Understanding Keyword Competition & Ranking Time

April 7, 2009 // Author: Jacob Stoops // 457 views // View Comments
Understanding Keyword Competition & Ranking Time
Tips to help you understand how keyword competitiveness relates to how quickly (or slowly) your site will achieve rankings.

One of the biggest questions I get as an SEO pro is, “How long is it gonna take to rank?” This is generally the spot where much new SEO business is won or lost. This is where having an understanding of a keyword’s competitiveness can help you understand how long it might take to get a site ranked.

Now, I could probably get a lot more business if I tell my clients that I’ll have them ranked nationally for the keyword “pizza” in a month. In fact, many SEO’s aren’t afraid to make that claim, and many highly naive clients buy into it willingly (only to cancel in a month when their nowhere to be found).

What’s even better, many biz owners think that they can just buy their way to the 1st page. While this may be true with Pay-Per-Click, that dog just won’t hunt with SEO. The only thing more money can do is help guarantee more work is put into an SEO campaign.

So what should you do?

Research Your Keywords!

Just because you think you should rank for “pizza” doesn’t mean it will just happen. Ranking for a highly competitive term takes a lot of time and hard work with both On-Site & Off-Site SEO factors coming into play.

I’ll use Donatos as an example. They are a well-known national pizza chain, but as of today they don’t even rank on the first page of Yahoo or MSN, and on Google they are #4 when they could be higher (they are even below the Google Local 10 Pack on my screen). Clearly they are bigger and more nationally known than most of those companies there, but they are missing the boat when it comes to SEO and their rankings are paying for it.

Okay, I Give! How Do I Find Keyword Competition & Ranking Time?

There are a couple ways to go about finding keyword competition:

  • Use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.
  • Use SEO Software such as WebCEO.
  • Search on Google for your keyword and see how many websites are listed (this is what I like to do).

From there, I’ve created a little table that you should be able to use to determine a keyword’s competition and expected ranking time. I’ve broken them down into Keyword Tier Levels:

Competing Websites Tier Level Ranking Timeline
100,000,000+ Custom 3+ Years
50,000,000 – 100,000,000 Tier 1 3 Years
20,000,000 – 50,000,000 Tier 2 2 Years
10,000,000 – 20,000,000 Tier 3 1-2 Years
5,000,000 – 10,000,000 Tier 4 1 Year
2,000,000 – 5,000,000 Tier 5 7-12 Months
500,000 – 2,000,000 Tier 6 4-7 Months
500,000 or less Tier 7 2-4 months

The Keyword Tiers

Custom Tier – Among the most competitive terms on the web, only the most powerful & popular sites can achieve rankings.
Tier 1 – Exceptionally competitive term, top rankings only achievable with highly-established site and overwhelming link strength.
Tier 2 – Highly competitive term, top rankings require on-page optimization, well-established history and robust link strength.
Tier 3 – Competitive, top rankings achievable only with highly optimized on-page content and substantial link strength.
Tier 4 – Slightly competitive, top rankings require well optimized on-page use and moderate link strength.
Tier 5 – Low competition, top rankings achievable with well optimized on-page keyword use and light link strength.
Tier 6 – Non-competitive term, top rankings achievable with well optimized on-page keyword use.
Tier 7 – Non-competitive term, top rankings achievable with well optimized on-page keyword use.

Keep in mind that this isn’t an exact science and these figures are more general than literal. They also assume that all SEO efforts are being done correctly. If you have a shitty SEO firm at the wheel, then it’s highly likely that your site will never arrive at its desired destination.

Photo Credit: ToniVC on Flickr

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  • Jacob, so I have my keywords in order and I am posting on two different blogs. One important is our important business blog and the other is just my personal blog (that I don't care about search - just for friends, etc). I sometime want to duplicate posts on both blogs but I want to make sure my business blog gets the "first post" credit for better SEO results.

    Question: How long do I have to wait before copying the post onto my personal blog so that my business blog get "first post credit" by Google/Other Search Engines?

    Love your posts, Keep up the great work
  • Leon
    when you research keywords, do you put them in quotations? to see exactly which sites show up that are optimized for that exact phrase? or do you do you look at competition with a broad match?

    thanks
  • Aside from from exchanging links to other companies, another way for you to help the site in getting higher listings is to issue a company press release that would link back your site as well. One of the good sites that is useful for press release is https://www.pr.com/signin.php.

    Also, it won't hurt if you could participate on forums that relatively discusses SEO or forums that allows you to place a link in your signature.
  • Thank you for the nice artical and the link to Web Ceo tools. I have searched the net for days trying to find the best CEO tools.
    Very nice site. Love the layout.
  • Ray
    @Everyone....in order to achieve good page rank you need to exchange your links to other higher rank sites too

    Regards
    Ray
    Free SEO, Online Marketing and Traffic-Generating Tips
  • I like your presentation of ranking time in a nice table. It let us know what is the realistic expectation. And we should start with long tail keywords (secondary keywords) and move on to short tail keywords (primary keywords) in a later stage.
  • Good article Jake! How do you decide what classification a search term is in though? How do you know if it is highly competitive or slightly competitive? Is all based on the number of searches for that particular term?
  • @ Evan....Keyword search volume is a good metric to use when picking which keywords you would like to rank for. It's best to find keywords that are the best combination of high search volume and low competition. Chances are that most keywords will fall in between.

    I like to base my competition levels on the number of websites returned in Google for a particular term. I don't prefer to use Yahoo or MSN for this as their results seem to be skewed a little bit too high.
  • If you have good connections in terms of people who work for big companies, and they are willing to place a link on their site that would link back to your site, that would be great in competitive terms, to get higher listings on Google. However, this all depends on how well listed and the amount of traffic that passes through their site. If you can get a link onto the BBC or Nike, etc then you'd have no problem
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