When determining how difficult it will be too rank well in organic search engine results there are quite a few factors every affiliate marketer needs to consider when assessing the competitiveness of a particular niche. This becomes extremely important when you have climbed to the first or second page of the SERPs and your trying to reach that number one spot! In this post I will be discussing the different variables for sizing up the competition, so you can determine exactly how your competition is outranking you for those valuable SERP spots.
If your just starting out with affiliate marketing and haven’t decided on which particular niche to promote here are the different factors that can help you in figuring out the competitiveness of the niche/industry.
1) Number of results in SERPs - The number of results displayed when doing a search on your particular niche/topic is an important indicator on the competitiveness of the niche. Below is an image of the number of search results in Google for the topic “blue widgets”. The statistic is displayed on the top right of Google every time you do a search for a particular topic. You can see that the search for topic “blue widgets” produced 411,000 results. By comparing search results you can get a better understanding of a niche’s competitiveness.
2) Number of search queries - The number of search queries the topic receives within a given month can help you in determining its competitiveness. If a topic only receives 34 search queries a month it is fairly safe to say that there will be very low competition compared to a topic that receives 500,000 search queries a month. A popular tool that I used back in the day to determine search queries was Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool, but they stopped updating it back in January 2007. There are several other tools on the internet, both free and paid, that you can use to figure out search queries but I’ll leave it up to you to go and find them.
Now that you have a general overview of the competitiveness of various niches/industries it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty! Let’s say your an old-timer with a pretty established site in a particular niche and your site is currently ranked at the bottom of the first page on the SERPs. You’re not settling for this and want that number one spot, but don’t know why the search engines aren’t ranking your website higher. Here’s how to determine what needs to be done to move up in those rankings:
What I would do is create a spreadsheet listing all your competitors sites that are ranking above your site in the SERPs in one column and then create a separate column too record each variable that I will be explaining below. So if you site was listed at the bottom of the first page of the SERPs in Google (ranked #10) you would have 9 rows in your spreadsheet - one for each listing above yours. If your site was ranked on page 10 of the SERP’s you can just randomly select listings above yours in the SERPs to get an idea of what you will need to accomplish to rise in rankings. Okay, now for the variables:
1) Number of Backlinks - Find out the number of backlinks accumulated for those sites that are outranking your site. You can do this by using a special command in the search box for the major search engines (for Google it would be “link:www.domain.com”). The search results will tell you how many backlinks a particular site has obtained. See image below for an example:
In a separate column in your spreadsheet write down the number of backlinks for each site so that you can get an overall picture of how much work you will need to do in order to beat your competition.
2) Number of Pages Indexed - Figuring out the number of pages your competition has indexed in the search engines will help you in your efforts. To get this information also requires a special command you need to type in the search box. For Google the command would be “site:www.domain.com”. Just like when you checked the number of backlinks, the search engine will display a total number in the results which will be the number of pages indexed. Again, write down this number for each of your competition’s sites to get an overall view later.
3) Keyword Density - You will need a third-party tool to get the keyword density of your competitions pages that outrank yours. There are hundreds of free keyword density tools on the internet, just do a search in Google for “keyword density tool” to find one. Once you get the keyword density for the sites write them down on your spreadsheet.
4) Important Site Listings - There are four sites that I believe all serious webmasters should be listed on - these are Business.com, Yahoo Directory, DMOZ/Google Directory, and Wikipedia. You will need to figure out if your competition is listed on these sites and record your findings on the spreadsheet. Just create a separate column for each of the four and write “Yes” or “No” based on if your competition’s site is listed. More than likely websites listed on the first page of the SERPs are listed in 2 or 3 out of the 4. Getting your site listed in as many as these as possible can give you a good boost in the SERPS.
5) Domain Age - Although you can’t really do anything to improve on a site’s domain age it’s good information to know. If you know your competition’s domains are really mature compared to your domain you know you’ll have to work much harder beating your competition in the other variables!
Oh, instead of typing in all those commands in the search engines to figure out backlinks and indexed pages there are websites out there like http://www.xinureturns.com that make it much easier to figure those variables out, all you have to do is type in the URL and it will collect the information for all major search engines for you! In fact, Xinu Returns offers a wealth of information on many other variables you can include while doing research on your competition. So why didn’t I just say that in the first place? Because I wanted you to understand how these sites come up with their results by querying the search engines. 
Once you have completed your spreadsheet you will have a really good perspective of what needs to be done to outrank your competition, and when you get that number one spot you can thank me later!
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