Now that we’ve gotten a general idea of how to use the Adwords keyword tool to find those traffic generating keywords, we can now turn our attention to finding the competition. Remember,  the competition field in the AdWords display is related to finding CPC advertising competition and with the addition of the CPC column and the local trend column, you can have a better idea if your site will generate decent PPC income.

If you’re conducting keyword research to find domain names, it’s a good idea to avoid general keywords as they probably aren’t even available anyway as .com top level domain (TLD). Another reason to avoid those types of domains is because the competition can be pretty fierce.

So how do you find those competitive sites?

You do a search using the allintitle filter to weed out the irrelevant sites. For example, if you’re looking to see how many sites have the term Wilson tennis balls, you do a Google search for allintitle:”Wilson tennis balls” There are a little over 2100 sites with that term in the title.

They are your competition for that term.

So what does 2100 mean in terms of competition level?  If your term has between 200 – 1000 results, that’s considered ideally low competition. Results between 1001 and 2500 are considered low-moderate, medium is 2501-5000, medium-moderate 5001-10,000 and anything above 10,000 is considered high competition.

Using Google Trends

In addition to using the allintitle filter in your competition search, you can also use Google Trends, aka, Google Insights for Search. When you select a term in the Adwords keyword tool, the drop down menu gives you the option to go to Google Insights:

When you click on the option you’re taken to Google Trends:

This graph show the 12-month trend of your keyword term and which regions in the world had the highest search volume. At the bottom right you’ll see the Related terms section. This can be a gold mine of keyword research. The Top tab is the default where you can find likely related searches.  The Rising tab is also a great resource because it shows you terms that are one the rise including breakout keywords. You can use the results in either one of these to do additional keyword research.

Between the AdWords Keyword tool and Google Trends, you can find some useful and potentially lucrative keywords for your blog posts, domain names, affiliate marketing and more.