Low or high competition keywords

[theironmill]

As of late I have been tweaking the keywords and content on my website to words and phrases that show up as low competition on the keyword tool. I still have loads of work to do to it and I'm wondering if I should go for words and phrases that have a really high competition. At the minute I get around 15 new visitors per day with around 80 page views so any advice would be greatly appreciated. Cheers

 

[nitro23456]

PPC?, organic?, niche?, budget?, inside leg measurement?

 

[RevaxMedia]

Depending on how much time you have towards this project I would split them into categories if applicable; i.e 5 x local keyphrases, 5 x low competitions keywords, 5 x moderately keywords 1/2 x high competition (trophy phrases)

This is just very generic advice as different websites can approach SEO from different perspectives.

 

[theironmill]

Oh yeah sorry its for organic results, and my inside leg measurement is 32inches

 

[nitro23456]

Whilst quite often the competition grading also applies to organic searches by coincidence, it is in fact a measure of the number of people bidding for the term via PPC. It is not a measure of how many sites are trying to rank organically for that term.

Make of it what you will, but there are numerous occassions where a 'high' competition word barely has many searches and would be easy to rank for organically and also the other way round.

In short its for PPC and then youre better off looking at CPC.

 

[softwaredevelopersuk]

Your business in on long time run, then you could prefer long tail keywords for increase the your keywords visibility. But for short time websites, Targeting short tail or exact keywords would be best.

 

[webgeek]

In addition to competition, you need to be examining volume.

Generally speaking, when choosing keywords, I like to:

1) Get plenty of ideas from a number of keyword suggestion tools
2) Run them through Adwords tool (among others) to find monthly search volumes in the target country
3) Sort by volume, in descending order
4) Start filtering based on whether they are relevant to a purchase decision, using a scoring system - Z are competition over 0.8, Y are 0.4 to 0.8, X are under 0.4

Depending on the niche, I would hope to find plenty of X's with decent volumes and only go with those. If not, I would add in some Y's or Z's as required.

If the volume is under 8,000, I would mark it as short term. If 8,000 to 20,000 it becomes medium term. If over 20,000, then it is long term.

That's roughly the method I use...

 

[JasonGomez]

Keep in mind that big competitors are probably aiming at highly competitive keywords. Instead they probably aren't doing much for long tail keywords. In that sense, it would be better to start with long tail keywords which generally bring better visitors (more CTR and more conversions).
Slowly start working on KWs that bring high volume but that's a long shot. It takes time and you'll probably spend more time and money.

 

[Ankit06]

I would say , try to get rank for long tail keywords. What I do is that I search long tail keywords which contains the short keywords as well. First try to get rank for wisely selected long tail keyword , once you start ranking , you will see that short tail keyword ( which is a part of long tail keyword ) will also show some improvement and once you rank on the long tail , start ranking the short tail keyword. I think this strategy helps a lot.

 

[jo_g_]

I would look at your competitors - what keywords are they targeting? Longtail keywords is probably your best bet, so what makes your business different and unique and target for those kind of words. This will probably bring you more visitors that are likely to convert. Obviously, you need to make sure there is plenty of content relevant to the long-tailed keywords, otherwise visitors may just bounce right off your site!

 

[MitchEljonseN]

Low compaction key words are really easy to take on the top pages and there is good advisability in the the Search engine can b gained easily..

 

[makeusvisible]

The common mistake people make when using the keyword tool is to presume that it is an accurate measure of SEO competition; it isn't

Just because a keyword has less competing pages, doesn't mean it is going to be an easier keyword to target. The metric you need to be using is how many of the competitors are doing quality SEO?

For example, a keyword that has 100,000 results may have just 3 sites doing really good quality SEO towards the specific keyword.

Another keyword may have just 1,000 competing pages, but there might be 20 of those sites doing top-notch SEO, and thus it is going to be a harder target.

Keep in mind that the keywords you choose are going to be a major investment for you.....both in time, and possible budget. Do not base your decision on any one tool, as you can only properly determine the right keywords to target by doing a full keyword research excercise.

 

[bridge72]

It depends who your biggest competition is. If you have a competitor in the area that you want to gain more traffic and sales above them then realistically you need to be targeting the same high-competition keywords as they are to ensure that you are not missing out to customers via their sales.

Low competition keywords are also good to have in your SEO strategy as it means that with less work you can rank higher and that you may also show up in search terms that other competitors have not thought of using.

My advice would be to go for a mix of the two if you want to stand out as an industry leader.

 

[SamWiseUKB]

regularly check google ad words and get alerts about trends. Also check Twitter for popular tags etc

 

[SamWiseUKB]

Saying that though I've heard that its best to avoid long tail. Its best to mix it up really. There's no hard and fast rules, so try to do a bit of everything in order to keep you hands in all the baskets.

 

[jay82]

I am of the opinion to focus on both short as well as long-tail keywords. Short tail keywords are more competion for sure but also searched up more often, therefore generate more traffic to your website. Whereas long-tail being more specific and less competitive is beneficial no doubt but generates lesser traffic. You need to build ranks on both to assure maximum traffic collectively from either source

 

[inbound interactive]

First off the competition column is for PPC not natural.

Once you have identified a bunch of keywords you might want to start by seeing how well your site ranks naturally by checking rankings and seeing where the volume is and where you rank for them and then start by pushing those keywords on to the first page.