The fastest and easiest way to gain information on your competition is to enter the keywords in which you intend to market into search engines and look for the results. First you want to search for a term, i.e. car wash (All examples are with Google). You should see a blue box indicating the number of total results found for that keyword. Next do the same search with quotation marks around the words; this is a more accurate search, because the quotation marks indicate that you are looking for that exact phrase. This technique give you an approximate idea about how many sites there are using this term within their website title or text. Although this is a good method to determine the total number of sites that are indexed on the web within your keyword, you are not competing against each of these sites, but more specifically the sites that are properly optimized.
The optimizer would want to look at the amount of pay per click (PPC) ads on the page, which gives an idea as to how much people are willing to spend on advertising for that keyword (the more PPC ads, the more people are willing to spend on advertising).
There are also many free tools which you can view the total number of searches per keyword, and also get suggestions of other keywords related to your specific search such as:
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/keyword-suggestion-tool.html?
and https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool Take all of this information into consideration when performing your research. Look for keywords that get a good number of monthly searches, but doesn't have in the hundred of millions in competition. Pay attention to the keywords and try and be as descriptive as possible, which usually helps with choosing a keyword/keyword phrase that will be better choice for your example. For example choose "shoe repair" instead of "shoes".
Contact Highline Technologies
Research Your Keywords and Your Competition - To learn more about this author, visit Jeff Pela's Website.
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Jeff Pela
(Visit Jeff's Website)
Jeff Pela is a Search Engine Optimization
expert based out of Union, New Jersey. He
has over 8 years web design and SEO
experience. He introduced Highline Technologies in 2003 to help
businesses improve profits by establishing
a web presence where needed, or enhance a
company's current web presence.
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