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In this lesson I’d like to look at an example of how to use the SEO matrix to make decisions about whether or not a niche is too competitive.

Imagine for a moment that you’re a very keen golfer and you’d like to create an internet business in the golf market.

If you research the market level keyword ‘golf’ using Market Samurai, the SEO competition matrix looks like the picture above:

The first thing you’ll notice about this SEO matrix is that the first 4 columns are entirely red.

If we look in more detail, you can see that all of the top ten websites for the search term ‘golf’ have a domain age of greater than 10 years.

They have very high page ranks of 5 up to 7.

They also have an enormous number of backlinks to the ranking pages and also to the overall domains.

Many of the sites also have a high number of links from .edu or .gov domains.

Most of them are listed in the DMOZ and Yahoo directories...

...and quite a few of them have also optimized their on page factors.

Which means the ranking pages have the word golf in their title, their URL, their description, and their header tags.

This is an example of an EXTREMELY competitive niche. Quite frankly it would be almost pointless to try and compete for the term ‘golf’ given the strength of the websites you’d be competing against.

However, this does not mean that you have to give up on your plan to create a golf related online business. Instead you just need to drill down into the market to find a more accessible niche.

For example, instead of trying to target the keyword ‘golf’ let’s take a look at the SEO matrix for the keyword phrase ‘golf putter’.

You’ll immediately notice that this SEO matrix is a lot less red than the previous matrix. If we look at the values in the columns, you’ll see why.

While the top ranking pages are still well established with most having been online for over 5 years, the page ranks vary between 2 and 5 which suggests that this term is not as competitive as the term ‘golf’.

Looking at the backlinks, we can see that there is quite a wide range in the number of page backlinks from 3 to over 10000. The domain backlinks also cover quite a wide range.

Only one of the sites has links from .edu or .gov domains and some of them are listed in the DMOZ and Yahoo directories.

When we look at the on page factors we can see that only a few of the ranking pages have been properly optimized for the term ‘golf putter’.

Overall this SEO matrix shows that the term ‘golf putter’ is definitely less competitive than the term ‘golf’ however with the mid level page ranks values and the number of page and domain backlinks, it would still take quite a lot of effort to reach the front page of Google if we were focusing on the term ‘golf putter’.

So, now lets take a look at the SEO matrix for the term ‘Ladies Driver’.

Once again, the websites that are ranking are all very well established sites, but this time there are several pages ranking in the top ten Google listings that have a page rank of 0 and also have 0 page backlinks.

The fact that most of these sites have very few page backlinks but a high number of domain backlinks suggests that these sites are ranking because of the overall authority of the domain rather than the authority of the specific pages.

None of the sites have backlinks from .edu or .gov websites but many of them are listed in the dmoz and yahoo directories.

When we look at the on page factors we can see that several of the ranking pages are actually optimized for the term ladies driver.

Of the three terms we’ve looked at, the term ‘ladies driver’ appears to be the most accessible mainly because the ranking webpages do not have very strong link networks.

In comparing these SEO matrices - the term golf is clearly too competitive and would be one to avoid.

The sites ranking for the phrase ‘golf putter’ appear to have fairly strong link networks as indicated by their backlink values so this niche still appears to be quite competitive.

In contrast, the sites ranking for the term ‘ladies driver’ do not appear to have very strong link networks or a high level of page rank authority which suggests that ‘Ladies Driver’ would be the most accessible of these three terms.

As this example shows, the strength of competition in a market is determined by a wide range of factors. The SEO Competition module in Market Samurai allows you to get a real time snap shot of these factors so that you can compare niches and eventually identify a niche which has an acceptable level of competition.