When you’re optimising a site to get a good placement in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), it vital to try and isolate who your _actual_ competition is. This process of course starts with your keyphrases.
Lets say we’re optimising a page for a mortgage brokers. We might be tempted to try and optimise for the word ‘mortgage’. This would be slow suicide. When optimising for very popular and established markets you need to be honest with your client. Don’t tell them you can get a top 30 ranking for a word like ‘mortgage’ as you can’t. Not unless they have an unlimited budget and an expectation of the process taking several years. Instead we need to identify some less popular keyphrases, ensuring of course that they are actually used at all!
Head over to DigitalPoints excellent and free Keyword Suggest tool. This excellent script queries Overture and Wordtrackers keyphrase database to see whatelse is returned for a given word/phrase and how popular each alternate phrase is.
Type ‘mortgage’ in the box and choose UK (if you want to follow my process – feel free to select your own country, the principle remains the same but I’ll be referring to UK numbers here). You’ll have to enter an antispam Catchpa but thats no hardship.
When the results come up, you’ll get two columns, one with Wordtracker results and one with Overture results. The numbers to the right of each result tells you how many searches _per day_ are done on that phrase/word.
Basically, the lower the number, the less competition you have. You can count on a conversion rate of between 2% – 4% so (for example) the phrase ‘100 Mortgage’ (which is searched for 370 times per day) will lead to between 7 and 15 click throughs to the client site a day (assuming I can get somewhere on page 1 or 2 – maybe 3). Bear in mind this isn’t the same as a _conversion_ rate. I have no way of knowing what your clients conversion rate is.
From those lists I would be tempted to have a go at anything under 300 returns per day – don’t go too low as it won’t be worth your time optimising for the return you’ll (not) get. If you feel braver then go higher. If you’re less confident, go lower.
Copy and paste all your desired phrases into a text editor and switch your attention to Google. We’re going to find out who our real competion is in the worlds most popular search engine.
Lets go with ‘online mortgage’ which returns about 100 times per day. Do an ordinary Google search (remember, I’m using google.co.uk so details might differ from your results.
Using that phrase I get 44,800,000 results. Yikes. thats a lot of competition. Except not all of it is. We need to narrow it down to see who we’re really up against.
Google adds weight to keywords/phrases in certain HTML elements – the tag for example. So lets see who uses this phrase in their page titles. Copy and paste the following into the Google search box:
allintitle:online mortgage
This little switch returns a set of results of pages that use the phrase ‘online mortgage’ in the element. Notice how much our competition level has dropped – from 44,800,000 to 334,000. thats a big, big drop. Still, thats quite a formidable number.
Its also well known that Google adds weight to a page if those who link to it use the keyword/phrase that is trying to be optimised. Lets see about that:
allinanchor:"online mortgage"
This returns about 129,000 results for me.
So now we have a more realistic idea of the amount of people who are actively trying to do business on that phrase. What we need to do now is find out how well they are doing. This is easy. Make a note of each distinct domain going back about 3o results and go to each page in turn. If they’re spamming or blackhatting in any way, report them (all’s fair in love and war).
After you’ve checked them out, go back to Google and type in:
www.kevinleitch.co.uk -site:www.kevinleitch.co.uk
Obviously switch my domain for the site you’re researching. This will give you a set of results based on people who are linking to the target site. I know about the ‘link:’ switch before anyone mails me – its just not very accurate. Go through the first 30 results for each of your results and make a note of each unique site. When you’ve done this for each result you should have a substantial list of people who you can now approach to ask about giving you a link – after all they did it for your clients competitors so they’re likely to do it for you too. they might charge you though so be sure to make the terms clear.
This is a long, slow, time consuming process but it will pay off for your client. Not immediately, but by being realistic on the keywords/phrases your client should target from the word go you aren’t going to be stuck optimising for a word or phrase that you’ll never stand a chance of ranking well for.
Left Brain Right Brain 
Didnt know about that other Keyword tool, should come in handy for a future project.
That allinanchor: is handy, are there any more like that?
You’ll find this handy Tom :o)