Hello, today we will consider such an important factor for SEO website promotion on the Internet as search query competition score... Writing with shaping site semantics sometimes not enough to get the desired result, which means there is something that you might not have taken into account.

In this article, I will talk about the competition between search terms and keywords, and how to evaluate their ranking for better performance.

Why you need to check search query competition

Working with the Yandex search engine wordstat is present in the craft of every webmaster and owner of a blog or site, but it is not enough just to select low-frequency queries and write articles on them and publications. The query may not be used very often, but competition in search engine results among sites of the same type may rank your material very low... On the third, fifth and even tenth pages relative to competitors. Who then will be able to see and appreciate your work?

I faced such a problem at the moment. I try to write high-quality publications that meet the semantics of the site, but the results are poor ... Therefore, the expected question arose “ What am I doing wrong?«.

As it turned out, "everything is so", only I do not take into account some features and points regarding key queries and competition. Yes, as it turned out, there is competition in the CEO too, and it is much tougher than in advertising projects.

In theory, advice for novice site owners is expressed in working with unpopular requestswhere low competition expected... But the webmaster may not know what the this key there can be quite a lot of competition for a relatively young developing resource.

Old and popular sites, which even indirectly touched the desired key search query, in most cases will be in the search results above your article, in which you concentrated on solving the problem for this key.

Therefore, for maximum efficiency of your work (you are wasting your time writing material?) And getting top positions in the SERP for low-frequency search phrases, you need to check the keywords for competitiveness.

How to evaluate the competitiveness of a search query

There are several methods for assessing the attractiveness of a keyword combination for writing a quality publication:

• Manual analysis
• Through the Mutagen service

Let's consider each method and its usefulness separately.

KEI

KEI stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index... The formula was developed and invented by Samantha Roy. It looks like this:

Where P is the number of requests for the last 60 days, and C is the volume of sites that meet the selection criterion.

The meaning of the KEY coefficient is to analyze the popularity of a query over time in relation to the corresponding sites for this key. The higher the score, the more traffic you can get from that search query.

But it is worthwhile to understand that KEI estimates the popularity and potential audience reach to a greater extent, taking into account the fact that all sites are equal... It is indirectly related to the assessment of competitiveness.

Popular program for parsing keywords from search engines Kay Collector or his free version — Slovoeb work with the KEI index when assessing popularity.

Hopes in the righteousness of the KEI indicator is not worth it, it is more suitable for compiling advertising campaigns in terms of obtaining information about the popularity of the request and the gross flow of potential visitors. In SEO, it can only be used as a benchmark or indicator.

Manual analysis

You can try to analyze your competitors for the desired search phrase yourself. This process is quite tedious and, at best, is suitable for evaluating one or more keywords. For mass evaluation of all keys relative to the semantic core, it is unrealistic to use this method.

Analytics can be carried out both in regional scale (if you indicated a specific region of work in the webmaster), and among all competitors on the Internet.

In the first case, you just need to open a browser, go to the desired search engine and enter the keywords. If there are very well-known and trusted sites in the top, then in this niche it is worth looking for other topics for publication.

Sure, it is worth considering your weight relative to opponents... If you have a young site, then almost all competitors are "sharks" for you, but if you already have some kind of regular flow of visitors and already have little authority, then it becomes much easier to compete with "trifles".

In the second case, open the search engine in incognito mode and enter the desired phrase. In incognito mode, your region disappears and you can see all competitors, taking into account ranking without regional affiliation. This method is relevant for sites without a specified advertising region.

Site without region, potentially has a larger audience reach, but the confrontation with the "regionals" is becoming tougher, since they have an advantage in the form of a territorial tie to extradition. " Here is their territory ”And priority will be given to them.

But this does not mean that there is no chance of surpassing rivals, if your portal is evaluated by search engines better than a resource with a link in terms of a combination of factors, then the place in the search results will be higher.

