Keyword analysis is an incredibly important part of any SEO campaign, therefore, understanding how competitive any given keyword is.

This will enable you to gather estimates of traffic that you can bring into your website and how much work will be involved in getting to the top of page one.

Take a look at the video below and make sure you leave your comments at the bottom of this post!

Video Transcript

Hi, this is Matt from findmyblogway. I’m going to talk to you briefly about a process that I use for understanding how competitive a search term is to target within the first page of google.

This can give you good indication of how long it’s probably going to take or how much resources you’re going to need to put into achieving page one rankings for any given search term and this can be applied for any of the different sites that you work on and just keyword analysis in general.

So, this is pretty much a staple part of my analysis stage of any SEO campaign that I use.

So to start with, the first thing that I do is to go to Google. And then I’ll type in the keyword, but I’m not going to type it so, for example perhaps we’ll just go, SEO Services.

Ok, so I’ve pulled up a range of different here on page one. What I wanna now do, is, I want to… all the URLs from this first page. Now instead of going and copying and pasting all these into my Excel spreadsheet, what I do is I use a plugin for chrome called scrape similar.

It’s a free plugin, you can just search for it on the plugin chrome store and it installs straight away, so all you need to do is right click like I have just on one of the URLs, press scrape similar, and there we go, we’ve just pulled off all of those URLs from the first page.

Nice and quickly. So I’ll just copy those. Go into my Excel spreadsheet here. And now I’ve got all of my URLs pulled off so that I can use them for the next stage of the analysis.

Ok so now I’m just going to copy all of these again so that I can put them into a tool that I use. Now this is … another completely free tool to use.

All you do is you have to sign up for an account, it takes two seconds. You don’t have to pay anything.

What … actually does is, you can put in up to one hundred URLs and it pulls off various metrics and … metrics, so page authority, it pulls off domain authority, how many links and how to reach URL and also the … rank score.

So here we have a nice little table … page one of Google. This in itself is a really good indicator of how competitive the first page is, but I don’t like to solely use… metrics because the index isn’t updated as often as other tools, which … will admit themselves.

And due to that, you can not always see completely accurate results. Now what I do like to use is majestic SEO’s tools alongside this. So I can get citation flow and the trust flow of each of the URLs that I’m looking at.

Now to do this, what I use is the SEO Tools plug in, for Excel. This was created by Neils Bosma and if you go to neilsbosma.se/projects/SEOtools, you can again download this for free.

And to be honest, if you manage a website, if you have any involvement with SEO or any kind of analysis that you do online, you need this. It is absolutely fantastic.

I’m going to actually do a full tutorial on all of the features of SEO tools, but I’m just going to touch on it briefly, but go over to Neils’ website, download it, and get it set up in Excel and just have a play around just to start with.

So what I’m going to actually use it for here, is in the SEO Tools tab I’m going to go to majesticSEO which it links up with, alongside loads of other tools so you can grab off the page rank for each URL, but just for this demonstration I’m only going to use majesticSEO.

So, you open up the tab here, first you’ll be prompted to log in with your majesticSEO, so you need just a basic subscription to majesticSEO. And I’ve obviously already logged in already.

I’m just going to copy these URLs and paste them in here so I can get metrics for each of them.

Again I’m not going to get into all the details of everything that you can use and do with the SEO tools plugin, but I just want to select index data select each of these URLs to get metrics on.

I just want the citation flow and the trust flow of these. And then you just need to select where you want to insert that data, press insert, and there we go. We’ve got all of that data now, citation flow and trust flow for each of these URLs.

So we’ve got some awesome data to start with on the first page of Google from one of my keywords.

The next thing I like to do and the final thing really, is create a nice graph similar to the way if any of you use Moz’s keyword difficulty tool, they have a nice quick kind of graph that shows off exact domain authority and page authority for each of the URLs on the first page of google.

What I kinda want to do is kinda emulate that but with the addition of citation and trust flow which is a bit more recent or should I say fresh.

So I’m just going to select the URL column, I’m going to also select domain authority column, the citation flow, and trust flow.

I’m going to insert the bar chart, and I’m just going to go … you can make these look a lot nicer, and I’m’ just going to make this bigger so it’s easier to see.

And then what I’m going to do is just on the bottom axis here, just make sure that that’s fixed between the zero and one hundred.

And now what I’ve got is a nice overview from position one here, all the way up to position ten of the first page.

And what you can now start to see, is that smart ranks, the guys ranking your number one, actually have an incredibly high citation flow and trust flow, whereas if we had looked at it just from domain authority, the top two rankings have a much lower domain authority than any of the other guys there.

So straight away you get a nice quick overview of the first page of Google. And then you can go on and do your more in depth analysis. You can also kind of make this look a bit nicer, and what I like to do, is every month have an update on this data.

And then update the charts, and then I can have a historical look at how frequently that … is changing over time and then I can decide ok, maybe I want to have a look at some other keywords, and then we can see whether we can break through to the first page, and in general I normally take my kind of top ten, twenty keywords that I’m targeting and do this for each of them and just name each sheet after the keyword name.

So a great quick way to get a nice visual overview of the first page of Google, and you can use this for both internal use or you can use it if you’re an SEO agency, to show your clients. And it’s just a great, great way to display data.

So I hope this has been helpful, and make sure that you check back on to the YouTube channel where we’re going to give a complete overview of the SEO Tools plug in because there is a whole lot more of functionality that you can use that stretches well beyond just this. So thanks again guys.