Assessing Keyword Competitiveness
It’s only natural for people to have a tendency to emphasize traffic over relevance, quantity over substance, and of course you need to always make sure that the search terms you’ve selected for targeting have sufficient traffic, but quite often you don’t want them to have too much either, since more traffic more times than not goes hand in hand with high competition.
Let’s look back to the Abilene law firm for example, which has decided they want to rank for the term ‘lawyer.’ Probably without realizing, the decision puts them up against almost all law firms in the entire English-speaking world, which of course include much larger and much more powerful firms. The last time I checked (two seconds ago), there are 406 million Google results for the search term ‘lawyer,’ and always remember there are only 10 listed on the first page of Google search results.
You must learn to choose your battles wisely when deciding on which keywords to target, and let’s examine just how you might go about doing that.
When it comes to assessing keyword competitiveness, there are several free tools. For example, the SEO Chat Keyword Difficulty Check Tool shows the higher the score the keyword search term gets, the more competitive the term, and the greater the difficulty it is to rank for. Remember that generally speaking, terms with a difficulty score over 60 require much more than just “on-page optimization” if you want the ranking on the first page of search results, and the first page ranking is right where you want to be.