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Calculating Keyword Competition

Knowing how competitive your keywords are is important, especially if some of your keywords display seasonal trends. Ensuring that your rankings peak at the same time searches peak is good SEO practice. But how do you measure keyword competition within your search space?

The difference between competing and related

A Search on Google for 'online dating' returns an impressive 55,400,000 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 55,400,000 competing 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 55,400,000 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 inanchor:. 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"

The final search returns 7,230,000 pages, that contain the term 'online dating' in their title, page content and have links pointing to them using the term. This is certainly a competitive term, although the number of pages returned by the combined advanced operators is lower it actually tells us a great deal more about competition than simply counting related pages.

Now Take Action

If you value the role the Internet can play in promoting your business to national or international market Contact Escocian today and a member of our SEO staff will contact you to discuss your SEO Requirements.