Interpreting the Market Samurai SEO Competition Module Data

Posted in Keyword Research on Mar 28th, 2010 | 14 comments

This one is a little bit more on the basic side, but I think it’s something important that needs to be covered, so it’s a good place to start this blog at. Market Samurai is a ridiculously cool tool. It isn’t particularly doing anything secret or ahead of the curve, it just gathers a lot of data from a lot of different sources and displays it in a very clean and organized way.

Now, some of the modules in it don’t make a whole lot of sense when you first open them. Once you get used to it though, you can use it to quickly analyze the difficulty of a niche to get an idea of whether or not it’s a worth attempting to crack it for an SEO project. I’m not professing to be an expert, but I think the following pointers can help clear some things up for people who use this tool but are curious about all of the little extras in it. So here it goes…

Let’s start a new project

So for this post, let’s assume you have a kickass site about sunflower seeds. I think it’s pretty safe to say I’m not outing anyone’s niche right now, but if you happen to be slingin’ seeds, my bad dude.

Alright, so fire up Market Samurai and start a new project. Our main keyword is sunflower seeds, so just go ahead and put that keyword into the first box and it should take care of everything else for you.

Click create, and in a second it will pop up a screen of icons. Go ahead and click on the SEO Competition Module.

What the Hell is all of this Stuff?

So the gist of this module is that it’s an aggregation of a bunch of different points about the top 10 results (the front page) for a keyword on Google. I’m going to go over each one really quick to kind of orient ourselves in the setup:

Off Page

These are all factors of the ranking page that don’t have anything to do with how the actual ranking page looks or operates. It includes these items:

Domain Age

Google loves old domains. The general rule of them is the older the domain, the better Google will treat you and the more you can get away with in terms of linkbuilding and ranking speed.

Page Rank

This is the PR of the ranking PAGE, not the whole DOMAIN. This is an important difference to remember. While Page Rank has fallen down a bit in terms of ranking importance in the last few algo updates, it is still a good metric of the power of a certain page. This column is useful for two reasons: 1, you can do a direct comparison of your page to the ranking pages and see how you size up in terms of PR. 2, if there a lot of high PR pages in the top ten, you could be in for a long ride.

Just because a page has a low PR doesn’t mean it’s an easy target. Sites inherit the PR of their parent domain to an extent, so you need to take that into account when sizing up the difficulty of the front page.

Page Backlinks

This is the number of backlinks to the actual ranking PAGE as reported by Yahoo. This is not the total backlinks to the DOMAIN. This is a really good metric to look at when sizing up the front page. What you want to look for are a few low PR, low backlinks to page sites ranking with the higher sites, because that can give you an idea of how easy it might be to rank for that term.

Domain Backlinks

This is the number of backlinks to the whole domain, not just the single ranking page. Sites like Wikipedia will have like 500 trillion backlinks to the whole site, which can significantly increase the ability of their pages to rank, even if the ranking page doesn’t have a single backlink. That’s why sites like Wikipedia and Yelp rank for every fucking term in their respective spaces.

Page .edu/.gov Backlinks

.edu and .gov backlinks are generally regarded as very high quality backlinks that can carry a lot more weight than other backlinks. The more of these that a site has, the more difficult it will be to beat them without having a very solid link profile.

DMOZ Directory

Most website directories online are shit. DMOZ is one of the few that is still really highly regarded by Google, mainly because it’s really hard to get into it. Being listed there can help a site a lot. If a bunch of your competition has these, you better figure out how to get one too.

Yahoo Directory

This is a paid website directory service offered by Yahoo. I think it’s about $200 a year, and can also really help your rankings. You’ll notice that a lot of people don’t shell out the cash to get one of those spots. I’ve never done it, but it might be worth a shot.

On Page

These are the factors that you have direct control over. You absolutely must make sure to have all of these things in place if you want to rank for certain things (well, most of the time).

Keyword in Title?

