Depending on your search-engine strategy, you may want to carry out a competition search. A competition search can help you find keywords for which there is very little competition, even none! Create a well optimized page for a keyword with no competition, ensure it’s indexed by the search engines, and you can guarantee a first place position when someone searches on the term!

The Competition Search can be used to help you decide which keyword phrases to target. In essence the Competition Search shows you two things. It shows how much "competition" a search term has - that is, how many other Web pages are returned in the search results for that search term in a particular search engine. It also provides an estimate of how many searches are done on that search term in the same search engine. Combined, these two piece of information can give you an idea of which phrases are worth targeting to get traffic out of a particular search engine.

Figure 4.20. 

Click the Competition Search icon, and you’ll see the Competition Search window.

Figure 4.21. 

Because Wordtracker searches using your keywords to see how many other Web pages are found, you have to specify which search engines you want to check—only two at a time.

Wordtracker will run the analysis for 100 words at a time; initially it will run the analysis on the first 100 words in your list; if you wish to go deeper into your list, use the drop-down list box at the top of the page to change which batch is analyzed.

Figure 4.22. 

Here’s a quick summary of all this information:

No.

The rank of the search term; sorted from the terms that Wordtracker thinks may be most competitive (based on the KEI number) down to the least competitive

Keyword

The search term.

KEI Analysis

The Keyword Effectiveness Index is one way to consider keyword competitiveness. The KEI compares the Count result with the number of Competing Web pages; the higher the KEI number for the search phrase, the better target the search phrase appears to be. This is a combination of the number of competing pages with the number of searches—the larger the Count the higher the KEI number; the larger the number of Competing pages, the lower the KEI number.

Count

The number of times the search phrase has been used in Wordtracker’s partner search engines.

24 Hours

An estimate of the number of times each day somebody searches this search engine using the search phrase

Competing

The number of Web pages the search engine says it has in its index that match the search phrase

Advanced Settings

There are a couple of settings you may want to use, though in most cases it’s not necessary to change these settings:

KEI Analysis—You can turn off the KEI calculation if you wish. Many people prefer not to use KEI, and would rather see the list sorted with the keywords with least competition first.

Quotes—You can use Exact Match searches (placing quotation marks around the keyword phrase being sent to the search engine, the default setting) or Partial Match searches (omitting quotation marks from the keyword phrase.

For instance, let’s say Wordtracker is sending the phrase golf putters to the search engines for the competition analysis:

An Exact Match search asks the search engine for all the pages that have the exact phrase "golf putters"; a Partial Match search asks for all pages with the word golf and the word putters—in some cases golf may be in one part of the page, and the word putters in another part of the page. Partial Match searches return more pages—often far more—but many of those pages are not in direct competition with your search. Thus Wordtracker uses Exact Match (Quotes: Yes) as the default, and there is rarely any need to change this setting.

Pay Per Bid Competition

Wordtracker also allows you to check “competition” in several Pay Per Click search networks, including Overture. Of course “competition” in such a case is different; this time Wordtracker returns a table showing bid prices for different phrases. It omits the KEI and Competing data, as they are not relevant in this case.

When starting a search using Overture, you’ll have to type a code to access the Overture database; Wordtracker will display the code you need, and you simply have to type it into the text box and click Submit.

Figure 4.23. 

Figure 4.24. 

Scroll to the bottom of the lists, and you’ll find Export Current results and Email current results links. These work like the Export Keywords and Email Keywords icons you saw earlier.