Competition Research with Market Samurai
In my last video I showed you how to conduct keyword research using Market Samurai so hopefully now you will have a decent list of keywords that look viable. However this is only one half of the story because what this list does not show you is how hard it is to compete for these particular keywords.
You’ve put in a criteria for the number of competing pages but that is only an extremely rough benchmark and it tells you nothing about the sites that are currently ranking in the top spots for those keywords. These sites are your competitors and it is these sites that you need to examine to get a better idea of the strength of their ranking for your target keyword.
The SEO competition module of Market Samurai allows you to run some very in-depth SEO analysis on the top 10 sites for your keyword. In this video I teach you:
- How to use the SEO competition module in Market Samurai
- Why the Alexa ranking is not relevant
- What all the competition information means
- How backlinks affect Page Rank
- The relationship between domain and page backlinks
- Determining what SEO factors you can control
- The relevance of anchor text on backlinks
- How you can get traffic without a top 10 listing
- How to evaluate the overall competition for a phrase
Download the Competition Research video here
Also, if you do not have the Market Samurai tool (you should – it’s free!) then you will still want to try and do at least some of this research manually. The easiest way to get most of this information is to use a Firefox extension called SEO for Firefox. In the 2007 version of the Thirty Day Challenge there was a video showing you how to use it.
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This the vid from ‘07 you had in mind?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqPJd5zp84g
Most of the others are there too.
@ST, thanks for sharing the link to that video.
Mike Collinss last blog post..77 Creative Ways To Make Money Online
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah … I can’t download your videos Caroline. They keep timing out on me.
Any chance you’d make a rapidshare link available?
I have Market Samurai since the middle of August and have yet to do something worthwhile with it.
Paddy Bloggits last blog post..Paul Newman R.I.P.
Nice work Caroline. Strangely enough i was just working on an article on doing the same without market samurai when i saw your post. I like your videos a lot. Perhaps you could continue this process and make videos of the entire process :)
kahthans last blog post..Doing Proper Keyword Research
@ST, yeah that’s the one thanks for that. I’ll edit the post to include the link.
@Paddy, one of the things on my list of things to do is to look at video distribution and finding alternative video sharing sites. I’ll get around to it one day promise!
@Kahthan, yeah that’s the plan but it wont necessarily all be video. Showing a tool such as MS is a good platform for video but some other stuff is best as a regular blog post but rest assured I intend to document every little detail of this project.
thanks caroline, im looking forward to the next video, whats it going to be about?
kahthans last blog post..Proper Keyword Research Part 2: The Long Tail Keyword
I’ve heard of Market Samurai a lot but haven’t got it – is it free software or do I have to buy it?
@simon
market samurai is not free software, but a trial was given out free via the thirty day challenge, it costs 149$ to buy outright and is available from noblesamurai.com.
what you could try is sign up for the thirty day challenge (its over now but you can still sign up) and then get the 40 day trial that comes with it.
kahthans last blog post..Using Misspellings to Get More Traffic
@Kahthan, I have a couple of posts coming up about creating the content for the sites but I’m not sure yet if there will be videos for that stuff.
@Simon, what Kahthan said but I’ll add that the keyword research part is always free I believe. Also, you don’t need to sign up to the 30DC to download the software.
This “living in fear” shit is getting old.
Kouji — I second that. Just created my sight poster “Shoot the Moon”; calculated my daily $$ wanted; prayed (” … has not given me a spirit of fear …”); touched basis with old parked site; looking at different keywords in Market Samurai. GAVE MYSELF permission to succeed. You can do this too — Peace, focus and action!
[...] doing your competition research I am sure that you will have seen on many occasions an article from EZine Articles ranking in the [...]
Thanks SO much for this one Caroline! You’ve helped me out a few times in the forums, but this really gave me a lot of what I was looking for. I have been hesitating and not starting the 30DC proper because of doubts on how to interpret the SEOC matrix, which you do very well here.
If anything, I can only hope to encourage you to perhaps do a follow up with more examples of result interpretation? This is the best of all the MS competition videos I’ve seen thus far.
Thanks!
@NikLP, I have closed this project for the foreseeable future now so there won’t be any more videos along these lines, sorry :-)
[...] Competition Research with Market Samurai http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/competition-research-with-market-samurai/ [...]
Thanks for the HOWTO on Market Samurai on Competition Research. The software is powerful but has a medium learning curve! Thanks Again!
Thanks for the vid! It really helped out my SEO competition research. Nowadays that kind of thing is pretty tough, but you definitely helped me out thanks!