Introduction To SEO Competitiondownload.marketsamurai.com/SC100204TS01MS_intro.pdf · each search...

Introduction To SEO Competition

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Introduction To SEO Competition - 1

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Video Transcript

The number one trap that people fall into when they start an Internet business is that they do nottake the time to investigate the strength of the competition in the niche they are targeting.

The truth is, even if you find a keyword that is relevant to your market, has a good level of traffic anda high commercial value, if the competition is too strong you will simply never obtain a front pageranking in Google.

Without a front page ranking, you will struggle to obtain traffic and without traffic you will struggle tomake sales and of course without sales your business simply won’t survive.

In this video I’d like to give you a tour of the Market Samurai SEO Competition module which givesyou an easy but incredibly powerful way to assess the level of competition in any particular niche.


Background

But before we get to Market Samurai, I’d like to take a moment to give you some backgroundinformation on how Google decides which websites should appear on the front page of its results foreach search phrase.


The Googlebot

A good way to visualize the process of page ranking is to imagine that Google sends out anautomated robot called a Googlebot to review your website.


On Page Factors

When the Googlebot visits your site, it reviews two main things to decide how relevant your websitewill be to Google’s users.

The first thing the Googlebot looks at is the actual content of your pages. By reviewing the titles,descriptions, headings and many other factors on your pages, the Googlebot can accuratelydetermine what your site is about. These factors are called the ‘On Page Factors’ and can play a bigpart in determining the rank of your website.


Off Page Factors

But the Googlebot doesn’t stop there. In addition to assessing the on-page factors, the Googlebotalso examines the number and type of other websites that link to your webpage. The idea behindthis is that if a lot of high quality websites are linking to yours then you must be delivering valuablecontent.

Factors such as the number of incoming links to your page and the age of your domain are knownas ‘Off Page Factors’.


Recap

So, in summary, the Googlebot uses a combination of ‘on page factors’ and ‘off page factors’ todetermine the value of your website which in turn determines where it will appear in the Googlerankings for various keyword phrases.


Create New Project

OK, lets now go and check out the SEO competition module in Market Samurai to see what thismeans for you and your online business.

For this example I’m going to take a look at the ‘dog training’ niche. So to begin I’ll create a newproject...


Enter Seed Keyword

...and then enter my seed keyword ‘dog training’.


Access SEO Competition Module

To access the SEO competition module, I just come down here and click on the ‘SEO Competition’button.

What this module allows you to do is to conduct a real time SEO analysis of the top websites thatare currently competing for the keyword that you’re interested in.

The great thing about this is that you can assess the quality of your competition BEFORE you tryand build a website.


SEO Factors

At the top of the screen you’ll see a list of the ‘Off Page’ and the ‘On Page’ factors that MarketSamurai allows you to investigate.


Generate Results

To begin my SEO competition analysis for the ‘dog training’ keyword, all I have to do is click the‘Generate Results’ button.

Market Samurai then goes out and researches my keyword and conducts a real time SEO analysisin order to populate this SEO Matrix.

This kind of analysis would literally take you hours or days to do manually but thankfully MarketSamurai can now do if for you in less than a minute!


The SEO Matrix

Generally speaking, Market Samurai uses a color code to illustrate how well optimized each of thesefactors are for the top websites. Green cells indicate that you have a good opportunity to compete inthis niche, orange cells indicate that it might be challenging, and red cells indicate a high level ofcompetition.

So if your SEO competition matrix is very green then you’ve probably found an accessible microniche, whereas if most of the cells in your SEO matrix are red, then you’re probably looking at a verycompetitive niche.


The Lion and the Two Internet Marketers

If you recall the story of the Lion and the two Internet Marketers from the 3rd Golden Rule video,you’ll remember that the key to improving your Google rank is to try and be just that little bit betterthan your competition.

The SEO matrix allows to see exactly what your competitors are doing which in turn helps you todetermine what you need to do in order to improve your Google rank.

Don’t be too concerned if this all looks a little complicated at first, we’ll go through each of thecolumns one at a time.


URL

The first column, the URL column, contains links to the top ten ranked websites for my search term‘dog training’. If I want to visit any of these sites, all I have to do is click on the link and MarketSamurai opens the website in a new window.

Domain Age

The next column is DA which stands for Domain Age. Google tends to give some ranking preferenceto websites that have been online for a number of years. If new or young websites are ranking in thetop ten of Google it can be an indication that the niche is more accessible.


