Search Engine Website Keyword Competition Analysis

Analyzing Competition in search engines for keywords is useful when trying to select which keywords to rank for in organic SEO. Where position checking is for tracking progress in your website rankings, position analysis is vital in helping you spend your time and resources on keyword phrases where you have a chance of achieving top positions.

While there are many factors to consider when sizing up the competition, here is a small list of things you will always need to consider:

• Onpage optimization and SEO, e.g. keyword density of targeted phrase. (While still playing a role, it has lessened in recent years. It can also be very niche specific.)
• Google PageRank of both the ranking website domain and the individual pages. (This gives a good hint to the level of backlinks which is an important offpage SEO technique.)
• Data such as the number of pages in domain that are indexed by Google. (Again helpful in determining competitor overall strength.
• Page title including the one currently used and the one in Google search results. (Tells you if the website owner is actively optimizing).

All this can influence what keywords you should try target when writing articles and creating websites.

To start analyzing your competition for a keyword phrase in search engines like Google and Yahoo, do the following:

• Type the keyword phrase into active keyword phrase for which you wish to analyze competition.
• Select search engine and search results depth to check in engine and depth to check.
  (Note: If you select a depth not supported by the underlying search engine, you will in most cases be shown fewer results.)
• Optional: Choose proxy to use in General options and tools | Internet crawler | HTTP proxy settings.
  Note: Proxy support depends on which HTTP engine has been selected in Scan website | Crawler engine.
• Click the analyze search results button.

While you can hover the mouse cursor over the data column headers to see explanations - here is a full list including descriptions:

• #: Placement in search results in selected search engine.
• Phrase: The search phrase we are checking competition for.
• Website: The website page address in search result for the given search phrase.
• Weight %: Weighted % keyword density in website calculated from the individual keywords and entire keyword phrase.
  (Note: Notice how the score here is a combination of the individual keywords and possible phrases as compared against the whole.)
• G page PR = Google page PR = Google PageRank of URL: Google PageRank is calculated by Google based on linking throughout the entire internet.
• G page BL = Google page BL = Google backlinks to URL. Google estimate of total links the domain has pointing to it.
• G Search Results = Google Search Results = Search results for a given query. Can help to estimate difficulty for a keyword phrase.
• Y page BL = Yahoo page BL = Yahoo backlinks to URL. Yahoo estimate of total links the page has pointing to it.
• Y site BL = Yahoo site BL = Yahoo backlinks to domain: Yahoo estimate of total links the domain has pointing to it.
• Y site URLs = Yahoo site URLs = Yahoo domain indexed URLs: Amount of pages Yahoo has indexed from the given domain.
• A Domain TR = Alexa Domain Traffic Rank
• SE title = Title in search engine result page: Title in search engine of page that appears in search engine results.
• SE desc = Description in search engine result page: Description in search engine of page that appears in search engine results.
• Page title = Title in page: Actual real title of page (which can be different than in search results).
• Errors HTML = W3C HTML errors: Number of HTML validation errors in website reported by W3C HTML validator.

Note: Some or even many of these data columns may have been deprecated and removed. Unfortunately it is very common that external services retire and cease to provide data. Sometimes these retired or similar services return and are then added back again.