Published on March 18th, 2017 | by Guest

How to Do an Effective Competition Research

How to find the best niche? That is the most asked question with the newcomers in the affiliate marketing. Finding the best niche can be a time-consuming task, and the competition is huge. The main thing in finding the ideal niche is to research your competition. Many others are doing the same job as you. Your job is to research your competition and find the ideal niche that will allow you to stand apart from your competition. Effective competition research is the vital part of becoming a successful affiliate marketer.

1. Getting started

When you are researching the market, competition is a good thing. It means that there is money involved in that particular market. But when you are optimizing your site for the search engines, it’s another thing. You have the option of analyzing the competition so that you can decide if the particular keyword is worth the effort. Analyzing the competition is an important thing if you want your keyword ranking higher.

2. Examining the results

The most common thing that most affiliates do first is typing their keyword in the search engine. It is an critical thing to do, as you can now start analyzing the competition. When you receive a whole lot of results, don’t be alarmed.

The number of search results is only an estimated figure. Not all of those listing actually appear in that number of results. In most cases, most of these sites haven’t done their search engine optimization and it should be easy to gain an upper hand in this business.

3. Analyzing the competitive search engine optimization

The third thing you need to do is to identify the level of search engine optimization your competition has. With this step you can examine whether your competition ranks higher or lower. This is one of the deciding factors whether your keyword is affordable or not.

Your title text is one of the key SEO factors on your page. That is the text that is generated in <title> tags of your HTML document. It always shows up at the top right corner of your page. The title of your page is also clickable on the search engine list.

If the keyword is present in the page title, that usually means that the competition is focused on this word and that they are your main competition. The greatest thing is that you can do all the analysis from the cheap personal computer or even a smartphone.

You can see how many sites have the keyword in the title of their page. If you type allintitle:”insert text here” in Google Search, you will get the mentioned information. Lower figures are better as that means that you can get in the business pretty easily.

Even if there are more than 6000 results, don’t be alarmed. There are more factors to analyze.

You can also see the incoming links on the competitor’s sites that include the particular keyword in the anchor text. Anchor text is important for determining your ranking. Your keyword will be harder to rank if there are lots of sites with the particular keyword in their anchor text.

You want a lower number of results here, but the word “low” here depends on the market and topic of your keyword. There are also many factors that can determine what is “low”.

4. Analyzing the page ranking of top competitors

PR or Page Rank is the main indicator of the site backlink strength. Backlinks are an important factor in determining the page PR. That doesn’t mean that you can’t rank lower if you have higher PR than another page. There are more factors to consider. If the high PR site is ranked lower than a low PR site, that could be for some reasons. It usually means that the page isn’t optimized for the keyword or maybe they use backlinks from pages with high PR without targeting the keyword with the anchor text.

You can use many tools for analyzing the backlinks to particular sites, one of which is Traffic Travis. Backlinks that come from sites with a PR of 5 and more will make getting in the business harder for you. If the particular keyword is in the anchor texts of these backlinks, that means that getting into business with that particular keyword won’t be so easy.

Too many sites with the PR of 6 and more that use good backlinks will make it harder for you, so be sure to choose another keyword and examine the results.

5. Analyzing the domains of the competition

You can check the age of the competitors’ domain with the help of the WHOIS tool. With this tool you can check the creation date of the domain.

Older domains usually have higher rankings than newer domains. That means if there are a lot of newer domains that focus on your keyword, they could be outmatched more easily.

6. Checking the search volumes for the keyword

You should make sure to see how many searches are made for your particular keyword. The competition usually starts to rank higher when there are a lot of search inputs for the particular keyword. That doesn’t mean that more search inputs bring better ratings, as this factor is not balanced.

You should check if the number of search inputs for your keyword is worth your while. Some keywords have too much competition and traffic to make earnings for you.

When choosing the particular keyword, you should see if it is even profitable. Finding a good keyword that will rank easily is easy enough. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a good choice. That can mean that the keyword is either undiscovered or unprofitable.

You can easily check if the keyword has some market going for it. Paid ads on search results indicate that there is money to be made with the particular keyword.

7. Researching other keywords

If you want to build a SEO affiliate site, then you mustn’t focus on just one keyword. You should have a few keywords instead. That way you can adapt to the variable situations on the market.

You should try to find the market where there is a high number of keywords to target. Use the already mentioned tool, Traffic Travis, to analyze the search volumes for keywords that are related.

8. Searching for related keywords

Keyword tools usually use the words you type as the base for the keyword suggestion and you can easily miss the related keywords with this method.

You can find the related keywords with a simple trick. You just have to type semantically similar words in Google Search with the (~) in front of the words.

For example, you can type in “~affordable ~footwear” and in the search results you will get the highest rated related keywords. With these related keywords you can easily beat out the competition.

Conclusion

Even though if your main keywords have huge ratings and are used by the big percentage of competition, you shouldn’t give up. You should take another look and check for easier keywords for you to enter the business more easily.

If your site is optimized for a few easier keywords, you could get even more traffic than with one difficult keyword. More specific search terms usually bring you more money.

When you do all 8 steps, you will analyze your competition and be able to choose the best keyword to start the business with. You just need some patience and time, and you can earn some big money. Good luck!

About the author:

Damien Stanford is a passionate writer who likes to write on various topics including technology, fitness, health and travel. Damien also likes to read a thought provoking book, travel to interesting places, listen to the good music and taking the nature amateur photos.

Tags: business, competition, effective, marketing, research, SEM, SEO, SMM