Determining how difficult your keywords are is the first step, after you have carried out your all important keyword research. Once you have used your keyword research tools such as the Google Keyword Tool or Market Samurai, you will be equipped with the knowledge of just how difficult your keywords are going to be to rank to the first page of the Google results with the ultimate aim of achieving the #1 spot.

As a guide in general terms, we have used the total number of “local searches” per month in exact match to use as a starting point. 0 – 500 exact local searches per month type keywords are usually the easiest to rank for, 500 – 3500 are medium difficult and 3500 and above always hit the most difficult scale for rank success.

There are however keywords that attract low numbers of searches that are very competitive and this where a good competitive analysis research report is vital to some campaigns success. It requires expert knowledge to really get a handle on the degree of difficulty so tools like Market Samurai are invaluable when it comes to making such assessments.

Easy Keyword Examples

• [emergency plumber sydney] – 210 local searches
• [carpet cleaner sydney] – 320 local searches
• [house cleaning services sydney] – 91 local searches

If we take a look at the Market Samurai screenshots we see that total number of backlinks for the top listed sites is quite low. Watch this video to see how we determine the degree of difficulty when using Market Samurai to analyze the competition.

<mareket sam video in here>

You have to use a dose of common sense when figuring out just what SEO package is going to get the job done, as some searches that attract low numbers have high degrees of difficulty. The best rule of thumb I have found is to ask yourself how much money could I make by being ranked #1 for my targeted keyword. If the answer is “a lot of money” then you can bet your competitors are making the same assumptions. The more money to be made the more your competitors are going to spend on their SEO efforts in attack and defense of what is making them money.

Exceptions To The Rule

For example a keyword with low numbers of exact match searches for – divorce lawyer sydney – is going to require the most amount of SEO firepower you can throw at it. As divorce lawyers tend to charge higher fees for their services then general domestic services, they stand to make a lot more money and therefore usually are prepared to spend accordingly on SEO services. Like I said, a good dose of common sense needs to prevail when it comes to SEO and budgeting.

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Medium Keywords

• [mobility scooters] – 1,300 local searches
• [landscape supplies] – 1,900 local searches
• [window cleaning] – 1,600 local searches

The same rule applies here, the more money to be made by a top #1 Google ranking, the more you need to budget. As before always use Market Samurai to analyze the competition before embarking on your SEO campaign, to ensure your choice is correct and you get the success you need as fast as possible.

Difficult Keywords

• [plumbing supplies] – 4,400 local seraches
• [carpet cleaning sydney] – 5,400 local searches
• [carpet cleaning] – 8,100 local searches

As the numbers of searches increases, so does the competition for the prize of being #1 in the Google search results.

More people searching means more clicks through to your website and if your site converts web visitors to customers or leads well, this means higher profits.

Don’t make the mistake many people make in their ignorance to these very obvious facts, and try to skimp on their SEO investment, trying to get out of it as cheap as possible. It just will cause frustration and is one of the main reasons SEO campaigns fail for some. They just don’t do their homework first, think up their keywords without researching first and throw an arbitrary amount of money at an SEO company or outsourcer and expect miracles. Recipe for disastrous results.

<image ms – divorce lawyer links numbers>

If you think you have a great keyword to rank for, you need to know if anyone else if thinking the same thing. No don’t ask friends or colleges what they think of it, use the research tools at your disposal and know for sure if others are actually searching using that phrase or group of words (these are generally called keywords), before setting off on your long slow trip to the top. If you fail at your research and do finally get your #1 ranking, after all the cost and effort, not to mention time lost, only to find that you get 3 visitors a month, you will be bitterly disappointed.

What I would like to point out here, is that you will notice that by choosing less searched terms (see carpet cleaner sydney and compare to carpet cleaning sydney above) you are going to have an easier (read faster trip to the top of Google) SEO challenge on your hands, as the competition tends to be attracted to the “highly searched” keywords as they are worth more money. So if your budget is low to start with and you are in a competitive industry, you can always chase down the easier keywords first with the lower SEO packages and when you have solid ROI (return on investment) for you business you can up grade to the more challenging keywords by setting aside a higher budget.

What Do All The Above Things Mean?

Monthly Searches – this is the recorded numbers of people searching locally (not globally) as reported in the Google Keyword Tool.

