No Comments Written by Anders on July 30, 2008 – 12:25 am

Arelatively new player in the field of competitive keyword research is Compete.com. Compete.com, located at www.compete.com, provides a robust look at where your competition is generating search-engine traffic on both pay-per-click and organic searches.

Compete.com also provides information on user interaction with your Web site, which is a powerful data set that other popular keyword research tools such as Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery do not provide. Unlike other popular keyword research and suggestion tools, Compete.com does not gather data directly from the search engines. Instead, Compete.com gathers information from actual Internet users who have installed the Compete toolbar.

This firsthand data collection allows Compete.com to provide significantly more information by analyzing not only how users search, but how they behave on the sites they visit after searching. This includes the time a user spends on a site, what percentage of the site’s traffic comes from each individual keyword, and a relative measure of how much each keyword is worth to the competitor site. In order to have access to user interaction data, you must create an account at Compete.com and purchase credits.

Then, each time you research, Compete.com deducts a number of credits from your account. At around two dollars per credit, these credits are well worth the investment. Currently, for one credit you can access the top 50 keywords for a domain.

For a few additional credits, you can access all the results, which typically means thousands of keywords. Compete.com also offers free keyword research and Web site analytics services, including the ability to compare estimated traffic statistics for up to five domains at a time over the last 12 months. This data can be very useful to you in forecasting seasonal trends, as well as in identifying who is doing the best job of capitalizing on seasonal traffic bursts.

The advanced data that Compete.com offers on a competitor’s Web site is broken down into a few categories. They are as follows:

• Volume Rank refers to the rank of each keyword in terms of what keyword is sending the most volume. This gives a quick look at the top-performing keywords, ignoring everything but raw traffic levels.
• Site Share refers to the percentage of the overall search-engine traffic that comes to a Web site from each individual keyword.
• Keyword Engagement is a measure of the average amount of time a user spent on the site and can be used as a gauge of user interaction on your Web site. This is broken down to a keyword level, so you can see what keywords are sending the highest number of interested Web site users.
• Keyword Effectiveness is a combination of Volume Rank and Keyword Engagement. It is a basic measure of which keywords are the most valuable in terms of referred users who were active when they hit the Web site. Keyword Effectiveness provides an additional measure of user interaction on your Web site. Compete.com allows you to sort the keyword list by any of these fields. This information can prove to be invaluable to your SEO research.

Keyword Research with KeyCompete

One of the most effective methods for generating keywords is to evaluate what keywords your competition is bidding for on major pay-perclick search engines such as Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Competitive research tools such as KeyCompete.com, which typically charge a monthly or annual membership fee, enable you to see the specific keywords your competition is bidding on, while also giving you access to useful keyword generation data.

Generating competitor keyword lists using KeyCompete can be done using four primary strategies depending on how many keywords your competitor is bidding on and how granular you want your keyword generation research to be. One way KeyCompete allows you to evaluate competitors’ keywords is by typing a competitor’s Web site URL directly into the KeyCompete system.

Using the URL method allows you to quickly access thousands of competitor keywords at any one time. However, the KeyCompete technology does not return results if your competitor is not using paid search. If your competitor is bidding on a very large list of keywords, you should request keywords in groups, instead of all at once.

This procedure requires you to type multiple KeyCompete commands. To search for competitor keywords in groups, such as all keywords that start with the letter A, type the competitor’s URL followed by a question mark (?) and the first letter of the keyword for example, www.visualseobook.com?a. This command generates all keywords for www.visualseobook.com beginning with the letter A. To generate keywords on an even more granular level, you can type a series of letters or a specific keyword to return your competitor’s keywords of a similar type. To perform this function, type the competitor’s URL followed by a question mark (?) and your specific command, such as www.visualseobook.com?seo or www.visualseobook.com?search.

KeyCompete can be used to evaluate the keywords that your competitors are bidding on, as well as to significantly expand your own paid search efforts. KeyCompete should be used as a primary keyword generation method. An annual membership to KeyCompete is under $500, but it can save you significant time and money in your overall keyword generation efforts compared to other tools that are currently on the market. KeyCompete offers many of the same benefits of a traditional keyword generation tool, such as the ability to search for variations of keywords across all Web sites. For this function, no URL is required; instead, just type a general or specific keyword, and KeyCompete provides you with an extensive list of similar keywords.

A supplement to the KeyCompete keyword generation tool is KeyCompete’s Long-Tail Keyword technology, which allows you to generate large keyword lists that include variations of more general keywords. For example, you can type a general keyword, such as “jelly,” and the KeyCompete Long-Tail Keyword tool provides you with an extensive list of specific descriptive keywords such as “gourmet jelly preserve” or “peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

This approach allows you to quickly find keywords that may have been overlooked by other keyword generation approaches. In addition to KeyCompete, other popular, competitive, keyword-generation research tools include Hitwise.com, GoogSpy.com, and SpyFu.com.

Analyze Your Competition with Seodigger

An effective approach to generating keywords for your Web site is to analyze where your competitors rank on the search engines for keywords that you want to rank for. You can use tools such as Seodigger, located at www.seodigger.com, to determine how well you rank for specific keywords versus your competition, as well as to determine other important factors, including popularity and a rough estimate of how much search volume each individual keyword receives.

Seodigger.com offers a free tool that allows you to easily determine the top keywords that your competitors rank for organically on both Google.com and MSN.com. Seodigger offers two options for accessing competitor keywords. Nonregistered users are allowed up to five free domain searches per hour, and registered users are provided up to ten domain searches per hour.

Another benefit of registration is a function called site-wide search. The site-wide search function allows you to search for the top 20 rankings for every single page of a Web site, as opposed to just searching the home page rankings. Registration is free and only requires verifying your e-mail address. In addition to organic ranking, Seodigger provides you with important information on keyword popularity.

Observing the keyword popularity of your competitors’ organic rankings is important because it can be used to determine the relative amount of traffic your competitor is receiving for a particular keyword placement. The Seodigger keyword popularity function also provides a rough idea for how much traffic you can possibly gain by increasing your rankings for your keywords. For example, if your site is ranked between spots 7 and 10 for two separate keywords, but one receives double the monthly searches, you stand to gain the most from optimizing further for the higher volume keyword.

Another popular free tool to evaluate your competition’s keywords is the Shoemoney Search-Engine Results Pages (Serps) tool located at www.shoemoney.com/serps.php. The Shoemoney Serps tool requires that you enter both a specific search term and the URL of the competitor that you want to evaluate. Unlike Seodigger, the Shoemoney tool allows you to evaluate ranking for only one keyword and URL at a time. Organic ranking results are provided across Google.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com, and AltaVista.com with unlimited usage requirements.

The Shoemoney Serps tool is also a quick and effective way to check in on your own Web site’s rankings for your main keywords. It is extremely fast, and provides a great snapshot of your Web site’s overall organic strength by showing the rankings across numerous engines. When the Shoemoney Serps tool displays the ranking results, the name of each search engine serves as a link to the actual keyword search that was done to obtain the results. By clicking any search-engine name, you can see what other Web sites are ranking for your target keywords, and what Web sites you may need to keep an eye on to ensure you defend your top rankings.