Through the Mutagen service

In general, options with the KEI index and manual elaboration do not satisfy an adequate assessment. Therefore, I recommend resorting to the third option - service for the selection of keywords and assessment of the competition of search queries - Mutagen... Its functionality is similar to Kay Collector and Wordboy, but this is a separate resource that can replace and even supplement the capabilities of programs.

For example, let's take the key phrase “ sEO optimization site «.

We can say that this the request refers to the midrange (about six thousand impressions per month). At first glance, there is quite strong competition and the request is very popular even among advertising agencies for seo development projects.

The mutagen gave him a score of 24... Taking into account the fact that the rating of the popularity of a query varies from one to twenty-five (maximum), an indicator of 24 points clearly demonstrates that such a key will not bring any benefit to your webmaster in writing material.

In addition to the high score, the resource showed how much advertising in Yandex costs for these keywords. Judging by the amount of placement, it is already becoming clear that the request needs to be changed or deepened.

In Mutagen there is an opportunity “ see tails". Let's take a look at them.

This field shows subsets of the keyword search phrase that have lower frequency and popularity. Highlighted sentences may be helpful. Let's choose one of the phrases and check it.

By key request “ »The level of competition is unit... And this is the lowest possible rate. This key phrase can be useful for writing an article. Let's see what Yandex Wordstat shows.

Writing an article on the topic “ step-by-step SEO website optimization "With auxiliary keys" instruction"And" by yourself "In conjunction with low competition will allow you to write a pretty decent article that will show up on search queries and attract some traffic.

It is worth noting one moment of working with Mutagen, it is not free... The cost of evaluating one request is about 30 kopecks. One hundred requests will cost you 30 rubles.

Hello, friends. glad to welcome you on the blog pages. In this article I will try to explain in detail what is low competitive queries and how to select them for the site. There is quite a bit of information on the net on this topic. If you purposefully search for information on a topic, then everywhere is about the same information that you need to move sites for low-frequency queries, but few people say that a low-frequency operator can be highly competitive and it simply will not work to get to the top of the search results. The point is that there is competition among requests. That is, there are many people interested in the same topic and everyone wants to get to the top, but only 10 sites get to the first page. Therefore, when choosing keywords for the site, you should take into account their competition.

How to evaluate competition for a keyword

If, when selecting key queries, you focus on low-frequency results and I dare to assume that this is the case, then you need to take into account that these queries are low competitive... And for this you need to study search results and see the list of issued documents for a specific request. Let's take an example.

As you can see in the screenshot for the phrase "how to choose keywords", only 93 impressions per month and this is a fairly low-frequency query. But let's introduce this search query in Yandex search and look at the results.

For this request, Yandex gave 2 million results and this indicates that for these keywords high competition... It will not be easy for young sites to get to the top lines in the search results, and if you take into account that the first 2 positions are occupied by Yandex pages, then it is completely impossible. In this regard, you need to choose lower-competitive queries so that you can get from the top only due to internal factors, without resorting to paid ones. And let's see what are VK, SK and NK requests.

• Low-competitive queries - 150-200 thousand results
• Medium-competitive - up to 1-1.5 million results
• Highly competitive - anything over one and a half million

If, when choosing keywords, you learn to take into account competition requests, then website promotion will be easier and cheaper. It is also worth looking at the sites that are in the top for the queries you need. if these are entirely trust authoritative resources, then again, I repeat, it will be extremely difficult to compete with them. If your site already has some weight and traffic from search engines comes to it, then you can experiment and select medium-competitive queries and track the results. That's all for today. I wish you successful progress.

And I was surprised that I had not noticed her earlier. The method described later in the article will allow you to use the Key Collector program to identify less competitive queries, which will save the budget for promotion.

The article is entirely devoted to the method of selecting key phrases, which, on the one hand, have very little competition in search results, and on the other hand, will bring users to your sites, that is, they will potentially have traffic.

