I’ll give you a quick peek under the hood of the Market Samurai SEO Competition Module.  However if you have not read my Market Samurai Review you should CLICK HERE and read it now.

The SEO Competition Module is fantastic.  It returns a lot of vital data in minutes, to do this by hand would take hours.  You can then download the results in to a spreadsheet so you can check how they change over time.

As I’ve said during my review it’s easy to understand and if you don’t you should check out the Market Samurai training videos which are really step by step.

I’ve cut off most of the page on the above result just so you can get a clear look at the results.  This search was for the keyword “internet marketing”.  On the left are the URL’s of the top sites in Google for this keyword, unfortunately I had to cut this off so the results showed up reasonably clearly.

So across the top we have various abbreviations.  Once you have Market samurai you just put your mouse over the top of the abbreviations and a balloon pops up telling you exactly what each column means.

I’ll give you a quick run down of each column.

DA – Domain age, so the site in the number 1 position is 8 years old

PR – Page Rank, the number 1 site has PR of 6

IC – Index Count, the number of pages that site has indexed by Google.  75 million in this case as it’s Wikipedia

BLP – Backlinks to that page from other sites.  Vital if you want to rank highly, the number one listing has 41,176 links to that page

BLD – Is backlinks to the domain in total

BLEG – The number of EDU or .GOV backlinks which are often thought to carry more weight

DMZ – If the site has a DMOZ listing

YAH – If the site has a Yahoo directory listing

Title – If the keyword is in the page title.  This is the most important on page SEO factor.  Even if the other indicators show strong competition if not many of the domains have the keyword in the title there is a good chance you can rank well for that term

URL – Is the keyword in the URL

Desc – Is the keyword in the meta description, this does not carry much SEO weight

Head – If the keyword is in the H1 tag.  Again a small factor but does show if the site owner is trying to rank for the term.

The key things I look for are, is the keyword in most of the page titles.  In this case all sites except one has the keyword in the page title so there are no easy pickings to be had.

I would then look at the top sites that have the keyword in their title and look at their PR and backlinks to that page.  In this example the top sites range results are PR 6 to PR 4 and have in excess of 5,000 backlinks.  So unless I’m willing to spend a long time building links this keyword is too difficult.  If you look at the color coding there is a lot of red on the page which shows we are against strong competition.

Weak competition would have top 5 sites with PR3 or below, backlinks in the low hundreds and maybe have some sites without the keyword in the title.

This is only a quick look at some of the information you can get from one of the modules from Market Samurai.  I hope you can see  how valuable the information is, it makes the difference between a mildly profitable site to one that brings in the big bucks month after month.