Analyzing the market
Before you begin to develop your website, or even before you purchase your domain, you need to have a good understating about the market that your website is belong to.
The first thing that I do is to check how many competitors there are within my website niche.
Lets take this website as an example: This website is talking about SEO and SEO tools that can help you with the time consuming tasks. One of my goals is to be ranked in a high position for the phrase “SEO Tools” . Lets check how many competitors we have out there. I use Google search engine as the source to my answers. At Google just click “seo tools”
As you can see there are 50,400,000 websites that meet this phrase criteria. I am sure that we all agree that it’s a huge number of websites. Based on this information we cannot jump into conclusions about the effort that will be required to be ranked high for this phrase. The next thing that I will do is to try to figure how well those website are optimized for the phrase. I will also try to estimate the kind of SEO effort that my competitors are doing in order to be ranked high.
I will use the Google “allinachore” operator in order to learn how many websites have back links using the “SEO Tools” as their anchor text. I am not looking for those who have back links with those words includes in it, but those who have this exact phrase as a back link anchor text. For this purpose I will type: allinanchor:”seo tools”
Hmm…. interesting. Although we’ve got 50,400,000 websites in the SERP (search results page) we only have 37,200 website that have the “seo tools” phrase as their anchor text.
Now I would like to check how my webmasters are using “SEO Tools” as their website title. Here again I will use another one of Google’s operators. I will type allintitle:”seo tools”
Now we’ve got 76,400 websites.
Let me tell you this. From my experience if you find a niche market with millions of websites listed, however, only few thousands are include for a specific phrase using the “allinachore” and “allintitle” operators, you actually found a phrase that will be relatively easy to get a high ranking for it.
But…. Does based on this information only, can a website owner make a purely business decision whether to put any SEO effort in order to to get a high position at the SERP for a giving phrase. You probably thinking in your mind that if I am mentioning this dilemma then there must be something behind my question. Well there is. In the next article I will explain about the other side of the equation and what you need to know in order to take that kind of a decision.
