Majestic SEO just launched a new tool that could help you further understand the competitive levels of a keyword phrase. Right now, much of our understanding on keyword competition is based off Google’s paid searches relative to the expected cost to rank in Adwords. This is the first tool I’ve seen where you can get a more complete picture by analyzing the competitiveness of a keyword based solely off organic searches. In my opinion, this will help give you a more complete picture of how competitive a keyword phrase truly is.

How Can This Keyword Checker Tool Help You?

What this tool allows you to do is actually “see” the number of web pages (InURL) and domains that utilize the keyword in an anchor text (InAnchor) or within the title (InTitle) of a URL (InURL) or domain. You will also get an idea of how popular a keyword is based on a volume score (ranging from 1-100). The volume score tells you how often the phrase is searched for. The higher the volume score, the more popular the keyword (as many searches are being done on that keyword).

How Does This Tool Work?

To start using this tool, click here to go to the keyword checker tool. You will see a text box near the top where you can enter a domain, a URL, or a search phrase (keyword):

As an example, I typed “apple martini” to check on the competitiveness of this particular keyword phrase. Always use the Historic Index because it gives you data based off everything that Majestic SEO has pulled, and therefore you will receive more comprehensive results.

The results report will look similar to the following:

Based on the report results given above, the search volume score for the search phrase “apple martini” is a 39. Therefore, this keyword phrase receives a decent amount of organic searches.

The rest of the data shown tells us the following:

• 8,950 domains were found to be using “apple martini” as anchor texts.
• 12,889 domains were found to be using “apple martini” in their titles.
• 27,577 domains were found to be using “apple martini” in their URL’s.
• 1,740 domains were found to be using “apple martini” in both anchor texts and titles.
• 28,650 URLs were found to be using “apple martini” as anchor texts.
• 54,751 URLs were found to be using “apple martini” in their titles.
• 288,167 URLs were found to be using “apple martini” in their URL’s.
• 2,794 URLs were found to be using “apple martini” in both anchor texts and titles.

To help further understand these numbers, I’ve added another keyword phrase “apple martini recipe” to run some comparisons:

The search term “apple martini recipe” shows much lower numbers than the search term “apple martini”, so “apple martini recipe” is obviously lower in competition, therefore this keyword is likely easier to rank for. As I continue playing around with this tool, and learning more about benchmarks to look for, etc, I’ll provide another post with additional updates, but this data should give you a decent idea of what this tool can tell you.

What I can tell you so far is that I currently rank within the top few spots on page 1 of Google for both terms. I do rank higher for the phrase “apple martini recipe”. This was accomplished mainly through proper on-page SEO and adding tons of quality content within the first few weeks after launching this site.

This website has become more of a “test” project for me, but it has also been placed on the back burner as I focus most of my efforts on Niche Optimizer.

I have not really touched this site in months, but it has done well in terms of search engine rankings with hardly any backlinks having been developed. This site receives 200+ unique visits daily just from organic searches.

If I wanted to progress this website further (which I plan to), I would focus my efforts on other methods of building traffic so that I don’t have to rely on the search engines for that traffic. I only wanted to mention where I currently rank for these terms to show you how SEO can affect the performance of a website (good or bad), and to also show you how the competitive levels of these specific keywords shown in the above report compare to the ease of ranking for them.

As I play around with this tool more (and I encourage you guys to do the same!) I’ll post more information on my experience and findings, but hopefully this will give you a good start.

Created by Elizabeth Fee

Crazy in love with my twins, my husband, and my life. And I'm here to help you fall crazy in love with Internet Marketing. You can also learn more about me personally by visiting The Niche Mom.