Help a fellow warrior: analyze my competition

[Schwabe]

Here is my sincere request: please analyze my competition.

Theoreticalsite.com gets #1 result for my target keyword phrase (2 words)
URL keywords: none (the keywords do not appear in it's URL)
Pagerank: 5
Domain age: 4 years old
Alexa rank: 35,000
Google backlinks: 1,300
Google indexed pages: 3,200

Starting a fresh domain TODAY - with the objective to overtake this site for #1.

Your feedback is much appreciated. In your opinion, please answer:

A) how difficult it will be to overtake them

B) about how long it might take

[dburk]

Hi Schwabe,

It depends on resources at your disposal. If you have a couple of related PR 7 pages that you can get your link on without linking to other external links, then you can potentially pass him in a couple of days.

If you are starting from scratch with no resources, you could spend many months or years trying to catch him and never make it.

Without knowing the resources you command and your level of commitment, we can only make wild guesses. We also don't know the resources your competitor commands nor their level of commitment to staying ahead of you.

If you are willing and able to spend $100,000, I believe you could catch him within one month. If you are planning to use free resources and commit only one hour a month, I predict you will never pass him.

Even if we know exactly what you level of resources are and your commitment level, we still don't know your competitor's actual strength.

Don't let this dissuade you from going for it anyway. At the very least you will learn a lot from the experience and you don't always have to be #1 to be successful.

[mrdomains]

This is almost an impossible question to answer since we know nothing of who else is on page 1, what your skill and resource level is, time-frame, and not least term / niche / domain. Sometimes you can´t just rely on numbers, some domains wont be moving from their serp position based on trust factors, affiliations with the big G, authority status compared to x number of variables.

Anyway, based on nothing other than a few numbers and your question, I suggest you do not go after this one. Having all the data and asking the question implies you are not experienced enough to crack a nut like this one. Save the time, go for something else.

[dburk]

Hi zinomar,

Wow, you dug up an old post, 15 months.

First, let me say that sites don't have pagerank, pages do.

Second, SERP aren't ranked based upon PageRank, they are listed based upon a relevancy score for the keyword query. There are many high PR pages that will be found well below pages with very little PR.

You make some good points, however many tough keywords can be ranked over time while you build up nice traffic from long tail phrases along the way. Don't let the big challenges scare you away, just work on a range long tail phrases that include that tougher one as a root. Your traffic willl grow steadily and over time even the highly completive keywords can be ranked with a smart strategy.