Transcript
Hi guys. And welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is how can you tell if keyword is too competitive for your business? Now, this video kind of may seem very basic and we filmed videos similar. But I want go a little bit more deeper today. When we talked about keyword research before we've talked about how different tools have keyword difficulty scores or competitive scores, and how you understand them based on the larger scope of keyword research. But what I want to talk about is, when the situation where your business is looking to engage in SEO, and you are ready to look at a keyword and you are not sure if it's something that you can actually reasonably compete for. Right? So that's what we want to discuss today. But before we begin, before I get ahead of myself, I want to introduce the tea we have today.
Today we have a mini leaf green tea, it's called an Imperial Green Tea. This is a green tea that I take out every so often when I want something a little bit more soothing. It was a little bit nicer because green tea is brewed at a much lower temperature. So on days like this, where the sun's beating down on me, it's a little bit nice to have a green tea. If you're curious about what the aromatics and the taste are, deep, rich and aromatic with a roasted [inaudible 00:01:13] bone, sorry, [bore Lawdy, 00:01:16] [bore loady 00:01:16] beans, sweet lemoncello, and strawberry jam or aromatics. So the bag will always do a better job of describing how it smells and tastes. But overall, I like this green tea, it's a little bit sweeter and a little bit more soothing as opposed to some other teas that I drink at times.
But anyways, let's just go ahead and jump on in. So how can you tell if a keyword is too competitive? Now, first things first, like I said in the intro of the video, you can look at keyword difficulty scores or competitiveness scores. But what I really want to talk about is if sometimes the tools you're using aren't always the most accurate and that's because they can't be the most accurate because they have millions and millions of keywords to kind of be measuring. And so they're using everything on a relative scale. And so sometimes things will fall through the cracks. And so I always encourage my teams and my clients... We need to do the Google searches of keywords ourselves, and then also vet them ourselves. And so what my team does beyond keyword difficulty, is we also go into the Google search results and analyze the top players themselves to see who the companies who ranked on the first page are doing and what their SEO metrics are.
So how can you truly tell if a keyword is too competitive? There are two major metrics about my firm looks like, actually, let's go three. There's three. Number one is intent. Now this one sounds obvious and I talk about intent a lot, but what I mean by intent is if you're going for a keyword, first things first... If the Google search results have no search results to appear that match a business like yours or the search result like yours, you can do anything you want, but you will not attain that keyword. And let me give you a great example. This is the one I use historically, back when I to work in my other agency, we had a lot of dentists. Every dentist will tend to ask me like, "Hey, can we write for cavity?" But if you do a Google search for cavity, the searches that come out, are not dentists. They're not anything business related. They're all informational articles about cavities and the top players like Colgate and the big dental brands. So for a dentist, they could go for it. But number one, it'd be so competitive because you're going for an informational search that's more national based and you're competing against the big brands.
And then number two, second thing is why would you want to rank for it? The only search results appearing are informational. None of them are business related. So for the dentist to rank for it, they would have to create a really awesome blog post and then try to get that ranked and commit all of their SEO resources to having cavity ranked. When, to me, it's so away from the funnel that... From the bottom of your funnel, that it may not be worth it. So number one is intent, right?
Number two, what we also look at is the number of referring domains coming into that page. So what we do is we like to look at the top of pages on this first page of Google. And then we look at the top three to five players and we see how many referring domains are pointing to that page itself. What we want to see is how immersed is the other firm in SEO and how many links are they driving in? Because the number of links and referring domains they're driving into their landing page is something that we will have to keep in mind as we do our own link-building referring to it. We need to match both, not beat them based on the number of referring demands on links coming in.
Now, second is content. What we also look at as the content library. That doesn't mean the size of this website. What we look at is... For the keyword that we're looking at, when we look at that site itself, how many pages on the competing site have that key word looking for in the title. That will generally tell you the number of content pages that that website has committed to trying to rank for that keyword. And the reason why that is important, because for SEO, two of the main three pillars of SEO is referring domains and content. And the more content you have, the better your library looks, and the more thorough your library looks for Google.
So saying all of that, what one of two things we really look at as referring domains and content, if a competing website doesn't have very many referring domains pointing into their web of that one landing page, but they have a lot of content, we know that in order to beat them, we either have to match all their content, or we have to beat them through sheer force of referring domains. But if a keyword is too competitive is if their landing page has like hundreds and hundreds of referring domains and yours has zero, and they have a lot of content. That means you are very far behind and the keyword might be too competitive.
So saying all of that, I want to add one more thing that might make it a little bit more complex, but it will give you the fullest picture. What we also measure is the number of referring domains coming to the landing page, the number of pages in the content library. But what we also will look at is the number of pages in the content library. Let's say we're trying to rank for, let's say that cavity term, we have one landing page reading about cavity, but then the content library has 30 pages for cavity for the whole website. What we will do is we will analyze all 31 pages for the total amount of referring domains pointed at those 31 pages, because there is link equity we want to measure across the site. And if we can look at all 31 pages and all the referring domains coming in, we can generally size up their entire SEO kind of playbook for that keyword.
Once you analyze that, you will really know because then the numbers are right there. If they have 700 referring domains and 700 pieces of content, and you have one landing page and one piece of content, you'd need what, 699 more pieces of content, or 699 more pieces of referring domains just to match them. And in that case I might be too competitive, right? So that's how we analyze everything beyond keyword difficulty.
So when you're doing your own keyword research, I would Google them myself, and I would do this analysis so that you have a very complete picture. And the reason why you want to be so meticulous is because SEO takes a while and you don't want to pick the wrong targets that were too competitive to start with, or you will have some trouble moving forward.
So I'm going to go ahead and leave it at that. If you guys enjoyed the video today of this [inaudible 00:07:25], if you guys enjoyed the video today, please like, and subscribe. I'm going to go ahead and pour out my tea now. And I hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks everybody. Oh.