Keywords – this is the total number of keywords we will be promoting over time and tracking in your SEO rank reports. It also represents how many keywords over time will be kept on the maintenance link building phase after achieving your desired search ranking.

Original Articles – the core of quality SEO is original content. We write hand written not machine generated original articles around your keywords each and every month.

Rewriten Articles – the core articles are used at a top level of link building and then the same content if rewritten using spun syntax to enable an infinite number of unique articles to a minimum level of 70%, ensuring that article submissions, blog posting and Web 2.0 properties are syndicated with content that Google indexes, creating the most number of backlinks possible.

Blog Syndication – when content is published to number of blogs according to the SEO package chosen, these are permanent one way links pointing at your website. Even if you cancel your subscription to our services your backlinks remain. The more diverse and the larger the number of blogs that you get your original rewritten content published to the greater the link footprint and the more diverse your backlinks will be.

Web 2.0 Sites – we use high PR web 2.0 sites such as Tumblr, Weebly, Hubpages and Squidoo to create very powerful “link wheels” for parsing PR to your website, all with anchor text links that specify your keyword. This enables Google and other search engines to understand that your landing page is focused on your chosen keyword.

Manual Profiles – we manually create profiles on the Web 2.0 sites that we use and this takes more time to do but is more powerful than other SEO companies that make claims of higher numbers only to find that the low quality profiles are seen as duplicates and removed by webmasters and site administrators.

Custom Videos – each month we create SEO marketing videos for your website. These videos are created with still images you supply to us, or with our stock images that are associated with your keyword and they are distributed across a large channel of video distribution websites, giving you both do follow and nofollow backlinks pointing at your website’s landing page.

Social Network – there is no mistaking the fact that Google have made it very clear that the “new backlinks” are going to be social mentions, tweets, listings, citations, reviews and the like as the years roll on. We are busy ensuring your future in the search engine stakes by posting Facebook comments, Twitter tweets, social bookmarking sites such as Stumbleupon, Delicious and Mr Wong and of course the new and all important Google+. If you haven’t gotten your Google+ circles going by now, you have no time to lose. This is a definite long term strategy that will pay off as we see the years bring new ways for search results to be “skewed” to a users preferences, history and personal acquaintances. Watch this video to see what Google are up to:
<google personal search>

Ping Backlinks – to ensure the search bots and spiders come running to crawl your links we use services such as Pingomatic to alert them to our freshly published content. As long as the content is quality and not some PLR republished duplicate content these pages are going to get not only crawled by the search spiders but also included in the Google index. This is a very important part of the SEO backlink building process and the reason for SEO failure can be contributed to the fact your content may have been published but Google ignored it, so choose carefully who you decide to trust in the SEO industry, because seemingly more or bigger may not lead to better results in the end.

Boost Backlinks – in order to boost the PR of your backlinks which in turn boost the PR of your landing page on your website, we use a method called Backlinks Boosting. Essentially it means building a second layer of links that are linking to the top layer of backlinks. The top layer of backlinks always point to your website landing page and the boosted backlinks point at these second level pages. This is very important for your ranking when you are up against competitors who have high PR on their landing pages.

Press Release – when you need to do some heavy SEO powerlifting, the Helium SEO custom press release can work wonders for your ranking. A well written press release that contains valuable industry news can be picked up by sometimes 10,000 or more news sites, ezines and websites looking for relevant up to date information for their readerships. Apart from being a great “PR” exercise, the obvious backlink created to your website can be just what the doctor ordered to get you past a competitor who you appear to be stuck under. Do this a few times a year to increase rankings and drive more interest to your business. We use PRWeb Advanced to ensure your press release gets to the most number of distribution points on the Internet. This alone is a $200 value and is included in the custom written press release. We provide examples of what you can have written and you choose what you wish to let the world know and we write this for you. This service is only available to our premium customers on the Difficult or Consulting packages. The cost is $449 – a major discount for what normally sells for $949.

PDF Distribution – it is a little known fact that pdf documents published on the web are able to be scanned, crawled and indexed by advanced search spiders from the major search engines such as Google. We use websites such as Slideshare to package up content we create for your site and have them published to this extended channel of the Internet. This adds further to the link diversity footprint that Google looks for and examines with their algorithm in determining site authority and your ultimate top rankings.

