one thing about search engines – quite often, web pages that are ‘not’ optimized for a certain term may get included in the search results because the page may ‘qualify’ because of some ranking criteria.

Generally, targeting very competitive terms is not a good idea because then you are usually working on a much ‘broader’ scope than before. The only exception to this is when you already have a well established website with a strong history of backlinks
and rankings in the search engines.

Estimating Relevance:

In keyword analysis, you will want to take each keyword and compare it to your website’s goals and objectives, and determine whether it is relevant or not. Why would you measure relevance?

To establish a direct connection between what a user is searching for and what your website is providing. If you target the wrong keywords and a searcher looking for “home theater systems” comes to your website which talks about “contemporary theater”, you’ve got a problem.

Not only have you spent time and energy (and probably money) in ranking for a term your website is not built for, but you’ve got traffic and they’re not converting into customers because of the lack of relevance of your website’s content to their keywords.

Relevance is as important as knowing the level of search popularity and competition for a keyword. Using the same 5-point scale that we used just now, you can rate keywords on their relevance to your website’s goals.

Incidentally, your name (or your website / company name) would also be a ‘5’ – as your website becomes more popular, more and more people will start typing in your name in the search engines to look for you. The same goes for any products that you are promoting.

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