How to gauge competition

KE's picture

I'm curious as to how you guys go about gauging the competition for a niche you are thinking about promoting.

Google is your friend...

profwebs's picture

You can use the natural search results to help gauge competition. Also, if you turn to page 32 of "High Profit Affiliate Marketing", Jeremy has written how to guage paid search competition. Yoy simply go to http://www.google.com/sponsoredlinks , and enter in the keywords that you are researching to see how many advertisers are bidding on those keywords.

Brian Weaver - Affiliate Marketer in Training
@profwebs on twitter
Brian Weaver on Facebook

IS this for real?

Dezchamps's picture

I went to the sponsored search link and i did a search for certain keywords like diet and it only returned two pages , 11 results.

Shouldnt a keyword as popular as diet return far more results?

http://twitter.com/Dezchamps

keep hitting "next"

profwebs's picture

See how many more pages keep appearing? I bet there are 100's of pages.
Cheers,

Brian Weaver - Affiliate Marketer in Training
@profwebs on twitter
Brian Weaver on Facebook

Same results

Dezchamps's picture

Tried that, and its the same 11 results. I guess that keyword doesnt have much advertisers.

I still dont buy it though.

http://twitter.com/Dezchamps

hmmm... what aren't you "buying"

profwebs's picture

I just went through the results for "diet" in Google's sponsored links and got to page 100.. thats over 1,000 different bidders on that keyword or broad match keyphrase with diet in it. The more you hit next the more pages appear below.

Brian Weaver - Affiliate Marketer in Training
@profwebs on twitter
Brian Weaver on Facebook

I guess something is wrong with mine

Dezchamps's picture

I think something is wrong with mine, I keep getting the same results. I search using the word diet and exact match "diet" and its the same.

This is not good for me if I cant see the proper results.

Any suggestions on how I can fix this Brian?

I tried both firefox and IE, dont know if that is significant.
http://twitter.com/Dezchamps

Hi Dezchamps, Brian is

Barry_G's picture

Hi Dezchamps,

Brian is trying to tell you to go to the bottom of the results page and click the - NEXT - It is blue and says NEXT.

Now if you are in another country than Brian, your results after clicking - NEXT- may be different than Brian's results, but unless you are searching via Google - Ethiopia, Africa, I doubt you are clicking on the - NEXT - at the bottom of Google if you are getting only 11 results for kw diet.

Does that make sense?

Good Luck

Barry

$%$%$%$%$%$%$%$

Go'in Deep This Time Up!!

Im in Jamaica

Dezchamps's picture

I did click next, if I didnt I wouldnt get 11 results, I would only get 10.

Maybe its the country as you say, I will have to look deeper into this cuz I found a few niches I'd like to check out.

http://twitter.com/Dezchamps

Yeah, I never thought....

profwebs's picture

About different results from different countries... I guess I have to remember that from now on and also that this is a worldwide community.. Thanks for clearing this 1 up Barry.

This isn't the exact solution I was looking for, but you can use this to see the different results from each Google datacenter: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/multiple-datacenter-google-search/

Brian Weaver - Affiliate Marketer in Training
@profwebs on twitter
Brian Weaver on Facebook

A Proxy is my friend

Dezchamps's picture

It is confirmed, its my location. I searched through a proxy and I got the results.

We totally forgot about geo-targeting in all this.

http://twitter.com/Dezchamps

Brian, Thanks for that

KE's picture

Brian,

Thanks for that answer. It is very helpful. However, even after you do a search on google's sponsored links, should you still check out the number of websites showing that keyword?

So for example if your keyword is: Diet and you find 20 pages of sponsored links, then you type in the word "diet" in google and find 20 million pages with that word, is that going to be a problem in terms of competitiveness?

Should one just focus on sponsored links?

Good question...

profwebs's picture

I'm not sure I can totally answer this one, but I'll give it a shot using the niche "diet".

Diet is a VERY broad niche and you are right, there are tons of competitors, so you would not want to focus on "diet" as your niche, you would want to "drill down" into the diet niche to get something more manageable. In my opinion, 20 million natural search results is way too much.

Think of niches having a pyramid, like this-

DIET
/ \
Diet Programs Natural Diets
/ \ \
Nutrisystem Jenny Craig The Grapefruit Diet

In the example above, Diet is at the top of the pyramid, and the "sub niches" below it are Diet Programs and Natural Diets. Then in each of these are sub niches, Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem. Below Natural Diets, I only listed grapefruit. There are many more "sub niches" that could be in this for all the terms, but these were a couple off the top of my head. This is what I meant by drill down into the diet niche to find a more specific niche with less competition. The farther you drill down, the less competition there is, but you must also make sure that there is still money to be made.

I see my pyramid doesn't display properly in the forum, but hopefully you can make sense of it with the description I gave.

I hope this didn't confuse you and also realize that I am new to aff marketing, so if anyone wants to clear this up a bit please do. Also correct me if I am wrong at all on this.

Brian Weaver - Affiliate Marketer in Training
@profwebs on twitter
Brian Weaver on Facebook

Correct me if I am wrong

Dezchamps's picture

I think that 20 million represents all the sites out there that are optimized for the keyword diet, both exact and broad match. These are the natural search results, so there may be a site with an article about a dog's diet that comes up on the first page because it is heavily SEOed. It doesn't mean that site is a competitor site.

The sponsored links represents all those advertisers who are bidding on the keyword diet, so in essence if you want to enter the niche using ppc, those are the results you should look at as competitors.

Am I making sense?

http://twitter.com/Dezchamps

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