I will say right away that for productive work we need third-party software. Personally, I recommend the KeyCollector program (which, by the way, is sold in the Webmasters store for points). It is on the example of working with this program that the entire article will be built. I am not affiliated with this software, but I can say that this is one of my most successful investments in seo software. Best program on working with the semantic core (with these same keywords) for your site, you simply will not find. WITH detailed instructions you can read about how to work with the program and its capabilities.

Beginners who are not yet able to purchase this software can use free parsers (the same Magadan). The only thing is that the KEI parameter (which will be discussed below) will have to be calculated with pens - but what a practical experience!

Go! In order to select only effective keywords, we need to choose from something. To collect the initial, raw base, you need to parse open sources of keywords. KeyCollector allows us to parse the following services:

• Yandex.Wordstat (yeah, where can we go without it).
• Google.Adwords.
• Rambler.Adstat.
• Search hints of the main PS.
• It also pulls keywords from the new Rookee functionality.

Let me not dwell on the parsing process - this is not what this is about. Moreover, I have already written a little about parsing and cleaning keywords within the doorway section of Webmasters.ru.

The only thing that I will note is that I recommend adding a sample from the Pastukhov database to all of the above sources. The forums provide similar services for creating samples, and it will cost you $ 2-5. And there is no need to buy an expensive full base.

The combined use of the operators "" and! allows you to count words in the query exactly in specified spelling, and ignore impressions for queries containing combinations with this word. In other words, this way we get the most accurate statistics on keyword frequencies.

All words with zero (or too low for you) frequency can be safely deleted, so as not to waste your (and machine!) Precious time on them. Thus, we will get a base of keywords with traffic.

Now the received keywords need to be checked for competitiveness in the search results. To do this, we need to calculate the KEI (keyword effectiveness index) parameter.

A little about this parameter. Very often it is not calculated as an assessment of the competitiveness of a given keyword in search engine, but as a certain ratio of the number of documents in issue for a given keyword to the frequency (in terms of traffic) of that keyword. For example, I have come across such formulas:

KEI \u003d (requests ^ 2) / pages)

KEI \u003d ((log (Requests) +1) ^ 2 / (log (Pages) +10) ^ 9) * 10000000

Their logic is quite clear, but in my opinion, now the parameter “Number of documents in issue” does not tell us anything special, and for my sites, I calculate the KEI parameter in a different way - fortunately KeyCollector allows you to use your formulas.

I use a rather banal formula:

KEI \u003d (MainPagesCount ^ 3) + (TitleCount ^ 3) for Yandex and Google search engines separately.

That is, the sum of the MainPagesCount cubes (the number of main pages in the search results for a given keyword) and TitleCount (the number of pages in the top 10, in which this keyword is directly included in the Title).

So, in the KEI parameter settings in KeyCollector, we enter the following formulas (in the program you cannot use exponentiation directly, therefore multiplication is used):

For KEI 1:(KEI_YandexMainPagesCount * KEI_YandexMainPagesCount * KEI_YandexMainPagesCount) + (KEI_YandexTitlesCount * KEI_YandexTitlesCount * KEI_YandexTitlesCount)

For KEI 2: KEI_GoogleMainPagesCount * KEI_GoogleMainPagesCount * KEI_GoogleMainPagesCount) + (KEI_GoogleTitlesCount * KEI_GoogleTitlesCount * KEI_GoogleTitlesCount)

Accordingly, the lower the KEI, the better. The most delicious keys with KEI \u003d 0 (if, of course, there is traffic for them). The KEI range according to this formula is from 0 to 2000.

The question may arise - why use cubing? The answer is simple - exponentiation will more clearly show that the value in one of the brackets is large enough (for example, 6 occurrences in TITLE) and such keywords will be easier to filter out.

It's time to start reading data from Google and Yandex and drink tea.

After the process is over, click on the button “Calculate KEI from available data”.

Well, that's almost all. Now we can set the filters we need for the KEI parameter:

With these filters, we will set the display of only those keywords for which the KEI for both search engines is 0, that is, the most “delicious”. Let me remind you that these are keywords for which there are no main pages or direct entries in the TITLE in the TOP-10.

