Internet Marketing For Newbies - Using Google to Check Competition
By Shelby Demmitt
There are many aspects to researching for any internet marketing campaign. Proper
research is vital, and will make the difference between one that will make you money, and
one that doesn't make a dime. There are many different aspects of your campaign to
research, and just as many different ways to do it. I will show you just a small one that
I use to judge how much potential competition a keyword has, and one that confuses many
new article marketers. And that is using Google itself to find information that you will
need to rank well with that search engine.
The first thing most people will tell you is to put your keyword in quotes in the
Google search bar to find how much competition that particular phrase has. How many
results you want depending on the person giving you the advice. The number can be anywhere
from 10,000 to 5,000 or less, or any number really. It can be all over the board.
Following this piece advice, our newbie usually asks, "Why do we check our keyword in
quotes when nobody types the search in this way?". The reason is this - putting your
keyword in quotes shows you how much competition that keyword has. This means that it
shows you exactly how many of Google's indexed web pages has that exact phrase in it.
For example, let's say your keyword is how to lose weight quickly. If the keyword is in
quotes, it will show you how many websites have this exact phrase within it. If the phrase
is NOT entered in quotes, then it will show you any web page that has these words anywhere
on them, in any particular order. So "how to" could be in the first paragraph of the web
page, "lose" could be in the third paragraph, "weight" could be in the fourth
paragraph... you get the idea.
So we as marketers don't care how many web pages have these words randomly appearing on
a web page. We want to know which web pages have this exact phrase, because we are trying
to rank for that exact phrase. But with that being said, don't use this method. That's
right... don't use it. At least not exclusively. There are other more accurate methods that
you can use to find your real number of competition. And the method is so simple that I
don't know why this isn't more commonly taught than the "quotes" method.
There are only a few basic steps that you should use to check how easily you can rank
on Google's first page. Here they are:
First, enter your keyword in Google like this intitle:"your quoted keyword here"
inanchor:"your quoted keyword here". What this does is ask Google which websites have your
keyword in the title of the page, and in the anchor text of the page. Why is this
important? Because Google gives higher rankings to pages that use the keyword in these
areas, as well as in the content. They will rank a page higher with this keyword in these
areas because it sees the page as being very relevant to the content. Using our example
above, Google will look for pages that have "how to lose weight quickly" in the title of
the page (or article) and in the anchor text, and give you those results. The number of
results will be significantly less than just your usually "quoted keyword" results.
So what do you do with this information? Well the first thing I would do is check to
see if your keyword has ten results or less. That's what I use, and have been successful
using that number. Many web pages are not fully optimized for a particular keyword, so it
will be pretty easy to find a keyword with ten or less results. And if you fully optimize
your webpage by putting your keyword a few times in your article, in your title, and in
your anchor text, you should be able to rank on the first page no problem.
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