Come on, you already knew this. Get your keyword in your meta title.

Keyword in URL?

This can really help you rank, but it’s sometimes hard to do. An exact match domain means a whole hell of a lot to Google. Having your keyword in your full URL (like in the URL of a blog post) is the next best thing, but sometimes you want your main url to rank for a keyword (like when doing client work) and it’s just plain impossible to get the keyword in the domain.

Also, exact match keyword in URL > broad match in URL

Keyword in Description?

Yeah, you know this one too. Remember, you have a 160 character limit. Make sure every page has a good meta description with your keyword in it. Exact Match as well.

Keyword in Header Tag?

By Header Tag, they mean h1, h2, etc. You should only have one h1 on your page, and it needs to have your main keyword in it as an exact match. Come on, you can do it.

Google Cache Age

This one seems odd to be there, but it’s useful too. It shows hold old the ranking page is in Google’s index, which means it shows you how long ago Google actually crawled that page. When a lot of the ranking sites have high cache ages, it means that there probably isn’t a lot of activity on those pages, which means you might be able to squeeze in there if you have an active blog. Google likes active sites.

Phew. Lots of words.

Get Some Results

Alright, now that you have a description of all of that stuff, go ahead and click the Results button. The whole process should take about a minute or so. You might notice that some things didn’t get returned (They’ll have a “-” in the box)…that could be because there’s no data for that or Google slapped your hand and wouldn’t let you have the data. You could try again another time or just work without it. If you run a lot of queries one after another, you’ll get this pretty frequently. Fire up some proxies if you need to move fast.

Let’s Analyze

First, the results for sunflower seeds:

Let’s get down to business.

So this screen gives you the top ten or so results for a certain keyword. You’ll notice that everything is color coded. That can give you an ok idea of what’s going on, but you should really dive into the numbers before moving forward. So let’s do it.

So the first thing I notice is that a lot of the domains are pretty old. That doesn’t necessarily mean the PAGE is old, just that the parent domain is old. The page could be just a few weeks old for all we know. Regardless, there doesn’t seem to be any new (read: IM sites) in the list except for numbers 2,3, and 7, and we don’t know if that’s because Market Samurai couldn’t get all of the results or they really are brand new.

Moving on, let’s look at the PR column.

Not too bad, there are two PR 5′s, two PR 4′s, and two PR 3′s. Normally, that wouldn’t be a good sign, but there are also 4 PR 0 sites in there. Each of those PR 0 sites have low BLP numbers, so this could be a good niche to start exploring…

BLD time.

There’s Wikipedia, with a bajillion links. They aren’t impossible to beat, but you’re always going to be wrestling with them. The rest of the sites have either around 50k links or a few hundred. Not the best prospects, but there are ways to get your backlink numbers up pretty high, and there is no data on the quality of those backlinks, so no reason to run away yet.

BLEG is looking pretty solid except for #3.

DMZ. Almost everyone. Better get that submission ready to go.

YAH. Most of everyone. That’s not the worst thing ever, but it could make things tricky.

On Page? Only one site has all 4 factors accounted for. That is a great thing for you, because you can now go out and make sure to get all 4 and be one of 2 sites with those factors. That can go a long way for helping you out in the SERPS.

Finally, Cache. Numbers look ok, pretty normal.

Personally, I would definitely investigate this and related keywords further. This is actually not that bad of a competition list, and is breakable with the right techniques. I would go to each site individually and take a look at what they’re doing to see if there are things you can beat them at. I would also definitely explore the Keyword Research Module to find more vulnerable keywords to target first. That’s the topic of a few other posts, though.

Alrightie, that’s it for now. Please let me know if this is something that is interesting or useful. I’m planning on doing the same thing for the Keyword Research module if you all want to see that.

In fact, I’ve been thinking about ways to do an SEO Case Study, and this might be a good target once the Keyword Research Module post is done.

Anybody have any good sunflower seed offers?

Adios,

D