4 Free Strategies For SEO Market Research Analysis

People often ask me how they can better analize their SEO Market competition.  This is something that you should have a pretty solid idea about before you ever design a webpage.  Unless of course you have purchased an existing domain.  In which case you are probably performing an SEO overhaul. 

The best place that I have found to begin market research analysis is with free tools.  I have discovered a couple techniques I am about to share with you to help you analize your keywords. 

All four of these strategies are based on the fact that you have already done some keyword research.  This is the step that I would do immediately after that.  I would begin with placing each word into a google search and seeing how many pages are indexed for that particular keyword.  This is a general look at your competing pages.  Just because a page showed up in this search doesnt mean that it was optimized for it. 

Second thing i do is do an allintitle search for the same keyword.  Odds are the number of results here is a more accurate look who you might actually be competing with. 

The next thing that i do with these is go to yahoo site explorer and do use that tool which is great at letting you know the number of backlinks that that particular site has pointing to it.  This is important because obviously the more backlinks pointing at the site the higher percieved importance Google will give it.  This is just another thing to consider when ranking your competition. 

The last little tip that i use is just to see how many sites out there are using the keywords in their anchor text.  I also just not the first ten results and see if there any duplicates between the allintitle and inanchor search for this.  If they showed up for it in allintitle but no where in the inachor then they are probably not going after that keyword to strongly. 

Taking all those things into account for all your keywords will help give you a better idea on where you should start your optimization efforts and which words are going to take you longer to achieve my goals.

For more tools to help you with SEO check out Google Cash Sniper