Researching niche markets, and competitors listing are all part of internet marketing. In this post I am going to introduce you to a handy firefox addon that I use on a daily basis – SEO Quake.
It is available here: Seo Quake Firefox Addon
Below is a screenshot of SeoQuake showing an analysis for each listing in the Google results page.
As you can see it has analyzed each listing on the search engine results page – taking into consideration it’s pagerank, backlinks, age and much more.
Basically, this amazing tool will help determine whether or not you can outrank your competitors and appear in the first page of Google.
I have found SeoQuake to be by far the most powerful and useful free tool that I have used to examine my competitors that rank in the top 10 in Google for the term I am targeting.
The key reason why I use this particular tool to find niches is because it gives me a detailed overview on the top listings and I can make a general assumption whether or not I can outrank my competitors for that particular term.
Breaking It Down:
Point 1:
Firstly, look at the pagerank of the top sites shown in the screenshot. This analysis will give you an indication of how competitive the market is and if it is dominated by anyone in particular.
If you find that most of the sites listed have a pagerank of 4 and above then I would leave it and move onto another market – there are plenty of other keywords in a less competitive market that you can target.
Point 2:
Thirdly, examine how many sites are linking to that page (yahoo links) refer to the figures highlighted in the screenshot.
It is important that you don’t become intimidated if the number you are researching is a high 400 or whatever because you need to be interested more in the quality of links (meaning anchor text) and not the quantity.
To clarify this point, a site could have 400 links from pagerank 0 sites, but a ‘keyword’ anchor link from a page rank 6 site will by far easily outweigh those 400 links.
If you really want to dig deeper, you can click on the yahoo symbol and it will show you the list of sites linking to that page.
You will then open the yahoo site explorer. Seo Quake will then analyze your comeptitors backlinks, showing you the page rank and details about the linking sites.
This is very powerful.
Point 3:
Now you have carried out your research and analysis it is time to look at the title in the results given. Do most of the results have the exact match keyword in their title?
If they don’t, then there is a strong chance that they have not targeted this keyword in particular.
Point 4:
Finally, SeoQuake lists the domain age. This is very useful as Google tends to favour older domains and generally gives them a rankings boost as a result.
For example, a 1995 domain will be very hard to beat compared to a brand new 2009 domain – unless of course you have a good link building plan.
Conclusions
Overall, I found SeoQuake to be a brilliant tool which provides you detailed information quickly and easily.
To use this tool you will need the firefox browser which can be downloaded free and SeoQuake addon will also need to be downloaded and is free to use.
After a while you will routinely get in the habit of knowing what terms are easy to rank for by simply following the points and guidelines I have outlined above.