Page Rank

The PR column contains Page Rank values. Page Rank is Google’s estimate of the authority of adomain. The higher the Page Rank, the more authority the site has.

So if you see lots of red cells in the PR column, it means that you’ll be competing against a largenumber of high authority websites. Alternatively if sites with low or zero page rank are ranking in thetop ten, it means that the niche may be more accessible.

Index Count

The next column is the IC column which stands for Index Count. This provides an indication of thenumber of pages on this domain which the Googlebot has indexed.

This is a great way to gain an insight into the depth of a particular site. The depth of a site relates tohow many actual pages of content exist.

So for example, with this number one ranked website, there appears to be 135 pages of content.

If the site is subject specific, this can also give you an indication of how many pages of topic specificcontent you will need to develop in order to compete for this keyword phrase.


You’ll notice that the domains listed here include wikipedia and youtube which have millions ofpages in the Google index. It is likely that these pages are ranking highly for the keyword ‘dogtraining’ due to the authority of their domains and the strength of their associated link networks.

If you want to explore the actual indexed pages for a particular site, all you have to do is click thisarrow next to the IC count.

Market Samurai then opens a new window containing links to all the pages from the site that arecurrently in the Google index.

Back Links to Page

The BLP column shows the number of back links to the specific page listed in the Google rankings.If there are no or only a few back links to pages that are ranking well, it again means that you have agood chance to compete in this niche

Back Links to Domain

The next column is the BLD column or the Back links to Domain values. This shows the totalnumber of links pointing not just to a specific page but to the entire domain.


If the BLP is low but the BLD is high, then the page is probably ranking because of the authority ofthe overall domain rather than any specific page.

Education and Government Back Links

The BLEG column indicates the number of backlinks that are coming from .edu or .gov domainsbecause Google has suggested that links from educational or government websites have a higherauthority than links coming from normal domains.

Demoz Directory

The next column indicates whether or not each site is listed in the Dmoz directory which is one ofthe largest human reviewed directories of the Internet.


Yahoo Directory

And the YAH column indicates wether or not each site is listed in the Yahoo directory which is now apaid directory which currently costs about $300 a year.

Off Page Factors

So these first 8 columns refer to ‘Off Page’ factors and together they give you a good indication ofthe strength of the link network that exists for each of the websites currently competing in your niche.

They also give you a good idea of the kind of link network you’re going to have to develop in order toachieve a front page Google listing.


Keyword in Title

Now the last five columns of the SEO matrix relate to the ‘On Page’ SEO factors.

The first column ‘title’ indicates whether or not the keyword you’re investigating appears in the Titletag of the ranking page.

Keyword in URL

Similarly, the URL column indicates whether the keyword appears in the URL of the listed webpage.


Keyword in Description

The next column DESC stands for description and it shows wether or not the keyword is present inthe description tag of the webpage.

Headline Tags

The Head column indicates whether the keyword appears within H1, H2 or H3 tags within thewebpage.

Cache Age

And finally the CA column indicates the number of days since the Googlebot reindexed the website.


Simplified View

If you are brand new to Search Engine Optimization and this all seems a little intimidating then agood way to simplify things is to hide all the columns and then just focus in on the Page Rank, BackLinks to Page, Yahoo, Title and URL columns.

This makes things a little less intimidating while still highlighting some of the most important SEOfactors.


Compare Your Website to your Competition

When you’re exploring the competition for a particular keyword, one of the most common thingsyou’ll want to do is to compare your website directly to your competition.

In order to do this, all you have to do is come down here and click the ‘Add custom URLs’ button.


Add Custom URL

You can then type in the URL of your website or any other websites that you would like to compareto your competition.

So I’ll just type in our site URL www.NobleSamurai.com into the box and click the AddURLs button.


View Site Details

And as you can see, the details of our website now appear at the top of this list which allows me toquickly and easily compare them to the competition.


Remove Custom URL

To remove my custom URL from the table all I have to do is come across here and click on the‘Close’ icon.


Summary

So just to recap, if there is one real ‘Secret’ to success online, it is to take the time to assess thestrength of the competition in a niche before you invest the effort required to build a business.

The SEO Competition module in Market Samurai helps you to assess the strength of yourcompetition quickly and easily and in doing so can help you to avoid months or even years of hardwork and frustration.


Introduction To SEO Competitiondownload.marketsamurai.com/SC100204TS01MS_intro.pdf · each search...

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