Monthly Reports – each month we publish your SEO rank reports to either your email, online or both – depending upon which SEO package you choose. An added level of reporting is provided to our premium and consulting clients that includes a short video created by myself which summarises where things are heading and what recommendations I feel are going to help in your sites conversions. I analyze your Google Analytics and pay careful attention to visitor flow, entry keywords, goal conversions and bounce rates. This also includes a written Action Steps report for the month ahead and any things that need to change with your web master or other noted possibilities for customer conversions.

How To Choose Wisely

It all begins with proper research.

You must start by doing your homework or having someone you trust to do it for you. Without the right knowledge of what you are up against, you are more than likely going to be disappointed with the results you get.

Knowing what are the easy to rank keywords, discovering your competitors seo weaknesses and exploiting them cleverly to your best advantage are what good competitive analysis research is all about.

If you are good with numbers and have a solid understanding of the metrics involved and are comfortable to do the research yourself, then the Google Keyword Tool is a free resource and a great place to start. The next step once your keywords have been identified and graded on level of difficulty, is to size up the competition. You need to see what sort of backlink profle the top 3 Google listed websites have to get an idea if you are biting off more than you can chew.

Some keywords are going to take years to rank for and some only days, weeks or months and you need to know how to spot the difference.

All of this takes skill and time to execute well and I offer the Competitive Analysis Research Report to clients who wish to pass this very important task into the right hands.

anchor text links - example of a link that is anchor text rich (contains the keyword you are chasing) is
“buy cds online” if you were wanting Google to understand that your page is focused on – buy cds online and contains the underline. If you had just a word called click here or something equally uninformative to Google, then you have missed the opportunity to tell the search algorithm what your page is about.

backlinks - inbound links or links pointing at or linking to your website landing page. Best if anchor text rich keyword links.

bookmark - social bookmarking websites are set up to help people find what you believe to be important. Examples are Delicious and Stumbleupon, Technoratti and Digg.

conversion - this is process you are aiming for with your SEO efforts. It is where a web visitor or surfer becomes a valuable asset to your business by becoming a purchasing customer or client.

distribution - the process of feeding out content to other websites and portals on the Internet.

duplicate content - content that has been published elsewhere first before it has been published on your website. Is penalised by Google and discounted or removed from the Google index.

global searches - searches of all countries combined.

indexing - having your webpage or published content accepted by the Google index and recognised as being original and relevant to the collective pool of content available by searchers on the Internet, as deemed by the Google algorithm.

keyword - a single word or a group of two or more keywords or phrase, expressed as a singular identity – keyword.

landing pages - the focus of your on page SEO efforts. What you wish to have rank highly in the serps.

link diversity - is where your backlinks are coming from a broad range of sources and not just limited to one area of the Internet ie; article directories only. More link diversity, better rankings.

link wheels - a group of high PR published web pages with links pointing to the next site in the wheel, with the final site linking and parsing all the link juice to the top site, generally your landing page.

local searches - these are limited to the chosen country of your research, as in Australia and not global or the rest of the world.

parsing - the act of offloading link juice to another web page for PR sculpting purposes and rank improvement.

ping - a signal that is sent out by various web service applications to notify search engines of freshly published content to assist in getting the content crawled and indexed by the search engines.

PR - PageRank a Google term for grading web pages. Not to be mistaken for website grading, only applied to a granular page level, in order to determine the importance of the individual pages. PR begins at 0 and goes up to 10, with sites like Google.com being PR10 and your new, unlinked to website a PR0 (zero).

serps - search engine results pages

site authority - site authority is calculated by many factors in the secret Google Algorithm. Those that are understood by most SEO’s are Site Age, PR, Indexed Pages, Inbound Links, Diversity of Inbound Links, Number of Referring Domains and the speed with which fresh content is published. Also becoming more prominent are Social Signals from the social Internet, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ circles.

spider crawl - the act of a remote web application that attempts to find web pages and linked content on a web site.

syndication - mass publishing of content, best conducted with non-duplicate content.

Web 2.0 - websites that are generally user created content portals. Sites such as Hubpages, Weebly, Tumblr and WordPress. There are about 320 top quality Web 2.0 sites to choose from when publishing quality content on the Internet that Helium SEO use for building high quality backlink bases.