Here, look, we quickly found a key with "!" - a frequency equal to more than 2k and KEI \u003d 0:

The undoubted usefulness of such a careful selection of keywords lies in the fact that pages tailored for such keywords with little competition love to immediately get into the top 10-top 20 (not everything, of course, you need to understand this), and bringing them to the top 5 becomes very easy.

A small remark - in a similar way, you can research the selected niche for the site as a whole, analyzing the average KEI for your chosen keywords. If the average KEI varies from 0 to 100, it is quite a weakly competitive niche. The higher the KEI, the more difficult it is.

By researching and analyzing keywords in the way described above, you can create niche sites, receive and convert traffic that is literally lying on the road on the next street. You only need to cross this very street (that is, start working and look for niches).

These are the tips for analyzing competition given by the user under the nickname Kareg. On my own behalf, I will add that I decided to check a group of requests that I recently collected on a very competitive topic "binary options". I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that out of a group of 150 requests with a frequency of more than 200! Wordstats, I got requests with low concurrency of about 100 requests.

For greater accuracy, I decided to check the competitiveness of these requests with the mutagen service, and out of 100 requests 40 had a competitiveness lower than 10. I think with a skillful combination of these methods, you can find less competitive topics and collect traffic with less promotion costs.

Low-performing keywords? How to determine the concurrency of a request How to calculate the cost of a promotion? For these purposes, we need a set of indicators that will allow us to operate with absolute values, and not with abstracted concepts like "plastic windows are difficult and expensive." With such a task as assessing the competitiveness of requests, KEIs and frequencies will do an excellent job.

What is KEI?

Collecting and analyzing the competitiveness of queries is often associated with such an indicator as KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index), i.e. a digital performance score that is given to a keyword or phrase. The KEI is calculated based on two factors.

The first factor depends on how often users search for something using a given phrase. The second factor reflects how many other sites and pages on them exist that are optimized for the same word structure.

Therefore, a KEI is a numeric value assigned to a keyword or phrase that takes into account both of the above. IT helps to determine the competitiveness of queries in Yandex, how effective it will be in terms of cost-benefit will be promoting them.

In my interpretation, this indicator is also composite and takes into account:

• the number of sites with this key in the header home page;
• the number of pages with the given key in the header.

The collection of the values \u200b\u200bnecessary for calculating the KEI parameter is possible using the program.

KEI calculation in Key Collector

The first step is to set the formula for calculating KEI in the program settings. I personally use the following:

((Number of sites with this key in the header of the main page) ^ 3) + ((Number of pages with this key in the header) ^ 3)

Translated into a language understandable by Key Collector, the KEI formula for Key Collector takes the following form:

(KEI_YandexMainPagesCount * KEI_YandexMainPagesCount * KEI_YandexMainPagesCount) + (KEI_YandexTitlesCount * KEI_YandexTitlesCount * KEI_YandexTitlesCount)

After saving the formula, the collection of initial data is initiated (Get data for Yandex PS), necessary for the calculation, and then, in fact, the direct calculation (Calculate KEI from the available data).

Upon completion of the calculation, all data will be available in the subject area of \u200b\u200bthe program:

Experimental KEI Formula

The formula for calculating KEI described in the previous paragraph is all right, don't worry, it still shows the stability of its estimates and allows you to check the competitiveness. I was worried about something else - it can be used rather limitedly when assessing the cost of promotion. For the last half year, I have been using the following construction:

30 * ((KEI_YandexMainPagesCount * KEI_YandexMainPagesCount * KEI_YandexMainPagesCount) + (KEI_YandexTitlesCount * KEI_YandexTitlesCount * KEI_YandexTitlesCount)) + 20 * KEI_YandexTitlesCount + 40 * KEI_YandexMainPagesCount + 0.00001 * KEI_YandexDocCount + 0.3 * YandexWordstatBaseFreq + 0.5 * YandexWordstatQuotePointFreq

Yes, yes, horror. It was based on the distribution of significance weights between the main estimated values \u200b\u200bof the request: KEI, frequency (general and exact), the number of occurrences in page titles (including the main ones) and the number of documents with this phrase in general.

