How Do You Check Keyword Competition? Not Like This I Hope

Before I continue on with my video series about affiliate marketing, I want to show you something and explain to you why it’s wrong.

While I was browsing the internet today I found an article that explains keyword competition completely wrong.

The article was about ranking youtube videos and you can check it out here.

It looks like this article is a couple of years old but either way it could give people the wrong idea.

So, let’s get into it.

Now, this is the picture that’s giving out wrong information.

What’s the issue?

The article indicates that this keyword phrase has low competition in Google’s Keyword Planner. Thing is…. that’s advertiser competition, not a keyword.

Why does this matter? Imagine if some of his readers are actually using this to try and rank keywords. This isn’t the first article I’ve seen like this.

They could be wasting time and money because they think it’s a low competition keyword when in fact it might not be.

I wanted to clear this up for my readers. If you use Google’s Keyword Planner to calculate the keyword competition, you’re actually reading the advertiser competition.

What’s the true keyword competition for “how to sing”?

In the top picture, I’ve used Long Tail Pro. In the bottom picture, I’ve used a free program called Keyword Revealer.

Notice how Long Tail Pro actually tells us it’s advertiser competition?

Although this keyword doesn’t have super high competition, it’s still high and can easily be confused with low advertiser competition.

You will also notice it now only gets 18,100 searches a month. Keyword Revealer and Google told me around 50,000, so ill go with that. This keyword isn’t very popular anymore. The original picture could be photoshopped…. that is a massive change.

Anyhow, let’s look into advertiser competition.

What is advertiser competition?

Internet users and companies use Google Adwords to advertise for specific keywords. It’s a Pay Per Click bidding system much like Facebook adverts.

This picture explains it perfectly

Let’s look at something real quick.

Low Competition

This means the keyword doesn’t have many adverts bidding for a spot.

In this case just one at the bottom of the page. I have seen them at the top of the page also but not so much anymore.

Medium Competition

I found a keyword with some medium stats. It has the advert in the top right.

Sometimes it might have 2 at the bottom instead.

High Competition

Usually, I see adverts at the top of the page or on the right side. Sometimes both.

Adverts don’t always show like this, this is just a general idea.

So, Is all this advert stuff important?

No, not really

I personally don’t want adverts all over the page I’m ranked on. It gives the visitor more options and they might not click on my niche site.

Some internet marketers claim that high advertiser competition means higher CPC.

Although this is generally true it’s not always the case at all from what I’ve seen when doing my micro niche passive website research.

When does CPC come into play and should you worry about it?

If you run a website and you use Adsense then yes you should target high CPC keywords.

Why?

Because that’s the average advertisers are willing to pay per click to their website from the Adsense advert.

I sell affiliate products with niche websites, I don’t worry about CPC so much when doing my research.

How Should You Check Keyword Competition?

Definitely, don’t use Google Keyword Planner to try and figure out the competition.

If you want to check it then you can use Long Tail Pro. If you don’t do much research then I suggest Keyword Revealer. It gives you 25 free checks a day.

The Moz SEO Toolbar is also a great tool to check out the competition on the front page of google. It shows you how much authority the sites have.

I went over this in my article on targeting low volume keywords with the Google planner.

Final Words

I just wanted to clear this up for my readers. I see a surprisingly high number of articles claiming that the Google Keyword Planners competition column is for keywords…. I usually e-mail them, telling them they should change it.

It can confuse people, I still see members in forums advising people to use the planner to check the competitiveness of a keyword.