Analyzing Niche Competition in SERPs: Top Sites are Wal-Mart, Target, Amazon, etc.

[helterskelter]

Hi all, when evaluating your competition for certain keywords, how much weight do you put behind the product pages from the nationals, like Amazon, Target, etc.? Are these relatively easy to trump, or something you'd avoid completely?

Obviously the sites themselves have huge weight with Google, but does it primarily depend on how many backlinks go to those specific pages within amazon.com, target.com, etc.? How do you personally analyze this when deciding whether the top 3 is possible in a niche?

In advance - thanks so much for your help!

[darrenmonroe]

Well according to many Google top people that recent change made it easier to trump them as long as you had a site with great and releveant content.

The little guy had def got a shot. I have beaten major companies (entrepreneur.com, and even Amazon) in some of my sites.

[jan roos]

From my experience those sites are fairly easy to beat. When you come across niche sites especially optimized for the specific keyword and if they have more than say 1K back links then I'd think twice about it.

Cheers

[helterskelter]

Great. Thanks, guys.