Calculating Keyword Competition
Knowing how competitive your keywords are is important especially if some of your keywords display seasonal trends. Ensuring that your ranking for a keyword peaks at the same time searches peak is good SEO practice. But how do you measure keyword cometition within your search space?
The difference between related and relevant
A Search on Google for online dating returns an impressive 137,000,000 pages related to the query in some way. The important words here are 'related in some way', it doesn't mean that the search engine has indexed 137,000,000 relevant pages.
Pages discussing carbon dating for example could conceivably contain the word 'online' somewhere in their text. Such a page would then be seen as related simply because the words 'online' and 'dating' are both present. In fact only a small portion of the 137,000,000 related pages will be relevant and even less will show the tell tale signs of optimization.
Using Google's Advanced Operators
Google provides advanced search operators to help mine data more accurately. The advanced operators that help calculate keyword competition are intitle:, intext: and inancchor:. These advanced operators work by first extracting a subset of pages from Google's main index prior to running their ranking algorithm.
For example intitle:"online dating" will extract a subset of pages from the main index that contain 'online dating' in the title, the search has also asked the words be an exact match in ordered agency. Similarly, intext:"online dating" and inanchor:"online dating" extract pages that contain an exact match in the body and the links that point to pages.
Putting it all together
On their own these advanced operators are of limited use in evaluating keyword competition but when used together in a single query they create a subset of pages that contain an exact match of the term in the title, body text and links pointing to the page.
intext:"online dating" intitle:"online dating" inanchor:"online dating"
intext:"seo scotland" intitle:"seo scotland" inanchor:"seo scotland"
Click the links above and look at the amount of pages being returned for each search, the one with the highest number is the more competitive.
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