REAL Competition vs Competing Sites?

[Charles Butler]

I just read a thread on the WSO from Angela who had a post that said she knows the difference between real competition and competing sites. Can anybody please elaborate on this? Thanks!

[Steven Carl Kelly]

Let me break it down for you:

People like to say: "We're ranked #1 in Google with 14,000,000 competing sites" or "We're ranked #2 overall with 22,000,000 competing sites". That sounds great as a marketing pitch because the average person isn't enlightened to the real truth about the SERPs.

First, at Google pages are competing for ranking, not sites. Google doesn't rank sites, it ranks pages. Pages from any individual site could be ranked anywhere (or not at all) in the Google SERPs.

Second, Google normally only returns 1,000 results for any particular query. That means the LARGEST possible number of pages that your page is going up against for a good ranking in the SERPs is 999. Yes, that's right, no matter how many "results" Google says there are, in reality Big G is only going to show the average surfer 1,000 of those results. Remember the marketing angle? It sounds much better to say: "My page ranks #1 out of 17 million" than it does to say "my page ranks #1 out of one thousand".

Third, your only REAL competition are the pages that show up on the first page of Google. Very little traffic comes from results after page one, so the pages you're going to need to beat out are those that show up on the first page. That means your TRUE competition are those pages in spots 1-10.

Fourth and finally, not all pages that show up in that big, huge results number that Google flaunts when you do a search are actually "competition" at all. The majority of those pages more than likely showed up on the Google results number by accident. They didn't set out to purposely get their page to the top of the Google rankings, the fact that they were counted at all likely came simply because they happen to mention the keywords from the query somewhere on the page. "Competition" only exists when a site owner is purposely attempting to rank their page high for the same keywords you're using.

Always (always) judge your competition on quality and not quantity.

[Colossal]

I think Steven nailed this one on the head.

Even if you do an exact search with your keyword and it shows 14 million pages, it doesn't mean that you're competing against all 14 million of them.

First 3 results on Google I think on average account for over 75% of all clicks. Nevermind all the other pages.

It's really just a marketing ploy.

[Ben_R]

steven you nailed it - very good answer cleared it all up for me cheers