There are tools available to help us with this, some are paid and some are free, so for the sake of this article we are going to focus on the free tools, which are going to be all we need to get the job done.

The first step is to figure out what keyword we want to examine.  After you pick your most promising keyword, were going to go back to our old friend Google and just type it in to the search box.

After you type in your keyword were going to look at the amount of search results which is displayed in the top right hand corner of the page before any of the listings.  You should see something that reads “Results 1-10 of about (number) for (keyword term).

The total results is going to be one of the numbers that we look at to determine the competition.  It’s not the most important, however it does give us a general idea of how many websites have that term on their site.

The more important result that we want to find is going to be using an “exact match” search.  To do this type in your search phrase into google, just like you did last time, but now put quotation marks around it.  So if I’m going to search the term: beginner guitar lessons, it’s going to look like this “beginner guitar lessons”.

What this type of search tells us is how many website are targeting this term.   Without quotes, google will display a website as a result if that term shows up in any variation anywhere on the site.  When you use quotes it tells google to only display websites that use that specific term in the exact order you tell it.  This gives us a much better idea of how many sites are actively trying to get ranked for this specific term.

At the time of this article, beginner guitar lessons returned 12,500,000 results. That’s a huge number and if every one of those sites was trying to rank for that term, the competition would be fierce and not worth the effort.  However when I search for it using “beginner guitar lessons” it returns 130,000 results.  Although this is still a high number, it gives me a much better idea of the amount of websites that are targeting this term.

As a basic rule of thumb, anything that has an exact match result of 10,000 or less is going to be quite easy to rank for.  100,000 or less will most likely be moderately difficult and anything above 100,000 is going to be difficult and time consuming.

The last factor to determine your competition, and possible the most important, is to literally just go to the website and check it out.  Visit the top ten listings for your keyword term and get a feel for how well optimized these pages are for selling products or services.

You would be surprised to find some niches where the top results are there just because no one who truly understands SEO has gone in and dominated the keywords.

Before you disregard a keyword or think that it will be too hard to rank for, make sure you do all the steps listed above to determine your competition.

Technorati Tags: how to rank in google, seo, seo competition