I no longer remember why the set of weights was the same - they were redistributed many times, the resulting estimate of the competitiveness of the request was analyzed in practice and then the formula was corrected again.

The calculation procedure for this formula is exactly the same as for the first, with the only difference that in advance, in addition to the KEI parameters, it is necessary to collect a general and accurate frequency.

Types of Keyword Frequencies

So, now about the frequencies. Frequency is a numerical value that reflects the number of requests from users of the Yandex search engine, or any other, to any word combination or its word forms over the last calendar month. They will not help to find out the competitiveness, but it is easy to assess the capacity of the direction. There are three types in total:

• general,
• permissible,
• accurate.

Overall frequency is an indicator that includes the statistics of impressions for a given request with all its possible word forms, additional words and symbols. In other words, if you collect the total frequency for the query "website promotion", then information will also be collected and summarized on structures like "website promotion in St. Petersburg", "inexpensive website promotion", etc. This mode is more suitable for a general assessment of the region's demand.

Permissible frequency is a frequency that allows declination and morphological deformation of the original query. In other words, if you collect the admissible frequency of the query "website promotion", then the results will include word forms like "website promotion", "website promotion", etc.

Accurate frequency is an indicator reflecting the number of requests to a particular request, without any changes and additions.

An automated check of these values \u200b\u200bcan also be done using the Key Collector program.

To obtain the most reliable information, it is better to determine the exact frequency as the main frequency.

After completing the collection of all the described parameters and after checking the competitiveness of requests, we can proceed to.

We have released a new book “Content Marketing in social networks: How to get into the head of subscribers and fall in love with your brand. "

How to determine low competitive requests

The high level of competition is a boon only for the consumer, but not for the manufacturer, seller or site owner. The webmaster has to put a lot of effort into the struggle for advantageous positions in the TOP 10 search engines. Therefore, a natural question arises - how to find low competitive queries in your segment?

It is interesting! Many confuse low competitive and low-frequency key phrases. However, there is one major difference. Low-frequency (LF) keys are queries that users rarely type in search engines. For example, the phrase “buy a Bentley” in its direct entry was searched only 297 times in Yandex over the last month. But this does not mean that this request is low competitive.

More videos on our channel - learn internet marketing with SEMANTICA

To determine the competition for a particular query, you can manually analyze the search results. You need to pay attention to the following indicators:

• number of authoritative sites in the TOP 10;
• how many answers the search engine provided;
• the number of start pages in the search results.

If the top is dominated by main pages, then most likely. The number of impressions in the search engine is a conditional characteristic. Usually low competitive requests get up to 1 million impressions. Authoritative sites should be understood as trust internet projectsof a solid age, high attendance and significant indicators X and PR.

NK requests without a commercial component

The highest competition is transactional or. These are phrases that contain the words: "buy", "price", "order" and other expressions indicating a person's readiness to make a purchase / deal. If you would like to know how to find low competitive queries, then you should consider keywords belonging to the following groups:

1. informational;
2. navigational;
3. multimedia;
4. are common.

Information requests often contain the words "reviews", "instructions", "advice". These are search phrases that the user enters in the event that he needs to get any information. A similar function is performed by navigation queries - they are typed to find a specific site.

General queries are difficult to assign to a specific group. For example, the phrase "Hyundai car" can be typed by a person interested in purchasing this vehicle. On the other hand, the user may need information about appearance or technical characteristics auto.

Multimedia queries are related to the search for various media files - music, video, photo materials, online presentations. NK requests for this group contain the words “download”, “watch”, “free”, as well as the names of the artists and the names of the groups.

Advice! To reveal low competitive special online services help requests. For example, the selection of keys can be done using the site http://mutagen.ru/. This service calculates the level of competition based on the issuance of Yandex TOP 30 PS for the last month. To take advantage of it functionality, you will need to register.