Search Engine Optimisation Training Course

Lesson No.4 - Evaluating Ranking Difficulty

by Bruce Gow Search Engine Guy Pty Ltd
http://www.searchengine-guy.com.au

So far with our keywords we have worked out our niche, built a refined keyword list, and developed some themes. The last thing to do with our keywords is to evaluate their difficulty in getting ranked on the search engines.

Before you start, you want to make sure that you are going to optimize for the right keywords in the right order.

Forget about KEI
One of the most popular way people use to evaluate a keyword potential is the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI). That’s a huge mistake.

If the core theory of the KEI is correct, its real life application demonstrate that this index is very flawed.
Your “real” competition is not the number of result pages returned by Google during a search query, that’s only the “virtual” competition volume.

The truth is that 99% of those pages are no competition whatsoever to you, especially considering how well we already have prepared our keywords already!
Your competition lies with the other people with the same knowledge as you, the people in the “know” about search engine optimisation (SEO).

SEO 101
Anybody with basic knowledge of SEO is a potential threat to you, so you need to identify those people quickly. In SEO it’s widely known that having your keyword in your page title is crucial and dramatically increase your chances to rank well in the search engines.

Your first task is then to identify those people, and for this, Google has a command line that makes this task a breeze: allintitle. In the search field of Google, type the following command:
allintitle:”your keyword”

The number of results returned this time is the number of pages that have your keyword (in this example “Pest Control”) in their page title.

Re-open your basic keyword list and add 3 columns:
• All In Title
• All In Anchor
• Difficulty

Your keyword spreadsheet should now looks like this:

Repeat the process for each of your keywords. Good job, you know already a much more realistic number as to what your real competition is, we are not done yet!

Remember, SEO is a combination of Onsite Optimization and Offsite Optimization. Obviously, the page title is an important component of on-site optimization, and we have covered this area with the command “allintitle”.

It’s now time to check the competition level at the off-site optimization level, and luckily for us, Google also has a command line for this: allinanchor. In the search field of Google, type the command: allinanchor:”your keyword”

The number of results returned this time is the one of all the pages which are linked to by backlinks with your keyword in their anchor text. This is where the real competition lies! Repeat the process for each of your keywords and update your spreadsheet accordingly.

Evaluating Keyword Difficulty
Aware of the information we just collected, here’s the formula I came up with and use myself to evaluate keyword difficulty; some of you may want to adjust or not this formula to their own flavour, personally, I ‘m satisfied with the results returned.

Here are the three elements we must keep in check with this formula:

1. How many pages have your keywords in the page title.
2. How many pages have your keywords as anchor text of their backlinks.
3. How many pages have both keywords in the page title, and keywords as anchor text of their backlinks.

Since someone who uses their keywords both in the page title and as anchor text for their backlinks is obviously somebody literate in SEO, I decided to attribute them double value.
Since the raw number is quite big, I decided to divide it by 1,000 to simplify the results.

So here’s the formula:
Keyword Difficulty = (([#allintitle]+[#allinanchor]) + ([#combo]*2)) / 1,000
Here’s how I rate the difficulty scale:

• Less than 1 – Extremely Easy
• Between 1 and 10 –Easy
• Between 11 and 100 – Medium
• Between 101 and 1,000 – Challenging
• Between 1,001 and 10,000 – Very Hard
• Over 10,000 – Extremely Hard

Here’s the method I use to calculate the value of [combo], that is how many pages have the keyword in anchor and title.
I’m not aware of any real accurate way to know such thing for sure, so I’ll just go with the difference between the allinanchor and allintitle (if you have one to share, you’re welcome!).

That is if 10 results have the keyword in their title and 23 have the keyword in their anchor text, I will assume that 10 of them have both keywords in anchor and title, and 13 only in anchor.

Alternatively if there was 23 results with keywords in their title and only 10 with keyword in their anchor text, I will assume that 10 of them have both keywords in the anchor text and title, and only 13 with the keyword in title only.

Anyway, this is in no way exact science and trying to get exact numbers would be waste of time as the results are ever changing, go with the best guesses and what makes sense for you.

Apply the formula and fill in the difficulty score for each of your keywords.
Optimizing for low difficulty keywords will allow you to rank quickly and easily in the search engines.

Exercise
This exercise is the last of the first part of this 21 lesson SEO Mastery course, and your graduation day as Keywords Master! For each of your keywords within the keywords groups your created, research the competition using the commands “allintitle” and “allinanchor” and evaluate your keyword difficulty.

Re-organize your keywords within each keyword group based on their difficulty as this will make it clearer for you to know which keyword you should optimize for first.

1.   Learn How to Sort Out the Competition
2.   Do Your Keyword Research Homework
3.   Refining Your Keywords
4.   Evaluating Ranking Difficulty
5.   Mapping Your Site Structure
6.   Understanding Links & PageRank
7.   Sculpting Your Site Structure
8.   Cascading Style Sheet Design
9.   Using Wordpress for SEO
10. Setting up Your Analytics
11. Engineering the Title Tag
12. Optimising The Content
13. Optimising The Description Tag
14. Building Internal Links
15. SEO & Images
16. OnPage Analysis Using IBP
17. Link Building 101
18. Beating Your Competition
19. Building External Links
20. Using Structured SEO

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